436 Undecidability Results for Utilitarianism

2011-09-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

It's easy to come up with counter-intuitive results when using utilitarianism as one's moral theory. The philosopher John Rawls attempted to remedy this defect in his essay, Two Concepts of Rules, by defining what he called "a practice".

In Rawlsian terms, a game of chess can be considered a practice. We can justify the game itself (with arguments such as “It develops a capacity for abstract thought”) and we can justify actions which are governed by the rules of chess (“Yes, I can do that: it's called capturing en passant – read the rule book”).

After making this distinction, Rawls applies it to attempt a resolution of some of the more counterintuitive implications of utilitarianism. In particular he claims that, because both promises and punishments are practices which increase overall utility, their rules must be followed on utilitarian grounds, even when direct calculation indicates that breaking the rules would increase utility.

Next, Rawls describes a set of rules called “summarizing rules”, which should be used by utilitarians because they save time and effort when compared with direct calculation, thus increasing utility. Because they do not define institutions, they are distinct from the rules which define a practice: they are formulated to prescribe behaviors in preexisting situations, and do not define a situation itself. The situations to which they apply are thus logically prior to this set of actions, whereas the rules of a practice are logically prior to the situation which they define. Rawls suggests that these are merely rules of thumb, and so cannot philosophically be described as rules. He does not deny, however, that their use is justified.

Summarizing rules are justifiable on the basis of utilitarianism because of the time (and energy) that they save via their use. Performing a utilitarian calculation is an action, and uses time and energy. Any action, in fact, must have a cost, for any action requires that energy be expended and time consumed upon its execution; and furthermore, any calculation is an action which also has a cost. Trivially, if x is an action which can be decided, there must be a method to decide it. Formally, I will denote these principles as:

(a) ∀xy(Kxy → Ax) - “For all x, if x is a calculation of some y then x is an action”.

(b) ∀x(Ax → Cx) - “For all x, if x is an action then x has a cost”.

where 'Ax' denotes 'x is an action', 'Cx' denotes 'x has a cost (in terms of utility)', 'Kxy' denotes 'x is a (utilitarian) calculation of the utility of the action y'. I will also introduce a modifier 'ϻ' which converts actions 'x' to propositions, so that 'ϻx' denotes 'x is moral' and '~ϻx' denotes 'x is not moral.'

Rawls next defines “general rules”, which are rules that, in the situations to which they apply, have been established as being more accurate than the typical utilitarian calculation performed by an individual. In other words, general rules are justifiable on the basis of utilitarianism because the probability of an accurate calculation increases when they are used, so that total utility is increased by the use of the rule. The situations to which they apply are logically prior to the rules themselves, so the set of general rules is a subset of the set of summarizing rules.

The notion of using utilitarianism to justify rules concerning the use of utilitarianism is self-referential, and risks the possibility of logical paradox, whether the rules are logically prior to the situations they describe or not. And because utilitarianism is used to justify the rules, it can be used to refute the rules whenever a situation can be found in which breaking the rules increases utility. Without a deontological set of rules governing the use of the system, serving as axioms, utilitarianism must serve as its own metalanguage, and this is the reason the rules collapse. We will see that, as in set theory, this “naive utilitarianism” allows for the construction of paradoxes which ultimately motivate proofs that can formally refute it.

It will be useful to formalize the relationship between the utility of an action and the cost of the calculation of the action in the following principles of utility, where ℧ is a functor mapping the linguistic description of an action to some r ∈ ℝ associated with the utility yielded by the action, and ℭ a functor analogously mapping to the real number associated with the cost incurred by the action of calculation.

(U.1) ∀xy(Ax & Kyx → ℧(y) = ℧(x) + ℭ(y)) - “For all x, y, if x is an action and y a calculation of the utility of x, then the utility yielded by performing y equals the utility of x (assuming execution) plus the cost (a negative number) of the calculation y.”

(U.2) ∀x(~ϻx ↔ ℧(x) < 0) - “For all x, x is not moral if and only if the utility of x is less than 0.”

(U.3) ∀xy(Kyx → ℭ(y) < 0) - “For all x, y, if y is a calculation of the utility of x, then the cost of y is a negative number.”

(U.4) ∀xy( Kyx → (~ϻy ↔ ~◇Dx)) - “For all x, y, if y is the calculation of the utility of x, then it is not moral to perform y if and only if x is morally undecidable.”

In the last principle, the predicate D, where Dx denotes “x is morally decided” (so that ◇Dx denotes “it is possible to morally decide x”, i.e., “x is morally decidable”), requires some explanation. U.4 states that an action x is morally undecidable when the action y that calculates the utility of x costs more utility than is gained by executing x. To clarify this idea, I have constructed a morally undecidable action.

Consider the action g, where U = “Utilitarianism” and g = “Deciding that g is immoral according to U”. Is g a moral action or an immoral action?

Suppose that we perform action g, using U. Then we have just decided that g is immoral according to U, so g is immoral and we have just performed g, which implies that we have just committed an immoral act. Thus g is immoral according to U. Similarly, if we use U to decide g, we will also have committed an immorality.

For suppose we use U to decide that g is moral. Then we should be able to perform action g. But if we do, then we will have just committed an immorality, according to U. Thus we cannot decide that g is moral without causing U to make inconsistent predictions. But if we use U to decide that g is immoral, then we will have performed action g, which we have just decided is immoral. Hence g must be immoral, but the only way to decide that it is immoral is to perform an immorality. Thus g is morally undecidable.

It could be argued that such actions have no moral value; that they are merely linguistic paradoxes of little consequence to moral theory. The fact is, however, that if an action has no moral value, then expending time and energy - however little - to decide that action results in decreased utility which is not compensated for by the (presumably meaningless) result of the decision. Hence the action yields negative utility, and so is immoral, according to U, by definition.

Action g is based on Kurt Gödel's statement g, by which he proved the incompleteness of any sufficiently powerful formal system S; and which asserted, in essence, “Statement g is not provable in S”. It is much easier, however, to construct paradoxical statements in English than within formal systems, so more powerful results than Gödel's can be obtained.

Consider, for example, the action h, where h = “Deciding that any action is immoral according to U”. Then by the same argument which showed that g is immoral, it can be shown that h is immoral, so that using utilitarianism to decide that any action is immoral is, in fact, immoral.

It could be argued that such undecidable actions are artificial paradoxes, appearing only when an action's description is intentionally constructed so as to refer to its own immorality. To refute this argument, I will present a generalized proof that h is immoral which does not require the construction of any paradoxical statements. To do so, I will assume the following (self-evident) principles, which apply for any propositions p, q or actions x, y:

(c) ∀x(◇Dx → Ǝy(Kyx)) - “For all x, if x is morally decidable, then there exists an action y such that y is the calculation of the value of x.”

(d) Dp ⊢ p - “If p is morally decided, then it is true.”

(e) D(p & q) ⊢ Dp & Dq - “If a conjunction is morally decided, then each conjunct is morally decided.”

(f) ⊢ p ⊢ □p - “If p is a theorem, then p is necessarily true.”

(g) ~∀x(ϻx →Dϻx) - “It is not the case that all moral actions are decided as moral.”

(i) ∀x((ϻx & ◇Dx) → ◇Dϻx) - “If x is moral and it's possible to decide x, then it's possible to decide that x is moral.”

Principle (f) is standard in modal logic, and principle (g) is simply the statement that no one is morally omniscient. The rest are implied by the nature of utilitarianism itself. Along with the principles of utility, principles (a)-(i) are sufficient to deduce the generalized equivalent of the statement “h is immoral”. I will call this “Theorem 1”.

Theorem 1: ∀x(~ϻx →~◇Dx) - “For all actions x, if x is immoral then it is not possible to morally decide x.”

Proof:
Taking the contrapositive of Theorem 1 yields:
∀x(◇Dx → ϻx)
I assume the negation to derive a contradiction, establishing Theorem 1 by reductio ad absurdum.

(1) ~∀x(◇Dx → ϻx) Assumption [for reductio]
(2) Ǝx~(◇Dx → ϻx) Quantifier Exchange
(3) Ǝx(◇Dx & ~ϻx) Negated Arrow
(4) ◇Da & ~ϻa Existential Instantiation
(5) ◇Da, ~ϻa & Elimination
(6) Ǝx(Kxa) Principle (c)
(7) Kba Existential Instantiation
(8) Ab, Cb Principles (a) and (b)
(9) U(b) = U(a) + C(b) U.1
(10) U(a) < 0, C(b) < 0 U.2, U.3
(11) U(b) < 0 Follows trivially from (9), (10)
(12) ~ϻb U.2
(13) ~◇Da U.4
(14) ~~∀x(◇Dx →ϻx) Reductio [(13) contradicts (5), negating (1)]
(15) ∀x(~ϻx →~◇Dx) ~~ Elimination, Contrapositive
QED.

It could also be argued that the cost of deciding any action is trivial, and not of any perceptible moral consequence, so that the cost of such a decision need not be considered in normal, day-to-day life. This argument can be refuted by demonstrating the existence of actions which do increase utility, and so are moral, but which are still morally undecidable. Hence Theorem 2.

Theorem 2: Ǝx( ϻx & ~◇Dϻx) - “There exist actions which are moral, but which are not possible to morally decide as moral”.

To establish deductively that (moral) morally undecidable actions exist, I will assume the negation of Theorem 2, i.e., ~Ǝx( ϻx & ~◇Dϻx), which is logically equivalent to ∀x(ϻx → ◇Dϻx): “For any action x, if x is moral, then x is morally decidable (as moral)”, and prove Theorem 1 by reductio.

Note that, rather than assume this negation twice, I have used one assumption for both Arrow Introduction and reductio, without discharge. Effecting the necessary modification would be trivial. The structure of this proof is based on Frederic Fitch's proof of the fifth theorem of his paper, A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts, which concerned epistemic logic rather than ethics.

(1) ∀x(ϻx → ◇Dϻx) Assumption [for Arrow Introduction/reductio]
(2) D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) Assumption [for reductio]
(3) Dϻx & D~Dϻx by Principle (e)
(4) Dϻx & ~Dϻx by Principle (d)
(5) ~D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) reductio on (2) [(4) is a contradiction]
(6) ~D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) Reiteration of (5)
(7) □~D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) by Principle (f)
(8) ~◇D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) Modal Negation Law
(9) (ϻx & ~Dϻx) → ◇D(ϻx & ~Dϻx) Instantiation of (1) with ( (ϻx & ~Dϻx) / ϻx )
(10) ~(ϻx & ~Dϻx) Modus Tollens with (9) and (8)
(11) (ϻx →Dϻx) Negated Arrow
(12) ∀x(ϻx → Dϻx) Universalization of (11)
(13) ∀x(ϻx → ◇Dϻx) → ∀x(ϻx → Dϻx) Arrow Introduction (1) → (12)
(14) ~∀x(ϻx → ◇Dϻx) Modus Tollens with (13) and Principle (g)
(15) ~∀x(ϻx → ◇Dϻx) Reductio on (1) [(1) and (14) yield a contradiction]
(16) Ǝx~( ϻx → ◇Dϻx) Quantifier Exchange
(17) Ǝx( ϻx & ~◇Dϻx) Negated Arrow

QED.

There may be various possible arguments against the significance or soundness of these results, but the significance of the final theorem, Theorem 3, cannot be denied, and it does not rely on the other two. I do require four more principles to prove it:

(j) ∀xy(Kyx → Qxy) - “If y calculates x, then y is a consequence of x.”
(k) ∀xy((◇Dx & Qxy) → ◇Dy) - “If x is morally decidable and y is a consequence of x, then y is morally decidable.”
(l) ∀x(~◇Dxn(∀n ∈ ℕ)) - “It is not possible to morally decide a set of (countably) infinite cardinality.”
(m) ∀P∀x((Px0) & (Pxn →Pxn+1) → Pxn(∀n ∈ ℕ)) - Principle of Mathematical Induction, where P is any predicate and ℕ is the set of natural numbers.

Principle (j) is true because any action y which is used to morally evaluate an action x would not have occurred without the occurrence of x. (k) is true of any consequentialist theory, and (l) is obvious. (m) is simply the Principle of Mathematical Induction, frequently used in all branches of mathematics and logic. These are sufficient to prove theorem 3.

Theorem 3: ∀x(~◇Dx) - “For all x, it is not possible to morally decide x.”

Once again, the proof will be by reductio.

(1) ~∀x(~◇Dx) Assumption [for reductio]
(2) Ǝx(~~◇Dx) Quantifier Exchange
(3) Ǝx(◇Dx) ~~ Elimination
(4) ◇Da Existential Instantiation
(5) Ǝy(Kya) Principle (c)
(6) Kc0a Existential Instantiation
(7) Qac0 Principle (j)
(8) ◇Da & Qac0 & Introduction on (4), (7)
(9) ◇Dc0 Principle (k)
(10) ◇Dcn Assumption [for Arrow Introduction]
(11) Ǝy(Kycn) Principle (c)
(12) Kcn+1cn Existential Instantiation
(13) Qcncn+1 Principle (j)
(14) ◇Dcn & Qcncn+1 & Introduction on (10), (13)
(15) ◇ Dcn+1 Principle (k)
(16) ◇Dcn → ◇Dcn+1 Arrow Introduction on (10), (13)
(17) ◇Dcn → ◇Dcn+1 Reiteration of (16)
(18) ◇Dc0 & (◇Dcn → ◇Dcn+1) & Introduction on (17), (9)
(19) ◇Dcn(∀n ∈ ℕ) Principle (m)
(20) Ǝx(◇Dxn(∀n ∈ ℕ)) Existentialization of (19)
(21) ~∀x(~◇Dxn(∀n ∈ ℕ)) Quantifier Exchange
(22) ∀x(~◇Dx) Reductio [(21) contradicts Principle (k), negating (1)]

QED.

Thus unconstrained utilitarianism is incapable of serving as a general theory of ethics, as it is impossible to decide whether any action is moral on utilitarian grounds. It is best suited for constrained situations, such as in game theory, or in deciding on punishments; but attempting to justify the rules governing the practice of utilitarianism by utilitarian calculation inevitably leads to paradox and infinite regress. Hence these rules must be deontological, which implies that Rawls's formulation was backwards: in any such hybrid system, utilitarianism must be the judge's tool, and deontology the law-maker's.

The Armorer of the Shadow Kingdom

2010-02-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

I now announce, with great pleasure, the knighting of the newest initiate of the Shadow Kingdom. Sir Cache Allot is a software engineer, an expert in information security and cryptography, has an exceptional academic background with research in another relevant CS sub-discipline, and is a long-time libertarian. His cryptographic armor will shield us from the claws of the Great Dragon who opposes us; his artifices will hide us from its yellow-hued eyes.

Arise, Sir Cache Allot, and rejoice: you are now a noble in our cryptographic brotherhood.

The Empty Camp

2010-01-30T19:27:00.000-08:00

"Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled for their life."

"I have seen knights setting forth, beginning assaults and standing muster, and sometimes retreating to save themselves."

"Ravenous greed would devour everything and then discover other wants. No bridle can restrain man's disordered desires within reasonable bounds."

Greetings, Light-Children of the Shadow Kingdom.

We begin this catechism with a call:

Hail G_d who brings Order to Chaos!
And hail the Light-Children, the joyful slaves of G_d, who build the pyramid named Order from the empty and chaotic sand! May our work be a monument not of trunkless legs but of noble stone.

As we build the Shadow Kingdom it must be with open eyes and hearts. The lie that humanity is free is proven false by the bold bacteria legion in our tissue. We are all symbionts. We are unwilling slaves to our genes and our generations. We are often willing slaves to our loves and to our lineage. We can be best used as joyful slaves to G_d id est joyful slaves to the greatest work: building and preserving Order. Do not let the words of the Enemy entrap your heart. Our first freedom is the freedom to shackle ourselves to greatness. Our finest freedom is choosing Good over evil and Order over chaos.

In our last catechism, we held the Fundamental Tenant, from my Consolation:

"Only the wise can do what they want to do."

The First Harmonic Tenant follows naturally from it:

"No man can be rich who cries fearfully and considers himself to be poor."

Fools live in fantasy. They believe themselves beset by enemies waiting to snatch what little they have, even if that little is a house on the hill. They build walls of laws and project their fearful thoughts onto the hearts of all. Every setback is a devastation and every closed door is the end of the world. When one considers the state of such men who run our state it is a miracle we are left unmolested.

The wise live in reality. In a typo I wrote "freality." Though an ugly word it is a good descriptor. The wise live in a reality that gives freedom of thought and action. Because fools believe in the fantasy of personal freedom, every failing is a failure. Because the wise know that freedom exists only to be given away, every failing is a correction. Because the wise live in reality, a wise man stripped of physical possessions knows that nothing has been taken from him. Fools place their treasure in earthy delights. The treasure of the wise is in knowledge and family.

It is for this reason I call you my children. The Shadow Kingdom is a family. Progressive Fools, led by the Enemy have sought to destroy the family for these three-hundred years and perhaps three-thousand more. We will rebuild it and with the bonds of blood we will stand together and thrive.

Fides Et Conscienta,
Father Boethius

The First Knight of the Shadow Kingdom

2010-01-29T13:28:00.000-08:00

We have now knighted the newest initiate to the Shadow Kingdom, who has sworn the oath of fealty and offered his services to aid in the advancement of our goals. Sir Francis Walsingham has mastered the arcane art of "software engineering", is a skilled applied mathematician, and knows a thing or two about investing and web-based start-ups. His skill-set is so relevant to our first fief that someday missionaries will tell his tale to convince nihilist savages that the universe is divinely ordered.

Our week-old fief is now four nobles strong, and I am quite pleased with our progress. We still need new nobles, dedicated to the ideals of liberty, who possess the following skills/areas of knowledge: web design, programming, cryptography, feudalism, network engineering, web-based start-ups, seigneurialism, onion routing, Jiu Jitsu, finance, joint stock companies, law, neocameralism, system penetration, opinion entitlement, usury, information security, and/or horsemanship. Current compensation: title, including partial ownership of fief (shares). Contact me to for more information.

Prophesy against Gog!

2010-01-25T16:43:00.000-08:00

"Therefore, thou son of man, prophecy against Gog, and say, 'Thus saith the Lord G_d; "Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Democracy and Progressivism!"

"Of those he seemed the one who wins, not the one who loses."

"Do we not agree that happiness is good?"

Greetings, Light-Children of the Shadow Kingdom,

You have been led to our halls by G_d. It matters not the name or face you give; nor does even your belief or unbelief shake this fact. Now you are here, it would do well to get you acquainted with our way.

The Shadow Kingdom waits for the day when "the light shall pierce the darkness." You, my Light-Children, shall pierce the darkness of self-obsession and arrogance that leads the Foul'd Enemy to Progressive Ignorance masquerading as the Good (as if such miscreants had read Father Plato! Infantile!). You shall be Priests and Knights, Lords and Burghers, Craftsmen and Learned Doctors.

Over the coming weeks, we shall explore the culture and faith of the Shadow Kingdom. Our fundamental tenant comes from my Consolation:

"Only the wise can do what they want to do."

You have seen the desires of men for peace and prosperity go astray. Promises of Hope and Change preceded our Fair President and have not been fulfilled (indeed, they have been roundly perverted!) because they were the promises of fools. "The wicked follow their desires but they cannot accomplish what they want. For they do what they feel like doing, and they suppose that they will find among their pleasures the good they are really looking for."

The wise know that freedom is an infinite good that requires work to be brought into this world. Fools believe freedom is finite and can only be stolen.

It is for this reason that The Shadow Kingdom is a Kingdom and not a Republic or Democracy. Democracy is rule by fool and the greatest of all designed Republics cannot but devolve into Democracy. For further discourse on this precise subject, we defer to Brother Mencius Moldbug.

Fides Et Conscienta,
Father Boethius

The First Priest of Crypto-Seigneurialism: Father Boethius Ordained

2010-01-24T09:19:00.000-08:00

I have now ordained the First Priest of Crypto-Seigneurialism, who has chosen the name Father Boethius. Father Boethius has a frightening intellect, astonishing erudition, a long history commenting at all the right blogs, and a distinguished, verifiable publication list in a professional-level venue.

Those of you contacting me desirous of priesthood, take note. I am forced by practical concerns to reject the applications of those who have nothing I can evaluate: if you don’t have a blog, or published works, or a thesis, there really is no way I can tell if your contributions will be valuable, or even where your sympathies truly lie.

If you are a programmer or IT specialist, rather than a writer, contact me instead regarding knighthood. To put it simply:

Knights = nerds
Priests = poets

The knights will serve as programmers and in information security roles. Just as in feudal times, ownership of “property” hinges on the ability to defend it, and just as in feudal times, Father Boethius and his brethren will enforce our principles, wielding the weapon of excommunication.

It Begins

2010-01-21T15:58:00.001-08:00

An entrepreneur has contacted me with an exciting proposal for the first crypto-seigneurialist fief. I’ve asked him to draw up a business plan, which should be done sometime next week.

The structure of crypto-seigneurialism, which will be further explained in my next post, requires an entity with the authority to grant titles. I have thus proclaimed myself Sovereign Founder and have granted the title of Baron to our entrepreneur, who has chosen the name Baron Fulk Nerra.

The project will use PHP and MySQL, so if you’d like to help for fun, profit, or knighthood: study up.

Also, Mencius Moldbug has set up a pledge fund, and he certainly deserves to be well-paid for the incredible body of work he has produced, but I fear we may see the end of Unqualified Reservations as a full-time blog.

Crypto-seigneurialism offers a solution. In Crypto-Seigneurialism Revealed, I spoke of “priests and cardinals offering oversight and ideas, the anonymous intellectuals of the crypto-economy, the chosen bloggers of neo-medievalism.” This, of course, is a paid position, and that Moldbug's blogging-fund ran dry at the same time that Perkunos chose to reveal crypto-seigneurialism seems more than coincidence.

I agree with Bruce Charlton that modern academia, by emphasis on specialization, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, prevents high IQ individuals from becoming revolutionary scientists, and that is likely what happened in Moldbug’s case … as well as in the case of another reactionary blogger, TGGP.

Even as extremely gifted individuals who seem to love nothing more than independent research, formally trained in CS, self-taught in economics, they don't quite fit in modern institutions, and yet are perfect for our priesthood.

If Baron Fulk Nerra’s fief ends up profitable – and I believe it will – then I, Sovereign Founder Ivan Navi, will command the Baron to tithe his profits for the establishment of a church, with initial offers of priesthood to the aforementioned bloggers.

We’ll see if the business plan is as convincing to you as it was to me.

Crypto-Seigneurialism Revealed

2010-01-09T01:25:00.000-08:00

My eyes hold, unblinking, eyelids repelled like two like magnetite poles. The twinge in my liver tells me I’ve gone too far and I try typing. Hands twitching in the monitor’s light in a darkness too dark to see jaundice.

On your second sleepless modafinil night you can watch each object move and melt like stained glass panes into shadows. In certain states you are compelled by addict receptors to make cocktails, nicotine mints between gums and lips as you swallow an extra deprenyl pill with dribbling lukewarm coffee.

Then sometimes the steady monitor screen starts to make the same silly scene and you find your focus fixed on a cursor trailing the tricks and soon the sun shines through the half-closed slats of your blinds.

But tonight is a night of focus and I'm steady. Everything is steady. Except that this thread suddenly splices two days of manic dreams into a single incoherent thought that’s sprouted and growing on my screen like a volcanic island from the sea; it fills my dark room with silver light and a wolf howls through the speakers of the laptop on my knees. I hear hoof beats and see a pale horse and rider approaching in 3D.

The rider nears. He’s wearing wolf furs and a wolf-head hood and his horse looks much like a mustang. He has a black beard and flowing mane and he’s now prominent on the screen, regarding me directly. His eyes take in sights with uncivilized vigilance, with a precision fine-tuned in some wilderness spread across steppes. His left hand loosely grips the handle of his war hammer; the muscles, the sinews – the skeletal frame itself – are fearfully thick, of a stock not yet domesticated. He regards me with all the contempt of nobility. He bears danger, savage and royal, like a lion ready to spring. The warrior speaks:

I am called Perkunos; I am called War-Hammer, the Berserk-Lord, the Wolf-Warrior, the Serpent-Slayer. I heard the song of your Wolf-Rite echoing across epochs, the throb of your days of hunger, the hum of your days without sleep, the flow of your days drowned in sauma. I am the greatest of your ancestors; you are the least of my descendants. Yet you have called and so I am here.

I think maybe I should ignore this, but maybe I should speak. I explain that I didn’t summon anyone and have never heard of a Wolf-Rite.

Then you discovered it on your own. The self-starvation, the resistance to sleep, the regular ingestion of sauma (yours a modern form) to generate a vision of your warrior guide.

He dismounts the horse in one motion. The horse fades from my screen. Perkunos stands silently. I close my eyes and know I haven’t died as I hear those familiar ecstatic screams, the yelling and laughter and crapulous retching of students in surrounding structures, the squealing breaks and revving motors on nearby cobblestone streets, and the tap tap tap of pointed spider toes on walls as the rasping cocksure voices of blocks of beggars beg me alms.

I open my eyes. I explain again that I did not intend to summon anything. Perkunos frowns.

Then?

I don’t know how to explain my fear of sleep, my floor marked with coffee stains half-covered by smashed plastic blister packs and cans and cardboard cartons emptied of cans of energy drinks. It’s just that each morning I awake restrained or compelled across a thousand dimensions by massed bureaucrats by means of thugs in blue hats, burgeoning biometrics and wiretaps, perhaps RFID on a national ID or in my skin, masses cheering it along to an endgame that always ends the same, their pawns emerging promoted and my mind and body not my property. Perkunos nods and I see he can read the text on the small notepad screen below him.

So I continue typing about how no one seems to feel this ever-present pressure except some people I’ve never met but read on the internet and how it intensifies in the ambit of the ugly concrete structures of the state, how everyone seems to swim through it unaware of it but marked by it and cursed by it but not by insanity though unhappy.

A man drives hours every winter to hunt in the rocky hills that jut up from the great desert plain. He takes a versatile hunting dog who lives for it, who seems to fly through foot-deep snow between sagebrush over boulders and holes or half-frozen streams in pursuit of any telling scent. And the man lives for it, trudging behind for hours uphill while slipping on iced-over roots or stumbling over thick tangles of Artemisia.

Sometimes he simply stops at a high point, sometimes next to large mounds of piled-up stones of some Indian burial, looking out over some plain of blue sage and drifts of snow climbing up over hills bleeding reddish clay at their cores while the dog pants and waits beside him.

But usually the man is working. He’d been planning to retire before his dog got too old but a cabal of neosocialists and bankers vaporized his 401k. And his son saw him this Christmas and for the first time he could remember, the man seemed unhappy.

And what would your plan be to free this man? And how will you escape that ever-present pressure?

I smile at the quaint simplicity of the savage mind. There is no plan and never will be.

Perkunos turns and somehow controls my browser with rapid movements of his war hammer. He pulls up my blog and scrolls down until he can see the mass of links I’ve compiled and begins to read. He turns back towards me.

Crypto anarchy? Counter-economics? Anonymous digital currencies? Offshore bank accounts through Guatemalan law firms? You say there is no plan, and there will be no plan, but clearly there was a plan. What was it?

No, that dream is dead; it’s documented embarrassing libertarian history. That was years ago and youthful naiveté.

Why didn’t it work? What do they say?

The technology is there – the problem is sociology. The average person is not willing to go to the extreme lengths needed to maintain his privacy so we are left with a small group of hardcore crypto-geeks who never end up having much of an effect, and the state never withers away.

I did not ask about the state withering away. I asked about escaping the state, and I asked about you, not the average person.

Well the goal was always for the state to wither away. The agorists, for example, write:

Along the way the risk of contract-violation between counter-economic traders will be lowered by arbitration. Then the protection agencies will start providing contract enforcement between agorists, although the greatest "enforcer" in the early stages will be the State to which each can turn the other cone into. Yet that act would quickly result in one's expulsion from the sub-society; so an internal enforcement mechanism will be valued.

In the final stages counter-economist transactions with statists will be enforceable by the protection agencies and the agorists protected against the criminality of the State.

At this point we have reached the final step before the achievement of a libertarian society. Society is divided between large agorist areas inviolate and statist sectors. And we stand on the brink of Revolution.

And Perkunos laughs! He’s laughing so hard the hammer falls from his hand.

Ah, the final triumph of good over evil, the fulfillment by the Chosen Ones of their Destiny, the mass conversion of the People to the True Way, the Revolution and overthrow of the Evil Ones. Semitic progressivism in an anarchic form. Why have you forgotten my culture? Why is every narrative Semitic? It is the intersection of the Indo-European with the Semitic that made your culture great.

There is another recurrent myth, once ubiquitous in the West, of a hero’s descent, into the underworld, to slay a dragon for his own undying fame. He is not divinely chosen; he does not wait for the help of others, or give up if they won’t follow – he goes by himself into battle, simply because he is a warrior and has chosen to do so.

I, Perkunos, was the original dragon-slayer; my undying fame spread across the world under various names: Fergus mac Léti, Beowulf, Heracles, Thraetaona, Thor, Trita Aptya, and many more. But the clichéd narrative of weak destined-ones overcoming the strong evil-ones has almost completely supplanted it. In comic books, for example, only Frank Castle represents traditional Indo-European mythology.

So go, now; descend into that underworld, those black markets and dens of thieves and slay whatever wyrms you come across.

But I don’t see what I can accomplish on my own sending encrypted messages to myself or making sure I’m unidentifiable browsing with Tor.

Not by yourself. An entire warrior class of those crypto-geeks who are willing to take the risks, and damn the common man.

But there was such a group, and they accomplished little.

And how where they organized?

They were anarchists.

A group of unorganized geeks gave up after failing to overthrow the most powerful government that has ever existed, and that is your excuse for having no plan to use the tools that are within your grasp? I tell you now that an organized group with a degree of intelligence and daring can use these tools to become both wealthy and free.

But I have no idea how to organize such a group.

There are innumerable possible schemes for organizing a group, but I will recommend the one I am most familiar with: my own. Your modern scholars know it as “tripartion”. It is this: society is divided into three castes, the military, the priestly, and the productive. The priestly caste is the most complex, being divided into two functions, the mystical and the legalistic, and is often represented mythologically by twins. This is sovereignty. Study on it.

And such a system can be used to organize a virtual community?

Look at the sheer variety of cultures, geographies, and eras in which society was thus divided. All Indo-European cultures followed this pattern, and, indeed, one of the greatest criticisms of Dumézil was that this division may have been universal.

Then how will I know which of the various permutations of the tripartition to implement?

I have traveled from my own era across the lands and the seas of time and have witnessed every implementation of the tripartition, and the one that most fiercely resisted the shifting fancies of the gods was seigneurialism.

A sovereign grants a fief, which is property, to a seigneur, who is a lord, member of the military caste, who in turn utilizes the productive caste to yield profit from that property in exchange for protection. Iterated, this system is called feudalism, and survived in this form for millennia.

But there are few systems more hated and mocked than feudalism.

Feudalism’s failing was its emphasis on birth; its eternal damnation of serfs to lives of serfdom. In your system, the serfs will simply be those without the intelligence or daring to enter the world of the nobility.

My over-stimulated synapses fire and erratic images coalesce, a vision of an ancient system recast with cryptographic castles and onion routed moats, chained relays of remailers as coats of chain mail with PGP cloaks, anonymous runts of CS and IT rising to nobility, hordes of gold stashed overseas exchanged electronically with every purchase in a networked black market economy.

These are the warriors, and then we’ll have our priestly caste, those who plot and devise our business schemes, establishing norms and excommunicating heretics. Both castes will have their hierarchies, based on the titles of those romanticized times, rising up through knighthood to lordship and beyond, barons and bishops and counts and kings and all this taken seriously. The warrior nobility is the entrepreneurs, the information security specialists who implement anonymous crypto-seigneurialist business plans on their virtual fiefs protecting transactions of ignorant serfs looking for safe ways to purchase cheap prescription drugs or small arms or weed; with priests and cardinals offering oversight and ideas, the anonymous intellectuals of the crypto-economy, the chosen bloggers of neo-medievalism. Formalizing this hierarchy now gives it stability; as cryptography allows for the stability of formalism, the formalization of crypto-anarchy makes it robust.

My head is spinning and I spit out my mint. When I look back to my screen Perkunos is gone. I start working.

The Virtual Plantation; Muslims Enthusiastic about Neo-Muhammadanism

2009-12-24T15:09:00.001-08:00

David Friedman recently posted an interesting entrepreneurial proposal regarding the importation of historical jewelry.

I thought of a possible improvement to the business plan:

It would be still more profitable, obviously, to have workers provide you with custom arts and crafts for free.

The guilt-free method of doing so would be to scam bait a conniving Nigerian (which is surprisingly easy given the likely 50 point average IQ difference) which, when done with sufficient skill, can generate very impressive artwork.

A team of five to ten such baiters could rake in the profits while simultaneously preventing thousands of crimes.

The linked-to bust is of the scam baiter "Shiver Metimbers". Getting free, customized busts made is the least of it.

I imagine a network of professional, Shiver Metimbers level scam baiters auctioning off custom busts and custom tattoos - "your face tattooed on a Nigerian scammer! e-mail history of bait included" - selecting the most gullible scammers by some sort of field-validated gullibility test.

On another note, I recently posted my description of a proposed variation of Islam, Neo-Muhammadanism, to IslamicBoard.com. The post was overwhelmingly voted up and received a comment, "good", which increases my confidence that Neo-Muhammadanism will quickly replace the obsolete version of Islam.

Also, since converting to Neo-Muhammadanism, debating progressives has become astonishingly easy. On page two of the posted thread I used Islamic debate tactics to immediately silence "VegetarianSoul", who had previously been impervious to all argument. Progressivism is completely submissive to Islam, and my variation is no exception.

Escaping the Decadence of Monotheism: Neo-Muhammadanism and the Cuckoo Strategy

2009-12-18T00:01:00.000-08:00

This clip may call out some strange imagining; some distant vision of myriad worlds, bound to geodesics like notes to melodies; some starless vision of alien oceans. We see sea life orbit in liquid ellipses; a thousand lives swimming, floating, like space debris, or the sounds in an unwritten symphony; soft against faintly-curved gravity, governed in the finest grain of time, like planets and stars under glass, and indifferent.

Naturally, I expected to see appreciative comments for this video, and truly appreciative, at the very least, for offering a moment's escape from internet inanity. I was, then, quite surprised to see comments such as the following, which follow this clip wherever it's posted.

1) Mixed feelings ... As a Scuba Diver I want to do nothing but get in there , But as a Person all I want to do is to put them back in the Sea where they belong . They are so wonderfull. But it dose WOW me.

2) It's so beautiful, but at the same time its very sad to know that those animals are stuck in a box with no freedom to swim where they wish, being surrounded by people who watch them all the time. It's sort of like prison to me.

3) Or you can look at it as cages and the animals can't escape. These animals are meant to have HUGE areas to swim in and swim miles and miles. They need that. It is not our right to take them away from their natural homes, no matter how it educates us. We can be educated through video and lessons, not imprisoning other species.

Of course, we know that no one really gives a shit about fish. This is an affected piety to signal one’s commitment to Gaiaism, which is a perversion of a perversion of Christianity.

It's disgusting that Christianity, the foundation of Western culture, has been contorted into these sickening, hyper-feminine worldviews; it becomes more intense and irrational once limits set by tradition and command are stripped away. Its permutability allows for markets and scientific revolutions, but its more strongly imprinted traits inevitably evolve, in the absence of religious dogma, toward totalitarian ideologies.

Mencius Moldbug brilliantly describes the metamorphosis of "mainline progressive Protestantism", the dominant U.S. denomination, into "Universalism" here. TGGP originally noted that Islam seemed the best fit for Moldbug's system.

Islam is a comparatively stable, immutable system, far less open to interpretation. The beliefs of a poor Muslim today roughly approximate those of a poor Muslim a hundred years ago. This stability comes at the cost of innovation, for which the Muslim world traditionally relied on conquered dhimmis through 500 years of Jihad. Once the main force of Jihad was smashed by a hammer - once the flow of dhimmi intellectuals ran dry - so too did the innovative ability of the Muslim world.

The Jihad, while it lasted, worked splendidly. The first step was to create a mob of sexually repressed adolescents, removing, through burqa chic, the possibility of seeing a woman; removing, through status-based polygamy, the possibility of marriage; promising, if they left living, the captured women of enemies; promising, if they left rotting, a paradise of 72 virgins; and finally, before any unbowed nation: let loose those sex-crazed hordes.

Their caste system was also quite innovative, allowing the Christian and Jewish populations of the Middle East to live and work as dhimmis who paid a special tax (the jizyah), providing much needed intellectual capital to those nations of rapist warriors.

Islam’s golden age and achievements were based on a core of these conquered intellectuals, dhimmi and newly converted, along with geographic access to the intellectual traditions of both East and West. The second-class status of this intellectual class inevitably destroyed it, and still destroys it, leaving Islam a religion of countries with three things that chill infidel blood: national average IQ's equal to those of U.S. child delinquents in the 1920's; nuclear weapons equal in power to those of the U.S. military in the 1940's; and a rage equal to that of the U.S. on September 12, 2001.

As Emerson said, “ … without great men, great crowds of people in a nation are disgusting; like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas-the more, the worse.”

The national average IQ of oil-rich Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, is disturbingly low. Only Muslim countries show this disconnect between wealth and intelligence, owing largely to being unearned ... and to the fact that "(i)n Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan close to half of all marital pairings are between first or second cousins," and "Among Muslims in West Asia and North Africa, the ideal marriages are arranged ones with first cousins".

Still, Islam’s stability is its strength. We do not want a nation of freethinkers, as freethinkers won't be willing to kill infidels over cartoons. We want a stable mass of near moronity - the current average of the Muslim world is less than a standard deviation away - from which we can pluck hairy human suicide-bombs with too low a capacity for abstract thought to see irony in responding to this statement by the former Pope - "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached" - with the following:

"At least five churches were attacked by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In the West Bank city of Nablus, firebombings left black scorch marks on the walls and windows of the city's Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches. At least five firebombs hit the Anglican church and its door was later set ablaze. A group called the Lions of Monotheism who said they were carried out to protest the pope's speech.

Later that day, four masked gunmen doused the main doors of Nablus' Roman and Greek Catholic churches with lighter fluid, then set them afire. They also opened fire on the buildings, striking both with bullets. In Gaza City, militants opened fire from a car at a Greek Orthodox church, striking the facade. Explosive devices were set off at the same Gaza church on Friday, causing minor damage. There were no claims of responsibility for the last three attacks.

Several organizations, such as Al-Qaeda and the Mujahideen Shura Council threatened in a joint statement: 'you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the jizya tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (being killed by) the sword. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the Mujahideen.'

Employees of Ankara's Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Presidency of Religious Affairs), the state body that organizes Muslim worship in Turkey, asked the authorities on September 19 to open legal proceedings against Pope Benedict XVI and to arrest him when he visits the country in November 2006. They said the Pontiff had violated Turkish laws upholding freedom of belief and thought by 'insulting' Islam and the Prophet(sic) Muhammad."

"A previously unknown Baghdad-based group, Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi (Islamic Salafist Boy Scout Battalions) threatened to kill all Christians in Iraq if the Pope does not apologize to Muhammad within three days. Christian Leaders in Iraq have asked their parishioners not to leave their homes, after two Christians were stabbed and killed in Baghdad.

There have been reports of writing in church doors stating 'If the Pope does not apologise, we will bomb all churches, kill more Christians and steal their property and money.'"

"The Iraqi militia Jaish al-Mujahedin (Holy Warriors' Army) announced its intention to "destroy their cross in the heart of Rome… and to hit the Vatican."

Despite the Pope's comments dying down in the media, attacks on Assyrian Christians continued and on 9 October, Islamic extremist group kidnapped priest Paulos Iskander. The relatives of a Christian priest who was beheaded 3 days later in Mosul, have said that his Muslim captors had demanded his church condemn the pope's recent comments about Islam and pay a $350,000 ransom."

We need warriors so exceedingly stupid that they'll blow themselves up in a room full of nuns to prove that Islam isn't violent (and get a shot at 72 cousins). Islam's stability is its strength - but its stupidity is its foundation.

If necessary, we can raise the rate of first cousin marriage, or even include sibling marriage, to lower the average IQ of our warriors as necessary. The use of burqas from birth, at all times - a minor but necessary revision - will circumvent the Westermarck effect. We will also need to relax the prohibition of music to some degree - our little tykes will need to do something to pass the time.

It is much easier to salvage a stable but flawed system than an unstable though formerly successful one. For that reason, we will tweak Islam, rather than Christianity, removing its design flaws and creating the world’s ultimate monotheistic, evangelistic, militaristic religion of peace: Neo-Muhammadanism.

Of course, a Neo-Muhammadanist Caliphate will necessarily be masculine, as would any designed not to drown in oceans of estrogen tears. Because in a world of universal, feminine empathy, your tears start to fall in strange fits of sympathy, till the day you reach out, with atrophied arms and finality, to type righteous pleas for the existential fulfillment of Japanese stingrays.

To solve the problem of the destruction of the intellectual class, we must provide an incentive for the dhimmis to remain dhimmis, and for high IQ Muslims to become dhimmis. We must spread high IQ genes through the Muslim population to prevent the intellectual decadence we see today, while at the same time leaving the idiot class intact.

We need this idiot class - it is the soul of Islam. It is not truly necessary for a society to have high average ability to be prosperous: recent research in "Smart Fraction Theory" shows that the relative ability of the society's brightest exerts greater effect than its national IQ.

Our method, then, becomes obvious: give dhimmis the droit de seigneur. We can justify this step superstitiously and religiously, or with some vague theory of Jewish conspiracies to kill devout Neo-Muhammadanists by means of virgin brides with polonium-laced vaginae. The dhimmis then become rather like royal tasters.

The droit will be given to the wealthiest and smartest of dhimmis. We imagine ten randomly selected virgins offered for every standard deviation from the mean in net worth or IQ (quarterly). Deflowerment will be viewed as Russian Roulette by the Neo-Muhammadanists, plagued as they'll be by images of shifty-eyed, hook-nosed Jews inserting glistening polonium pellets into ripening cherries, the surrounding skin tending to a sudden softening, a peeling; appealing, ripened - granted, yet dripping liquid carcinogens like skoal from hillbilly lips, all but glowing, permeating flesh and burqa, all but burning in rising metastatic masses, scraping and staining that lovely goat-skin gown.

To risk such horrors is clearly a task to be relegated to the lowly dhimmis, and those lowly, shrewd dhimmis will feign reluctance under those husbands' eyes, and under all eyes - save those of the deflowered? We may yet need to require fertility pills, or inform our loyal Neo-Muhammadanists that Jewish polonium requires several hours of direct contact over various days to cause death. The optimal fertility rate must be reached.

This is similar to the cuckoo strategy: brood parasitism. The cuckoo's eggs evolve quite rapidly to maximize success:

Many hosts of the Common Cuckoos, such as the Great Reed Warbler, learned to recognize the parasitic eggs and would simply eject the foreign eggs from their nests. The cuckoos countered by evolving eggs that mimicked those of the host. In fact, this mimicry is so good that one ornithologist had to use genetic markers to tell the difference between host eggs and parasitic eggs. The picture below is an excellent illustration on just how good this mimicry has become.

We can thus expect our half-dhimmi offspring to evolve to look like inbred Muslims, even while possessing genius-level IQ's. We want these firstborn, these who inherit their father’s IQ, these who are unafflicted by the defects of incest, to be capable of free thought and thus capable of rejecting this religion. We will thus change that sacred, holy, poetic command from, “If anyone changes his religion, kill him,” to “If anyone changes his religion, charge him a hefty exit tax.” In this way, only our high IQ Muslims can afford to become apostates, and our army of semi-moronic, bearded inbreds is preserved.

By the time Neo-Muhammadanism becomes a world religion (estimate: five years), gene sequencing will be widely available. We can then further improve the genetic potential of our dhimmi class:

“A recent advance in gathering eggs from women will make it much easier for choosey moms to give birth to geniuses. Two British fertility clinics have found a way of safely obtaining thousands of eggs from a woman. Fertility clinics, therefore, will soon be able to give a couple thousands of embryos to pick from. So let's say that a certain couple's genes mean that normally they have only a 1% chance of conceiving a child with the genetic potential to reach a genius IQ. With the ability to select among thousands of embryos, however, this couple could now almost guarantee that their offspring has the genetic potential of a genius.”

And apostates these geniuses must become. With proper breeding to maximize the Gini coefficient - or to effect some superior distribution -of IQ in the population, we will see huge differences in the IQ of the dhimmi-sired firstborn and his family. With a difference of two or more standard deviations between them, and a power-based family structure prone to honor killings - even in America - the bonds of love will not keep our chosen dhimmis from joining their apostate intellectual peers.

Neo-Muhammadanism also solves the problems of the West. Our smartest students have the lowest fertility; the declining fertility rate of Westerners in general presents rather difficult problems for the socialists. Neo-Muhammadanism solves both problems through its steady supply of the gifted to the crypto-aristocracy. The need for an aristocracy is readily apparent to any honest student of history. Thomas Jefferson said:

The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious
gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts and government
of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent
in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not
to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the
concerns of society.

And it is not only the West in which the aristocracy is dead or dying. In 2005, a Japanese mathematician named Masahiko Fujiwara released The Dignity of the Nation, which became a bestseller. Takuan Seiyo, a European living in Japan, summarizes and responds:

Freedom, Fujiwara writes, has degenerated into nothing more than unrestrained egotism. Equality is a fiction, a lie used to mask a reality of great inequality, or to wield as a club in the constant class, race and gender skirmishes roiling the West. Globalization is worldwide homogenization, and not to the highest common denominator. And democracy is based on an erroneous assumption: that people are capable of making mature and informed judgments.

Only a governing elite can curb democracy's tendency to run amok, says Fujiwara. Members of the elite must possess four characteristics: a broad cultural and historical erudition, an ability to see "the big picture," exceptional strength of character, and sufficient love of their people and country to sacrifice for them their lives in an hour of need. Japan, Fujiwara adds, used to but no longer has such an elite. One of his greatest delusions is that Great Britain, France, and the U.S. still do.

Our high-IQ elite will be erudite, visionary, and will have had the strength of character to leave their lifelong religions. They will not, of course, have any love for their Neo-Muhammadanist nations, and would likely not even sacrifice one single whale shark, let alone their lives, to keep an ICBM from annihilating Mecca (and Medina). But, for this purpose, we have our blessed idiots. They won't sacrifice their lives to save the whale shark, granted, but they would gladly perish, in glorious martyrdom, to kill you if you call it Muhammad.

So one of the duties of our aristocracy will have to be outsourced, but outsourcing is all the rage these days, and our dhimmis are still closer to a new, true aristocracy than our dying democracies will ever bring us.

It's that damn democraphilia of our time (remove it from your mind), ever seeking equality at the expense of liberty. Here is where Neo-Muhammadanism shines, hiding those gifts of the aristoi, even offering them freely in the form of gifted first-born children, and thus removing the appeal of jealousy-based politics.

The tendency of democracies to harden into various cancerous, lobbying cartels is one of the main causes of the steady loss of vitality and economic decline suffered by all aging democratic nations, as explained in 1982 by Mancur Olson. Examine one of his theory's postulates, 27 years old:

Special-interest groups also slow growth by reducing the rate at which resources are reallocated from one activity or industry to another in response to new technologies or conditions. One obvious way in which they do so is lobbying for bail-outs of failing firms, thereby delaying or preventing the shift of resources to areas where they would have a greater productivity.

Brilliant. And where lies the escape from their grasping, stifling paws?

Olson says that Germany and Japan did well because their special interest groups were shattered by military defeat. When new labor unions formed in Germany and Japan, they tended to be very broad-based and therefore had an incentive in the overall welfare of their societies.

The constant warfare of Neo-Muhammadanist societies, in both victory and defeat, will destroy those entrenched power structures, those innovation-stifling special interest groups, those corrupted bureaucracies and corporations. Intense intergovernmental competition will lead to hypercompetition of militaries, which will lead to astonishing technological progress. The constant influx of intellectuals through expansions of borders, coupled with the high IQ breeding program, will lead to a new explosion of revolutionary scientists, and our holy military will provide fulfillment, adventure, employment, and population control to our proles, who will believe themselves elite.

All we need now is a prophet.

How to Learn All Eight Romance Languages

2009-12-05T23:51:00.000-08:00

The main Romance languages are:

Latin
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Catalan
Occitan
Romanian

They share a large common vocabulary and similar grammatical structures such that fluency in one allows you to gain rapid fluency in another. Indeed, by some estimates, you can learn a second romance language in half the time you learned the first. In general, the more Romance languages you learn, the easier it should be to learn subsequent romance languages. As Barry Farber says in How To Learn Any Language:

You learn so much Italian when you learn Spanish that it's a shame not to switch over and pursue Italian once your Spanish is adequate. Portuguese isn't far behind, and even French, the Romance language least like the others, has enough similar grammatical features and vocabulary to help you conquer all of the other Romance languages.

To learn them all, we must first choose an optimal order for our learning sequence. The most widely spoken is Spanish, but the most culturally influential is French. French also offers access to many high quality language courses, such as Assimil. Spanish has more affordable immersion opportunities and more people to practice with (depending on your location). In the end, choose the language that will be most immediately useful to you.

It may interest you to consider Esperanto: it is much easier than any natural Romance language (claimed to be six times easier), has the same shared vocabulary, and will allow you to gain fluency quite quickly. There is some evidence that first learning an easy “practice” language like Esperanto facilitates the learning of subsequent languages. Some studies even claim that learning Esperanto first, followed by French, is more effective than studying French for the same amount of time.

In one study, a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group, who studied French for all four years. Similar results have been found for other combinations of native and second languages, as well as for arrangements in which the course of study was reduced to two years, of which six months is spent learning Esperanto.

If Esperanto interests you, you can learn it for free at Lernu, or from Teach Yourself Esperanto, which is considered among the best Teach Yourself language courses ever written.

Lernu provides free tutoring and a personalized lesson plan with sufficient material to teach you the language fluently. According to the heading, “after you’ve studied everything on this last, you’ll probably be able to speak Esperanto!” You may find it worthwhile if there is an Esperanto club in your area. You can check here for clubs in the U.S.

Next, we’ll learn French and Spanish in your preferred order. Spanish and French are far apart, as Romance languages go, so this order will minimize confusion.

One of the best courses for learning French, the FSI Basic course, available here, is completely free, as it was created by the U.S. government to train diplomats and so is in the public domain.

This course is extensive, but also quite boring, and it would be quite a challenge to force yourself to study for the hundreds of hours needed to complete it. As such, you will probably end up using this course as a supplement. The hundreds of grammar and conversation drills, along with the dialogues, will be an invaluable aid to developing fluency.

For pure reading ability, I recommend Wilson's Teach Yourself French, available used at very low prices. The author claims in the introduction that you will be able to read almost anything after completing the book. I found that to be true (with significant use of a dictionary), but I started studying French after I was already fluent in Spanish. In any case, you will be surprised by how much you can read after finishing the book. It has a sequel, which further develops reading ability, called Everyday French.

A less boring but costly supplement/alternative to the FSI course is the French in Action course (you will also need the text and study guide). As far as I know, this is the best, most lively French program available. And, for pure listening comprehension, you will find no better resource than the set of free videos available here. They are entertaining, though corny, and have a cult following.

Another good (and less expensive) method is the Assimil course. These are a favorite of noted polyglot Professor Alexander Arguelles. In fact, one of the reasons he recommends learning French first is to be able to use the French Assimil courses for other languages which are not available in English.

There are countless schools offering French immersion programs, but I have yet to take this step. I believe immersion to be vital for the development of true, conversational fluency in a language, and have been researching various schools in France and Quebec. An alternative, for now, would be to find an online tutor and converse at an hourly rate through Skype.

The best course to learn Spanish is the free FSI course, and this course is considered the gold standard of FSI courses among language nerds. If you have an interest in language, you have likely seen an FSI course while browsing language programs in bookstores, but they have been repackaged by Barron’s under the title “Mastering Spanish” or “Mastering French” and are sold for absurd prices. Don’t be fooled: they’re profiting from slightly altered public domain material that was paid for (if you’re American) by your tax dollars.

The same criticism of the French course applies to this one: it’s a tough slog. I was able to work through all four volumes in about six months, after which I took multiple immersion trips to Guatemala and Nicaragua to gain and improve fluency.

I was impressed that my Spanish, developed only by means of the FSI course, was better than many of the immersion students in Guatemala on their second or third trip, as were they. The immediate correction provided by the drills offers feedback no teacher would have the patience or time to provide, and their impressive range and sheer quantity cover so many situations that you will rarely find yourself at a loss for words.

There are also Assimil and Teach Yourself courses for Spanish, but I didn’t use them. Like the French in Action videos, there is a series of free videos, called Destinos, available here. They are a great help in improving comprehension, but aren’t as entertaining as the French in Action videos.

A Spanish immersion trip will likely be considerably cheaper than a similar trip for French. The deals available in Central America are especially good. I studied primarily at a school called Celas Maya in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. The cost of tuition and homestay is incredibly low:

Spanish Language Study
US$150 weekly (September through May)
US$165 weekly (June through August)
Tuition includes:

• Five hours a day, five days a week of one-on-one instruction with a 1/2 hour
morning break
• Homestay with a nearby Guatemalan family including a private room seven days
a week and three meals a day except Sundays. (more info)
• Optional participation in scheduled activities
• Access to the school library including textbooks, videos, literature, and
non-fiction
• One hour a day (weekdays only) of free Internet access in our Internet café
• Daily fresh coffee, tea, hot water, and mid-morning snack.

Language study is available without the family homestay for a savings of US$35 per week.

This covers nearly all the costs of the trip. You can find reviews of intensive immersion programs (for many languages) here. Teachers vary in ability, but they are rotated weekly and are generally quite good. The one problem is that the crime rate in Guatemala has risen considerably. Be sure to read the country report by the Travel Department before going.

If you go, don’t miss Lake Atitlan. It is astonishingly beautiful: Aldous Huxley called it “the most beautiful lake in the world”. This is a typical scene. Antigua is also a very interesting and pleasant city, with all buildings and roads kept, by governmental decree, in the colonial style. It’s also full of Spanish schools, but the usual advice is to go to a city with less tourists, such as Quetzaltenango, if you’re serious about learning the language.

After French and Spanish you’ll learn Latin, on the advice of Professor Arguelles. If you have no interest in dead tongues then skip this step, but this quote by the professor may make you feel a bit guilty for doing so:

The suggestion that it might be possible to learn all the Romance languages without knowing Latin just because she is "dead" will surely cause all the great 19th century philologists to turn over in their graves, for they would most certainly all assert to a man that being well versed in Latin is an invaluable cornerstone in the construction of polyglottery.

My recommendation is to use the Lingua Latina courses according to the recommendations of the Dowling method. The traditional methods teach you to decode Latin texts – even after years of study, traditional students still aren’t reading with fluency. The Dowling method’s goal is to allow you to read Cicero with the same ease and fluency with which you are reading this sentence.

We then proceed to Italian. Assimil can once again be recommended. Unfortunately, FSI does not offer an Italian course. Used copies of the Ultimate Italian course are quite cheap and provide sufficient material to prepare for another immersion trip. After learning the previous languages, few difficulties should arise.

We follow with Catalan. There is little material available for this language, but there is a Teach Yourself course and an Assimil course for Spanish speakers (that should include you at this point). Catalan seems, if you try to read or understand it, somewhere between Spanish and Italian. With minimal study time and an immersion trip to Barcelona, you should be able to pick it up with little effort.

Portuguese will also be easy. For some native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese, the languages are mutually intelligible. The languages are so close that, before ever having studied Portuguese, I once took a placement test and received a grade of “intermediate” due to my knowledge of Spanish. Fortunately, FSI has two good Portuguese courses here.

Next, we have Occitan. Professor Arguelles says he could find no speakers of the language on a trip to France, and that these days it should be treated more as a written language than a spoken one. Assimil offers a course in the language here (now you see why we started with Spanish and French).

And last, we have Romanian. Assimil's course with audio is quite expensive. The course without audio isn't exactly cheap, and audio is really a necessity. There are at least two Teach Yourself courses, a newer one and an older one. The older version is far more in depth, and better suited to serious study. Romanian is the most difficult language on our list, since it has a large quantity of Slavic loan words and noun cases, and this is why we've saved it for last. Our best bet will likely be Assimil, followed by an immersion trip.

For general information on learning languages and some motivational material, take a look at Barry Farber's How To Learn Any Language. For more information on learning entire language families, check out the classic book The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages as well as the posts of Professor Alexander Arguelles at the Lessons in Polyglottery forum, where you can ask learn directly from the professor.

This entry was based in particular on chapter 9 of the The Loom of Language and this post of the Professor’s.

Also, here is the Professor's overview and advice on using Assimil, FSI, and Teach Yourself.

I will write entries on learning the Slavic and Germanic branches in coming days.

The Baddest Man on the Planet

2009-12-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

Who is the baddest man on the planet? The man who, when locked in a cage, unarmed, with any other man on Earth, would come out victorious in single combat? Can you tell just by looking at him? See if you can make the correct choice:

Did you pick the guy in the snazzy sweater, Fedor Emelianenko? That’s right: the universally recognized, undefeated, number one ranked heavyweight of the mixed martial arts world is a chubby, bald Russian who dresses like Bill Cosby, except when he dresses like your four-year-old nephew:

Yes, Fedor likes cartoons. While virtually all other fighters cover themselves in tattoos and wear shirts with various combinations of skulls, flames, pit bulls, grim reapers, and more skulls, Fedor is drawing pictures like these:

Such a strange set of traits make Fedor one of the most fascinating characters in any combat sport.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

In a strange inversion of the Rocky IV plot, Fedor trains with a local team with no other top fighters, pounding tires with sledgehammers and chopping wood, while top American fighters train at state of the art gyms with dozens of top fighters, coaches, nutritionists, and personal trainers.

Fedor recently converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and brings his priest, father Andrei, to his fights. Father Andrei bears a disturbing resemblance to Rasputin and holds the gym record for pull ups.

Fedor has won millions in the course of his fight career, but lives in a small apartment with his family. Money seems unimportant to him, now that he has enough of it: he turned down a five million dollar a fight contract with the Ultimate Fighting Championships, offered by the foul-mouthed president, Dana White. Instead, he accepted a less lucrative contract with the little known Strikeforce.

Strikeforce also managed to obtain a network television contract. White failed to do so, likely because of his winning personality. The combination of Fedor and NBC offers a frightening challenge to the UFC: Fedor’s first fight in Strikeforce on Nov 8th, a second-round knockout of the much larger Brett Rogers, drew millions of viewers world wide.

If you’re curious as to how this unassuming fellow has managed to remain undefeated in over 30 fights for over 9 years, be sure to look up some of his fights (such as this highlight or even this vid of Fedor vs. six Koreans).

The transformation once he steps in the cage brings to mind Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth. His ferocious combination of speed and brute force recalls the days of Mike Tyson – and Fedor may just become that level of star.

And these sweaters will become all the rage.

Suicide: The Quantum Road to Wealth and Happiness

2009-12-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

If the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, there should always be some universe in which a version of you survives. As you age, the odds of your death increase yearly, monthly, daily, but even when you reach one thousand years there will be an infinitesimal chance of surviving one more day, and thus there will exist a universe in which you will continue existing.

Still more interesting: what path does your consciousness follow? If the universe “splits” in two, one carrying your corpse, the other leaving you breathing, then it would seem your consciousness would have to proceed along the path in which you live. Since there will always be a universe in which you live, and your consciousness will always proceed to such a universe, your consciousness is essentially indestructible: you are quant-immortal.

How likely is the many worlds theory? More than you may think. Feynmann considered it the most likely model, as do many other physicists. So, let’s assume that there’s a five percent chance you’re quant-immortal. This gives you a five percent chance of becoming a millionaire.

Here’s how: rig up an error-proof device that fires a shotgun upon receiving lottery numbers not matching a given ticket. “Error-proof” is of course impossible – the machine must simply be an order of magnitude less likely to fail than for the numbers to miss.

Chain yourself up, forehead before the shotgun. If you are quant-immortal, and the device nearly error-proof, you will likely find your consciousness arriving in one of those happy universes in which the numbers happened to hit: you’ll have won the lottery. In various other universes your brains lie on the floor, but in various other universes you’re the King of Luxembourg. The other universes are irrelevant; the knowledge is the thing. With this knowledge in hand, you could use such a device, with sufficient creativity, to send your consciousness into whichever desired reality imagined – you would have hacked the universe.

Of course, a 95% or greater chance of death will likely dissuade you from our experiment, but the next time you’re standing on a ledge on a lonely night, come on down and set up a lottery-shotgun-rig. Your surrender may just be the first step towards godhood … or a most puzzling suicide-note.

NHB 2.0: The Rebirth of Vale Tudo

2009-12-01T17:28:00.000-08:00

The original UFC was castrated by the boxing lobby; perverted, purchased, and repackaged as the UFC you see today. The current management destroyed the previous incarnation, rebuilt it with political power, and warped it with corruption. What we watch now is the incestuous union of sibling sports. Boxing’s rape of NHB begat the Zuffa UFC, its parentage apparent in its scoring system, rules, management, and corruption. The Zuffa UFC will soon fall, but all successors will be of its lineage.

We must have a fresh start, outside the Citadel. We will uncover our genesis like ruins; build upon its foundation, silently, until our beautiful slave clothes rip to shreds and a step pyramid of stone looms before us. A new business model; a new sport, towering over the rotting mass of the Citadel.

The sport is easy: Vale Tudo. Our rules: the standard Vale Tudo prohibitions, along with a ban on strikes to the back of the head and neck. If cuts become too great a problem, we will reluctantly prohibit headbutts.

Our ideal set of rules will likely be Pride’s rules + elbows, with gloves optional. Our judging system will be the Predict-Wager System.

We will then have, in our ideal combat sport, slightly modified Vale Tudo rules, an improved round system, and a judging system which rates the judges, referees, and fighters, paying them accordingly. NHB 2.0 is already superior to MMA.

Certain fighters will be attracted to such rules. Many will wish to test themselves. Frozen corpses litter Everest, yet men still climb K2. The perceived brutality is one advantage, the allowance of gis and freed hands another. Along with a scoring system which emphasizes finishes and longer rounds, such rules will be seen by jiu jitsu practitioners as ideal. Headbutts may rapidly change that impression.

Even with preferred rules, attracting top fighters will require money. Our most profitable innovation is the Predict-Wager System itself – it will be utilized by the judges themselves, true, but the profitability will come from the audience. They will be given the chance to risk their money at various terminals which litter the floor like slot machines. The fighters will be given a cut of all chips wagered on them to finish their opponent.

Our initial matchmaking will be the simplest and the oldest: the tournament. In this way, a fighter who proceeds through all rounds to the championship makes considerable money from accumulated wagers alone, plus win bonuses. A sandbagging A-level fighter could find such a tournament quite profitable, even in its infancy. NHB 2.0 is then further differentiated from MMA.

Allowing for our rules is trivial. In states with no commission, we can do as we please, and in states with a commission, we will promote on reservations. For perspective, consider that any small show you’ve seen in which a contestant wears a shirt or wrestling shoes is not strictly following the unified rules.

The events will be streamed over the internet, as Rio Heroes was. The profitability of the Rio Heroes model was proven, and the calls by the “MMA community” for its prohibition demonstrate just how different things have become. The Castrati, of course, did not join the chorus, but their voices faded before legions of Whiteshirts, as eager to prohibit NHB as their Zuffa heroes before.

It is the Castrati, now, who have the choice. If MMA is what you’d hoped it would become ten years ago, then sit quietly and enjoy your UFCs. If the ten-point must system satisfies you, or if you think it will be changed, then continue debating spoilers while awaiting the next TUF. If watching NHB prohibitionists such as Ratner profit from our dead sport doesn’t irk you, then simply continue supporting the UFC.

But if the notion of a sixteen-man Vale Tudo tournament fills you with nostalgia – memories of bare knuckles, size disadvantages, and fear; uncertainty, head butts, and style vs. style; that unmistakable Bloodsport quality – and if the state of the sport called MMA disgusts you, and you desire a return, then you must work to make it happen.

A Castrati promoter, or a business-savvy Castrato, will begin an NHB 2.0 promotion. There is an amateur Vale Tudo event called UCL in New York, and professional organizations are coming, as Rio Heroes came before. If you are a promoter, consider it: it may make you very wealthy. Transfer your support to this true version of MMA; divert your focus from the popularity of the UFC. The Castrati must form a new support network for NHB as passionate and unbreakable as pre-TUF MMA’s. The first and simplest step is the realization that they are entirely different sports.

The Predict-Wager Judging System

2009-12-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

The ten-point must system is designed for boxing. It is implemented by boxing commissions, utilized by boxing judges, and produces, when applied to a mixed combat sport, absurd decisions, even when applied correctly. It fails to incentivize proper judging; it incentivizes wins by decision (witness Guida’s transformation). Its one redeeming quality (for those who choose the system) is that it hides corruption and incompetence in its ambiguity.

Admittedly, it’s easy to point out problems. Maybe the ten-point must system is simply the best available. If not, we should stop whining until we offer an alternative. The test, then, is in designing a better system.

But one has already been designed: Pride’s judging system. Pride’s system, however, still produced its share of bad decisions and boring fights. We should consider both as design flaws of any system, and we must design a system that excludes the possibility of such flaws.

Our system will be engineered specifically for mixed combat sports. It will be greatly simplified, due to the simple nature of these sports’ objective: finish the opponent. It will incentivize good judging and legitimate efforts to finish the opponent.

With these objectives in mind, consider the “Predict-Wager System”. A revised description (from Decline and Fall 2):

“’The judge shall be paid in accordance to his return on real-time wagers on the fight. The judge will bet on the likelihood of fighter A finishing fighter B by placing a wager, weighted by his estimation of the likelihood of a finish by fighter A of fighter B. The value of the wager drops (after a calibrated grace period) as time passes, and the value of the chips used in wagering drops as more total chips are wagered. To encourage betting, increasing odds are offered on a fighter during increasing periods in which other judges have not bet on that fighter.

If there is no finish, the judge will be recorded as voting for the fighter on which he bet the most total chips, the fighter who receives the most votes shall win the decision, and the judges shall be paid a fixed rate.’

A judge, witnessing a knockdown, would bet strongly, as he would upon seeing a close armbar attempt. He would bet weakly on takedowns, depending on the perceived danger (or lack thereof) to the bottom fighter. He would bet very little on a fighter like Sherk. Accumulating “points” via lay and pray, or Tim Sylvia style strategies, would become obsolete. The “Fight of the Night” would be easy to calculate, based on total chips bet and their distribution between the fighters.

Skilled judges would be quantitatively identified simply by being those who make the most money – those who saw danger and predicted it without having devalued their chips. Unskilled judges would then be dismissed, or would quit due to low pay. With three judges betting very heavily that a fighter is about to be finished, referees who stop the fight at the correct moment can be easily identified. To greatly increase the action and risk taking of the sport, we would make the fighter’s pay in large part determined by the amount of chips bet on him to finish the fight.

We thus change the incentives: previously having little incentive to judge correctly, the judge is now paid directly in accordance with how well he can predict finishes in MMA, and thus how well he understands the sport. Knowledgeable people then have a strong incentive to become judges; Peoples would lose his incentive to remain one. And fighters would have to be capable of finishing, or at least threatening to do so, and would have a strong incentive to go for the finish, where previously their incentive was to hold down the opponent and not take risks.”

Such a system would require computers, which is likely the only reason it was not previously designed. The number of virtual “chips” is unlimited, but their value declines with every chip bet. The proper numbers for the decline, the grace period, the increasing odds, and the payouts will be determined initially by an economist, and calibrated by experiment, to ensure the judges and the fighters are incentivized in the most efficient way.

To make this all concrete, I will give an example of how to score a fight using the Predict-Wager System, based on a fight I have not previously seen. The value in chips bet, listed in dollars, is simply convention; the quantity represents my estimation of the probability of a finish. “I wager $90 worth of chips,” simply means I believe there’s a 90% chance of a finish (ignoring any betting strategies I may use).

Here’s a quick use of the Predict-Wager System to evaluate Sadollah-Baroni:

Round 1, Minute 1: Baroni comes out strong, swinging wildly. It’s not extremely threatening, but punches are landing hard and one may find its mark. I wager $20 on Baroni.

For the rest of the round, nothing threatening occurs.

Round 2, Minute 3: Sadalloh is opening up on a gassed Baroni with knees, elbows, and kicks; the end seems near. I wager $30 on Sadollah.

Round 3: Baroni seems ready to go at various moments throughout this round: I wager, at different periods, in succession, $40, $50, and $30.

The fight ends. I have wagered a total of $150 on Sadollah and only $20 on Baroni. My vote goes to Sadollah, as do those of the other judges.

Sadollah, however, would likely have finished the fight if he’d had the greater incentives to do so that the Predict-Wager System provides. He was certainly capable of doing so.

In addition to eliminating poor judging and boring fights, the Predict-Wager System will also provide another means of extreme profit: gambling. Judging under the Predict-Wager System becomes a skill-based game of chance, more skill-based than hold ‘em, more entertaining than horse racing. Casinos will hold Predict-Wager tournaments on the nights of fights, and champions will become eligible for a judging spot in the big show.

Unfortunately, the current big show will never use such a system. It is regulated by a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies have two characteristics: 1) they are resistant to change and 2) they abhor accountability. The Predict-Wager System would allow instant evaluation of the competence of the judges. Worse still, it would allow instant evaluation of the competence the one who selects them (Kizer).

Any promoter who does realize the profitability of the Predict-Wager System may contact me for clarification of details or the initial code for the wagering software (contact details in profile).

But in the end, the Rebirth requires far more than simply a new judging system. The Predict-Wager System is but a small part of an entirely new strategy; a business plan and a sport as distinct from the UFC as muay thai is from kickboxing.

This plan will be fully described in my next post.

The Decline and Fall of the Fertitta Empire (pt 2)

2009-11-25T09:50:00.000-08:00

Why Boxing Won

Many of Guatemala’s crimes are mundane: murder, kidnapping, robbery. Some are novel and disturbing, such as officials demanding thousand dollar bribes to release a newly adopted child. Some are otherworldly, a vigilante response to a worthless legal system. Lynchings. Mobs dousing corrupt cops with gasoline. Mobs lighting matches. Processions of civilians through streets in the night, flashlights and weapons in hand. And the weapons: axe handles, shovels, chains, knives … if lucky, you may see a pair of nunchaku.

But the most alien are simply prehistoric. Local rumors hold that foreigners steal children and kill them to sell their organs. Tetsuo Yamahiro and his busdriver, Edgar Castellanos, were beaten to death by a mob of 500 Maya due to suspicions raised by the tourist’s photography of children. Castellanos was also doused in gasoline. Someone in the mob had a light.

Strangely isolated, these Guatemalan Maya. Many do not speak Spanish. Their women wear brightly colored, woven dresses, which differ from tribe to tribe. In the Spanish schools they give seminars, often on their dress, aimed at preserving Maya identity, and occasionally they parade together in their dresses in a show of Maya solidarity.

From conversations I know that many of them, as in any group, are unaware of the roots of their tradition. They’re unaware that their tribe-based color scheme was a Spanish-implemented Maya filing system, or that their dresses are old world peasant garb. They certainly don’t learn so in the second-rate schools they’re sent to.

The poorest of them live, isolated, in their villages, struggling to learn Spanish as their languages die, practicing fascinating variations of Catholicism (one of which includes a department store mannequin as a god), farming coffee beans, weaving, and dying by governmental incompetence. Their only act of defiance, through decades of civil war, severe poverty, and systematic discrimination, is to hold tight to the beautiful slave uniforms of whose origin they’re unaware.

But their defiance should be a reaction, a casting off, a look back to their greatness. How many psilocybin mushrooms must I offer for them to see their true path to glory? Hasn’t it become obvious? They must shed their clothes, restore the Maya calendar, and build a step pyramid in Guatemala City.

For our purposes, let’s skip the shrooms and head straight to LSD. How do you feel about boxing?

UFC fan on boxing: Boxing is dying. It’s the sport of old men. The UFC is the future!

Two tabs of LSD later: Our perspectives change and we reexamine the UFC. We watch the pseudo-mobster president sitting in the crowd, his amateur boxing record stamped on his forehead. The roaring crowd behind him coordinates. He stands and throws rhythmic punches and they follow with poor form behind him, Nu Metal blasting out over them, the sweat pouring to the floor.

From somewhere we hear Don Frye’s distinctive voice – he’s in the ring, fighting, but looking directly at Dana.

“I'm starting to realize why your wife might want to give your son a sissy name."

We look in another direction and see the vice president. He’s wearing a sequined headband with the inscription: “Marc Ratner: Inductee, Boxing Hall of Fame”. Next to him sits John McCain, surrounded on this hot Las Vegas evening by boxing promoters fanning him with hundred dollar bills. Behind them sits Larry King, or a wax figure of him, and they speak gravely of human cockfighting. Lorenzo Fertitta’s not far away; we see him on a committee arguing persuasively against sanctioning.

Next to the judging box sits Keith Kizer. He looks jealously towards the Zuffa employees. Both of his positions in the commission were vacated by employees relocating to Zuffa, and he knows it’s his turn next – the internship is almost over. He gives a thumbs up to the judges.

There they sit: Adalaide Byrd, Cecil Peoples, and Patricia Morse Jarman. Rutten lands repeated leg kicks and knees to the body. The judges yawn. Frye secures the takedown. Byrd goes to the bathroom. Peoples dozes off. Jarman furrows her brow.

“What is he doing?” she asks Kizer.

He shrugs. “Good matchmaking creating tough, close fights that are hard to score. The judging criteria are posted on the NSAC’s official website: http://boxing.nv.gov/”

The next round begins. Rutten lands a beautiful four-punch combination. These boxing judges ooh and ah and scribble frantically with their pencils. We suddenly see the scoring criteria, and note, with disappointment, that they are little more than revisions of boxing’s. Our trip ends.

Our conclusion: boxing defeated the UFC years ago, castrated it, purchased it, and took over. The UFC is boxing marketed to the young – more permissive to appeal to youthful rebellion, but boxing all the same – right down to the reality show.

The supposed battle between boxing and the UFC is much the same as the choice between two political candidates who differ on irrelevant but divisive issues, with no ultimate plan to fix anything.

With the rise of the reality show, legions of fans in Zuffa-brand shirts laughed as the ratings rose and gloated as boxing’s fell. There was a strange animosity. It was as though they felt themselves part of some counter culture pitted against the boxing mainstream, and they attack boxing to this day. Perhaps we will see a Zuffa-shirted parade of solidarity against boxing. I’m sure that would make Ratner’s day.

A note on the reality show. The standard narrative is that the reality show increased the UFC’s popularity, which lead directly to greater fighter salaries. When looking at fighter salaries compared to revenue, however, the UFC actually reduced total fighter salaries compared to revenue for close to year. This was likely due to the watering down of cards allowed by reality show contestants. It was only after the emergence of several threatening organizations that salaries significantly climbed.

It is Strikeforce that has now become the most threatening. Dana White’s personality ruined the Fedor deal and a shot at NBC. Now Strikeforce has both. If you are a Whiteshirt, the following graph may disturb you:

The red line represents UFC searches, the yellow Lesnar, the blue, Fedor. Fedor alone captured more interest than the entire UFC. If you don’t believe that’s significant, name another such fighter. I know of only two: Carano and Kimbo. But Carano is gone and Kimbo’s a short-term investment. Fedor and network exposure are a frightening combination.

We can also examine Wikipedia page views:
Ultimate_Fighting_Championship has been viewed 115963 times in 200911.
Brock_Lesnar has been viewed 291713 times in 200911.
Fedor_Emelianenko has been viewed 520780 times in 200911.
Disturbing.

Kimbo, as stated, is a short-term investment. Oversaturation of weak cards in a recession is a short-term decision. Bad judging, which protects favored fighters but disillusions fans, is a short-term decision. And that explains everything.

The UFC is in debt. Remember Xyience? Xyience was, for a time, portrayed as a top-notch sponsor for the UFC for the purposes of securing a 325 million dollar loan. But Zuffa was funding Xyience, and Xyience was run by old Fertitta friends. Once the loan was secured, the company went bankrupt.

And what was the loan used for? To increase fighter pay? Advertising? No – it was used to purchase and destroy Pride.

And then Station Casinos went bankrupt. A Nov. 20 report from Rich Bergeron, discoverer of the Xyience debacle:

“A new report from Local 226 (see below), an unlikely source but nonetheless an appropriate voice, reveals how the Fertitta family and other insiders at Station allegedly turned a personal profit of over $1 billion on the back of the business.”

“Still, if the Fertittas continue to struggle and get bogged down and distracted because of the Station Casinos bankruptcy, they will not have as much of their own personal money to put toward getting the UFC out of debt. There is talk of selling an interest in the company, and it’s not as unlikely now to think about the whole thing going up for sale in time.”

This is consistent with the management’s recent treatment of the UFC as a short-term investment.

The Fertitta empire has declined and is nearing its ultimate fall. The black swan event of simultaneous main draw illnesses is a significant blow. Strikeforce will continue forcing the UFC to pay greater salaries to retain talent and buyrates will continue to fall with oversaturation of weak talent. The sponsorship bans will make Strikeforce contracts more profitable than a salary comparison would imply. Poor judging will disillusion fans. The UFC will be sold, White fired, and we will see a new equilibrium between fight organizations.

And none of it will matter.

The commissions will still be in place. Strikeforce, with its ban on elbows, is yet another step towards boxing. The judges will still be incompetent, the incentives towards corruption enticing, and the scoring system absurd. Regardless of what happens to the Fertittas and Dana White, the Citadel will still stand, and no true form of MMA shall pass through its gates.

Imagine what the Castrati, along with newer, non-Whiteshirt fans, the types who do not mock allusions to works such as “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, could invent to replace the sport of Nu Boxing. It is trivial to design a better sport. What are the sport’s three greatest problems? Poor judging, early/late stoppages, and boring fights.

All three can be eliminated by changing the scoring system from the “Ten Point Must” system to the “Predict – Wager” system. It is incredibly simple, eliminating the pages of criteria judges seem incapable of remembering.

The Predict – Wager System:

“The judge shall be paid in accordance to his return on real-time wagers on the fight. The judge will bet on the likelihood of fighter A finishing fighter B by placing a wager, weighted by his estimation of the likelihood of a finish. The value of the wager drops as time passes, and the value of the chips used in wagering drops as more total chips are wagered.

“If there is no finish, the judge will be recorded as voting for the fighter he bet most heavily on to finish the fight, the fighter who receives the most votes shall win the decision, and the judges shall be paid a fixed rate.”

A judge, witnessing a knockdown, would bet strongly, as he would upon seeing a close armbar attempt. He would bet weakly on takedowns, depending on the finishing ability of the fighter on top. He would bet very little on a fighter like Sherk. Racking up points would become obsolete. The FOTN would be easy to calculate, based on total chips bet. Skilled judges would be quantitatively identified simply by being those who make the most money – those who saw danger and predicted it without having devalued their chips. Unskilled judges would then be dismissed, or would quit due to low pay. With three judges betting very heavily that a fighter is about to be finished, the fight could be automatically stopped, and the referees who stop the fight at the correct moment can be easily identified. To greatly increase the action and risk taking of the sport, we would make the fighter’s pay in large part determined by the amount of chips bet.

We thus change the incentives: first having no incentive to judge correctly, the judge is now paid directly in accordance with how well he judges. People who know MMA then have a strong incentive to become judges; Peoples would quickly retire. And previously having little incentive to finish a tough but controllable opponent, a fighter now has every incentive to attempt to finish the fight at all times.

Such a system is far too efficient for the Citadel, but imagining alternate systems is marvelous escapism. And escape is exactly what we need. My next post will detail the escape from and defeat of the Citadel, the construction of the Step Pyramid, and the promised explanation of the role of the Castrati.

The Decline and Fall of the Fertitta Empire

2009-11-22T18:23:00.000-08:00

Part 1: Castration, Collusion, Corruption

Once upon a time the UFC had its own set of rules, its own referees, and its own judges. The crowds cheered and stars were born, the management poor but the product pure. All too soon its popularity threatened the boxing establishment, the Luddite before the mechanized loom. The response was violent. The establishment used political influence, in the form of McCain and the athletic commissions, to castrate the virile, threatening sport in its youth.

With boxing promoter gratuities and battle cries of human cockfighting, McCain annihilated the cable revenue stream, leaving his gutted victim to wither away in obscurity, leaving establishment-approved combat sports nicely protected and taxed in this indestructible Citadel of corporatism.

Proud new owner of an enemy’s balls, shrunken though they were by the former lack of testing, the Citadel began to mold the UFC in its own image, imposing gloves, rounds, and weight classes; arbitrarily restricting techniques it disliked, including “pressure points”.

Though a eunuch may have a decided advantage in a human cockfight, the Citadel is all but invincible in total war. Our castrato could only plead, in his pleasant soprano voice, for sanctioning. He needed recognition by the Citadel – recognition that would allow him to breathe.

The Citadel simply waited, merciless and patient, for SEG to breathe its last. Then, for two million dollars, former Nevada State Athletic Commissioner Lorenzo Fertitta and his brother made the purchase. The NSAC immediately provided sanctioning, the pay per view contracts were restored. Business, now paying the required tribute, was booming. Former MMA-ban proponent, Executive Director of the NSAC, and boxing HoF member Marc Ratner eventually became Vice-President for Regulatory Affairs. The UFC had been assimilated. It was now part of the Citadel.

The CSAC, obviously, is within the walls. You need only read of its treatment of promotions in competition with the UFC/Citadel, most notably the difference in treatment of Diaz and Sanchez for identical crimes.

Sponsorships, pay per views, and finally, the infamous reality show on Spike, buoyed by a timeslot following pro-wrestling. Spike, reality TV, and pro-wrestling. Three apparent contradictions of the Flynn Effect.

The marketing of Dana White was one of the program’s most effective manipulations: pre-TUF fans observed what was once a cringing, middle-class, suit- wearing aerobics instructor, ever smirking forced congratulations and awkwardly awarding belts, transformed by the magic of editing and acting into a hard-talking, street-tough father figure, fair but firm. This image appealed to the young fans of the show, many of whom were likely fatherless bastards, and to this day, any post criticizing the UFC or White is met with a torrent of misspelled vitriol, stamped with post-04 join dates. These are the UFC’s unofficial soldiers, a sort of Dana White fanclub / paramilitary organization. They are most fittingly referred to as “Whiteshirts”.

The Whiteshirts, of course, now hold most of the power, and many eunuch-era fans have lost interest. Those impotent originals that remain, though having lost immediate influence to the castration, maintain the most extensive networks of contacts in the MMA community, and hold the majority of the knowledge. The elite twenty percent of the Pareto Principle. I will leave a small hint to these, the Castrati, as to their future role, which will be fully explained in a future installment.

Wiki:

“An important figure in the Ottoman court was the Chief Black Eunuch (Kızlar Ağası or Harem Ağası). In control of the Harem and a perfect net of spies in the Black Eunuchs, the Chief Eunuch was involved in almost every palace intrigue and could thereby gain power over either the sultan or one of his viziers, ministers or other court officials.”

“The Ultimate Fighter” itself is such an effective tool of manipulation, such an efficient popularizer of mediocrity, and so widely watched and well known that it must be considered as nothing less than the Citadel’s propaganda wing.

Returning to sanctioning: the Castrati were ecstatic, and, defending it, often wrote proudly of MMA being “a sanctioned sport”. This approval was, to my memory, unanimous. The benefits are obvious, and both the Castrati and the Whiteshirts approve of them. Oversight. Regulation. Prevention of corruption. These ideas are so widely believed and so little questioned that few would consider an alternative.

But we view reality with imperfect eyes. At times, it is helpful to alter our perception as the ancients and the mystics did: with drugs. A tiny tweak of your neurotransmitters to connect our points of view. I offer you a single psilocybin mushroom.

Common sense: Sanctioning reduces corruption by providing external oversight.

Psilocybin mushroom: Sanctioning increases corruption through displacement of blame. Consider boxing, which we all know to be corrupt, in which promoters wine and dine, or sometimes bribe, judges, and consider that those same judges now work the UFC. What is the standard Whiteshirt response to accusations of corruption after the results of absurd decisions? “The UFC doesn’t appoint the judges; the athletic commission does.” Any idea of boycott is quickly abandoned.

The UFC, then, and indeed, the Citadel itself, has little incentive to provide fair decisions, and in many cases, a large incentive to provide foul ones. If we accept that boxing judges are influenced by promoters, and thus that promoters have found ways to influence them, it becomes obvious that the UFC, as a quite profitable sub-department of the Citadel, could easily use such methods to influence Citadel judges.

There exists motive; there exist means. And the evidence? We will assume that it is profitable to the Citadel that the fighter with greater name-recognition wins. I have selected what I believe to be the most controversial decisions of post-assimilation UFC:

-Hammil-Bisping

-Jackson-Griffin

-Rua-Machida

-Couture-Vera

-Ortiz-Belfort

-Ortiz-Griffin 1

-Bonnar-Jardine

The decision in each of these fights went to the fighter who had greater name-recognition prior to the fight, with the sole exception of Jackson-Griffin (easily explainable by TUF vs. Pride implications). Verify on Google trends. I already have. If you have a counter-example – a very controversial decision in post-assimilation UFC in which the decision went the way of the fighter with lesser name-recognition – please let me know.

Motive, means, evidence. And what of unsanctioned MMA? What was widely considered the worst decision in UFC history prior to assimilation? Rutten-Randleman. In Pride? Jackson-Rua, perhaps. These may have been poor decisions, but they certainly can’t compete in terms of outrageousness with half of the sanction-enhanced list. Simply put: there were no Rua-Machida level robberies in MMA prior to sanctioning because the promotion would have borne the blame.

What, then, does sanctioning provide? The unified rules and judging criteria, which are nothing but a ludicrous permutation of boxing’s, created by boxing bureaucrats for boxing bureaucrats.

Pride, on the other hand, with no need to please such an out-of-touch group, designed rules and judging criteria specifically for MMA. When comparing Pride’s rules and criteria to the UFC’s, both Whiteshirts and Castrati agree, in most cases, that Pride’s were superior, with two exceptions: the ban on elbows and the ring.

It’s quite telling that the two main “problems” with the pride format are precisely those that descend from boxing. Importing boxing artefacts such as the 10 point must system, mandatory gloves, and overly short rounds is at best debatable and usually absurd.

What else, then, does sanctioning provide? Judges such as Peoples – the quintessence of sclerotic bureaucracy: utterly incompetent, corrupt, and immune to dismissal.

And lastly, sanctioning provides an extra tax, called a “licensing fee”:

“NRS 467.107 Additional fees for license of promoter; exemption; regulations.1. In addition to the payment of any other fees and money due under this chapter, every promoter, except as provided in subsection 2, shall pay a license fee of:(a) Four percent of the total gross receipts from admission fees to the live contest or exhibition of unarmed combat, exclusive of any federal tax or tax imposed by any political subdivision of this state; and(b) Three percent of the first $1,000,000, and 1 percent of the next $2,000,000, of the total gross receipts from the sale, lease or other exploitation of broadcasting, television and motion picture rights for that contest or exhibition, without any deductions for commissions, brokerage fees, distribution fees, advertising, contestants’ purses or any other expenses or charges.”

So for the service of decreasing the quality of the judging, rules, and integrity of a promotion, the NSAC feels entitled to charge a tax that must also decrease fighter’s salaries.

The entire Citadel – the UFC, the commissions, the boxing promoters, the casinos, the corporate sponsors, the lobbied politicians – is simply another iteration of the corporatist phenomenon, and the UFC-NSAC’s interchangeable personnel, shared financial interest, and collusive nature recall the relationship of Goldman Sachs to the Department of the Treasury. The protectionism of government bureaucracy coupled with corporate power breed the worst kind of arrogance – not the ambitious arrogance of a creative entrepreneur, but the passive, innate arrogance of a bored, entitled monarch. As John Derbyshire writes of a 30 year Goldman Sachs employee:

“For me the turning point in the drift toward paranoia was this summer when I listened to an interview with Charles Ellis, author of The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs. What disturbed and alarmed me was Ellis’ undisguised contempt for the radio host and the callers. Granted, it is generally frustrating for intelligent people to come on these shows where they are asked to hold forth for 30 minutes and engage with dull interlocutors. But Ellis’ own attitude to the whole affair suggested an angel come down from on high, he made no effort at all, and refused to hide his lack of effort. What he thought of everyone else was clear, mortals were beneath his consideration. When he did deign to speak Ellis calmly would assert that Goldman Sachs was insured and protected no matter what happened to the economy, specifically, even if AIG collapsed.”

Now who does that sound like? People who plead to Keith Kizer to fix the problems (invariably answered with bureaucratic condescension) are missing this key fact: Kizer is the problem. You’re asking the man who’s directly in charge of selecting the judges of all non-title fights for change. He neglected to watch Machida-Rua or Couture-Vera. He’s not worried about incompetent judges - he’s the one who selects them.

Boxing has had decades of sanctioning, and is filled with corruption and incompetence. It sucked the life from the sport. Now it begins in MMA. The UFC-NSAC hybrid has no oversight – but it also has no foresight. It will consume itself in its corruption and incompetence while another promotion emerges.

My next installment will explain exactly how, and how the Castrati will help.