Happy New Year!

My Dearest Supporters, Loyal Readers & Despised Enemies,

The Lord seeing fit to leave me to roam free another annum, I once again bid you the happiest of New Years. Unless you are my enemy: then I pray to your confusion and conversion, and hope that your hangover teaches you a lesson.

Here is what is happening this year.

I’d normally report on which posts were most popular, but I no longer have the ability to sort posts by views. But a quick scroll through reveals some of the top articles were The Triumph Of The Feminine, Autism & Tylenol, Academics Say It’s Morally Obligatory To Bioengineer Ticks To Stop You Eating Meat, Peer-Reviewed Research: Men Find Looking At Nearly Naked Women Distracting, On Scott Adams’s Vax-Decision Analysis, with the latest being I Finally Read James Lindsay’s Manifesto. The Class, in total, beat everything.

My favorites, which were also in the top, and even more relevant, were On The Limitations of AI: Predictions, The Limitations Of AI: General Or Real Intelligence Is Not Possible, AI Cannot Hallucinate Nor Lie, How To Tell If You Have Bad Dice, On The Myths Of Scientism, Sabine Hossenfelder’s Free Will Folly & The Deadly Sin Of Reification, IQ is Not Intelligence. And two in the same genre of Big Changes In Science: A New Physics Arises: Irreducible by Federico Faggin Reviewed, On The Form Of Species: ‘Dance To The Tune Of Life’ by Denis Noble Reviewed.

The book Wolfgang Smith pour tous: Introduction à la physique – Et témoignages-hommages à la suite de sa disparition was released in November. I have a chapter. Here’s the blurb (translated):

Intended as a tribute to Professor Wolfgang Smith on his 95th birthday, this book is a good introduction to his work, namely physics and the philosophy of physics that is inevitably associated with it.A mathematician, physicist, and metaphysician, Wolfgang Smith, at a time of excessive specialization in the sciences, developed a cross-disciplinary approach that is both welcome and valuable.Numerous contributors provide an overview here and facilitate understanding, while also referring to the master’s books.

An English edition will be issued sometime this year from Angelico Press. I’ll announce it when I know the details.

The Class progresses. Here is the overview, which can, should, and even must, be read by everybody. The foundation took over a year to build. It is impregnable. We have now started the major work of critiquing specific models used in Science. Starting with the most popular and worst understood (i.e. regression). Next up is time series. But we’ll get to every major trope. Stick around for my favorite bad thinking: multiverses.

Yet the Class is not easy. The length is intimidating. Each segment is long. Sticking with it requires work and ability. So I thought of making “independent” shorts; videos only, sans post. State an idea, move on. No real proofs, which are saved for the long classes. Would these be valuable to you?

I am a slow thinker, and it took some time before I grasped the full outlines of scientism, which is the insidious ideology (it’s tempting to call it a religion, but not of itself, of ourselves) that has taken the place of Christianity. Rate how deeply you feel about that sentence on a scale of -145 to 3. Work on the book, now two, continues apace.

I had hoped, so far without success, to figure a way I could do a class on (yes) psychic phenomena. I wanted to at least duplicate some of Sheldrake’s work, at least as a tool to teach probability. It is incredibly easy to fool yourself in this kind of research. Mostly because cause of the phenomena under study is ignored.

Scientists are bad with cause, as regular readers know, but they at least (mostly) aim for it. Not so much psychic research, which after a century remains in the early stages of attempts to demonstrate there is a there there. For instance, I have never seen any attempts to reconcile a view like Federico Faggin’s (the mind is in something like a quantum state; see also Wolfgang Smith) with telepathy, which says one mind can, somehow, nobody knows how, “read” another. Yet that reading is causal, and thus must disturb the mind read, which means what exactly?

Well, that is enough on that for now. More to come. (Especially if I’m right about our return to the 1970s; here and here.)

We will continue to highlight bad science, and not just that it is bad, but why it is. You must learn to spot the tricks and techniques scientists use to fool themselves and you.

Incidentally, I am happy to say that my predictions about the course of AI on right on target (here and here). Against this boasting, it’s true that these foretellings were about as difficult as guessing which direction the sun would rise.

If you see what you think is bad science, or ripe scientism, feel free to tag me. I get a lot of requests, so I can’t promise I can get to all of them.

Substack is now easily ten times the traffic of the old blog. I should have made the switch during the covid panic. Really blew an opportunity there.

I am determined all work free to read for everybody, and to rely on the generosity of readers and supporters. Of which I am profoundly grateful. A million thanks to all of you.

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