Don’t ask me — I’m a Qualit!

Charles Cameron:

February 9th, 2013 at 1:13 am

My undoubted favorite quote of the week, entirely supportive of what I’ve said above, comes from a spectacular work of fanfic, Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 3, Comparing Reality To Its Alternatives:

Harry smiled with a certain grim satisfaction. It was too bad that he was right in the middle of discovering the amazing new world of magic, and couldn’t take time out to explore the amazing new world of being rich, which a quick Fermi estimate said was roughly a billion times less interesting.

For those who need a nudge or two before reading (a) fanfic or (b) anything Harry-Potter-related, the SF writer David Brin calls this work a “terrific series, subtle and dramatic and stimulating,” while Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, breathed a blessing over it, “Oh Thoth Trismegistus, oh Ma’at, oh Ganesha, oh sweet lady Eris… I have not laughed so hard in years!”

Charles Cameron:

February 9th, 2013 at 5:35 pm

Forgive me harping on the topic, but this quote from John Burgess’ Crossroads Arabia blog illustrates my point about quant and qualit quite nicely:

Arab News reports that a square meter of land near the Grand Mosque can now cost as much as SR1.5 million (US $400K).

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With that kind of money in play, is there any question that historic preservation takes a vastly distant place in the minds of developers?

Charles Cameron:

February 9th, 2013 at 6:12 pm

I can’t resist giving you one more example — because it comes from an article about eschatology, a major theme of mine, and the work of Joel Richardson, about whom I have written and who has commented here at ZP at least once.  It’s from a Religion News Service piece titled *An Islamic Antichrist? Joel Richardson Predicts A Muslim Satanic Figure* which just appeared in the Huffington Post, and I’ll start with a few paras that set the scene:

“The Antichrist moves a long way from Augustine’s view of something that we all face inside us,” Shuck said, “to being very much an external battle with concrete figures.”

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Popes used the Antichrist to rally Crusaders. Reformers used the Antichrist to battle popes. Northerners saw the Antichrist in the slave-holding South, and Southerners saw the same specter in the abolitionists.

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In the modern era, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, U.S. presidents, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, England’s Prince Charles, and even megachurch pastor Rick Warren have all made the Antichrist list.

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Apocalyptic Christianity always needs an enemy, scholars say, and the Antichrist is nothing if not adaptable.

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“The Antichrist idea is very responsive to changes in current events,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. “It’s a symbol for what is most unsettling or troubling.”

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Antichrist prophecies raise fears by warning of an imminent battle between good and evil, Fuller said, and settle those fears by assuring Christians that the “good guys” will win in the end.

That’s a rough outline of the diverse ways in which the term “antichrist” has been used, although it omits to mention its use as a translation of the Islamic “dajjal” — and will, I think, explain why the writer describes the application of the term to current political figures as “bad theology” when he continues with the remark I wanted to bring your attention to in the context of “quant and qualit”:

If bad theology, the Antichrist often makes for good reading, as attested by the more than 60 million copies of “Left Behind” books sold.

If “good reading” can be attested to by millions of copies sold — a purely quantitative measure — what room is there for qualitative judgment?

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Okay, I understand the phrase means about the same as “page turner” — but even without the quantitative measure, I’d have to tell you the Left Behind books strike me as poorly written to the point where it’s a pain to read them.  And there *are* Christian apocalyptic thrillers that are far better written — those of Joel Rosenberg spring to mind.  I may disagree with Rosenberg’s theology and its political applications as I do with those of Joel Richardson, but he’s a snappy writer, while Jenkins, the “writer” behind the Left Behind books, is not.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/islamic-antichrist-joel-richardson_n_2635806.html . 

larrydunbar:

February 10th, 2013 at 12:01 am

Perhaps it was leverage and people willing to compromise their values that “killed Wallstreet”. But to me Wallstreet was “killed” by one quantum unit of energy (human) taking advantage of another quantum unit of energy (computers).

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Humans as observed are, in a position of their distribution, to always have an advantage over another distribution called computers This is because it is human math that computers are using, and the home team, as far as I know, always has an advantage. 

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To me it is not so much who killed Wallstreet, but why it was killed when it was, instead of at a sooner or at a later date in time.

In other words, Wallstreet was killed at a time when it was at an advantage for the humans to do so, because to do so at a later date would have excluded those who killed Wallstreet (the Qualits), and sooner would have excluded the wealth (quants) that came from the killing.

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Perhaps those who killed Wallstreet were wrong in their tempo, but the tempo was just at a matter of time and not events. It is the qualits (humans), through their math, who command Wallstreet, in control by computers. So it is the quants who were and are in control.

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As the quants don’t have any problem with the qualits in command, they simply control the system as the qualits command.

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So time, the time of the killing, only depends on the qualits’s willing to act and not the magnitude of the decision of the quants events. 

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You in effect are asking the qualits to postpone their decisions, based on their orientation, when it is their ability to out “act” the computers that gives them their advantage. But by bypassing their orientation the qualits have an advantage over the quants. Giving up an advantage, which is why we orient ourselves to begin with, goes against the values of the qualits.

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Perhaps the qualits should have acted after the quants burst the bubble, but to do so would not have been to their advantage 🙂