#mind interferometry

[mentalisttraceur]

Symbiotic Disorders

We know this idea as a joke: "I'm not healthy, I just have a system of perfectly balanced disorders". But I think this is a useful model to try out, especially for mental stuff. What would happen if at least two disorders can coexist and mask each other?

It could hide or stop dysfunction or the differentiating features so much that the person doesn't fit either diagnosis - but internally there is still all the pain and struggle of the disorder. It's worth remembering that when trying to understand others, and ourselves.

It might help you be more durable, willing, or able in certain roles, in the face of certain pressures and risks - maybe sometimes that's even worth the personal cost?

It would be harder to heal, improve, or even acknowledge problems, because each disorder is now load-bearing. You try to give some advice a fair shake, you work on being healthier, and yet you get worse outcomes which you know your old ways reliably prevent.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

A key thing about abused kids....

Kids are often so far away from knowing what's abusive and what isn't, and from even having a correct interpretative lens about it, that if you naively ask them to describe their home life, odds are extremely high they won't even think to mention a lot of the abusive stuff.

Because it doesn't even stand out to them. And the worst stuff that does stand out? Well that was obviously because they "deserved it" or "brought it upon themselves" or whatever. They might feel shame bringing up any of the stuff they did that the abuse was punishing.

They don't know that their dad doing a thing that physically hurts and leaves them unable to breathe for a while is abusive - they think surely other dads do that too when you make them mad, or worse, and honestly their dad is better because that's not hitting, it never bruises or bloodies or breaks anything and it doesn't even hurt that much.

They don't know that that one time their dad seriously hit them when they were like five is fucked up enough to mention - they think it totally makes sense because they did something that exceptionally raised negative feelings, surely any parent would.

They don't know that the one time they half-performatively ran out of the room because mom hurt herself doing something and expressed angry frustration, and then mom chased after them yelling and hit them, because she interpreted the kid's played up fear whimper sounds as laughter rather than as a meta comment on fearing literally exactly this behavior that mom is now doing... yeah they don't know that's particularly worth commenting on because that event is the only one they still remember but it's memorable precisely because it was an exceptional situation that's the most understandable.

They don't know being made to retrieve and eat food out of the trash that one time is abusive - they think "well I did waste some of that food, and I deprived someone else in the family from eating it who might've enjoyed it" and then don't even think anything of it until they're in their fucking thirties and two years deep into a self-chosen unemployment after they've realized they need something that drastic to work through everything.

And when that's the highlights, they're not even going to think about how every argument happens in the intimidation shadow of getting physically hurt if you make a parent too mad or stand up for yourself too angrily. They're not going to bring up all the yelling and chronic drip of self-esteem-damaging insults about their intelligence and moral character that come out whenever they do something bad or not-actually-bad-but-apparently-adults-think-its-bad or bring home bad grades.

They sure as fuck aren't going to think to mention the kinds of data points that a psychology-versed person will immediately recognize as textbook cause of CPTSD, but which to the kid just seems too subtle of a detail within their normal to even mention, like "oh, and I can never know if the yelling is done - it could randomly resume at any time if one of the parents thinks of another Great Point to make about how I'm bad or am doing bad things to my life or [...] - so sometimes I only fall asleep long after the yelling has stopped because I noticed that the sounds outside my bedroom have distinctly indisputably shifted to my parents talking pleasantly about something amongst themselves, or the lights have gone out".

Point being: if you just naively ask an abused kid to describe their experiences, they're probably not even going to think of a lot of the right stuff to bring up. You gotta really try to creatively apply your more experienced perspective to feel around, think of possibilities, ask questions that would trip over some detail, and most of all you gotta notice relevant mental movements in them and ask yourself what kind of abuse pattern might cause them.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

Kinda reminds me of how what we're surprised by and why is a pretty neat mind interferometry tell.

Like, to me, it isn't surprising, but it would've been about five years ago, before I had the empirical logic and prediction trees epiphanies and update-rippled them through everything in my head.

There's also probably something about being comfortable with the low-level side of software and hardware development that helps - at least the part where your mind starts to fluently think with encoding/representation as entirely independent/orthogonal w.r.t. what operations you can do on the information/substance.

I think these are both necessary conditions, probably there are others too.

For example, I don't remember if I found it more surprising before I realized that my "verbal decoupling" experience was most-similar-to / best-explained-by my brain implementing a language predictor which my conscious thoughts drive (like one might a horse; left unattended it has a weak 'mind' of its own, but is also somewhat directionless and just sorta stops and chills a little while after the last spurring onward). But now it certainly feels more thoroughly less surprising to me with that then it would without it.

What I mean is... once you've thought with those concepts enough, I think it becomes obvious that

"every piece of text on the internet"

is overwhelmingly not random, and that in fact it would be a herculean task for any piece of text, any utterance, to not leak some evidence gesturing at how the real world is.

(Actually, fundamentally, it's not just herculean, it's impossible, because the set of texts and utterances that have been physically possible in our universe so far is a strict subset of all possible texts and utterances, and this creates an extremely subtle but present and inescapable empirical backstop which epistemological inference can in principle eventually find and brace against.)

All the "random" and wrong texts we produce are thoroughly shaped and shackled on all sides by deterministic (or at least stochastic with pretty good predictability at scale) forces and trends.

No one just emits wrong or "random" text by perfectly picking from the possibility space of things to say next at random. People say things because on some level they predict it will be funny, or helpful, or hurtful, or any number of things which are fundamentally influenced by predictions and empirical observation about how the world is and how other people are.

We just can never hold enough of those texts in our minds at once to "zoom out" enough - to see the grand patterns writ large in our collective noise. At best, our brain very incrementally does a lesser form of this, with all of its subconscious processing chipping away at the problem, caching some small number of partially-computed tentative pattern candidates in the form of not-yet-pruned neuron connections and so forth.

frankly it is surprising that a piece of text-prediction software trained on "every piece of text on the internet its engineers could get their hands on" ever says anything true at all

[aeroautomotive]

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[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

I am perpetually astounded by the lack of self-critical review so many people exhibit.

How do you live without the shadow of your every thought containing a secondary thought testing that thought for ways it could be relevantly wrong, incomplete, or oversimplified?

I get that it's expensive and effortful... So is walking or reading - it gets easy enough to do casually and feeling effortless with exercise, as the brain habitualized the cognition until it's automatic and optimized into the wetware. But I get that it's expensive beyond that too:

I pay the cost of being slower due to the failsafes of error-checking, of doing multiple ways of thinking to reach the answer.

I sometimes snag in the middle of doing or writing (or speaking in a context I am treating as thinking together) because I spot potential of a relevantly different alternative, and feel compelled to ripple it forward mentally until it either seems to fail or win.

I frequently pay the tax of appearing less confident, uncertain, indecisive, or not knowing something, to those who need the chimp cues of immediate unwavering decisions and not pausing to think.

Of course, I have modes where I simply confidently execute on my current goals as my current self, or state cached wordings of conclusions/beliefs/thoughts, unfettered by review or doubt.

But to regularly go for days without questioning even one thing? To have an argument, or any sign of possible negative impact on someone, or a not-as-good-as-you-wanted result, and not doubt your mental and external methods? Not even later, once you're out of the situation? To have someone directly tell you you're in some way wrong and have done no earnest intensive search for any way it could be true by the next day?

Disturbing, frankly. Disappointing. Infuriating.

I get that sometimes there's a lot more self-review than we see. Face-saving and other monkey-politics keeps people from showing it or backing down. Once hard feelings or disagreement are in the air, there might not even be good opportunity to "show your work". Once someone shows themselves too stubbornly or severely unpleasant, negative, or unwilling/unable/unreceptive to understanding your side, it's often very tempting or just practically necessary and efficient to just ignore them, ghost them, and minimize engagement.

I mean, I myself exhibit all of these issues in my life. Many people I've hurt, embarrassed, or said mean things to never got an apology or update from me, for many of those the opportunity is likely gone forever, and for some of them I simply don't want to (for a variety of reasons... admittedly in some of those cases I probably would want to, were I maturer, healthier, had better perspective, or was in a better situation).

Also, people have a tendency to escalate - if you react to my wrong with what I see as an unacceptable wrong, either in itself or as a response to mine, my reflex and intuition is to only apologize for mine after I've opposed your hard enough to disincentivize it, to absolutely under no circumstances to give you any reward or benefit for it... it took me a loooong time to learn to just let that slide sometimes, to see how it could be outweighed by other values/goals/priorities (or even appreciate it as an equally emotionally valid compulsion on your part to oppose my wrong, even if it is ethically/intellectually sloppy enough to be wrong at the logical level).

But obviously I've been trying my best to take all that into account, by looking at the many second-order signs, at the more unambiguous mind interferometry evidence of review.

I look for the growth at the next similar interaction or decision point, in the form of any sign that this person has changed how they think, reach conclusions, test knowledge and beliefs, and thus cause themselves to feel. I look for growth by seeing if results produced by that person change.

I look for signs of checking one's thoughts for errors in how quickly someone responds, because for example

I know from my teenage years what it's like to knee-jerk into spitting smart-sounding reels of self-righteous argument which is convincing to anyone already inclined to agree (or on the fence and not particularly critical when someone blows to sway them) while doing only the work of coming up with why I'm right and none of the work of finding ways I'm wrong.

I know how I slowed as I gradually started to predict the branches of counters and dismissals (always Wrong, of course, until I took that process far enough to see things I was missing or mistaken, and then once that proved fruitful enough I slowed exponentially more).

I know how I slowed as I started to re-check all relevant knowledge before asserting it, just in case I forgot or missed or assumed something, at first to smugly link sources if needed and then because it turns out you actually learn more and update/fix your own view by doing that.

I know how I slowed when I became proactive about checking/questioning my own assumptions, each time trying to go a little deeper - why do we have this moral duty to not do that obviously bad thing as I confidently feel we do? why is it bad, actually? why is it good for people to not suffer? how do I know my thinking is even capable of reliably finding the right conclusions here?

So when some self-described-as-34-years-old replies to me with an essay after so little time that their slowest possible speed was that of 15-year-old me feverishly typing out the arguments they think of with no attempt to break them first, and the result has several immediately-obvious-to-me weaknesses/flaws that I stopped permitting in my thoughts like a decade ago (I'm 32, for reference), what am I supposed to conclude? That this person does just as much review as I do or even more, and yet they're on Tumblr posting like that because it's actually really intelligently aligned with their true goals and values? And that the people that reblog or comment in agreement are also doing as much critical review of their thoughts as I do, but they can actually see that the post really is a good own of what I said (while I'm just too dumb, traumatized, tunnel-visioned, or lacking in relevant dimension of emotional intelligence or perspective to see)?

For the sake of them and everyone they effect, I really hope so. For the sake of humanity and every mind humanity effects, I really really hope so.

For the sake of me and everyone I effect, I try really hard to see it that way. I come back to these things months or years later and try really hard again. Luckily, it can never be a complete waste of time and effort, because it's good exercise no matter the result, and through the effort I find flaws in myself even if I don't start to see them correctly identifying any.

...

Someone swings by my blog and leaves some snarky and hostile comment. They also block me, as if getting in the last word that cannot be replied to is anything better than both utterly vile and self-stunting.

It took me years of emotional work to become so willing to sacrifice the possible growth of another, so willing prevent another's ability to help me see how I'm wrong, to become willing to block people. These other people seem to do it so easily. Even so, I could never have the lack of compassion needed to say something negative and then actively prevent a reply... I have touched those emotional states, spent some time in them, in simulations of scenarios that feel like they warrant an utter violent beatdown rather than words. I get how satisfying it can be, but I have never felt that way without also connecting, mere moments later, in a reviewing thought pass which rolls in immediately after that emotion recedes, that it is very cruel to prevent a reply after saying anything less than a perfectly convincing (and correct) thing.

And yet I occasionally give another go at figuring out any way they might be righter than me. I hope for the sake of them and everyone they affect they do the same.

They are following up on a negative interaction we had the day prior. We both could've done better and didn't "show our work" of any self-review or growth. In some cases, I "started it" - I came into their post and called them out on something, maybe even harshly, or made an aside they find unpleasant. In some cases, I "started it" - I made a post publicly that didn't cover some angle they rightly feel is important, or which triggered them in a way that I should've been considerate of, or I genuinely put out a bad take with serious potential for harm if not countered. Do they ever think back and see the mirror in which they too "started it"? For the sake of them and everyone they affect, I hope so.

In the day since that interaction, I had reviewed what I could've done better several times, and found several answers. I would not react the same way next time, or at least I would take less time to realize my reaction is worse than it could be. Even before that, I left their last comment on my post alone, unchallenged in its doubling-down on asinine bad-faith presumptuousness and self-serving framing and typical one-sided use of argument creativity and logical rigor. If I was going to speak to them again, it was going to be when I had the time and spoons to be more patiently clearly helpful, and maybe more willing and able to acknowledge to them how I could've done better, with the benefit of more hindsight and emotional distance.

But when they came at me again the next day with that mean comment, it was not merely unprompted, and on another distant post, and accompanied by a pre-emptive block... it was comically and mind-numbingly poking fun at a post of mine about me making the effort to see how I am wrong. What a truly profound level of self-unawareness. I can only indirectly conceive of the level of wrong (or cowardice at hints of cognitive dissonance, or intellectual dishonesty and unethical values) it takes to see a statement explicitly about the effort to see how we are in the wrong and the other person is right, and press on unstopped by "maybe that applies to me, in this situation" (or the sadly apparently far more advanced "oh, I should reinterpret the entire interaction as if this person is more inclined to spot error in themselves than I thought").

...

In every case I can think of that I've made one of my asshole replies, I thought or even started writing a couple drafts of more constructive replies, but managed to rip myself away only after enough consideration the cold calculus of how I could best spend my time, and had to make the cruel ruthless painful decision to defer it for later or maybe not at all, while still pushing back on what I saw as either unacceptable ethical bad or an unacceptable personal boundary trespass.

I review the ever-mounting set of life experiences to yet again try to figure out if I shouldn't have said anything, if I should've let their action pass silently, perhaps just blocked them or ghosted them or cut them out of my life - maybe silence would be kinder to all affected, if I can't give patient friendly guidance or motivate any review or epiphany without being hurtful.

I split yet more hairs. I identify new compounding factors than I previously did not conceive of. I add yet another meta layer. Re-check if those memories or experiences with those people were really predictive or representative of what's right to do in this situation, with this person. Can I see any new patterns or commonalities or discriminating predictiveness-optimizing differences? Sometimes I can, I digest this, I come up with updated thoughts that would check for and notice and factor in this difference among possible minds or situation, and then I think it enough times in enough vividly imagined scenarios to be confident I've set in motion the process of it becoming my new automatic default. I hope the result is a little more ethical, a little more precise at deciding when it would be too much harm to snarl or say something incisive or worse, versus when it would be unacceptably harmful not to.

I hope, for the sake of them and everyone they effect, they do too.

...

I review this whole strategy. I review the relative success in various situations of people who don't seem to review as much.

I reach ever outward. I suppose I have surrounded myself with people who might be missing how I could be better, that I have self-selected into a social circle of people most compatible with my current flaws. Surely we are all constantly repelling the people who most clearly see and acutely feel our worst flaws. I suspect that the people who are most drawn to me are probably missing the same things I most need to have my eyes opened to.

In the shadow of my mind's every judgement, every condemnation, every rejection, is the suspicion that I'm wrong and they're right, that they're better or wiser or have more perspective in some relevant way, in a different or deeper way than I was able to think of so far any other time I've tried to see how it might be so.

I think, about yet another person, "holy fuck, how can anyone be so self-uncritical? so full of the bad kind of inept confidence that has no connection with evidence? do I even want to keep in touch with this person?"... Within an hour I've come up with and have begun pursuing an opportunity to ask someone who knows that person really well and rather liked them for a second opinion, carefully trying to keep the question from being leading towards the negative and even suggesting a positive angle (primarily because I am simultaneously practicing the genuine supposition that they might be onto something and maybe I'm being too harsh or whatever).

I hope, for their sake, and for the sake of anyone who can't choose or doesn't know to not be affected by them, that the person I've just judged that way does too. Then I remember that they have to deal with at least one person who seems even more grossly overconfident and self-uncritical, and I think maybe it's better they hold on to their evidence-independent confidence, because I worry it would harm them if they tried my level of self-critical review and taking other people seriously when they need to stand up to such pressures.

I micro-gaslight myself all the time trying to take such people seriously. It's dangerous if you have to live with them or otherwise spend too much time with them, luckily I don't. But even without that it's costly. In the face of the disgusting, abhorrent asymmetry between

a person who constantly tries to see how others might be right, and

a person who somehow manages to typically not consider they might be wrong,

it takes a lot of knowledge and rigor and endurance of logic and a ridiculously good memory and a certain deep stubbornness for the former to stay confident and resist the distorting influence of the beliefs and "logic" of the latter (incidentally, it takes all those things at levels inconceivable to the latter, because the latter could not remain the way that they are if they had that much of all of that).

[shailig150]

Black Hole

What is a Black Hole?  

A black hole is one of the universe's most intriguing and mysterious phenomena. Defined as an area in space with such high gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape its clutches, black holes have fascinated scientists and astrophysicists for centuries. The concept of black holes dates to the late 18th century, which was coined in the 1960s. However, it wasn't until the 20th century that scientific research and advances in technology enabled us to begin understanding these enigmatic cosmic entities.  

History of Black Hole  

The history of black hole research is intertwined with the theories of great scientists such as Albert Einstein and John Michell. Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1915, laid the groundwork for understanding the behavior of gravity in extreme conditions. Through his equations, scientists began to comprehend the possibility of a singularity, a point of infinite density and space-time curvature, at the center of a black hole.  

Further advancements were made in the 1930s and 1940s when physicists such as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and J. Robert Oppenheimer delved into the theoretical understanding of black holes. Chandrasekhar's calculations on the collapse of massive stars under the force of gravity revealed a critical mass limit, now widely known as the Chandrasekhar limit, beyond which the core would collapse into a black hole. Oppenheimer's groundbreaking work expanded on this, proposing that black holes are formed from the remnants of massive stars after supernova explosions.  

While significant theoretical progress was made, the actual observation and confirmation of black holes remained a challenge. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that X-ray astronomy led to the discovery and observation of evidence for black holes. Pioneering scientists like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose brought further understanding through their mathematical investigations. Hawking's contribution to black hole theory, his hypothesis of Hawking radiation, revolutionized our understanding of black hole dynamics and their evaporation over time.  

Observing/watching a black hole  

In recent years, advancements in observational technology have allowed scientists to observe black holes directly. The landmark achievement came in April 2019 with the release of the first-ever image of a black hole's event horizon, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. This global collaboration of telescopes utilized interferometry techniques to image the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away from Earth.  

The image revealed a dark region surrounded by a bright ring, known as the accretion disk, composed of superheated gas and dust spiraling into the black hole. This image provided convincing evidence for the existence and nature of black holes, aligning with the predictions of general relativity. It marked a significant milestone in our quest to understand these cosmic marvels.  

While observing a black hole directly can be challenging due to their immense distances from Earth, scientists have also been able to detect black holes indirectly by observing the gravitational effects they have on surrounding objects. These observations have provided insights into the prevalence of black holes across the universe, ranging from stellar-mass black holes to supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies.  

In conclusion, black holes have captivated the minds of scientists and fascinated humanity for centuries. From the initial theoretical explanations by Einstein, Chandrasekhar, and Oppenheimer to the recent direct imaging of a black hole's event horizon, our understanding of these cosmic enigmas has vastly expanded. Thanks to advancing technology and observational techniques, we are gradually unraveling the secrets of these mysterious celestial objects and gazing into the abyss of the unknown. 

[mentalisttraceur-long]

This is good advice and summary.

In particular, I think the bit about how some people use explanations to save face and reduce consequences during apologies is very insightful, because I have never seen anyone explicitly make that connection. People will say things like "explaining feels like making excuses or avoiding responsibility", but that just begs a deeper "why?" that this gives enough of a hint to answer:

Per the empiric definition of logic, people need the right experiences to train up their sense of logic to discriminate apology explanations by motivation.

People need first hand experience with figuring out causes or ethics, and with motivation to share that thinking with others when apologizing, for their idea-fitting and mind interferometry to consider it when someone is apologizing.

People need the right prediction trees to put in the effort of considering or discerning those possibilities.

So you need all three of those for an explanation apology to even make sense. (Unless you are giving it, in which case you only need the motivation to figure out causes and ethics and to share that thinking with others.)

It's pretty easy to see how you might not get those experiences:

If you have too many formative interactions with toxic or emotionally immature people, you won't have enough experiences of genuine apologies with constructive explaining - as far as your brain will know, all apologies with explanations it has ever encountered are ones were the person is not fully or truly sorry.

More subtly, if your sense of logic is undermined, warped, or not trained enough in any way that is relevant to any of the above mental skills, you won't be able to do it reliably enough, and your brain will rightly (given the evidence available to it) deem it too error-prone to be worth doing.

But I think most commonly, people are just more sensitive to the interpersonal and "social monkey politics" aspects of apologizing than to the abstract goals that motivate explanation apologies. And if that's what you are more focused on, if that interpersonal/social stuff always motivates you more, then you'll naturally expect others to be driven by similar motivations.

And if we spend enough time in either of those perspectives, an interesting realization is that it is not even that easy to determine if an explanation is coming from a place of genuine apology. The external evidence might be a lot more ambiguous than it seems from the explainer's internal perspective.

Anyway, we can apply the same analysis to understand the disconnects in the other directions and combinations better.

For example, explainers tend to be people whose brains learned from their experiences to treat an accurate identification of the causes and ethics of hurt as predictive of and necessary for not repeating that hurt.

So the reason most explainers find most promises not to repeat "dishonest" is that they think in a way very oriented around figuring out causes and determining what individual actions or rules for deciding on actions are right or wrong. So when you say "[x] won't happen again" to a typical explainer, they are going to be very sensitive to the logical nuances of whether or not [x] is outside of your control, or if [x] might be the right thing to do sometimes. And then maybe the explainer thinks you're being dishonest with them, but maybe they think you're being honest but now committing an additional wrong because you're making an overly broad commitment or misunderstanding the causes (both of which are cognetic openings, a I would expect a typical explainer is more sensitive to cognetic openings as Bad Things That Must Be Resolved).

Both the no-repeats-promisers and the social-consequence-embracers might strike a typical explainer as not even having a properly clear view of what they are apologizing for. Usually, "explainers" are not just explaining why it happened, but they are precisely pinning down what they did wrong out of everything that happened. So to an explainer, a failure to "explain" (or rather precisely identify what you are apologizing for, which might require something like "explaining" to do) can feel a lot like "sorry you got hurt".

What are you sorry for? What won't happen again? Without you sharing those answers, how do I even know if we are on the same page? How do I know you won't just hurt me again in a myriad similar ways? Some people learn to see a spectrum of possible related badness, or to expect that they will be misunderstood, so much so that getting a precise and agreeable explanation from you of what precisely happened and what you think you did wrong would be the most efficient way for them to actually feel reassured that you won't hurt them again. Explainers are sometimes explaining because they want to extend this rare courtesy to you.

Also, explainers are often... explainers about more than just apologies. They might have formative experiences with the right kind of toxic or immature people which make them feel the need to explain themselves more generally, or have their sense of logic warped/undermined in a way that makes them worse at discerning when such explanations are not needed, and so on.

I'm not going to do as deep of a breakdown of no-repeats-promisers right now, but I think a similar analysis based on the notions of empirically defined logic and prediction trees will get you most of the way there: their brain must have learned to treat actual hard commitments as the most reliable metric.

One nuance is that if you have a hard unambiguous commitment, you can hold people accountable, or at least judge them accordingly. If you have a lot of formative experiences with people squirming around past apologies and promises, like "no actually I didn't say I wouldn't do [x], I said I wouldn't do [something very similar to x]", then maybe you reasonably conclude given the evidence available to you that anyone who does that is acting in bad faith. I would expect a mind with those experiences might learn to prefer crisp, simple, unambiguous apologies and promises. No room for forgettable nuances or details. A very sweeping "it won't happen again" might be ambiguous in another dimension, but given the right experiences, a mind could feel like that ambiguity overwhelmingly favors the recipient of the apology: because they are then empowered to judge if it happened again. So it really means something substantial when they hand you that kind of apology.

But I think a lot of the time it's simpler than that: some people might learn to speak the no-repeats-promises apology language natively because of overwhelmingly positive experiences - they just got lucky and never had situations where they had to notice the ambiguity, never got screwed over by the ambiguity. And they just had people who were discerning enough (like mature parents or friends) who said "it won't happen again" and knew precisely what they meant.

Similarly, it's easy to see how a person's logical cognition might be undertrained or warped such that they would just fail to see the ambiguity, and if you don't see the ambiguity, explaining might seem like irrelevant noise, and consequence-embracing might also seem irrelevant but in a different way - like "I'm not interested in compensation, I am interested in it not happening again".

TL;DR:

Which apology language you speak "natively" is probably largely a function of what cognition was positively or negatively reinforced, especially in our formative years, and in particularly what we learned each of these behaviors to mean and be predictive of.

The actual vision of how to get from that general theoretical basis to a mental reference frame where each apology language actually makes sense and is "logically" (relativistically) correct didn't occur to me until I saw this post.

Apology Languages

Properly apologizing is one of the things that keeps social situations running smooth. After all, everyone messes up, and sometimes even when everything goes right there’s inevitable conflicts. A simple ‘I’m sorry’ keeps minor missteps from blowing up into a full mess.

Yet, sometimes, people fully sincerely apologize past each other.

How?

Well, apology languages are part of it.

Two of the major things an apology does are:

-Acknowledge that something ‘wrong’ happened (basic apology)

-Reassure the listener that the problem is less likely to reoccur (full apology)

How does an apology actually do that, though?

Here’s the rub: it varies. People, in fact, apologize differently. (Culture influences this heavily, as does neurodivergence. Some of the worst fights I’ve seen started when an allistic person and an autistic person both tried to very sincerely apologize to each other… And completely misinterpreted the other’s apology).

For a basic apology:

-Some people consider a ‘wrong’ to cover anything that wouldn’t be the case in an ideal world. (”Sorry,” you say, sincerely, when taking care of yourself means you can’t help someone else.)

-Other people consider a ‘wrong’ to only mean something they wouldn’t do if given full knowledge of consequences. (”Sorry,” you say, sincerely, after an ill-timed joke hurts your friend).

To these two groups? The other often looks dishonest (you’re apologizing when you don’t mean it!) or stubborn and proud (you’re refusing to acknowledge I got hurt!).

(Lawyer speak apologies [specifying what you’re apologizing for] can strike a balance between these two, but can also come off as condescending. “I’m sorry you got hurt” is unlikely to go down poorly if everyone agrees it’s the circumstance that’s sorry, unless your listener thinks you did something you shouldn’t have and are now refusing to really apologize. Communication! It’s hard!)

For a full apology:

-”It won’t happen again” is the standard thing you say to your boss for a reason. Flat out, “I won’t do that,” is for some people the most reassuring thing you can say.

-”I screwed up” or “How can I make it up to you” is another way. These two phrases are actually doing something very similar - they’re self-imposed consequences on the apologizer, whether in social capitol or effort.

-”It happened because…” is a very common reassurance among autistic people. You’re not saying it won’t happen again - you can’t promise that, and it’s bad to lie - but you can give your listener a glimpse at how you’re processing what happened. You’re putting out what you think went wrong, which they’re welcome to help you refine, and indicating you understand it enough to hopefully avoid the problem.

The problem? To an explainer, a straightforward reassurance sounds dishonest, and the person imposing consequences sounds like they’re not putting in the effort to figure out what actually happened. To a reassurer or self-imposed consequence, the explainer sounds like they’re weakening their apology. (Depending on which consequence you self-impose, this usually goes over a bit better - “how can I make it up to you” is most likely to go over well, but being self-depreciating can sometimes sound like you’re fishing for reassurance.)

But wait, an explainer may ask, how does explaining why it’s less likely to happen again make the apology lesser? The thing is: people whose apology language involves self-imposed consequences will offer explanations - but only to save face and reduce the self-imposed social consequence inherent to an apology. So you’re giving a high-effort breakdown of all the things you know went wrong, and they hear someone trying to avoid what they’re consider a ‘full’ apology… In their own language.

Balanced apologies usually look something like: “I’m sorry. [period, pause, or line break] I know I [messed up/ hurt you] by [explanation goes here]. [I’ll try to avoid doing that again./ I’ll try to do better./ I’ll try to word things better.]”

While it’s tempting to skip the obvious parts - if you’re explaining you “clearly” know you messed up - if you’re trying to resolve a fight? No, seriously, spell things out.

Now, this is both social advice, because a lot of people don’t seem to realize that people apologize differently, and a thing to keep in mind when writing.

How does your character apologize when they’re being fully sincere? When does your character apologize? Where are the places that an apology doesn’t translate, where a misunderstanding of someone’s intent might occur? (Be careful with this, as the readers we’re better positioned to figure out what the characters mean, so it can be frustrating to read two people talking past each other.)

If your character is good at social and intended to be reasonable, you can also show them code-switching between apology languages, or helping detangle a fight between people who’re communicating differently.

[mentalisttraceur]

Getting blocked doesn't come up very often for me. The instances I'm aware of I could count on one hand. (Minus the one repeat offender who blocked me like 4-5 times over a few years. Who might still be reading my blog. 👋)

So I guess I'm still figuring out exactly how I want to react to people who block me, and processing all my automatic reactions to it, because I haven't had enough experiences with it to really explore this. Especially not as I am right now, after having accepted and explored and integrated all that I once disallowed in my mind because it seemed too selfish or whatever.

Of course, I already know what the mature and ethical reaction is - basically just think of it as a crude but understandable move driven by genuine hurt or need, because of either misunderstanding of me by them or substantial incompatibility between us. Be patient with such people, and as an act of proactive kindness try to avoid interacting with them as much as possible, even when I do not have any ethical obligation to. But be clear about enforcing the boundary in the opposite direction - your personal interaction preferences are not above all else, they can be wrong, and don't you dare think they let you keep me out of spaces that you do not own or matters that concern anyone besides just you.

But ethics aside, what do I personally want? Well, lately I'm feeling particularly unforgiving about blocks which

I see as unjustified, and

which in any way inconvenience me.

Like maybe the people whose blocks of me fit those criteria are uninvited from any of my spaces or projects. Maybe if you're a guest in my house and I find out you're one of those people, you get immediately told to get out, and if you say anything other than an immediate and compelling apology acknowledging at least some of what I find bothersome about it, you get a very short reply and then an upgrade to "get the fuck out". Maybe if you need help, maybe this is where my grudges become dangerous for the first time in ever - maybe I just choose not to help, unless of course I get that apology. Maybe if you're one of those people and you ask me what you did wrong, the only hint you get is "oh you want to know what you did wrong? you should've been more compassionate to that desire earlier".

Of course, if you ask me about an actual ethics judgement of any of the above, I'm pretty against it all at face value. But being blocked when I perceive it as unjustified really taps into my retaliatory monkey brain, and also strikes right at the place where my patience for people's bullshit is particularly worn thin. Like, you want to use this tool which has profoundly asymmetrically absolute and circumstance-insensitive effects? And you want to use this nuclear option so carelessly and clumsily? Ok. Then I guess when it displeases me, when I have grievances to raise with how you used it against me, I'll use the only means to affect your incentives that you're leaving available: a looming threat that one day it may have consequences which could only be avoided by either not blocking me or maturely communicating beforehand. You're not the only one who gets to take clumsily excessive actions (which in their worst extremes might hurt a lot or do actual and severe harm) because your feelings are hurt or you have negative judgements about someone. And if you think anything I suggested above is horribly disproportionate, notice that it's actually nothing more than as if I could block you in real life.

Luckily, a fully fulfilled and succeeding me, with more fully developed mental skills, just won't be bothered at all by someone blocking me and just won't have time for grudges about it. To that version of me, noticing that someone has blocked me will be like encountering an unpleasant smell in a public bathroom - quickly forgotten, not really held against anyone because people can't really help being the source of those sometimes, and I wouldn't even make you look or feel bad about it by bringing it up if I didn't need to. On the other hand, if you keep smelling too badly, I might not want to be around you, and the cognition suggested by the mind interferometry evidence of a bad blocking leaves a pretty lingering stench.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

I used to want to learn Lojban, probably for over a decade now. Not enough to actually ever get around to it, but enough to keep it on my mind as a thing to do eventually.

But I think I'm starting to realize that my values for constructed languages have evolved - the language needs to be designed from the right perspective, the right foundation of thought and philosophy.

I want a language designed by:

Someone who has had the epiphany of empirically defined logic, and really followed it mentally to have it permeate and update all understanding of how things are, what we know, what's correct and sound, and so on.

Someone fluent in cognetic openings and cognition habitualization, who is by default vigilant for the liability of bad cognition, and eagerly driven to respect that as one of the roots of basically all problems which we can do something about.

Someone who sees the unifying idea behind logical elegance (and equivalently mathematical/algorithmic/scientific/representational/modeling/expressive elegance or "power"), simplicity (a minimalism of things being complected together), Occam's Razor and "Macco's Razor", composable language, and so on.

Someone who is normally thinks in probabilities. With something like fuzzy bundles of branching and merging possibilities of different likelihood, rather than normally thinking with a singular version of events, truth, reality, and so on. Someone who understands what it's like to act in multiple possibilities at once, to chose actions based on what would happen in more than one possibility at once. Someone who has learned through constant exhaustion of doing so how valuable it can be to optimize for collapsing possibilities that are importantly different as soon as possible.

Someone who is good at mind interferometry, in a practical way, both of the self for introspection, and of other people enough to not have jarringly wrong ideas about why people do things.

Someone who understands the combination of the last two points. That communication and actions with interpersonal effects can, often should, and sometimes must be unethical or at least hurtful in some possibilities, to be the best action across all possibilities. Who sees how that thoroughly modifies how sufficiently mature and intelligent minds should talk about what is appropriate to say or do, and when and why.

Someone who knows how to think in functions and abstractions, and who when it matters can readily identify how every not-function-like thought and reified idea is just rigid special cases of a more general and flexible function or abstraction. Who is familiar with how intractably impossible it can be to convey an important idea to someone who doesn't have this skill.

Someone who understands the difference between relative, uncertain, and subjective. Who I can trust to not dismiss relativistic or probabilistic things as subjective. Who I can trust to not treat things from a familiar or common reference frame as absolute.

Someone who has outgrown basic childish shit, like values such as labeling some thoughts or feelings as immoral regardless of their actual consequences, projected wishful thinking such as rejecting possible truths because they imply something we don't want, and so on.

Someone who has had the gated truths epiphany, has understood gatedness enough to realize that it is physically and logically impossible to express all ideas in a way that will be accessible to those who haven't yet trained or epiphanied or experiences the right stuff in their minds, because words alone, especially plain, easy, accessible words, cannot think for you, cannot update your automatic thinking and emotions for you, cannot give you new raw qualia.

Someone who has had various epiphanies about mind steering and reshaping. Who has the attachment to outcomes epiphany, and has grown the ability to conceptually separate the good parts of "attachment" from what we talk about on the other side of the attachment to outcomes "gate". Who has had the prediction trees epiphany, and really followed it mentally to have it permeate and update all understanding of how minds work. Who regularly does simulation to explore or train their emotional reactions and other automatic cognition. Who has figured out pre-grieving. Who sees "habitualization depth" just one oversimplifying step towards describing how habitualization behaves. Each of these individually doesn't matter, but I want it to be someone who has seen many useful distinctions and phenomena to say about cognition relative to what we have in normal language, as Eskimos have about snow, or as seafaring people have about ocean water.

Someone who is sensitive and caring enough about hurt in all its forms to not robotically insist on Correct(tm) speech, thinking, and behavior, without balancing it moment by moment against how much it hurts people.

A constructed language not guided by an awareness of all this is not likely enough to be useful enough for me to justify the time and effort to really learn it - to come close enough to fluent to really start thinking in it.

It might teach me something, it might be useful in some unlikely situation, it might help me communicate with more people, or it might add value to my life in some other way. But if I'm optimizing for that, I get more value out of learning the most widely spoken languages, or other more "natural" languages which have those properties, like a sign language or a whistling language.

If I'm learning a constructed language with a minimal speaker base and no monolingual users, it needs to improve over my current languages in terms of making my communication significantly less wrong or immature in important ways. It needs to be something that is so much better for communicating the best thinking we can do, that those of us who need it cannot help but find ourselves reaching for it once we get a taste of it.

And the above list is what underpins the best thinking I have which is currently under-served by my languages, and I suspect by all natural languages, thanks to the insufficient language problem. A constructed language would need to make thoughts and ideas that result from those qualities simple and easy to hear, read, speak, and write.

[scifigeneration]

Pairing lasers with microwaves makes mind-bogglingly accurate electronic clocks – a potential boon for GPS, cell phones and radar

by Andrew Ludlow and Franklyn Quinlan

Mating laser-driven atomic clocks like the one shown here with microwaves promises more accurate electronic devices. N. Phillips/NIST

Time and frequency standards are a key part of technologies we have come to rely on in our daily lives, from GPS navigation and cellphone networks to the electrical power grid. The importance of these systems and the constant drive to improve their performance has led to the development of atomic clocks that keep time and measure frequency with incredible accuracy.

Conventional atomic clocks use the billions-of-times-a-second vibrations of atoms like cesium to calibrate microwave signals, which are read by other devices such as GPS satellites, to keep time. The most accurate atomic clocks, however, calibrate optical signals from laser beams rather than microwaves, and they use atoms like ytterbium that oscillate even faster than cesium – hundreds of trillions of times per second.

Optical clock frequencies are so stable that it would take more than 14 billion years – the age of the universe – for one of these clocks to be off by a second. But researchers haven’t been able to feed these ultrafast optical signals at their full performance into electronic devices.

Our team of physicists and engineers, with members from the University of Colorado, University of Virginia and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has found a way to link optical atomic clocks with microwave signals without compromising the amazing performance of the optical clock signals. The resulting microwave tracked the optical clock with a precision of under a quadrillionth of a second. A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. This yields a 100-fold improvement over the cesium fountain clock, the gold standard for microwave atomic clocks.

Keeping time

The very best microwave clock today is the cesium fountain clock, which oscillates near 10 GHz or about 10 billion cycles per second. Carefully tracking the clock cycles makes it possible to deliver a clock frequency with high stability. The best cesium fountain clocks can provide about 13 digits of precision after tracking one second’s worth of oscillations. Averaging over longer times increases the precision, and if you’re willing to wait for days or weeks you can improve the precision of the clock frequency to about 16 digits. With 16 digits of precision, it would take 300 million years for a clock to be off by a second. Microwave atomic clocks, housed in metrology institutes worldwide, are used to define the international standard for the second.

Microwave atomic clocks underlie much of today’s technology. For example, GPS measures the relative delay of timing signals from overhead satellites to determine your position. Without the nanosecond-level stability of the clocks onboard the GPS satellites, the relative timing delay among satellites would vary randomly, making it impossible to find your position accurately.

High-performance clocks are also extremely important for science. One example is very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) where microwave and millimeter wave signals are detected at observatories spread across the globe, and are combined to form images of cosmic objects. High stability clocks are needed to effectively time stamp the received signals so they can be combined in a meaningful way to form an image. A recent example of this technique at work was the first-ever images of a black hole.

Over the past decade, a number of optical clocks have surpassed the performance of their microwave counterparts. Optical clocks operate at 100s of terahertz – more than 100 trillion cycles per second – and can now provide 16 digits of precision in one second or better. In just a few hours, they can offer a whopping 18 digits of precision or more. This has opened up exciting new avenues in scientific research with atomic clocks, including the search for dark matter, testing whether fundamental constants of nature are truly constant and chronometric leveling where gravity’s effect on an atomic clock rate can be used to measure Earth’s gravitational potential. With the extraordinary performance of optical atomic clocks, a redefinition of the second now seems inevitable.

New applications become available by bringing optical-clock-level stability to microwaves.

GPS could be more accurate, positioning you to within a few centimeters rather than a few meters. Better GPS would improve the performance of aircraft auto pilots and self-driving cars. With more precise timekeeping, electronic communications like cellphone signals can transmit more information.

Radar is dependent on the frequency stability of the transmitted microwaves. With higher precision microwaves, radar sensitivity could see sizeable improvements, particularly for detecting slow-moving targets. Moving VLBI to space and outfitting it with improved timestamping could greatly increase resolution and observation time, making it possible to image more objects in the universe.

Combing frequencies

Bringing optical atomic clock precision to microwave signals was achieved with a tool known as an optical frequency comb. The frequency comb, named for its array of discrete, evenly spaced laser frequency tones, emits a train of sub-picosecond light pulses. A picosecond is a trillionth of a second.

The black rectangle (center) is a high-speed photodiode that converts laser pulses to high, super-stable microwave frequencies, bringing the incredible accuracy of optical atomic clocks to everyday electronics. Franklyn Quinlan/NIST

When the frequency comb is connected to an optical clock, the rate at which these pulses are emitted is a well-defined fraction of the optical clock frequency. Shining these pulses onto a high-speed optical-to-electrical converter makes it possible to generate a microwave signal that oscillates at a well-defined fraction of the optical clock frequency, and whose stability and accuracy matches that of the optical clock.

Armed with this level of performance, a new generation of microwave timekeeping opens the door for many scientific and technological advances.

About The Author:

Andrew Ludlow is a Lecturer of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder and Franklyn Quinlan is a Physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[mentalisttraceur]

Dog Whistles

When we say some meme like a phrase or symbol or whatever is a "dog whistle", you cannot just remember it, as if every time you see that thing it will have a clear, specific, or knowingly secret meaning. Dog whistling is not something you can boil down to superficial pattern matching.

The core of dog whistling comes down to mind interferometry. Dog whistles are born from the deep and huge information asymmetry inherent to different life experiences, not the shallow and tiny information asymmetry that you could compile into a dictionary of secret meanings.

The game is not "aha, you chumps don't know this other meaning!" The game is "you don't have enough experience having this on your mind", "you haven't spent enough time in my community", "you can't relate to us", and "you never ran the gauntlet of wanting to express this but having to keep watering it down or beating around the bush due to predictions of negative consequences from saying it straight".

[mentalisttraceur-long]

I only post about video games here if it has value beyond the video gaming itself.

So having said that:

StarCraft 2, when played "competitively" (even just on the ranked ladder online, not necessarily professionally) is the single most intense mental exercise I know of.

Things like Rubik's cubes or chess or go, or advanced math problems, or holding in your head everything needed to design or understand a complex software architecture or design or algorithm, or a martial arts spar, or playing a musical instrument at peak ability, or simulating experiences and cognition, etc - all that pushes various different thinking limits too.

But StarCraft 2 1v1 ladder play, when you actually go at it as fast and effortfully as you can... Holy shit. It's anywhere from five to sixty minutes (depending on how well you and your opponent play) of non-stop brain firing on all cylinders.

There is always something more you could be doing, always more things you could be checking or keeping track of.

The game will consume and reward any improvement in multi-tasking or information processing or strategic judgment or world-modeling (of the game state) or mind interferometry (of the other player) or just raw speed and precision of movement that you can feed it.

Near as I can tell there is no ceiling. You can keep getting better forever, and you will still be able to get better at doing it, even if you do end up better than everyone else. Of course that is not unique - lots of games, and most deep real-life skills, have no ceiling.

It's the combination of simultaneous and urgent demands, the complexity and variety, and the lack of obvious ceiling, all together, that I find unique.

Now maybe there are other games like it and maybe other people get the same level of intense deep and broad mental challenge in other things.

For example, I predict that once developed far enough, and if approached with the same deliberate focused activated intensity, "humaning" can open up that rich unceasing explosion of challenge.

So there are probably other ways to get mentally exercised as intensely or more, perhaps even in the skills I mentioned earlier as not doing that for me. StarCraft 2 1v1 ranked ladder play just happens to be the most intense one I have had.

I do think I am onto something with the whole "if approached with deliberate focused activated intensity" comment though. I think part of why SC2 is so mentally intense for me is that I go into it feeling like it has to be.

But in the other hand, I think I am only able to feel that way because with SC2 I can see beyond my ability - I cannot do as well as I know can be done. Also SC2 only became this way for me when I saw by example just how fast it could be played.

Looking back, I have had moments of similar intensity when humaning. But only when things seemed like urgent theats or problems. But usually those were done as soon as impression management damage control was done, and only the most immediately relevant cognition flows of at most a mind or two had to be mentally handled.

Oh and when I got attacked by that dog five years or so ago - but again I won that too quickly, so the state lasted for literally at most five seconds. And there was so, so much less to that problem space. One human and one dog bodies' worth of anatomy simplified down to just the movement mechanics and vulnerabilities, the dog's mind, the one human observer in the room who literally did not even get around to moving in the time before it was over, background proceeding of peripheral perceptions for signs of people in the nearby rooms doing anything relevant.

That sounds like a lot, and maybe it is, but it is mostly interlinked in these smooth cognition flows that handle it all, while SC2 involves so much more that has to be individually and discretely mentally accounted for.

StarCraft 2 feels like it demands more of my mind than any of those situations, but most importantly - and this is the huge thing - it demands it for much longer periods of time, unrelentingly.

The hilarious thing is that a huge number of people play way better than me. I'm actually pretty damn sucky. So I suspect there is some way to just play it with way less mental effort and intensity and focus.

I have always been prone to exponential skill growth curves. I kinda suck at things, usually for years, until eventually I grind and stumble my way into finally getting a feel for the problem space and the skills and the cognition needed, and at some point it tips over and I start improving really rapidly. Then a few years later people assume I'm natural or talented or have always had a knack for it.

But anyway, I'm either still in what I suspect is the sublinear part of my SC2 skill growth curve, or just getting out of it. We'll see.

So there are probably ways to play, at least at my weak level, that do not provide that exercise, and we could probably find something else that does.

And also, I am not sure how much of the cognition I train up playing SC2 is actually transferable to other, more practical matters.

Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing that in the decade since it came out, I have basically found nothing else that exercises the mind the same way.

[spaceexp]

First Laser Light for GRACE Follow-On

NASA - GRACE Follow-On Mission logo. July 3, 2018 The laser ranging interferometer (LRI) instrument has been successfully switched on aboard the recently launched twin U.S./German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellites. The LRI, which is being flown as a technology demonstration, has made its first measurements in parallel with GRACE-FO's main microwave ranging instrument, and initial comparisons of the data from the two types of instruments show that they agree as expected. "The LRI is a breakthrough for precision distance measurements in space," said LRI Instrument Manager Kirk McKenzie of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages NASA's contribution to the instrument. "It's the first inter-spacecraft laser interferometer and the culmination of about a decade of NASA- and German-funded research and development."

Image above: Artist's rendering of the twin spacecraft of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, scheduled to launch in May. GRACE-FO will track the evolution of Earth's water cycle by monitoring changes in the distribution of mass on Earth.Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. The GRACE-FO mission, launched on May 22, continues the work of the original GRACE mission of monitoring phenomena such as the melting of ice sheets and changes in groundwater levels by tracking the changing pull of gravity on the GRACE-FO satellites. The microwave ranging interferometer records these changes in gravity by measuring how they change the distance between the twin spacecraft. By accurately measuring these minute changes as the two spacecraft orbit the planet, scientists are able to calculate month-to-month variations in Earth's gravity field. The LRI is an enabling technology for future GRACE-FO-like missions with potential to significantly improve the accuracy of those missions. The instrument is jointly managed by JPL and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hanover, Germany. Seeing the light The LRI's "first light" operation took place over two days. On June 13, the two GRACE-FO satellites began sweeping their lasers in spiral patterns in search of each other. Gerhard Heinzel, leader of the space interferometry research group at the Albert Einstein Institute and manager of the German contribution to the LRI, explained the challenge: "There are coin-sized holes on each satellite through which the laser has to be precisely pointed towards the holes in the other satellite over a distance of more than 200 kilometers [137 miles], while both spacecraft race around Earth at 27,000 kilometers an hour [16,000 miles per hour]. It is truly mind-boggling." (Here is a fuller explanation of how the LRI operates https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7116.) In the data that were downlinked the next day, it was clear that each spacecraft had seen several flashes of light during the spiral scans, indicating both LRI instruments received light from the opposite spacecraft and were working as expected. The settings needed to establish a continuous laser link were calculated and uploaded to the satellites, and the LRI delivered its first intersatellite range data at a later downlink that day.

Image above: As GRACE-FO orbits (ground track at bottom; north is to the right) the distance between the two spacecraft changes very slightly (top) as the mass below changes (middle, shown as changes in ground elevation). Image Credits: B. Knispel/G.Heinzel/AEI/GFZ/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SRTM. "The plan for establishing the laser link worked exactly as designed. In fact, the laser link locked in on the first attempt," said Christopher Woodruff, the LRI mission operations lead at JPL. In the coming weeks and months, the GRACE-FO research team will work on fine-tuning the operation of this novel instrument and completing their understanding of the data it delivers. The fine print GRACE-FO is a partnership between NASA and German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Additional contributors to the laser ranging interferometer include SpaceTech in Immenstaad, Germany; Tesat-Spacecom in Backnang, Germany; Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado; iXblue in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France; the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Adlershof and Institute of Space Systems in Bremen; Hensoldt Optronics in Oberkochen; Apcon AeroSpace and Defence in Neubiberg/Munich; Diamond USA, Inc., and Diamond SA in Losone, Switzerland; and Airbus Defence and Space in Friedrichshafen. For more information on the LRI, see: http://www.aei.mpg.de/2277280/first-light-for-grace-follow-on-laser-interferometer For more information about GRACE-FO, see: https://www.nasa.gov/gracefo https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/ Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Alan Buis/Esprit Smith. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

[scepticaladventure]

27  Gravitational Waves  12Sep18

Introduction This essay continues my series of essays discussing tests of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. More detailed descriptions of the test themselves can be found online and in the literature. See for example the literature review in May 2017 by Estelle Asmodelle from the University of Central Lancashire Ref:  arXiv:1705.04397 [gr-qc] or arXiv:1705.04397v1 [gr-qc].

I have questioned whether the experimental tests exclude any other explanations for the same phenomenon. So far I have examined gravitational redshifts and gravitational light bending, the Shapiro round-trip light delay and the ‘anomalous’ precession of Mercury. The evidence so far is that while General Relativity provides a satisfying explanation for all of these experimental observations, other ways of describing the outcomes are also viable. Hence there may be more than one way to include all the evidence within a different but still complete and consistent model or theory.

In this essay I will look at the latest of the five so-called tests – gravitational waves.

Gravitational Waves Gravitational waves are generated in certain gravitational interactions and propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. Their possibility was discussed in 1893 by the polymath Oliver Heaviside, using the analogy between the inverse-square laws in both gravitation and electricity.

In 1905, Henri Poincaré suggested that a model of physics using the Lorentz transformations (then being incorporated into Special Relativity) required the possibility of gravitational waves (‘ondes gravifiques’) emanating from a body and propagating at the speed of light.

Some authors claim that gravitational waves disprove Newton’s mechanics since Newton assumed that gravity acted instantaneously at a distance. I think this is unfair to Newton. Whether or not Newton explicitly claimed that gravity acted instantaneously at a distance I do not know, but it would have been a reasonable and pragmatic working assumption to make at the time. Furthermore whether he assumed instantaneous effects or delays at the speed of light makes no practical difference to the validity of Newton’s work for the type of celestial mechanics he was interested in.

In 1916, Einstein suggested that gravitational waves were a firm prediction of General Relativity. He said that that large accelerations of mass/energy would cause disturbances in the spacetime metric around them and that such disturbances would travel outwards at the speed of light. A spherical acceleration of a star would not suffice because the gravity effects would still be felt as coming from the centre of mass. The cause would have to be a large asymmetric mass that was rotating rapidly. Or better still, two very large masses that were rotating around each other.

In general terms, gravitational waves are radiated by objects whose motion involves acceleration and changes in that acceleration, provided that the motion is not spherically symmetric (like an expanding or contracting sphere) or rotationally symmetric (like a spinning disk or sphere).

A simple example is a spinning dumbbell. If the dumbbell spins around its axis of its connecting bar, it will not radiate gravitational waves. If it tumbles end over end, like in the case of two planets orbiting each other, it will radiate gravitational waves. The heavier the dumbbell, or the faster it tumbles, the greater the gravitational radiation. In an extreme case, such as when two massive stars like neutron stars or black holes are orbiting each other very quickly, then significant amounts of gravitational radiation will be given off.

Over the next twenty years the idea developed slowly. Even Einstein had his doubts about whether gravitational waves should exist or not. He said as much to Karl Schwarzschild and later started a collaboration with Nathan Rosen to debunk the whole idea. But instead of debunking the idea Einstein and Rosen further developed it and by 1937 they had published a reasonably complete version of gravitational waves in General Relativity. Note that this is 22 years after the General Theory was first published.  

In 1956, the year after Einstein’s death, Felix Pirani reduced some of the confusion by representing gravitational waves in terms of the manifestly observable Riemann curvature tensor.

In 1957 Richard Feynman argued that gravitational waves should be able to carry energy and so might be able to be detected. Note that gravitational waves are also expected to be able to carry away angular or linear momentum. Feynman’s insight inspired Joseph Weber to try to build the first gravity wave detectors. However his efforts were not successful. The incredible weakness of the effects being sought cannot be over emphasized.

More support came from indirect sources. Theorists predicted that gravity waves would sap energy out of an intensely strong gravitational system. In 1974, Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. discovered the first binary pulsar (a discovery that would earn them the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics). In 1979, results were published detailing measurement of the gradual decay of the orbital period of the Hulse-Taylor pulsar, and these measurements fitted precisely with the loss of energy and angular momentum through gravitational radiation as predicted by calculations using General Relativity.

Four types of gravitational waves (GWs) have been predicted. Firstly, there are ‘continuous GWs,’ which have almost constant frequency and relatively small amplitude, and are expected to come from binary systems in rotation, or from a single extended asymmetric mass object rotating about its axis.

Secondly, there are ‘Inspiral GWs,’ which are produced by massive binary systems that are spiralling in towards one another. As their orbital distance lessens, their rotational velocity increases rapidly.

Then there are ‘Burst GWs,’ which are produced by an extreme event such as asymmetric gamma ray bursters or supernovae.

Lastly, there are ‘Stochastic GWs,’ which are predicted to have been created in the very early universe by sonic waves within the primordial soup. These are sometimes called primordial GWs and they are predicted to produce a GW background. Personally I doubt that this last type of GW exists.

On February 11, 2016, the LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaboration announced they had made the first observation of gravitational waves. The observation itself was made on 14 September 2015, using the Advanced LIGO detectors. The gravity waves originated from a pair of merging black holes millions of years ago that released energy equivalent to a billion trillion stars within seconds. For the first time in human history, mankind could ‘feel and hear’ something happening in deep space and not just ‘see’ it. The black holes were estimated to be 36 and 29 solar masses respectively and circling each other at 250 times per second when the signal was first detected.

By August 2017 half a dozen other detections of gravitational waves were announced. I think all of them have been in-spiral GW’s. These produce a characteristic ‘chirp’ in which the signal becomes quicker and stronger and then stops. This is very useful for finding the signal amongst all the background noise. The flickering light pattern signal in the interferometer detector can be turned directly into a sound wave and actually does sound like a chirp.

In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish for their role in the detection of gravitational waves. (The same Kip Thorne who co-authored the heavyweight textbook on gravity that I have referred to so often in these essays that I gave it its own acronym - ��MTW).

As I first drafted this essay in 2017 there was considerable excitement in the world of astronomy because the Large Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatories (LIGO) suggested that a pair of neutron starts were in the process of collapsing. Space based telescopes were then able to look in that direction and they observed an intense burst of gamma rays. This is the first example of the two types of observational instruments working together and the dual result confirms that LIGO had been observing what they thought they were observing. Furthermore it provides evidence that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.

Detection LIGO is a large-scale long-term physics project that includes the design, construction and operation of observatories designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and applied theoretical work to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. It has been a struggle lasting many decades. It took many attempts to achieve funding for the observatories and nearly a decade to make the first successful observations. A triumph of persistence, optimism and the begrudging willingness of the USA National Science Foundation to fund a speculative fundamental science project to the tune of US$1.1 billion over the course of 40 years.

To my mind the experimental set up is reminiscent of Michelson Morley experiments 140 years ago. But it is on a much larger scale and is incredibly more sensitive, with all sorts of very clever tricks to increase the sensitivity and to get unwanted noise out of the system. Two large observatories have been built in the United States (in the states of Washington and Louisiana) with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by enhanced laser interferometry. The observatories have mirrors 4 km apart. Each arm contains resonant cavities at the end.

When a gravitational wave passes through the interferometer, the spacetime in the local area is altered. Depending on the source of the wave and its polarization, this results in an effective change in length of one or both of the beams. The effective length change between the beams will cause the light currently in the cavity to become very slightly out of phase (anti-phase) with the incoming light. The cavity will therefore periodically get very slightly out of coherence and the beams, which are tuned to destructively interfere at the detector, will have a very slight periodically varying detuning. This results in a measurable signal.

Or, to put it another way: After approximately 280 trips up and down the 4 km long evaluated tube arms to the far mirrors and back again, the two beams leave the arms and recombine at the beam splitter. The beams returning from two arms are kept out of phase so that when the arms are both in coherence and interference (as when there is no gravitational wave or extraneous disturbance passing through), their light waves subtract, and no light should arrive at the final photodiode. When a gravitational wave passes through the interferometer, the distances along the arms of the interferometer are repeatedly shortened and lengthened, creating a resonance and causing the beams to become slightly less out of phase and thus allowing some of the laser light to arrives at the final photodiode, thus creating a signal.

Light that does not contain a signal is returned to the interferometer using a power recycling mirror, thus increasing the power of the light in the arms. In actual operation, noise sources can cause movement in the optics that produces similar effects to real gravitational wave signals. A great deal of the art and skill in the design of the observatories, and in the complexity of their construction, is associated with the reduction of spurious motions of the mirrors. Observers also compare signals from both sites to reduce the effects of noise.

The observatories are so sensitive that they can detect a change in the length of their arms equivalent to ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton. This is equivalent to measuring the distance to Proxima Centauri with an error smaller than the width of a human hair.

Although the official description of LIGO talks about gravitational waves shortening and lengthening the arms of the interferometers by almost infinitesimal amounts, I think it might also be reasonable to describe what is going on as very slight changes in the speed of the photons being reflected back and forth 280 times in the 4 km long arms, as compared to the reference photons in the resonant cavities.

Some Comments on the Interpretation Commentators continually refer to gravitational waves as being “ripples in the fabric of spacetime”. There seems to be some deep-seated human desire to regard spacetime as being real and tangible, more or less like some sort of four dimensional fluid in in which the Universe is immersed. Computer based animations invariably depict empty space as some sort of rubberized sheet being dimpled by massive ball bearings and this promotes the same sort of mental images, attitudes and beliefs. Which is a pity.

It may be a lost cause but I point out once again that spacetime is a human construct for measuring, modeling and discussing what is going on in the Universe. It has no more reality that the Cartesian coordinate grid of latitude and longitude lines here on Earth.

It was not Einstein who promoted the idea that curved spacetime is an actual physical reality. This only happened after his death and was promoted by authors such as MTW and Stephen Hawking. For example, John Wheeler often made the comment that “mass/energy tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime curvature tells matter how to move”. The cover of MTW classic textbook shows a little ant wandering around on the surface of an apple and dutifully following its curvature.

I would say to John Wheeler that he has started to confuse mathematical models with reality and that the analogy with the ant is a false one. The ant can feel the curvature of the apple with its little feet. The surface and its curvature is real and tangible. But spacetime is a manmade imagination created for our own convenience. A better analogy is the lines of latitude and longitude we have invented for talking about movement on the surface of our home planet. These lines do not actually exist. They cannot be observed. They are not tangible. I would say to John Wheeler that spacetime does not tell matter how to move any more than the latitude and longitude grid on Earth tells ducks how to migrate.

Which is not to say that I think that spacetime does not correspond to something that it observable. In fact I do. But this is a heretical idea that I will explore in other essays.

I also agree that applying a spacetime metric to this “something” is a good idea. But spacetime is not that something, and that something is not spacetime. In other words, do not get a reference system invented by mankind for convenience of describing physics mentally confused with reality itself.

Another crime in my book is commentators who compare gravitational waves with electromagnetic waves. Unless such commentators can explain how two stars orbiting each other can produce quantized packets of energy and then how these packets can be reflected, polarized, refracted etc. I suggest that they refrain from such analogies. If they must use analogies I suggest that they try acoustic comparisons instead.

Note that Doppler effects are a familiar phenomenon in sound waves and they should also occur for other moving disturbances such as gravitational waves. But where gravitational waves are concerned the effects should not be called red-shifting. The Doppler effect is not called red-shifting when it applies to acoustic waves and I think it should not be called red-shifting for gravitational waves either. It is just a plain old Doppler effect.

Discussion I do not find it surprising that a pair of massive pair of stars rotating about each other might have tiny push-pull effects a long way away. I think this is what you would expect to find even with a basics inverse-square law based on classical physics. For example, if a large asteroid suddenly knocked the moon out of its orbit, I think it reasonable to expect that observers on Earth would notice changes in gravity very soon afterwards.

Nor am I surprised that gravitational disturbances travel at the speed of light. In fact I am surprised that this has not been measured experimentally years ago. For example, the passage of the Moon overhead produces a noticeable gravitational tidal effect on the surface of the Earth. Since the centre of the pattern of this disturbance coincides exactly with where the Moon appears to be then that is evidence for the gravitational effect to be arriving hand in hand with the visible light from the Moon.

I would be surprised if gravitational waves are ever found to consist of discrete quantized packets, analogous to photons. In my currently preferred conceptual model of the Universe, photons are disturbances in something that can be modelled by spacetime constructs, and gravitational waves are disturbances of that something itself.

This is more than a semantic difference. Consider a laser beam that is pointed at the sky and turned on and off again. This sends bunches of well-collimated photons off on a journey into deep space which, in principle, can continue travelling indefinitely. Barring absorption by dust or blocking by some solid barrier, the beam of photons stands a chance of being able to be detected on some distant galaxy at some time in the future. Not so a gravitational wave. The energy from a gravitational wave spreads outwards in all directions and becomes increasingly weak with distance from its source. I think there is almost no chance of being able to detect gravitational waves coming from binary star events and suchlike outside of their local galaxy. Colliding galaxies might be a different story.

Conclusion After initial doubts, Einstein eventually decided that gravitational waves were a necessary feature of his Theory of General Relativity. The recent detection of gravitational waves, apart from being a remarkable achievement, is further confirmation that General Relativity works well as a model. However I think it is not proof that General Relativity is the only viable and useful way of looking at physics in our Universe.

[mentalisttraceur-incomplete]

Applying my last post on main to the earlier post about differences between people in how someone feels safe or not:

You can use "I treat 'will this person respect me?' as the measure of safety" as the starting point to deduce the possible experience set that could have trained that: a history, perhaps, of people overriding your decisions, being controlling, or presuming to know better than you what you needed or wanted.

But crucially, you can go further and use the difference between that and someone who might instead measure safety by "does this person care about me?" to discern necessary or likely differences in those formative life experiences of those people.

For example, what's the functional difference between a motivational thing like "care" and an external behavioral thing like someone respecting your experience and preference self-reports?

There are many differences, but the reason why prediction tree analysis is so useful is that it points at the particularly salient differences:

what specifically is the difference in the raw experiences (/qualia) that might result from them? But much more crucially in this case:

in what situations/circumstances/conditions would they produce different results?

And from that question we can see a few possibilities.

The simplest is that some people learn that care is predictive of respect, and this gets deeply habitualized and sinks below the conscious reasoning level. Some people might never have the experiences where someone believably genuinely cares about them yet doesn't respect their boundaries or preferences.

A common variation is people who just don't seem to comprehend how failure to respect boundaries can happen despite genuine caring. In fact one only needs to sample popular discourse to see a lot of occurrences of the general but subtle pattern exhibited by some people of weirdly mentally gluing certain intentions and consequences together - a reasoning error generally shaped like looks like "you did [bad/hurtful thing], therefore you [intended it / had bad motivations]".

If you don't have the right experiences, you don't habitualize the right cognition to the point of automation. You can parse the words and you can sorta hold the concept in your head intellectually, but it doesn't actually connect to any intuitively real-feeling or even sensible cognition.

Also, while in principle everyone is always the best authority on their own mind, but in practice sometimes some people are worse at knowing themselves and enacting what's best for themselves than others close to them. Little children and drunk/drugged people come to mind as likely candidates.

So if someone has sufficiently influenctial experiences in their life that makes them sensitive to that distinction, that would give additional weight to evidence of care over evidence of respect for how safe someone feels.

Similarly and with some overlap, people who have particularly bad experiences as a result of their own preferences or decisions might feel safer with someone who will override their preferences or decisions. I think there is a minority of people in the world who just don't trust their own judgment and decision making to be as good as what they could get if they outsourced it - who have for just given up on being the best judge of what's best for them. Those people have no choice but to prioritize care or other factors instead of respect - their brain has learned to expect that it is possible for them to get better outcomes if someone they otherwise trust overrides their preferences.

Yet another alternative, again with some overlap: We can imagine a callous or abusive relationship where someone coldly and rigidly respects a person's self-reports or preferences, but does so with seemingly no effort to distinguish situations where it actually hurts the person. Someone like that might be very sensitive to the dangers of respect without caring.

Meanwhile, being hurt by controlling parties who purport to care would of course be an influence towards sensitivity to the dangers of caring without respect. And that sensitivity would make all of the above seem like dire cognetic openings.

Of course, most people keep maturing and refining their model with experience, so these different initial approaches tend to converge. The person who indexes on caring might find increasingly more nuanced enumerations, framings, definitoons, or logical consequences of caring which lead to respect of boundaries, preferences, self-reports, etc. I imagine the respect-oriented view maybe lends itself to a similar maturation? Perhaps "realizing" a definition of true caring in terms of respect? Or just treating caring as an important factor in whether or not someone will respect them.

And so I think as people get more mature, well-rounded, and soundly-thinking, you get more convergence on functional/logical equivalency, and it ends up being just a meaning relativity difference, or a difference in "angle of looking at it" or other mental reference frame difference than an actual practical difference in what indicates safety to them.

Of course once you have prediction tree analysis, that itself is good mind interferometry evidence for their history - how they got to their criteria for safety, what was most salient to them when finally settled on a wording.

Of course, the wording itself is not the telling part. For example, maybe you spend years feeling safe with people because they seem to care about you, and then one day after discovering the wonders of prediction tree analysis and applying it you realize that you actually deep down always cared about them respecting your self-determination. In that case, your earlier choice of wording would have only been evidence of how you learned to map your internalities to language earlier in life. And if I naively interpreted you as prioritizing caring just because you worded it that way, then my prediction tree analysis would have been off.

Which is yet another facet of just how useful prediction tree analysis is. It is the tool that lets us introspect and check all of these ideas we might have about what way we are. If we articulate ourselves as finding people safe based on whether or not they will respect our decisions or that they genuinely care about us or whatever the criteria is, but then to the best of our ability to do prediction tree analysis it just doesn't add up with what we know of our own experiences and history, then there is a good chance that we missed something or got something wrong somewhere in all of that.

[mentalisttraceur]

And this problem right here is what forced me to come up with my entire philosophy chain of:

experience axiom (yeah that's right you literally can't avoid this axiom, you can only misunderstand it enough to think you did)

empiric definition of logic (aha! no axioms to get/"justify" "logic"! go ahead... don't accept these zero (0) axioms)

mind interferometry (oh look we used "that which has predicted correctly so far", or as I call it, "logic", to break out of solipsism for all practical purposes)

??? (listen I haven't had time to flesh out the rest of this, I've got bills to pay and people to incompetently try to flirt with)

profit! (I win, I'm right, and there's literally nothing you can do about it with your axiom choices - get rekt)

Because it is just a teensy bit of a justification dilemma if you have to try to argue for ethics from axioms that other people have freedom of choice to just not accept. And I'm exactly the kind of person to look that problem in the face and say "no... it will not end like this... feeling smugly confident as I tell people that they are indefensibly wrong is too important."

the correct stance (ie mine) on this metaethics debate is that the categorical imperative, which is true for all rational beings in all universes, demands that you be a preference utilitarian, but what concrete demands that implies are dependent on contingent (biological, historical, whatever) facts about what agents’ preferences are and what actions will further them

ah so you’re the kind of agent that believes in an axiom and asserts that it holds even for agents who do not believe in that axiom.