BenRayfield
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mad-scientist and computer programmer looking for something more interesting than most people accept as their future
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    Oversimplify to complicate
    Project: The Total Library
    Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
    —Albert Einstein

    E usually does not equal M C^2. Thats only when its not moving.

    The USA government learned that terrorists keep more secrets and try to have more privacy than people who are not terrorists. Therefore secrets and privacy are bad, so the USA government proceeded to build expensive and complex infrastructure and thousands of pages of new laws so they can now spy on phone calls and lots of other kinds of communication, so they can control the problems: privacy and secrets.

    By oversimplifying the problem (privacy and secrets are bad), they created an extreme amount of complexity. They wanted a simple solution and got the opposite.

    Einstein had simpler ways of influencing lots of things. I'll explain with a simple logical process (which I wrote a small software to do for me):

    Start with the 1.3 million Wikipedia pages with the shortest names (excluding the longer named pages). Each page has X number of pages that link to it and Y number of pages that it links to, only counting links from/to the pages that have not been removed yet. Repeat the following 6 times: Remove all pages where X (links from other pages) is less than or equal to Y (links to other pages) or if X or Y is less than 5 links. Each time, theres around 5 times less pages. After repeating this possibly oversimplified logical process, there are only 16 Wikipedia pages remaining, including http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecule
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

    Repeat it the 7th time and it reduces to these 2:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I

    Pages with much larger numbers of links were removed, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States  was removed in step 6.

    Oversimplified? Or a correct and simplest way to find the core ideas that control our reality?

    Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
    —Albert Einstein

    Anyone can write a book, but a book is rarely as accurate as a paragraph.

    Tue, Aug 17, 2010  Permanent link

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    nagash     Tue, Aug 17, 2010  Permanent link
    trully fascinating!
    I find it so meaningful that you got UN (the world united) and WWI (the world at war) at the end of the line, tell me about binary patterns!!
    BenRayfield     Tue, Aug 17, 2010  Permanent link
    It makes sense why this would find the deep causes of everything (as well as people understand and write it on Wikipedia), because pages that get linked to more often are linked to more often because they're interesting or important but pages that link to more pages than link to them are dilluted. For example, if a page links to 100 other pages but only 3 pages link to it, we should ask why the 4th page did not link to it. Why should a subject that covers 100 other pages be so uninteresting/unimportant that only 3 other pages link to it? That part of the algorithm is simply to keep pages only when they are smaller (links from the page) than those who are interested in them (links to the page). The other part of the algorithm is to only keep pages that have at least 5 links in and out (counting only links from/to the pages not removed so far), and thats to make sure theres at least a little information in it and that its a little relevant to other pages.

    I only gave the links remaining after steps 6 and 7. Steps 1 - 7 and the code are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/humanainet  by clicking "view all files" and then the "Open Source Substitute For PageRank Algorithm" folder (PageRank being an algorithm Google was not smart enough to invent but instead bought for millions of dollars). This algorithm does something similar. Google is a good example of unnecessary complexity. They would do better to figure out why they could not invent PageRank or this algorithm and had to buy it from smarter people instead.

    The UN and World War 1 look like opposite forces if we ignore time and only consider the set of ideas on Wikipedia.

    Ordering the remaining pages in each step descending by number of links to them, United_States stays near the top the whole time, but probably because of the arrogant attitudes toward its own people and other countries and exponentially increasing complexity, you could think of USA being calculated as removed in step 6 as a warning for USA to stop its futile world domination strategies or be cancelled-out by the forces described on Wikipedia, or you could also (with good reason) not take it so literally since its a statistical algorithm and may be out of context in some ways, but I tend to think such warning from the algorithm is accurate. Simplify or be cancelled out. The UN knows what it stands for more than USA knows or admits what USA stands for. Theres probably still time to fix all these problems, theoretically if people knew they existed.

    Since World War 1 was many years ago, we shouldn't take step 7 as something about the present or future, but instead about a choice that was made long ago and continues to affect things.

    If people would learn how I calculated these things from Wikipedia, they could play countries like a chess game instead of letting countries play us as pawns. Somebody has to do it. Random moves are not working.
    meika     Sat, Sep 18, 2010  Permanent link
    Goodness. Wikipedia as a Tarot deck.
    BenRayfield     Mon, Oct 4, 2010  Permanent link
    The simple math I wrote above (to use the patterns of links between Wikipedia pages to predict things) is a logical system that thinks in terms of cause and effect.

    A tarot deck (and other systems of using randomized inputs to get specific information that has no obvious connection to the randomized inputs) works because of statistical clustering of all possible permutations and variations of quantum wavefunctions (cross-section of the multiverse). Its the same reason why its possible to be in only 1 place at a time. The assumption that you can be in only 1 place at a time is built into our DNA to make our brains think that way, but after thinking about it for long enough, I find the idea very nonintuitive. It makes no sense to me why you should be in only 1 place at a time. Being blurred between an infinite number of possibilities, like in quantum superposition, at all times, makes much more sense. Such blurred views of reality are called quantum wavefunctions, and what we call reality is the statistical clustering of them (which can be written as 1 wavefunction combined or many).

    Both (Wikipedia math and tarot cards) use statistical clustering but for clustering different things. I'm clustering the cause and effect chains between written ideas on Wikipedia.
    meika     Tue, Oct 5, 2010  Permanent link
    Goodo,

    But every entry on spacecollective looks like a card.

    BenRayfield     Thu, Oct 7, 2010  Permanent link
    There's a fine line between insanity and insanity.
     
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