Pope Leo: Ignorant of Economics

Pope Leo XIV

@Pontifex

·

Jun 22

It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security.

Catholic bishops are supposed to care about the poor deeply, but none of them bother to study economics. This is as absurd as saying you care deeply about the sick, but you refuse to study medicine, anatomy, pharmacology.

Condemning commodification is identical to condemning doctors for performing triage. After all,  triage disfavors some of the sick in favor of others who are less sick, and all because doctors recognize they don't have enough supplies to treat everyone!

For shame!

By using triage, doctors commodify medicine!

The condemnation is stupid. It is true that the wealthy have a duty to the poor, but it is also true that no one person nor any group has enough resources to solve everyone's problems.

Thus, some method must be found of apportioning resources to need. The most efficient method we know to correctly apportion resources to needs is precisely commodification.

Just as we need to define terms before we have a conversation, so prices are part of the definition of  how resources should be apportioned to needs, otherwise we cannot commune properly with each other. Price is a form of communication and definition, it is as absolutely critical to resource allocation as correct term definition and grammar is to language.

Literacy is Necromancy

 The Bible warns against necromancy. Necromancy is conjuring spirits of the dead, in order to gain hidden knowledge or foretell the future.

In nearly every book, the dead communicate with us.

When those books, written by the dead, describe mathematical formulas, especially statistical or other advanced maths, those formulas give us hidden knowledge which allow us to foretell the future. 

We predict the future (weather, baseball scores, etc.) by using formulas communicated to us by the dead via books.

Explain how reading books, especially science or math books, is not necromancy. 

Transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that advocates for the use of advanced technologies to fundamentally enhance human physical and cognitive capabilities, eliminate disease, and significantly extend human life spans. Reading and writing are both technologies invented by men, they are advanced technologies compared to anything any other creature uses.

Explain how reading is not transhumanism.

A lot of the things Christians or the Bible says is evil are things the Bible or Christians do every day.

Some Cultures Are Simply Better

 This chart makes it clear that different cultures have fundamentally different ways of resolving problems.

Some cultures are pure shit. White, Asian, European cultures are simply better than tribal cultures. People have to decide how they want to live.

Everybody had the same 500 years. Japan went from society that literally used just swords, bows, and arrows in 1850 to building the finest fighter plane in the Pacific theater and start development on their own nuclear weapon in less than 90 years.

China went from being totally owned and oppressed by European powers during the 1830s Opium Wars to totally owning Europe and Canada today. It took less than two centuries.

Everybody had the same 500 years.

Not everyone made the same choices on how to use the time.

How Far Does Sub-Creation Go?

 Christians used to argue that babies conceived via IVF were not human and did not have souls.

When the Pope said they were wrong, the children WERE fully human, a lot of people felt this was some kind of tech delusion.

Either:

1. the human soul is actually just physics or
2. God creates and infuses a human soul.

If the former, then we can build an AI that has a living soul. Not necessarily a person, but certainly alive. 

If the something is alive because God creates and infuses a soul, then either God creates and infuses living souls into only carbon-based life forms (grass, trees, rabbits, people) or He infuses it into anything He wants.

Notice, human persons are persons because their souls are spirits (immortal). Everything else, according to Christian doctrine, has a living soul, but is not a person because those souls are not spirits.

If God is the one behind all this, then we don't know to what extent men can participate in creation.

We DO know that when you fully simulate a fruit fly's brain, with all neuronal connections in a simulation, the simulated fly ACTS like a fruit fly without any training at all. That is, we CAN create an artificial life at least as complex as a fruit fly. It has already been done. Artificial bacteria with fully artificial DNA have also been created.

So... that's food for thought.

The Magisterium has Jumped the Shark

Magnifica Humanitas demonstrates the terminal incoherence of the Magisterium as expressed by Pope Leo XIV

101. The gains in efficiency and the potential to improve certain services are clear, yet rapidly and uncritically adopting them exposes us to a range of risks, including the tendency to overlook the environmental impact.

It is amazing that this encyclical manages to contradict itself within the space, not of a single article, but of a single SENTENCE. The Pope apparently doesn't understand that EFFICIENCY PRESERVES the environment and reduces environmental impact. That's the whole point of efficiency, son. The more efficient a process is, the less resources it needs to dig out of the environment, the less it needs to manipulate the environment, in order to accomplish the task. He even says this in article 67, but he never connects the dots between the articles. 

67. Furthermore, care for our common home and our responsibility toward the poor and future generations require that the use of the goods of creation and the new possibilities offered by technology be regulated in such a way as to respect the environment, avoid waste and prevent new forms of exploitation.

But then, he makes EXACTLY the same mistake in regards to profits and economics in general. In article 30, he extols Rerum Novarum (a Johnny-Come-Lately encyclical if ever there was one), in part, by saying:

30. Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum constitutes a milestone in the development of the Church’s social teaching. The document places the dignity of work and of workers at the forefront of its reflection; affirms the right to a fair wage for oneself and one’s family; recognizes that persons have a fundamental value that takes precedence over capital and profit;

But he is apparently completely unaware that profit is exactly what happens when a massive number of people express their personal preference for a particular good or service. Profit happens when you allow persons to express their fundamental value by giving them the opportunity to obtain the things they fundamentally value for their own existence. Businesses make profits when their services are valued by massive numbers of people.

72. When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good

Massive profits happen precisely because a massive number of people vote, with their dollars, on which processes they want. By definition, the processes that are controlled only by a handful of actors don't make a profit. The customer has to agree that the process is useful enough to buy, thereby making the entire global community (to whom this process is available) jointly responsible for the common good. 

Dollar spending *IS* communication. People communicate their preferences by voting with their wallet. If you attack profits, you attack one of the major, foundational communication lines people have with each other. 

So, he tells us to treasure communications while he actively attacks the communications (profits) we use, in part, to allocate resources. He tells us to care for the environment and its resources, but for God's sake don't prize efficiency. He reacts towards AI the same way the Holy Office reacted to the printing press. 

It's a fucking stupid encyclical, filled with theological cant, endlessly repeated bromides, in which every article contradicts every other article. 

The Church may one day have something useful to say about AI.
I look forward to that future day. 

Math and Poetry

Every specialty has its own language. There is no question this is true. But math is uniquely able to destroy people's confidence and self-image if it isn't handled well. 

This particular language is spoken by every inanimate object in the universe. The point of magic, of necromancy, of astrology, of all that nonsense, is to speak directly with the universe and/or "the spirits" that are said to dominate it.

Mathematics does what all those others things try to do, but can't. Math allows you to communicate with stones, trees, stars, with EVERYTHING. 

Math is the Ur-language.

When people can't do math, they lose the ability to converse with the universe. And they inchoately know that they have not got the ability. It is humiliating in a way that not knowing other sub-languages can never be.

Now, some people object to learning math via online tools like Khan Academy, but the tool itself is not the problem. The tool has to be used as a teacher, but the student must practice the concepts taught themselves, or all the videos in the world are a waste of time. Math problems must be done on paper with pencil. Writing with pencils and paper is the single most important way of building memories and connections. 

That's why all math needs to be done in a math notebook. The computer screen CAN be instructional, when used correctly, but math is done between the brain, the pencil and the paper. 

Reading physical books is geometric - each physical page maps to a physical memory in a way that screen reading cannot emulate. Our house is filled with books, my adult kids still routinely read 500 to 1000 page books on the regular.

But, if you need to teach a subject you don't know, a screen can have a place. Listening to a Feynman lecture cannot be done without appealing to electronics. That's just how it is. 

As Chesterton said, we have to commune with the great civilization of the dead. The dead can commune with us through books, and now also through screens. Screens have their uses.

Only Elon Musk Believes in Evolution

 Everyone says evolution is real, but no one acts as if it were.

If intelligence is a positive product of evolution, then smarter people would reproduce more. But they don't. Someone who was a) smart, b) REALLY believed in evolution and c) believed themselves to be genetically better than average would d) want to reproduce. Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" revolves around this idea. The entire premise of evolution is that genes well-adapted to an environment proliferate. But, across the globe, TFR is dropping. It drops fastest in areas with high IQ. Public, vociferous proponents of evolution don't have children themselves. So, proponents of evolution are either a) stupid, b) secretly believe themselves to be dysgenic or c) secretly don't actually believe in evolution. Most people who claim to believe in evolution really don't. That's the charitable explanation. The uncharitable explanation is that people without children are stupid, and we're watching the world descend into a maelstrom of stupidity as TFR drops. That is, in the movie Idiocracy, the stupidest people were the "smart" couple that never had kids. Now, there is a third explanation. The underlying assumption to the previous analysis is, of course, that our thoughts are of any importance. But, if our ability to think does not matter at all (from an evolutionary standpoint), then the lack of reproduction is not based on anyone's beliefs. In fact, what any person believes/thinks is simply a distraction from what is really important to reproduction and evolution. If this is true, then IQ is not currently a positive contribution to gene survival.