Another reason for Ph.Ds on food stamps

(This is a somewhat-addendum to the first subchapter of a middle volume of the History of Assholes compendium)

Whenever I look for work, I find that I'm qualified for a ton of different jobs and that nearly all of them are sketchy as hell. I can anonymously kill people in drone design! I can find new and creative ways to screw people over in quantitative finance! I can stalk people in large numbers and sell their information to drone designers and financiers in behavioral prediction!

As an example, Brain Corporation (and yes, this is a real company) has jobs I actually want. Models of the visual and motor systems? Fuck yeah! Maybe we can build some useful stuff! Inevitably, though, some line like this shows up in the news page

Brain Corporation receives DARPA funding to design an artificial nervous system for UAVs

and I have to wonder whether I misread some fine print and spent 6 years in evil graduate school instead of regular graduate school.

History of Assholes Part I: Social actualization theory

The Social Actualization Program, run by the recently rebranded Department of Nonviolence (internal motto: "We have so many fucking guns that even our pens are actually guns. Give me your wallet."), was initially conceived when top brass began to suspect the practical limitations of the department's precision "heaven lottery" systems. In particular, the smoldering remains of recently liberated neighborhood children had been found to negatively affect levels of cooperation among the local flesh and mineral resources.

Charged with facilitating fair trade between highly respected corporate citizens and empowered local families (a common exchange involved the wholesale purchase of the family, which the company would then manage in exchange for mining rights), the SAP was envisioned as a more "organic" or "epidemiological" alternative to dropping enormous-ass bombs. The program would take a network engineering approach based on new developments in the theory of actualization, funded by the department's bloated research arm.

The program's initial failures were possibly as noteworthy as its eventual successes. The presciently named Project Trail of Tears of Joy, for instance, was designed to evoke zero-resistance population movement over hundreds of miles from repurposed (razed, colloquially) villages to more comfortable homes in sweatshops. The protocol involved carefully chosen "actualizing signals" communicated by agents in the social periphery; calculations had anticipated that these signals would align the population into a highly-directed, coherent and competitive wave of human capital. Instead, an orgiastic fusion reaction consumed the entire adult population of the town as well as several of the researchers. To make matters worse, the site was generating a cloud of unspeakable filth, and as the reaction proceeded through its third fortnight it had become clear that the local geography would be contaminated with smut and uninhabitable to decent people for generations. The project was shelved, the tragedy ultimately being blamed on a miscalculation involving "a factor of minus-two." Other endeavors such as Project Social Network Cannon were similarly ill-fated.

Despite the rocky start, investments in SAP were eventually borne out to resounding success. Where "suggestive coherence" had failed to produce anything marketable aside from priapism, an exploratory investigation in straight-up lying was generating intriguing and paradoxical results. When actualizing agents just made shit up with periodic regularity, remarkably robust interference patterns emerged capable of demolishing entire continents. At the same time, properly gauged incoherence turned out to be a nearly thermodynamically optimal means of converting excess time into undirected bullshit energy. This process was later directly harnessed into electricity by publicly-funded researchers and sold for a pittance to then-foundering network news agencies, who, to quote one scientist, "had been using this shit for decades without even knowing it."

I'm coming to grips with the fact that I'm using what's known as "control theory" in my work. As applied to living things, the term actually kinda makes me want to throw up. It's an oddly refreshing feeling, though, to be confronted with a word that doesn't hide its potential destructive power in an age where morality has basically been euphemized out of existence.

A great scientist can set a field back 15 years

And a great method can set it back 20.

See also my recently published fmrenology paper: "Why the fuck am I even in science? Neural correlates of evoked existential crises during the reading of bogus fMRI papers in top-tier journals"

Anyway, what better way to start a bitter grad student blog than a study that basically shows that 90% of the conclusions (and 99% of the implications) drawn from an entire line of research are wrong?

Title paraphrased from Ennio Mingolla.