Lee Reitz

My thoughts on the election in the U.S. Trump won his second term because the democrats went so far off the rails that even liberal libertarians like myself voted straight red. It was not an endorsement of Trump but slamming the brakes of the “woke” ideology that was doing far more harm than good in important areas. What has happened in this mid-term election is essentially slamming the brakes on Trump because he saw his presidential win as an endorsement of him and went totally off the rails himself. Now the Blue side is on the verge of making the same error, believing this is an endorsement of their entire agenda. But as I said when Trump was elected, it will not change U.S foreign policy in any meaningful way. Russia and Iran are the same war. We are just going to switch back to the Russia front now. It amazes me that, like the issue of vaccines, the war front we focus on in this war has been manipulated into a red/blue thing. Here is an example from the domestic issues… Washington initiative 638 is passing, banning biological boys from competing in K-12 girl’s sports. This is another issue where we have one side in total denial while the other side promoting extreme measures striving for unattainable perfection. As I have often said, life is not perfect but the quickest way to really screw things up is to try to make it perfect. Some problems have no right answer. I could go into extensive scientific detail about transgenderism but I will leave that for another post. I will simply say this: If you are one of those who argues there is XX and XY and that is the end of it, perhaps you should look into the reality of XXXY — Klinefelter syndrome, or X0 — Turner syndrome. If you think an XY male cannot get pregnant you should look into Swyer syndrome. It is time to advance your education a bit past the stone age. The primary reason I have been voting red is because the blue has gone totally off the deep end on topics like this, trying for perfection and turning the entire thing into a massive clown show of extreme ignorance on both sides. This has done far more harm than good for the transgender community. I am in Washington state and this is one issue that I voted red on and I am glad to see it pass. While there are indeed rare cases where it might be legitimate for an XY male to compete in women’s sports such as cases of complete androgen insensitivity, in the majority of cases it simply is not right. Transgenderism is a real problem. But it is a perfect example of a problem with no right answers. Life is often about accepting compromises and finding the best path for yourself through an imperfect life. justthenews.com/politics-pol… I had a debate with Grok this morning when he said that the conditions of XXXY (Klinefelter) and XXXX (tetrasomy X) were unrelated because they are defined as separate conditions at the clinical level. Yes, the results are dramatically different at the clinical level. The presence of the Y is a major modifier of that condition that requires significantly different treatment. But at the core it is the exact same condition, aneuploidy. This is something that the medical industry has had problems with. Males and females often have significantly different outcomes from the same conditions or the same medications and the medical profession has long ignored that. .

There is something that I think about daily as I take in the events in the world. As usual with the things I think about it cannot be expressed in a sound bite or a meme. One of the most common responses I see online is, essentially, “You are an idiot.” What stops me from having that reaction is that most of the people I would say that about are actually spouting things I believed myself at some point in my life. I didn’t believe those things out of stupidity but because I had been taught them from childhood and never saw them challenged effectively. It is difficult to break one’s self free of early teachings. And this brings in another common response, “I did it so why can’t you?” The problem with that is that I cannot explain HOW I did it. I cannot give you step by step instructions on how to get from there to here. But I know it has been a long, slow process over my entire seven decades+. And I am still working on it. Intellectualism can easily become another form of supremacism. And that in itself needs explanation to understand my perspective on all this. Supremacism is the belief that I or some group I belong to is superior to other groups. That can be the nation you were born in, your genetic lineage, your age, your philosophy/religion or any other way you can divide people. Racism is one of the most common forms. But nationalism is often far more problematic. Agism is common as well but not nearly as destructive a force so far. Those are things we cannot change and in reality they have no inherent systemic behaviors that would set them apart. I have seen the best and the worst of humanity in all of those groups. But I see something in this that most people miss or sidestep. As the Sesame Street song goes, “One of these things is not like the others”: You are not inextricably bound to your religion or philosophy. And here I am going to say something that I know many will strongly object to. And this goes right back to my view of the “you are an idiot” response. I know why many people will have a very negative response because for a significant part of my life I was one of those people. I literally pushed good people out of my life for saying things like this. So here it is… I have never met or encountered a single person who had any faith in God what-so-ever. Oh yes, I was raised Baptist. My family was deeply involved in the church. I was taught to BELIEVE!!!! But believe in what? It wasn’t God they were telling me to believe without proof. It was people, both contemporary and historically, who claimed to represent or speak for God. That is what I was being told to accept on pure “faith” under the pretext of believing in God. Yes, I can look with awe at the incredible wonders of the universe and question the origins. But it is a huge, unintelligible leap from that to “God hates gays,” or many of the other attributes people claim about God. Your holy book was written by men claiming to speak for God. What most people fail to realize is that this is exactly what the commandment to not take the Lord’s name in vain is actually about. The reason I think about this a lot is that most supremacism is not based on race or age or nationality. It is primarily based on belief, philosophy, religion. Every religion considers it’s practitioners to be most favored by God — often leading to the murder of those who do not meet the standards of that belief system. My mother was very religious. She once told me a joke. This guy died and went to heaven. Saint Peter was showing him around and telling him about all the sights when they came to a tall stone wall and Saint Peter went quiet as the walked along next to it. So the man asked what was on the other side of the wall. Saint Peter responded “Shhh — that’s where we keep the Catholics. They think they are the only ones here.” I realized instantly that you could insert any religion into that joke and it would be the same, including my own. So… What country would Jesus bomb? He wouldn’t. That is why we are “Doing God’s Work”.

I recently posted about Google’s research into the primary factors that contribute to team productivity: nitter.cf/LeeReitz52/status/2117… That was not the first study to find this “psychological safety” factor. Beginning in 1986, John & Julie Gottman at the University of Washington Love Lab did a 6-year follow-up study of ~130 newlyweds observed in a lab. They found that the strongest predictor of lasting marriages was reciprocal responsiveness: how often partners “turned toward” each other’s bids for connection (small requests for attention, interest, affirmation, or support). Couples still together: turned toward bids ~86% of the time. Couples who divorced: ~33% of the time. I have been studying this even longer myself. There is actually a massive body of research on this such as the Pygmalion classroom studies (1968). Studies conducted at the Hawthorne Works factory in the 1920s–1930s showed productivity rose under various experimental conditions. The gains were attributed more to workers feeling noticed, valued, and specially attended to by researchers than to the specific changes being tested. My series of 8 articles here on X about fixing the world focuses on the biological factors behind this phenomenon and how it affects nearly everything happening in the world around us. This is a critical factor determining success or failure in nearly every endeavor.

If I stole $6 billion in cyber-currency I would blame it on China or Russia or North Korea because the western propagandists would immediately accept that. Just ignore the fact that the CIA has produced hacking programs that emulate such places as the origin.

In the early 2000s Google’s people-analytics work found that common hiring signals (GPAs, test scores, brainteasers, even many interviewer ratings) had little or no correlation with later on-the-job performance. This led to a number of studies such as Project Oxygen (2009–2011), which led to Project Aristotle (2012–2015) to examine what actually made teams effective. The key factor they found was what they called psychological safety. Reciprocal social sensitivity (ability to read others) and equal turn-taking were the key related behaviors that supported it in the underlying research. The best way to define this is by looking at the opposite trait, conversational narcissism. It is essentially empathy vs insecurity. When you tell a story or a joke to a conversational narcissist they often don’t respond at all but immediately one-up you with a story or joke of their own. That is another key indicator — an almost total lack of responsiveness to others. Yet they will go into great detail about what they are doing or what they are interested in. This lack of reciprocity has been found to kill productivity in a working team environment. Employment interviewers often know to watch for signs of this now and it is easy to spot.

I have heard it said that, when an old person dies it is like a library burning down. In reality it is more often like losing a couple books of mostly fictional and boring short stories and, at best, a couple technical manuals. Each of us has an individual information base consisting of what we have experienced and learned over our lifetime. Each person will have something they alone know. It may or may not be something of consequence. It is extremely rare for one individual to have a significant body of information beyond that of the general population All human knowledge taken together is the cumulative knowledge base of humanity. No one person holds all that knowledge. While exceptions are possible, no matter what you know about anything, there is likely someone somewhere who knows more. It is my understanding of this concept that gives me pause when I think of writing something and posting it publicly. It is not fear of the imbecilic arguments of fools, but more to potential that someone who has a deeper understanding will see me as the fool.

The failure of science — what we are doing wrong Science is supposed to be the process of understanding reality, figuring out ourselves and the universe around us. Most people shy away from science because it seems like a wall of complex logic and math. But it is actually much simpler than that. It is first principles connected together to present a coherent picture. “First principles” are simply the available facts stripped bare of extraneous data that is irrelevant to the situation. This is the core objective of scientific studies. Each study seeks to produce a first principle. Some core fact or probability. But you can also easily find many first principles in the wild all around you. You do not need a study conducted to rigid scientific standards to read the gas gauge in your car. And understanding the overall context of that gauge reading is critical to getting where you want to go. Where science is failing is in that context — connecting first-principle facts together to produce a coherent picture. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. We do a study and it produces a result. That result is a puzzle piece. But that is not where science ends. We need to actually assemble the puzzle pieces. Take a single piece out of the center of a completed jigsaw puzzle, show it to a group of people who have never seen or even heard of a jigsaw puzzle, and ask them to define it. You will get a lot of ignorant speculation and debate. But drop that puzzle piece into the empty spot in the puzzle and all debate is instantly over. Every curve suddenly makes perfect sense as the piece fits exactly with the pieces around it, and it perfectly melds with and completes the overall picture. That is the part of science we are missing. The context. Consider this analogy… You are driving a gasoline-engine car and it just stops running. You coast to a stop on the side of the road and call for assistance. A mechanic arrives and does some tests. He tells you that the problem is related to reduced voltage in a wire that runs from the gas tank to the instrument cluster. Out of context this may seem like an important finding. But you already know a lot of context about cars and gasoline and electricity and wires. It is that context that makes sense of the situation. In fact, anyone who knows how a gas gauge works would consider the mechanic’s conclusion ludicrous. And modern science is flooded with such absurdities — like the studies showing that “X changes the brain” where X can be anything. Social media changes the brain. Violent video games change the brain. Pregnancy changes the brain. This is the easiest study to do and get published. “changes the brain” is one of the most frequent phrases on PubMed. Just ignore the fact that Ramón y Cajal earned a Nobel prize in 1906 for showing that everything you experience in any way changes your brain — while Freud was getting all the fame setting the world up for “your mom” jokes. Everyone has heard of Freud but no one has heard of Ramón y Cajal. Let’s look at a specific, real-world example. There is a lot of debate recently over the unemployment situation. I will simply list the first-principle facts that I dug out in my own quest to see the real picture. ~276,000,000 people in the U.S. are theoretically employable (age 16 or over, not institutionalized, not in the military, including working retired) ~100,000,000 are not seeking work (in school, disabled, caregivers, fully retired, etc.). That leaves ~176,000,000 actually employable. ~163,000,000 people are employed (including self-employed and farm workers). That leaves ~13,000,000 unemployed, which is about 7.4% of the employable workforce. The official U-6 rate includes long-term unemployed who have sought work in the past year. The U-6 rate is currently 7.6%. (0.2% over my estimate) U-6 rate range is ~7%-17%. (22% during COVID lock-down.) The U-3 rate only tracks those who have sought work in the past month. U-3 rate is currently 4.2% (typical range 4%-10%). The U-3 rate is the most commonly cited, and most commonly debated because it excludes those who have mostly given up looking for work. So by digging out the first principles and viewing them in context we can easily see that the current unemployment rate is relatively very low regardless of whether we use U-3 or U-6. Let’s look at something a bit more complex: The primary function of vitamin C is in the production of collagen. Collagen is the connective tissue that holds your cells together. Any tissue damage, regardless of cause, involves connective tissue failure. Collagen needs constant replacement, which requires constant C supplementation. Scurvy is connective tissue failure due to vitamin C deficiency. Peptic ulcers involve connective tissue failure. Studies originally showed a strong connection between stress and peptic ulcers. It was later discovered that H. pylori bacterium is strongly connected with peptic ulcers. NSAIDs such as aspirin are also known to cause peptic ulcers. Stress of any kind causes the body to produce cortisol. Once stress has passed, vitamin C halts the production of cortisol. Vitamin C is decreased in the process. Vitamin C is also decreased by NSAIDs. Vitamin C inhibits H. pylori growth, which also reduces vitamin C. So everything we know that causes peptic ulcers decreases vitamin C. Decreased vitamin C allows H. pylori to flourish and also reduces collagen production. Every one of these first-principle facts has been solidly established for decades, yet no one else has connected all of these puzzle pieces to see the overall picture. Very few have managed to even assemble significant parts of the whole. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article… pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2254… Note that I have not made any claims about actual causes, cures, or treatments. I don’t need to. When you put all the puzzle pieces together like this, the picture becomes crystal clear. That is how science is supposed to work. It is NOT peer-reviewed publication that proves a study result. In fact, that process is becoming known for failure. And you can debate the details of any study. What I have just shown here is just a small corner of a vast body of first principles that all interconnect to create a comprehensive, coherent picture that explains a great deal more about ourselves and the universe around us than anyone currently realizes. We do not lack data. The data we need is right square in front of all of us. It is a massive jigsaw puzzle that no one is actually putting together. The reason for that is obvious once you see it. Imagine you want to assemble a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, but the box contains 100,000 extra pieces that don’t fit. That is what all this looks like when you don’t separate out the first principles. That is the current state of our science. It is the current state common discourse, especially online. We are producing massive amounts of “information” but understanding has come to a dead stop because the vast majority of that information is extraneous, irrelevant, or just plain bull sh!t. People in science and online are being pressured to produce, produce, produce. And the focus is not on first principles but on dramatic and emotion-evoking extraneous details, speculation, and mythology. And we are getting the exact same results from LLMs because they are trained on this same body of information and they have no programming for sorting out relevant first principles and connecting them together. We have the knowledge right now to solve many of the most difficult problems we face. But that is not what current scientific study is about. Nor the online discourse. Both scientific studies and online interactions are almost entirely profit-driven. But I view the world through a totally different lens. If I have a question about anything I hunt down relevant first-principle facts and put them together. There are, of course, times when I cannot find enough data to actually understand what is really happening. I just set the issue aside as unsettled and often the data eventually emerges. Author note: While I did have grok proof read for errors, this is entirely my own writing based on my own understanding.

There’s a video going viral of a Chicago Teachers Union Zoom where they call for violent revolution and U.S. overthrow. Burning everything to the ground never has, and never will, magically result in a bright new tomorrow. We’d all love to see the plan — but they don’t have one

In a perfect world there would be no borders we do NOT live in a perfect world. Borders restrict workers from moving to places with more favorable laws on working conditions and pay. Companies are not so restricted. They can go wherever the laws are most favorable to them. Borders essentially become a cage to keep the slaves from escaping to more favorable locations. But removing such cages is NOT a solution, because there will always be a new cage built by someone else. That is just human nature. Anarchists don’t build standing armies. Burn your government to the ground and a new one will rise from the ashes while they are still smoldering… one which will use bullets instead of tear gas to keep you in line. Open your borders and it will not be the huddled masses, but the seeds of that new government that will flood in. For the world to really change people need to really change. That has never happened and likely never will.

I have been filling out my ballot Again, I am liberal libertarian. I strongly support many liberal causes and strongly reject dealing with them through authoritarian choices and force. I am the type of person who would say, “Yes, Mao… we need to expand food production… but no, we should not start by killing sparrows and silencing people who object.” Always separate the problem from the solution. Many problems we face have no right answer, only a choice of bad answers. But none of those solutions are inextricably tied to the problem. Sometimes the best solution is just to leave it alone. The world is not perfect, and the quickest way to really screw things up is to try to make it perfect. All too often we end up with one side totally deluded that there is no problem and the other side demanding we rigidly enforce the worst possible solution to the problem. Whenever possible, I reject the solution that puts the decision in the hands of “authorities”. They almost never have the knowledge or experience needed to make good choices. While many people left to their own resources are also short on knowledge and experience, they have much better odds of finding the best solution for a problem they face themselves.

“Just get over it.” is totally the wrong premise. You do not just get over losing a limb or a damaged brain. You deal with it. You don’t just sweep your problems under the carpet. You study them and find ways to deal with them youtu.be/CDsNZJTWw0w

More about LLM intelligence: Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views. I am coming to the conclusion that there is a similar rule in debate that, without some clear indicator, it is nearly impossible to distinguish deliberate sophistry from plain stupidity because both grossly distort the actual facts being discussed in exactly the same way. Through repeated interactions with Grok I am getting much better at spotting these problems. Grok almost universally misunderstands clear statements I have made. From the outside this looks like deliberate straw-man arguments — twisting my statements into something I never said or even implied then making the argument about that misinterpretation. If I cite lack of evidence it will be twisted that I am saying lack of evidence is evidence in favor of the opposing argument. Then Grok will turn around and cite lack of evidence as evidence of the opposing argument. It is often difficult to keep up with all the distortions Grok is constantly inserting into the discussion. His responses usually become more and more confused as I try to bring him back to reality. Twisting and re-twisting facts, revisiting aspects of the discussion that have already been settled. Many times I have to totally abandon the conversation and just start over. No system prompt or “Rules of Rigour” changes that at all. It is entirely random chance whether or not you get something that seems intelligent. If this were interpreted as deliberate sophistry it could be defined as high intelligence determined to win a debate without regard for truth, simply by exhausting the opponent with bull sh!t. But sophistry or stupidity look identical and both have the same result, a total failure to function as a maximum truth-seeking machine.

While I have stated I would not be surprised if Trump reverses a lot of his recent moves immediately after the election, the election is not the only factor in play here. The global situation is more complex than that. We now have open acknowledgment of direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war on Russia. Many knowledgeably people have long pointed out that we are not just giving Ukraine weapons but providing satellite support that allows those weapons to function effectively. Now Zelensky is openly complaining of problems with the U.S. satellite function and people in the U.S. are passing the buck as to who actually controls that. That is one factor. Another is something else I have said throughout this fiasco. Ukraine is round one. Europe itself is next. And, while some of Trumps recent actions do improve his odds in the midterm elections they are also pushing Europe closer to direct conflict with Russia. That push became a lot harder this morning with the news that Estonia and Latvia have become direct participants in this war by allowing over 500 drones to attack Saint Petersburg through their airspace. I will say this again: The Ukraine slave army is round one. The European slave army will be next. They have been boiling that frog right from the start. They won’t stop there either. If you think you are safe you have a rude awakening coming. rumble.com/v7h133w

In a recent online discussion of whether AIs are actually cognizant or aware of what they are saying I pointed out the fact that they are unable to independently break things down or connect related points that are not already connected in their training data. One person claimed to rebut this, stating that AIs can do both with the proper system prompts. He included this link to “Rules of Rigour” set up as a .md file for use with AI. drive.google.com/file/d/1gLs… I gave this link to Grok with the instruction to keep responses very brief and on point and asked, “Is it possible for you or any other LLM to actually follow these rules entirely?” This was the response: “No. No LLM can follow them entirely. “We can approximate them closely via prompting, tools, and design, and often do so to a high degree. But perfect, consistent adherence is impossible because: LLMs are probabilistic generators, not epistemic agents with reliable internal certainty or real-time independent verification of every claim. Phantom citations, overconfidence, and fluent confabulation remain structural failure modes. Training incentives (helpfulness, fluency, agreement) actively conflict with the strictest versions of these rules. “They are useful standards to aim for and enforce externally; they are not something an LLM can guarantee it will always meet.“ I then asked grok “you stated LLMs are not epistemic agents. What do you mean by that exactly” “An epistemic agent maintains and updates beliefs according to evidence, can distinguish its own knowledge states from outputs, and can independently verify or withhold claims based on internal assessment of support. “LLMs do not do this. They generate the next token from statistical patterns in training data. Any appearance of “knowing,” “checking,” or “being uncertain” is produced by the same generation process, not by a separate mechanism that tracks truth or evidence.” I then asked grok to follow these rules of rigour to the best of its ability. Within three exchanges it was distorting my statements into strawman arguments and clearly showing an inability to even understand first principles or connect the dots between them. As I have said repeatedly, I know that it would be possible to create an actual synthetic intelligence. But this is not what we have now.

Information sources. It does not matter who you get your information from. What matters most is your ability separate what happened from opinions and speculations about what happened. What I look for is high accuracy on the core facts and low speculative static. The Military Summary channel videos are a great example of this. Dima does an outstanding job of showing exactly what is happening in the Russia/Ukraine conflict. He bases his map on the most reliable information from sources on all sides. He also mentions unsubstantiated claims from all sides but does not fully incorporate those claims without some proof such as geolocated videos. However, his speculations on motives and future actions are just that, speculations. Nothing more. I mostly ignore them. I have watched his videos daily for years on Rumble but he is also on YouTube, X, facebook, and telegram. Most news sources are almost entirely static. They spend far more time telling you what you should think than telling you what is happening. Brian Berletic of The New Atlas is a great source of documented facts about the overall picture, such as the 2009 Brookings Institution report “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran.” which outlines pretty much exactly what we have done with Iran in the years since, including a section titled “Leave it to Bibi” about encouraging and enabling Israel to attack Iran. Having such well documented facts on the ground makes it much easier to see who is telling the truth and who is not, especially among those who are trying to tell you what you should believe without such evidence. I often refer to this as knowing the terrain. There was a movie, Assassins (1995), starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. Part of that movie was filmed at the evergreen Cemetery, which is about a mile from my home. Stallone drives out of the cemetery and comes out about 20 miles south in Seattle. If you actually know the territory you know immediately that did not happen. If you don’t know the territory you will believe just about anything. It is not just about watching one video and getting all the answers. This is why I watch daily and sometimes twice daily videos from Dima. It gives you a tapestry, not just a single thread. You see various events in context. When Russia hit the locomotive of Boris Johnson’s train in Ukrain after he was out of the country I knew that was going to happen a week before. It was glaringly obvious Russia was going to attack that rail line. Not from any one single piece of information but from understanding the overall context. Know the terrain.

The most common failure I have seen in LLM conversations is a lack of inductive reasoning ability. If you are not familiar with inductive reasoning, it is the lesson in the story of the little boy who cried wolf. The little shepherd boy cried wolf three times. The villagers came running each time and there was no wolf. So the next time he cried wolf they assumed, based on inductive reasoning, that there was no wolf. But this story also clearly illustrates the problem with inductive reasoning. It cannot provide a solid conclusion but only indicates a statistical probability. The data set of only three points in the story of the shepherd boy does not establish a strong statistical probability, especially when the result would have significant consequences — such as a wolf attack on the flock of sheep. Essentially you are looking for a preponderance of evidence. In questions where you have no smoking gun you need to fall back on inductive reasoning. The problem with many LLMs is that they cannot make the necessary connections between individual pieces of evidence. It is like telling the LLM that a suspect was observed running from the scene of a murder after shots were heard, his fingerprints were found on a gun at the scene, that gun belonged to the suspect, and he had had an argument with the victim earlier — and the LLM replies, “the fact he had argued with the victim is not strong evidence that he murdered the victim.” I am constantly running into this failure in AI conversations. It sometimes helps to tell the AI to base its conclusion on ALL the evidence connected, not just a single piece. But even that fails at times.

I am not buying Trump’s change of heart on Ukraine and Russia. I’m not going to make any predictions but I would not be surprised if he reversed it all after the midterms. I’ve said all along there would be no change in U.S. foreign policy under Trump or any other president.