Internet is stupid

The telephone system is very intelligent. At all times knows who is calling whom, where and when moving data or voice. The Internet is stupid, but he knows one thing: this bunch of bits needs to move from one end of the Net. Stupidity is stubborn. If a router (the device that distributes network traffic) is broken, the data packets are deviated on an alternative route and the network is working anyway. Thanks to his stupidity Internet accepts new devices and people, then spreads quickly.

If you optimize a network for one type of application, it will be the worse for others.

The value grows on its edges.

If the Internet was an intelligent network, its designers had envisaged the creation of good search engines in his structure. On the contrary, intelligent web designers have created a network rather stupid. Intentionally. The search services can be built and delivered by any of thousands of extreme nodes of the network, offering, to a wide range of users, to spark tremendous innovations.

This excerpt of the article (I cannot remember the author) on the stupidity of the internet, created by intelligent design so that it can be developed and improved by anyone, makes me to reflect about religion and God and religion. They are the inventions that have had more success in the history of humanity, because affordable to everyone (some would say in everyone). This is easily intelligible (from the perspective of the atheist) because, instead of a single intelligent design, it is a projection of individual fears. Man is born as a snail and only when he acquires consciousness of his being “soft”, he builds for himself a nice, protective shell.

Objection: but the man is so fundamentally stupid, that got to do the intelligent designers? And in fact have nothing to do. The God’s creation is an instinctive thing that can be compared to the curl at the sight of danger. What I wonder, however, is whether the stupidity of man can be a proof of a superior intelligence. The man may have been created intentionally stupid, especially “soft” (malleable would be more appropriate). On the reasons of this tenderness we could discuss. A believer sees us certainly a purpose to “spiritual journey”, to improve themselves, to reach maturity, losing the skin to access to the Nirvana, as an unbreakable core. Instead, I see in this self-construction a “domestication”, and certainly not by a metaphysical entity.

[italian version]

Homeopathy of the idiocy

Homeopathy works on the principle of similia similibus curantur, or the similar treat the similar, that it means that to heal from an orchitis we should take small doses of political jargon, a concept that raises some legitimate doubt.

The fact is that the success of homeopathy seems to have no boundaries, due to the penetration of a product on the market seems to be directly proportional to the degree of misunderstanding of the mechanisms that regulate it. Indeed, this is why religion still selling well, despite the fierce competition of best surrogates, especially in their soothing qualities, such as satellite television and bowling.

Therefore, people are convinced that you can cure the idiocy with the idiocy, simply by applying the principle of successive dilutions that, contrary to common logic, instead of diminishing the effect of the drug, increases his effectiveness.

Found that also Italy has entered the fan club of homeopaths, do not be surprised when you hear or read nonsenses uttered by some leading figure in the bleak media landscape. This idiocy is used to treat those already present, the idiocy that has infected the institutions and citizens, conveyed by mutant viruses through the ink of newspapers (take a look at yours fingers, the next time you will read a newspaper), by radiation or television, or by other unknown beams.

Unfortunately, the suspicion that someone is overdoing it with the nonsense exists and is reasonably based on the resurgence of symptoms, so that to be diluted in the ocean of boundless stupidity, it might rather be the intelligence. But maybe that’s the problem at its source: there’s somebody that maybe we need to heal from this terrible disease, whose most common symptoms are critical sense, a desire for knowledge, tolerance, manifest inability to intellectual sodomy and to collapse in front of the socio-economic superpower.

[italian version]