December 1. Last week John Robb posted this teaser about the "power curve". Here's a great explanation by Simon Funk, Behind the Power Curve. Basically, in the physics of flight, if you're above a certain speed, then the more power you apply, the faster you go. But if you drop below that speed, then you're burning more power as you go slower, just to maintain altitude. The only way to get off the "back" of the power curve, and back to the "front", is to lose altitude.
This is a good metaphor for all kinds of things. Funk mentions financial debt, where you spend more and more money on interest, and software companies that get behind schedule and try and fail to spend their way out of it, and personal goals where "the act of looking itself is a cost", and you need to give up and focus instead on personal improvement.
Clearly it also applies to the consumer-capitalist economy, which is spending more and more money trying to maintain an outrageous standard of living for fewer and fewer people. Losing altitude means canceling a bunch of debt and reducing the wealth and power of the upper classes, and if we don't do it voluntarily, we'll stall and crash.
But I noticed something else. Here's Funk explaining the physics of the power curve:
The apparent paradox comes down to efficiency -- in order to maintain altitude at the lower speeds, the plane needs to pitch up more and more, and pretty soon the drag (air friction) is eating up most of the power. So at that point instead of pushing you forward, your fuel is being used to just stir up a bunch of air.
That reminded me of this Tom Murphy post about solar-powered cars. After calculating that it's impossible to have cars as we know them with self-contained solar panels, and expensive to charge cars with home solar panels, he mentions one useful vehicle we have right now that is powered by panels on its roof: the solar golf cart! The catch is that the maximum speed is 25mph (40 km/h). We could have solar driving right now, at a speed that would have seemed miraculous 150 years ago, and instead we're wasting the last of our oil pushing air out of the way to maintain our ridiculous driving speeds, because we're in so much of a hurry to get nowhere.
December 2. The other day I disagreed with calling the Occupy movement angry. I wrote, "anger is a toxic secondary emotion created by incorrect processing of pain... successful movements remain calmly focused on their message and their goal." I've had a few responses, either disagreeing or not understanding. Alex writes:
What do you see as a better way to process pain? When is anger useful for long term motivation? What do you think of the cliche: depression is anger without enthusiasm? And what do you mean by primary and secondary emotions?
I read somewhere that anger is an emotion created by other emotions, and you have a choice of whether to create it or not. This struck me as true and important. I'm sure some people see it differently, but this is what I see when I observe myself: the best way to process pain, physical or emotional, is to immediately and completely feel it, face it, and let it pass through. If I am unable to do this, I can see it turning to anger or other emotions. Maybe this isn't always possible. If you're in physical danger, you might have to let your pain turn to anger or fear, and this could be an evolved survival mechanism. Anger is the wrong tool for long-term motivation, but it does seem to be useful in the short term. Another reader suggests, and I agree, that long-term "anger" and short-term "anger" are whole different emotions, and we've made a mistake to use the same word.
I don't feel qualified to define depression, but it seems to have something to do with lack of autonomy and meaning in day-to-day life. Now that I think about it, this might be the real motivation of the Occupy movement! It's not that they're driven by anger, but that they're curing their depression by finding a way to put some autonomy and meaning in their lives. If the control system doesn't let people cure their depression peacefully, sooner or later they'll cure it through violence.
December 8. Via Hacker News, a fascinating article about What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447. This is related to my post a week ago about the power curve. Basically all three pilots made huge errors. First, faced with a massive cluster of thunderstorms, the most experienced pilot said "fuck the storm" and plunged right into it. He could have flown through it, and the autopilot could have flown through it, but right when the plane hit the worst part of the storm, he went to take a nap. When the airspeed sensors got iced over, the autopilot switched off, leaving the least experienced pilot holding the stick. He made a first-day-of-flight-school error, and pulled the nose all the way up and held it there. The other copilot didn't notice. The plane went into aerodynamic stall, and a loud stall alarm, "designed to be impossible to ignore", was ignored by all three pilots, all the way to the ocean. At any moment the plane could have been saved by lowering the nose, dropping altitude, and increasing airspeed, but by the time the lead pilot took over, the plane couldn't go any lower without crashing. The irony is, they thought they had lost control of the airplane, when really they were controlling it too much, in the wrong direction.
There's a lesson here about technology destroying our ability to survive in the absence of technology, but I want to take a different path, and make it a metaphor for the economy. Only an unskilled and panicking pilot will respond to a stall by pulling the nose up, but almost every "pilot" of the global economy thinks the best response to the "stall" is to spend more money to stimulate growth. I'm stretching the metaphor here, but I think they're treating money like altitude, and growth like speed. In that case, going into debt (dropping altitude) to buy growth (speed) would be the right move.
Really, altitude is analogous to the size of the economy. You grow an economy by increasing the frequency and quantity of activities for which money changes hands. Like a plane that's flying too high, an economy that's grown too big has to work harder and harder to maintain increase. Now the economy has stalled, and the solution is voluntarily shrink it: to cancel a bunch of debts and de-monetize a bunch of activities. For example, unemployed people can take care of each other's kids instead of paying for day care, and grow their own food instead of buying it. In a full economic crash, kids are not taken care of and food is not grown. If these activities are merely de-monetized, it's called a "depression", but really only the change is depressing. Once people get used to it, work done for direct benefit is more meaningful than work done for money. So, the meaningfulness of life is analogous to airspeed.
December 10. Computers Will Entertain Us to Death, and two related links, The Acceleration of Addictiveness and Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization. Will we fall into the holodeck and not get out?
It's important to remember that every sub-world must justify itself in terms of the world that contains it. Right now World of Warcraft benefits the larger world of industrial civilization, partly by creating jobs in the computer industry, but mostly by giving people a world that is more beautiful and meaningful than our dysfunctional human society. But the subworld has an optimal size, or an optimal proportion of our attention. If the working classes are not entertained enough, they'll walk off their jobs and bring down the system; if they're entertained too much, they won't have time to do their jobs.
But suppose that automation becomes so advanced that nobody has to work. Then it gets interesting. The first problem is population. Even in conventional reality, it's difficult to keep the birthrate up when there's no economic incentive to have kids. The "superstimuli" piece suggests that humans could be exterminated by "artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children." There are ways around this, including growing babies in vats and raising them with robots. But by the time we can do that, we might say "why bother?" Artificial people, in either physical or virtual space, might seem better in every way. For reasons I covered in The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines, I don't think we're going to "upload ourselves" into computers. But we might blur the line between biology and technology so much that the last fully biological humans would fade away in obscurity.
So here we are with a populated physical world, and many subworlds of pure information, with no physical constraints, that could be orders of magnitude more populated. The big question is: what is the physical world's incentive for keeping the sub-worlds around? Or, if you own the Matrix, what do you do with it? I can think of all kinds of ideas, which for now I'm keeping to myself...