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...
January 1, 2012. For the record, this is my position on the Mayan calendar: 1) The 2012 winter solstice is not the end of the Mayan calendar, only the renewal of a 26,000 year cycle, based on the precession of the equinoxes. 2) We don't know what the Mayans thought was actually going to happen on this date. 3) Whatever they predicted, they were just guessing like everyone else. 4) Nevertheless, this world is full of meaningful coincidence, and if you look around, big changes are underway. Also, the popular myth of the end of the world in 2012 might make people bolder in trying to change the world.
I don't think we'll see a global hard crash, unless it's caused by something in the realm of astronomy or science fiction. Catastrophes will be local, and the global system will continue to barely function while slowly breaking down, like a poorly maintained road.
In the coming decades, I see two trends pulling in different directions. One is energy decline. There is nothing on the horizon that can match the abundance, density, and ease of storage of fossil fuels. There are enough alternatives to give us more energy than preindustrial people, but not enough to maintain the outrageous consumption of the late 20th century. Reduced consumption will cause economic collapse, since our economy is based on perpetual increase. Professional economists will be the last ones to see that economic growth is the wrong goal, and the right goal is to maximize quality of life with zero growth. But I think humans lack the self-discipline for an enduring steady-state economy, and instead we will continue to enjoy growth-based economies by repeatedly crashing them, like we did before the age of oil.
The other trend is information technology. The smartest computers will continue to get smarter, and where this will take us is anyone's guess. Will artificial intelligence be used more to strengthen human domination systems, or to undermine them? Will AI's develop their own motivations? At what point does it make sense to ask what it's like to be a computer? Is there any place for the whole drama to reach equilibrium? I can see equilibrium in only two scenarios: human extinction, or something we can't even imagine.
January 3. Susan comments on the scariest aspect of the ongoing collapse:
I work in a busy emergency room. I had left ten years ago and just returned last May. At first I was amazed at how much sicker the patients were and how heavy the work had become. This weekend I realized that we do a lot more for the patients. It seems that almost everyone who comes in with anything more serious than a twisted ankle gets blood work and an EKG. It doesn't seem like a lot until you multiply it by hundreds of patients every day. When you have a very elderly person and/or a very sick patient, they amount of care they receive skyrockets unbelievably, even if that person isn't expected to live much longer.
Related: How Doctors Die. The people who understand the medical system best, and have the most choice, choose not to throw money at themselves in the final weeks, but to focus on quality of life and a graceful exit.
Why doesn't everyone die this way? Because they're swept up in the flow of the medical system. Doctors and nurses may be trying to help people, but the system as a whole is predatory, trying to suck as much money as possible into the giant black hole of private capital around which the whole economy orbits. Any procedure a hospital can bill insurance for, it will do, and it's difficult for patients to refuse. Meanwhile insurance companies will raise rates, and governments will pretend to do good by throwing more money down the hole while cutting more valuable services. How long can this continue? Susan writes:
This isn't really news to me, as a nurse, that the US spends more on health care and has poorer outcomes than any other rich country. But it did occur to me that we might be at the peak of what we can provide. We take care of more and more baby boomers as they're getting older and they are not as healthy as the generation before them. Fifteen years ago I'd take care of a lot of 80 year olds who had never been really sick, had never taken any medication other than aspirin and had never been in a hospital. Now, I'm seeing 60 year olds with all kinds of health problems and we haven't even got to the baby boom bubble yet. I can't imagine that we're going to have enough staff, resources or even space to take care of these people in another ten years.
My guess is that rich people will continue to get more medical care than is good for them, and middle class people will also get more care than is good for them while going deep in debt. This will drop most of them into the lower classes, who are already getting much less care than they need. It is not possible for medical providers to cut back services to what is actually helpful; it is only possible for them to cut back to what is profitable. Of all the issues facing us, health care is the only one where I can't see any non-catastrophic path to a better world. Here's a subreddit discussion.
January 6. Today I went to the Huntington, and it got me thinking about museums and civilization. I once wrote that the logical extension of civilization is the death camp, but I was wrong. It's a mistake to attack civilization for causing pain and destruction, because nature causes much more pain and destruction, and the avoidance of pain and destruction is a civilized value. The correct way to critique civilization is to point out control and lifelessness, and the logical extension of civilization is the museum, where everything is dead and preserved. An even better metaphor is the botanical garden, where the plants are alive, but they're disconnected from nature, over-protected, and completely managed. A botanical garden appears to be better than wild nature if you just see a snapshot, but nature is much better if you understand the relationships.
January 9. Last week's Archdruid post, Waiting for the Great Pumpkin, repeats the argument that we're in for a long decline, rather than a sudden crash or recovery, and offers this great summary of what to do about it:
The only way out of the trap is to accept a steep cut in your standard of living before it becomes necessary, as a deliberate choice, and to use the resources freed up by that choice to get rid of any debts you have, get settled in a location that has a fair chance of keeping a viable degree of community life going, and get the tools and learn the skills that you will need to manage a decent life in an age of spiraling decline.
January 9. How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. Yoga was developed by people in great physical shape who had enough body awareness to avoid injuring themselves. "Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems." And teachers push students and themselves too hard because of ego.
Of course it doesn't have to be this way. Christienne, who teaches yoga, points out that postures are only one part of yoga, overemphasized in the west. A good yoga program would integrate the postures with relaxation, body awareness, and a culture of going with the flow rather than striving. Ideally we wouldn't even need to follow poses, because we would all have the skill to improvise whatever exercises we needed at the moment. The farther we get from this understanding, the more we fall into rigid and uniform routines that are inevitably wrong for us. This reminds me of how religion starts with direct experience of the divine, but often hardens into meaningless rules and memorized prayers.