He also speculates that the reason this work is written in a language never seen before was that it was made by a small group of people who belonged to a culture that didn't have a written form. They created the text, borrowing some European, Middle Eastern and Caucasian elements, to help preserve their knowledge about nature. He adds that "given that the 15th century was a time of upheaval... it is plausible to consider this 'cultural extinction' to be a possibility, with the group in question developing a script and literacy, only for it to be extinguished."
Physics and the Demiurge is a brief blog post with this stunning idea:
Wave-particle duality makes most sense in the context of being a form of data compression. Essentially, the function only collapses if someone's looking, meaning that the simulation doesn't eat up infinite amounts of memory. That's an interesting point in itself, because it's a strong argument in favour of our reality being a simulation in the first place.
But there's an interesting corollary here. If you're religious, it's a strong signal that the creator is not omnipotent. If the universe had to be built in a way which was resource-constrained, then it implies that the entities doing so were not possessed of infinite resources.
Writing The Snowden Files: The paragraph began to self-delete. A reporter covering the NSA describes a bunch of strange experiences, from obvious encounters with spies to bizarre computer anomalies. This is going to sound crazy, but this is my number one area of specialization, and where can I write about it if not on my own blog? If you study the fringe, you see this again and again: through a combination of heightened awareness and isolation, it is possible to veer off into a reality that cannot be reconciled with consensus reality. You can say there was a crumb under the delete key, but this untestable conventional explanation serves to protect consensus reality from the phenomenon, making the experience possible. It didn't happen because the NSA was watching -- it happened because nobody was watching.
]]>What we need is not just less work -- though we do need that -- but a rethinking of the substantive content of work beyond the abstraction of wage labor. That will mean both surfacing invisible unpaid labor and devaluing certain kinds of destructive waged work. But merely saying that we should improve the quality of existing work and reduce its duration doesn't allow us to raise the question of whether the work needs to exist at all. To use Albert Hirschman's terms, giving workers voice within the institution of wage labor can never fundamentally call the premises of that institution into question. For that, you need the real right of Exit, not just from particular jobs but from the labor market as a whole.
The Economics of Star Trek does a beautiful close reading of the Star Trek canon, to argue that it's a valuable example of a proto post scarcity economy. Basically the Federation is like European socialism with such massive benefits that nobody has to think about money, but there are still private currencies that you can play with on the edges of that system.
I sort of love that Star Trek forces us to think about a society that has no money but still operates with individual freedom and without central planning. I love that democracy is still in place. I love that people can still buy and sell things. It's real. It's a more realistic vision of post-capitalism than I have seen anywhere else. Scarcity still exists to some extent, but society produces more than enough to satisfy everyone's basic needs. The frustrating thing is that we pretty much do that now, we just don't allocate properly.
Finally, this reddit comment explains how hunter-gatherers were more free than us, and why this freedom was linked to mobility, lack of storage, and a social taboo against hoarding.
]]>The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, as sentient men and women in the most productive years of their lives, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, "class brains," acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life... These faux adults of Woody Allen's have dinner at Elaine's, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder "what love is." They have "interesting" occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating.
This is related to my own complaint about Woody Allen: he always writes about rich people. If I'm going to watch something as fantastical as hopping on a transatlantic flight without thinking about the cost, I'd rather see wizards or spaceships or time travel.
Actually, my favorite Woody Allen movies are about time travel, and maybe he has accidentally seen the future. I know we're facing serious crises in the 21st century, but suppose we muddle through them and continue with "progress"? Of course it's a good thing to eradicate polio and slavery, and next we might have self-driving cars that never crash, and an unconditional basic income. What happens when we have so far reduced the danger of anything bad happening, that nobody has had to face any physical risks or overcome any serious challenges? Will the whole human race turn into permanent adolescents indulging their obsessions with trivial emotional problems? Or maybe that's more a 20th century thing, and the 22nd century will be immature and solipsistic in ways that we cannot yet imagine.
Let's say we invent the Star Trek replicator. Finally -- goods can be made out of thin air. Food can be made out of thin air. Replicators would be a scarcity destroying machine with the possibility of both destroying labor AND ending world hunger. It'd be a major shift for society. But insert the corporation and the capitalist who would wrap this machine's usage up in license fees, laws restricting usage, etc. They would use it to destroy labor, but they would prevent the device from destroying scarcity. It's too threatening to the power structures that control capital. You'll never technologically innovate yourself out of the exploitation of capitalism.
What about just using technology to make ourselves happy? Here's an article, illustrated with a great comic, about a Dutch biologist and his research into supernormal stimuli:
Tinbergen succeeded in isolating the traits that triggered certain instincts, and then made an interesting discovery. The instincts had no bounds. Instead of stopping at a 'sweet spot', the instinctive response would still be produced by unrealistic stimuli. Once the researchers isolated the instincts' trigger, they could create greatly exaggerated dummies which the animals would choose instead of a realistic alternative. Songbird parents would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider and redder than their real chicks, and the hatchlings themselves would ignore their own parents to beg fake beaks with more dramatic markings.
Of course the point is that humans play these tricks on ourselves when we eat junk food and watch TV and so on. The conclusion is that we have to learn the awareness to hold these urges in check. But as technology continues to make stimuli more powerful, can our awareness keep up? Here's a 2007 article on the subject, Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization.
]]>]]>It took a long time and some real work, but we were able to put together what we think is the most comprehensive list of black NFL quarterbacks ever compiled. More than a compilation of names, this was an opportunity to find and publish these men's stories. Some are brief; others are long. We penned longer pieces on the most notable players, like Fritz Pollard, Warren Moon, Steve McNair, Michael Vick, the immortal Akili Smith, and many more, but every player on this list is part of a broad narrative that traces the history of football and its relationship with the broader society.
So the most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing. Because once you think you know what you're doing, you stop looking around for other ways of doing things. And you stop being able to see other ways of doing things.
In terms of what computers will actually do, that guy seems to be a naive techno-utopian. Here's something smarter from Norbert Wiener in 1949. The NY Times asked the famous mathematician to write an essay on the coming machine age, but mistakes by editors kept it from being published. In 2012 it was rediscovered. My condensed excerpt of their condensed excerpt:
These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.
Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.
Completely unrelated, today I made this quick reddit comment about a dumb article arguing that globalization has reduced poverty:
]]>Dollars per day sounds like a good definition of poverty, but it isn't. Globalization goes with monetization: goods and services that were formerly outside the money economy are brought into the money economy, so now you can't get them without money. Having more dollars per day is meaningless if the things you need for quality of life also cost more dollars per day.
It's true that global poverty is decreasing, but you measure it with stuff like infant mortality or access to clean water. An article that measures it purely in terms of money changing hands has no credibility.
]]>I've seen that strategy referred to as "Leading from the Middle". In the middle, you can have as many leaders as there are things that need some leading. Instead of relying on very few hierarchically placed Leaders to lead on all fronts at once all the time, you can have the best person at each time and for each purpose, working in an over-lapping and hopefully non-competitive, collaborative, fluid, organic, ebbing and flowing kind of way.
Resistance only defines the edge of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it's just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It's the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It's the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It's building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.
In case you missed it, Cannabis during pregnancy endangers fetal brain development. I've also seen studies about mild brain damage if you use it as a teenager. Still no evidence that it's bad for adults, and I'm looking forward to buying it legally in a few months.
And a reader sends this good news link, School ditches rules and loses bullies.
I'm not sure that what they call "success" is a good thing. At least they admit (about 2/3 of the way down) that these three personality traits are not all good. But do we want to live in a society where the rules are set up so that people with these traits have vastly more wealth and influence than people who don't? Do these traits lead people to use their wealth and power in a good way once they have it?
Would it be a better world if we could somehow set it up so that the wisest or most generous people had the most wealth and power, instead of the most narcissistic, insecure, and self-controlled people?
And whoever is most "successful", we should ask how much of this success is zero-sum. For example, if I make lifestyle changes to improve my health, it doesn't require someone else to be sicker. But with wealth and power, success often requires someone else's failure. I'd rather live in a society that guarantees happy and comfortable lives to everyone, than one that condemns people to poverty for having the wrong personality.
Loosely related, a new video/article from the Onion: Laid-Off Man Finally Achieves Perfect Work-Life Balance.
]]>Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? ... Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.
Hunter Gatherers vs 21st Century Desk-sitters. Basically we spend too many hours under stress and sitting down.
Reddit comment on automation and unemployment. Automation is making more jobs unnecessary, the economic benefits are being sucked to the top of the pyramid, and our obsolete agricultural-age work ethic is preventing us from seeing the obvious solution: pay people to do nothing.
For the Love of Money is a confession by a former seven-figure-income hedge-fund trader. It's no surprise that all those people are addicted to making money. More generally, I would say that any human, in any position of power, will be tempted to narrow their consciousness to compulsively chase rewards that are harmful to society as a whole. I see only two ways out: everyone is enlightened enough to resist that temptation, or no one is in a position of power.