]]>I highly recommend Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, for three reasons. One, it's very good history. Second, it makes a strong case that most of what we think of as European or Renaissance ideas were imported from Kublai Khan's imperial court. Third, it might get people off this "collapse of the Roman Empire" meme. The Mongols conquered the world, integrated it into a single trading unit, then lost control as an empire when the black death wiped out northern China and Persia, but all the infrastructure and intellectual legacy they left behind was swiftly incorporated into the Ming, Rus, Moghul and Persian empires that grew up from the ruins within a span of three decades.
The media trains us to think about this as if the president is a dictator: I'll support whoever I agree with or like the most, and if elected that person will change everything in the way I want.
In practice, I don't think the president is that powerful. I think Obama really wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, and pass medical reform without an insurance mandate, and it turned out he couldn't do it.
Bernie Sanders is easily my favorite candidate on the issues, but I think if he got elected he would just butt his head against the whole rest of the system, appear to be a total failure, and get crushed in 2020. I'm still supporting him because I don't think it's possible for him to actually become president, and the better he does the more his positions will be accepted in the long term.
I think the country will do best with a non-ideological boring competent moderate, like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But Hillary is like Bob Dole. She's so unlikable that she can't win unless Trump runs as an independent.
I also want to say that I don't think Bernie Sanders and socialism are being held down by rich people. There are plenty of rich people in Europe, and they know they'll keep their money and power no matter what. The enemy of American socialism, and the defender of poverty, is the lower middle class, because they don't want the lower classes to be pulled up to their level, and not have anyone to look down on.
]]>There are more combinations of coins that add up to "some of each" than either "all up" or "all down," so pure random chance dictates that we're far more likely to go from the all-up state to the some-of-each state than the other way around.
This reminds me of one of my favorite reader comments of all time, about a physics professor who speculated that the universe will never die from entropy, because no matter how spread out the energy gets, life will always stay one step ahead and find a way to work with it. You could say that there are ways of working with the coins where an apparently random distribution is just as valuable as all heads or all tails.
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Don't Work Here Lady is a trending subreddit for stories about customers mistaking other customers for workers, something that's more common than I would have guessed.
If you're in my area, the Inland Northwest Permaculture Convergence has been scheduled for September 10-13 at a place about a half hour northwest of Spokane. I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make it this year, but I was at the event last year at the same location and it was great.
Finally, a fun soccer/football video, Lionel Messi vs 3 or More Players.
The permafrost is melting because of wildfires, which are happening because of El Niño. The Fukushima Daiichi reactor exploded because the diesel generators that ran the circulation pumps were flooded in the largest tsunami to hit Japan in several centuries. Specific causes are, definitionally, not a trend. Are the massive refugee camps in Asia minor part of "the collapse"? No, they're part of the Syrian civil war. Which may have been caused by food prices, by drought, and in turn by climate change, but it's a war. Once it ends something different will happen. The idea of a collapse as a consistent sequence of exponentially worsening events (or a single event with worldwide reach) doesn't square with the stochastic pops of unique and unpredictable microcollapses we've been seeing since Katrina. Without a single variable that can be plotted on a graph, how can all these random events possibly be linked? So do they even count?
This reminds me of something I hate about the internet the more I notice it: everything has an emotional or moral subtext. In the context of collapse, people are seeking hope or the purity of refusing to accept hope. Morally they want stories about victims and villains. And simple stories are always more popular than complex stories, partly because simple stories are the only thing beginners can wrap their heads around. "We're not headed for techno-utopia? Then it must be extinction!" Last week I had a visitor who quoted me saying something I don't remember saying, but I agree with it: the future will be more utopian, more hellish, and weirder, all at the same time.
]]>]]>Our intelligence grows from childhood over many years of training, through our physical and mental interactions with the world. We learn methods alongside experiences. Concepts are built up through ostensive communication, which is impossible without extensive sensory apparatus. For an intelligence to emerge, in an artificial system, we would have to very purposely build it and train it interactively.
I believe that all of those human qualities that we pretend are weaknesses (and superfluous in robots) like emotion, dreaming, and imagination, are precisely the keys to understanding what we mean by intelligence. The brain is far too non-linear to be a Turing machine, and these contextual states are what makes flat information into actionable intelligence. We seem to be trying to compete with a waterfall by binding together hosepipes.
It seems to me that enhanced intelligence is more likely to come from brain science, than from current ideas of artificial logical reasoning. To imagine that silicon technology is the way to advance intelligence seems like the hubris of computer scientists.
If everyone sat down, popped some goggles on and saw what it was like for someone of a different gender or sexuality to have sex, our shared empathy would go through the roof. At the next G8 summit, Cameron and Obama and Putin should all experience first-hand how gruesome it is to be humped by a horny bloke.
He's mostly joking, but I still think he's too optimistic. Look at how the internet puts all the knowledge of history at our fingertips, and people use it mostly to confirm what they want to believe, not to challenge themselves. If we have a choice, we'll tend to use virtual reality the same way.
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