You can read a prettier version of this on Medium. Please ‘Clap’ if you do.
We’re going to need a bigger boat.
We are hard-wired for deep empathy with our ‘brothers and sisters’…even brothers and sisters well outside narrow family connections.
We are hard-wired to hate and even kill anyone we feel threatens us and our people. Empathy freezes. Antipathy switches on.
The same neurotransmitter, oxytocin, is likely central to both reactions.
[This article is, also, available on Medium. If you read there, I would appreciate some Claps. Thanks.]
I frequently come across statements on Free Will, dressed up as science or philosophy, that are religion in drag.
Based on this unfirm foundation, the analysis goes sideways.
A thought experiment can help tidy things up.
“Three billion years ago, life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them.
Evolution was a communal affair.
But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share.
The Darwinian interlude had begun.
Now, after three billion years,
the Darwinian interlude is over.
[This article is, also, available on Medium. If you read there, I would appreciate some Claps. Thanks.]
– Technology is increasingly empowering the individual.
– 30 or so years out, some Columbine Killers wannabes will be able to use a virus or dirty bomb.
– The only real solution is the surveillance state.
– There won’t be good individual counter-measures: trying to block surveillance will only make you stand out.
– One path to that solution is panic and partial collapse of our democratic standards similar to the dynamic of post-9/11 legislation.
– It would be nice to do better than that.
Dawkins’ Selfish Gene carries a lot of weight.
I discovered that back in 1975 when I first threw it across the room.
This happened right after the opening paragraph where he dismisses all philosophy written before Darwin. I hadn’t even gotten to the ‘lumbering robots’ part twenty pages in.
That was another toss.
Increasingly, disvalues appear as the principal output of the economy, and the production of goods and services as the means to prevent being injured by these disvalues.
Ivan Illich, Whole Earth Review 73 (Winter 1991)
“How Much a Dollar Really Cost”
Kendrick Lamar
I’ve been tracking research on wealth and bad behavior for years…it confirms a bias of mine (more on that below)…but there’s a matching flip side. Something that surprised me.
An aside in a marketing course pointed me to research: folks that feel socially isolated will pursue a riskier investment strategy. The working hypothesis is that the accumulation of money is being used to compensate for a lack of community and connection.
Up until very recently coop games sucked. They were generally aimed at grade school kids with a theory about provided a way to play games that wasn’t competitive. That negative objective (not being competitive) didn’t really do much for game design and even grade school kids tended to find them boring.
This started to change when one of the first wave of rock start German game designers, Dr Reiner Knizia, built out a Lord of the Rings board game into a successful coop game in 2000. (Knizia was a contemporary of Tueber of Settlers of Catan fame. For reference, Catan was published in 1995 and became the first Eurogame that remains an international hit.) Continue reading Coop Games – History and Suggestions
The intersection of innovations in data collection, tracking, and online advertising has created a novel situation in which the public is vulnerable to manipulation by unscrupulous advertisers and hostile foreign actors. In order for we as citizens to understand and take appropriate action, we need to start with an understanding of what information is being collected about us and how it is being used. From there it will be possible to tell what, if any, further regulation might be necessary. I, personally, think that this step should be all that’s needed.
We need a regulation paralleling the Fair Credit Reporting Act that allows us to discover 1) what data has been compiled on us and 2) who is using it and when.
This is particularly true for political advertising.
The companies that sell access to us including Facebook and Twitter, but, also, the Agencies that track our browsing history via cookies or feeds from our (now unregulated) Internet Providers need to make available information on what they are tracking about us and how it is being used. Continue reading Privacy and Data Protection Lobbying
We rely daily on science and it’s models to guide everything from what we eat, to the medicines we take, to the construction of the machines we use to get to work and back.
But are the models 100% certain? Are they True with a capital T?
That question misunderstands how science works.
Newton’s theories were incredibly robust until they got reframed by Einstein. Now they’re consider ‘true within limits.’ Big components, eg gravity itself, mean something very different to Einstein than to Newton.
Einstein’s Theories of Relativity are considered incredibly robust. And, along with most of physics (the most precise science we’ve got) there’s evidence that they’ll be reframed again within the next decade or three.
Net net, Newtonian mechanics aren’t ‘100% certain’…just true within the limits of our current understanding…but you bet your life on them every time you get in a car.
Science: being 25 years past my pre-science life expectancy, I’m a big fan!
The theory that we’re seeing potentially catastrophic human-caused climate change is, unfortunately, extremely robust at this point.
The models, also, point to ways we can mitigate that if we act in time.
Theories about climate change are contained in big models with precise mathematical relationships between the working parts. Globally there are 26 different research groups building competing climate models.
The models are in broad agreement on the big picture and are battling the fine points. On that front, they’re duking it out in peer reviewed journals for glory and funding. Yes, scientists do want glory and need funding. They are competing for attention and get glory and funding by winning bets, ie making accurate predictions. There’s an argument that this is harmful to the overall progress of science but, for now, winners win and losers lose.
It’s easier to shrug off the scientific evidence for climate change if you don’t dig into the modeling. This article from Bloomsberg Business Week, “What’s Really Warming the World?”, shows the detail and complexity being modeled better than anything else I’ve read. I think it makes the evidence much more compelling.
A final observation: if you do not have a model that’s winning bets against the others then you haven’t made table stakes. I don’t care if you’re some yahoo on talk radio or Freeman Dyson, one of my heroes.
I’ve been trying in this essay to stay carefully neutral on the Right / Left thing although I’ll cheerfully admit to being on the Left.
One has to ask why Russia supports alt-right movements not just in the US but across a broad range of Western democracies?
Russia, which views open societies and functioning democracies as a threat.
A point of interest is the easy alignment between Russian oligarchs and Republican operatives. (Although, I’m not sure both sides have the same level of insight into what it is they’re doing.)
Quite frankly, when the Soviet Union went away and Bush the First declared a peace dividend, I figured Republican Party would dissolve and that most Democrats and Republican’s would peel off into some center right party leaving me and those of like mind happily occupying the fringe Left. Having to be moderate is really not much fun.
I underestimated the Republican big wigs.
If the core mission of your party is making the rich richer, you need tricks to get elected. Fear and sowing division are the most effective tricks. I watched in amazement as the Republicans, post Soviet Union, pulled boogie after boogie out of their hat starting with gay guys in San Francisco and ending now apparently with an UN/US secret agreement to round up patriots and take their AK-47s.
Well, the GOP should be happy. The Rooskies are back, big time…but they seem to be on the side of the Republicans. Life is weird.
PS, not all Republicans are big wigs, of course, particularly in South Dakota where I grew up.
30 years ago I considered the Republicans the party of choice for folks I enjoyed arguing with about the appropriate role and size of public sector.
At this point, given their more or less complete capture by the oil industry, the GOP has morphed into an existential threat to the human species. I’m hoping my friends on the right are noticing that.
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