[FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

Wed Apr 21 11:54:26 EDT 2021

I believe that Merle's challenge to us to find/create/accept more
generative dialog is furthered by this narrative about optimism/pessimism. 

I also think this topic of (mostly) technological innovation (some
socio-economic-political) is a good place for some purchase on the topic
of the inevitability (or not) of positive and/or negative consequences
of technological innovation and it's coupling with capitalism and
materialistic consumerism.   Modes of pessimism and optimism and
variations on confirmation bias play into our dystopian/utopian
narratives AND their applicability to the world we actually live in, not
just the ones we most hope/fear.   Depression/Anxiety are significant
components of this stigmergic field.  

I read Chiang's most recent collection: _Exhalation_ in the last few
months and was impressed by his play as a cautionary/aspirational
storyteller.   I read this specifically to try to sync MY
optimism/pessimism with my 41 year old daughter who seems to have
shifted her reading interests into much more speculative fiction than
previous to having a baby (first and to be only).   Previously she
thrived on a modest cynicism about the world coupled with a morbid
fascination for futures such as implied by the Zombie Apocalypse
genre.   She is a molecular biologist with a firm (realist?) grasp on
just how easy/hard innovation in her domain is.   She is less
pessimistic about the wild post/transhumanism (post animalia/post
fungii/post botanical) future than I am (because she is more grounded in
the realities) but is becoming more free to consider both cautionary and
aspirational narratives without going to the utopian/dystopian extremes.

Having walked two old men to their graves via Alzheimer's,  I find
Glen's suggestions that Psi drugs might provide some relief/opportunity
anecdotally credible.  Along with the rolling back of memory scale, a
key feature of Alzheimer's as I've experienced it, is a reduction of 
inhibition.   Whatever the victim of the disease might be holding back
begins to come out.  This can lead (in some cases) to bluntness unto
rudeness and in some cases even violence, but in most cases I have
experienced hit has lead to a more open and receptive nature, learning
to take things more "as they are" and less "as they should be" or "as I
thought they were".   The conflicts that arise with an Alzheimer's
patient (IMO) seem to be rooted in the "normie's" needs to enforce a
strict version of reality that might actually not meet the "facts at
hand" well.   Animal familiars (pets & otherwise) and young children can
often alert us to similar misalignments, and thereby provide much-needed
regulation IMO.  

Regarding the utopian/dystopian, optimism/pessimism, aspiration/caution,
progressive/conservative axes.   I suspect we often think of these as
gaussian-esque distributions when they are in fact (at least)
bimodal.    The logic of looking for central/centrist
positions/perspectives/outcomes may well be a fool's errand.   it feels
to me that we need to seek more and/or comprehensions (as so well
captured by Dicken's best/worst of times).    Perhaps Glen's hopes for
Psi may have a useful play there.  I do believe that DaveW and I have
nattered on a little about AE Van Vogt's "World of Null A" which was a
Golden Age of Sci Fi romp through the ideas and implications of a
(sub)culture which eschews  strict Aristotelian logic.

- Steve

On 4/21/21 7:39 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Well, Chiang was, I think, arguing that there's a reductionism lurking in the asymmetric *use* of technology. Exploitation of resources by capitalists is just one form it can take. Reducing progressive ephemerides to the influence of superheroes or conspiracy theories is another one. Roko's Basilisk is yet another one.
>
> To gloss all that into an equivalence class of arbitrarily swappable buzzwords or over-specific irony about the misunderstanding of socialism is a mistake. Eschatological thinking might not rise to being a first order trait ... a crisp category of people. But it's a persistent and prominent pattern.
>
> I really enjoy optimistic narratives like Pieter's. But I can also appreciate tragic narratives like Merle's. Eric's (and Chiang's) broach of the emergence of detailed and echatologically ambiguous story-telling out of the simpler types hits the right vein of ore. We're seeing more of these ambiguous stories lately ... in spite of the render-farm nonsense Jon laments.
>
> On 4/20/21 12:54 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Yeah.  I’m not sure what they’re afraid of, or even that they could articulate it.  (And I guess I mean this as a royal “they”.  Not some others, but a Weltanschauung that we can see rising, in which we are immersed)   You are certainly right that the words are just buzzwords, exchangeable at the drop of a hat.
>>
>> There is an expression “a full world” that I took up from its use by Herman Daly in papers like “Economics in a full world”, which argues that the problems that need solving are different when everything is occupied, than they were when everything was (for people) a frontier with no effective pushback against their expansion into it.  People’s anxiety and bad behavior is somehow reflective of an awareness that the world is full, and there might not be any room in it for them.  
>>
>>
>>> On Apr 21, 2021, at 12:23 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The hypothesis that the latent fear is of capitalism is amusing since the anti-vaxxers who are afraid of Bill Gates doing whatever he is intent on doing to them (what is it?) seem to be the same ones so terrified of socialism.  
>>>
>>> Btw, someone finally approved by Clubhouse subscription, and so I turned it on.   Let's just say the "compelling app" is not full of compelling people.   It is one thing to know that these anti-vaxxer people exist, it is another thing to realize they have a place to talk, and do so.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
>>> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 10:23 PM
>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>>>
>>> This was a nice read, Glen, thank you.
>>>
>>>> On Apr 20, 2021, at 12:11 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I should have linked this:
>>>>
>>>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chi
>>>> ang-transcript.html
>>>>
>>> Several of Chiang’s observations have a ring of insight to me.
>>>
>>> On just one, for the accident that it overlaps with another factoid.  His comment that superheroes:
>>> 1. Are magic == special
>>> 2. Preserve the status quo
>>>
>>> I think it was in Jane Smiley’s introduction to the volume of the Icelandic Sagas that she edited and compiled, that she says the Sagas are considered a premonition of the modern novel far ahead of its normal place in literature (the Quixote is I think usually credited as the first) because (for the Sagas), they realized that the old heroic tales of gods and trolls (e.g. the Eddas), didn’t have the depth to remain interesting under the retelling.  The Sagas brought the focus “down” to the real troubles and accommodations and inventions of real people, which were richer, more complex, and more satisfying over time than the old tropes.  I have come back to her comment many times, in thinking about what is the cultural role, whether of Eddas, epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata in India, Gilgamesh, etc.  I think for all of these, Chiang’s characterization works in both its dimensions, though perhaps in different degrees for different cases.  
>>>
>>> So the political right in the US turn to an encompassing paranoia +/= cynicism and Qanon, and the movie industry (whoever that serves) is dominated by Marvel Comics franchises.  Having had the modern novel, we are throwing it away for not even epics, but dumb cartoons of epics, but keeping the magic and preservation of the status quo.  After all, the real heroics have supernatural up-enders as well as restorers (Loki or Enkidu), and in the more advanced versions (the Eddas) the trickster is not dominated or overcome, but a persistent force.  (c.f. also the Kosare in Tewa and Keres, and the mudheads in Hopi, in NM).  
>>>
>>> There was another observation of a similar kind I recall, from perhaps two sources.
>>>
>>> Some historian came through SFI (for weeks or so), and gave a talk commenting on the iconography of scientists following the second world war.  The public wanted old-age Darwin, tired, patriarchal, apparently gentle (one never saw the picture of the young man starting out to find his way in the world, and the imperious, contemptuous Newton image was long gone), and old-age Einstein, again the tired benevolent grandfather.  From some other source, years earlier (I think coming from agriculture), there was the comment that sterility in the US came in the 1950s from the front-and-center nuclear terror.  Television was Ward Cleaver and Andy Griffith.  In the Cleaver home Ward wore a tie sitting in the living room chair in the evening.  In Mayberry there was nobody non-white to consider the circumstances of, and nothing seriously bad ever happened.  That was also when food in the grocery all went under plastic, and the ability to smell food walking into a store disappeared.  
>>>
>>> So I guess we already know people admit they are scared, because that is commented on everywhere, but the reworking of their lives betrays a much more inclusive fear even than what they state.
>>>
>>>
>>> I did wonder, too, in reading the Klein transcript, whether Chiang’s brief characterization of the alchemists would be more congenial to DaveW’s use of the word, since he always makes it a point to reject the common reference as a misunderstanding.
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> "It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?"
>>>>
>>>> On 4/19/21 8:01 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>>>>> Ha! Sure. ... it still looks like SteveS called it with the Red Queen's Race. Even if such tech solves more problems than it creates, it'll still be distributed according to the power structures in place (e.g. rich people) when the tech's ready to scale.
>>>>>
>>>>> On 4/19/21 7:54 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>>>>> Again technology to the rescue...   Nanotechnology for desalinization.   
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>>>>>> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 7:45 AM
>>>>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>>>>> Subject: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Copper? Natural gas? Pffft! Water's the interesting one.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ftheconversation.
>>>>>> com%2finterstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-along-with-the-climate-15
>>>>>> 9092&c=E,1,Ewpqbk1K7YvvWaN9Wq82biEau11JE47_9tv9w77esjTa5t6HYRzAKlQ2w
>>>>>> -qi_xGNkEoqhkVKJuvI9hoKZ1q58ZXHgk_APFIJbNOqB5FmfTBe3-Djst8,&typo=1
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And another one:
>>>>>> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theolympian.
>>>>>> com%2fnews%2fbusiness%2farticle250595449.html&c=E,1,NvMnnmssGuhqpYLB
>>>>>> wvA3sYGLQlpI4LtssXofxpMUZv79UtcRK8Tqe9uBjxn8-AxuqoH2Ah-11_RcM_IlTW-T
>>>>>> GgAXXpjbp6RfGPzrix6us3-O6w6BrA,,&typo=1
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 4/15/21 7:59 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>>>>>>> Another good example is water rights across states given 
>>>>>>> watersheds, flood irrigation, etc.
>>>>>>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.theguardia
>>>>>>> n.com%2fus-news%2f2021%2fapr%2f05%2farizona-water-one-per&c=E,1,CH_
>>>>>>> fKbSUirJq0d8JFH7BJbRnp3VoLW_l2ZsofeB8tXplQqNrJKiPCkdY2T3Ze0zf1SFcRC
>>>>>>> sXjtq_OHxVwg0cuwInTDLJULErLjTj6DMWH-ln0w,,&typo=1
>>>>>>> centers>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So, the question you're asking (how might "storage" in BTC be less preferable to other assets?) isn't really answerable *without* first discussing what that reservoir is *for*, what end does it serve?
>>>> --
>>>> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>>>>
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