[FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

Mon Jan 3 14:29:20 EST 2022

Here's another (long) article on how adaptations may play out.  Thumbnail summary:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/magazine/california-widfires.html

The costs will come year after year, and the insurers will be forced to adapt.   They will plan for their own survival, and that will constrain what people can do.  That's a good thing.

Marcus

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 3, 2022 12:09 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

Hi Nick,

I wasn’t denying, or indeed addressing, the premise of your question, but if I had addressed it, I would have affirmed that it is an important and also a difficult one.  I have a large bulk of thoughts about this, but it is a jumble of inputs and fragments and ideas by others that I repeat secondhand, and not systematic or insightful by me.  So on that one I continue to paddle around.  Many of the positions that I entertain as potentially right are probably far more extreme than anything you would want to countenance.  I neither hunger for them nor fear them; they are just so many sigmas from the inertia in which the world has moved for my whole lifetime, that whether they are right or wrong is a matter of large importance.  That means taking a position on it is not something to bullshit about.  Unable to bullshit at least over the hard parts, I find myself with little I can say.

I was just struck that, in what was sort of a drive-by by Marcus relative to your psychological question, he brought up a thing that he and I have both spent several years working on, but which it hadn’t crossed my mind to apply technically to the current schisms.  That made it interesting, and I wanted to flag it in passing, in case anyone had insightful things to say about it.

Best,

Eric

On Jan 3, 2022, at 11:28 AM, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Marcus and EricS,

I am uncertain about the degree to which your answers deny the premise of my question: What does a healthy 2040 COMMUNITY look like.  Marcus seems committed to a naturalist morality, all natural selection is good, but I can’t believe that Eric is, given other things he has said in these pages.  The citation of the aphorism,

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

…suggests a hankering to out think the market, to head off the future, not just to plan to profit form it, but perhaps I am inserting my own Silent Generation Deweyan hankering.

It’s freezing effing cold in this room and I have to go to the sunny side of the house.

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,_W7j54oqLb3FlrCApp7Wxz_bXFYtKjTsI9AJO6oe5oKUoYqq0U1_aR70BeTojSFX3DTFLJ2VRaVtQQTBjBGVX-Ee7AKNdVzTGSo3rnTy6ck,&typo=1>

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, January 3, 2022 5:15 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

This is an interesting direction.

How small a minority does one have to be in, for it to count as an arbitrage opportunity?  In the El Farol and Minority Game abstractions, any minority is enough.

If we think about the dichotomy in public health, or in reason vs. hormonal aggression, the split in the US (at least by political commitments) is not so far from 50/50.  But as far as “profiting from the committed wrong”, that market seems to be cornered already by a very tiny percent, who have priced in much of the available surplus.  The difference between the dupes and the honest but powerless seems unimportant compared to the difference between both of those and the insiders with power, access, and control.  Somehow these richly structured extensive-form games with coalitional solution concepts seem very far from the market model in which we often think about arbitrage.

I am also reminded of the aphorism in that other realm “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”  Or in the case of climate, agricultural, and social instability, alive.

I wonder what makes an adequate toolbox of concepts and analogies with which to think about this (at least somewhat) systematically.

Eric

On Jan 2, 2022, at 2:58 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:

Nick writes:

< So, what does a healthy 2040 community look like.   What are we working TOWARD, here.  Once of the things that the Mcnamee podcast highlighted for me was my feeling that, in a chaotic world, people like me, planners, are just out of tune with the world. >

I don't think it really matters how people interact in social media or what they think.   What will matter is how people adapt to climate change and the exhaustion of food and energy, and the migrations resulting from climate change.  That's where the opportunities will be.   If there are millions of people that deny it is happening like they deny pandemics, then things simply must be arranged so that the natural accounting occurs.   The planners will look past the chaos and make their investments.. and wait.

Marcus
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:32 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

So, what does a healthy 2040 community look like.   What are we working TOWARD, here.  Once of the things that the Mcnamee podcast highlighted for me was my feeling that, in a chaotic world, people like me, planners, are just out of tune with the world.

By the way, I think “surfing the web” , as it has been used, is a terrible metaphor.  What most of us do is like water skiing the web.  Bouncing over the wake, never actually getting into the water.   Gives surfing a bad name.  A surfer finds the few survivable paths through an immense concentration of hostile forces.  Surfing is more like martial arts.  In fact we must begin to surf the web.   To realize the manners in which its hostile forces constrain us and find the few paths that allow us to master those forces and come out of the curl safely.  We thought it was a playground; now we see it’s a minefield.

n

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,-Fd2M0MU4wX5y1N6mhhnNrFlsG64cdcJ8jOErlxB0hvFzR4dcEnKSSt2EqX5s2fb-wPOBqSH4X2Ap1mYP24zv3_muYGYijRLpnFKTxxN3dQyGtSp1B6x&typo=1>

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, January 2, 2022 2:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

Nick writes:

< Imagined a world in which we all worked at home, everything was on zoom, and everything was delivered by Amazon by drone.  I realize this is a reductio, but hum along with me for a few bars.  There would be no intermediate social landscape between the home and the distribution center.  No intermediate human scales.

I can’t say immediately why this would be a bad thing, but my gut doesn’t like it.>

I can't think of many examples where the intermediate scales are anything but wasteful or intrusive.   Maybe to see a tailor coupled to the purchase of certain clothes?  I still drive to services (dentist, doctor, hair stylist), just not to redistributors, because they don't really add anything.   There's still a farmer's market that seems as popular as ever -- but they DO offer something unique.    I can drive five minutes to Home Depot but honestly half the time their inventory is exhausted for what I want, and I end up ordering it online.

Marcus

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

Marcus,

I would like to be convinced …. But

Imagined a world in which we all worked at home, everything was on zoom, and everything was delivered by Amazon by drone.  I realize this is a reductio, but hum along with me for a few bars.  There would be no intermediate social landscape between the home and the distribution center.  No intermediate human scales.

I can’t say immediately why this would be a bad thing, but my gut doesn’t like it.

Nick

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,p4rsPfl7qCnkvPDXzYT5M-1fZBZKaCDIB1z2Osc-CfFDLgw598S0mD13_Sppk4ua_2uMIZVWNAECmtZ8s2kblHg2quJex4YawfboMGbRTDU_u15bu8836eLAHQ,,&typo=1>

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Sunday, January 2, 2022 1:38 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

I can see living without Facebook (I do), but why can't we live with Amazon?   It seems like they did a pretty good job of displacing the likes of Walmart.  It could happen again.  What added inherent value do stores have, other than as a mechanism to prevent he consolidation of market influence w.r.t. to prices?
________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at gmail.com<mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>>
Sent: Sunday, January 2, 2022 12:03 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] Roger Mcnamee !!??

I just listened to this podcast

https://feeds.megaphone.fm/VMP5489734702<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ffeeds.megaphone.fm%2fVMP5489734702&c=E,1,G87ToIzgI5DT4ZpiKuXcRc2EHcS4lpVgIftU98yiNor7PFNa9lCoDMtpA2GT4_2eudXeeatF6BgR-Peqwvf8pBQOnsbOiuYBI693rGSZCjDA8-JbvEUZ&typo=1>

a conversation between the former prosecutor, Joyce Vance, and the musician, financier, turncoat Facebook investor Roger Mcnamee, who likens this moment with big tech to the moment before the food industry regulations of the early 1900’s and anti-pollution legislation of the 60’s, moments when Da People reasserted control over over-weening industry interests.  He is author of the book, Zucked.

An hour-long pod cast is a terribly inefficient way to learn about something, so I hope that one you, for whom none of this is news, can offer a more condensed source.

We are basically talking about the Amazon paradox, here: can’t live with it; can’t live without it.  How much ARE we willing to pay to have the trains run on time?

As usual, I am in need of instruction.

Nick Thompson
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com<mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwordpress.clarku.edu%2fnthompson%2f&c=E,1,AekdfP2MBl31iUxGjknOMPY6CLKTWZ0Uy_4dTUwGKgNke6kg7BN0qwu3VC8xzay12y6vtDYGszhL0ussBgpgtjOzZjJu9AWkUutwzgaFOibLSYQ0DDICSZg,&typo=1>

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