[FRIAM] crackpots and privilege

Merle Lefkoff merlelefkoff at gmail.com
Fri Jun 2 14:59:39 EDT 2023 

I'm way behind.  Wondering why anyone is still talking about the "lack of
predictability" from complex systems. I prefer thinking about the opening
afforded to the "adjacent possible".

On Fri, Jun 2, 2023 at 6:19 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> I have just started reading *The Earth Transformed* by Peter Frankorian.
> It seems to have some relevance to this discussion as one of its themese is
> how multiple climate change events in the past shaped human adaptation and
> evolution. Might provide some interesting ground for what kind of changes
> might result from current crises. Big caveat, of course, is the lack of
> predictability when it comes to complex systems
>
> davew
>
>
> On Wed, May 31, 2023, at 9:02 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > Yeah.  It’s a good objection, because I don’t know either.
> >
> > I know what sources I am feeding off of.  They are all this
> > popular-science writing, and who knows its status; maybe it becomes the
> > urban legend of “intellectual” spectators?
> >
> > There is the whole follow-on from the Siberian silver foxes, and the
> > stylized facts of piebald coloring, round ears, and chattiness as the
> > mark of epigenetically altered hormonal profiles among domesticates.
> > Not sure how you do that with primates that already have short ears and
> > limited hair, but there’s always the chattiness.
> >
> > Some of it, I think, came from reading Barry Lopez’s book Of Wolves and
> > Men as a young kid (a book that at the time, I figured was just a
> > surplus on the used-book tables, but which I have seen referred to
> > repeatedly over the years), and then some decades later, some other
> > book-length thing about social intelligence among dog breeds and their
> > relations to wolves.  The broad thesis being that adult wolves don’t
> > have a sense of humor.  People see wolf pups that look like dog pups
> > and think “I’ll raise one of those”, and then suddenly the transition
> > to adulthood happens, and all this “relation” they thought they had
> > vanishes as the wolf becomes the adult wild animal, and they realize
> > they are in completely over their heads.
> >
> > Factoid upon factoid, somewhere in this I fit the thing my boss
> > mentioned a couple of years ago, about a Nature (?) article reporting
> > that one of the mutations systematically separating dogs from the grey
> > wolf was in the gene that is cognate to the one that mutates to cause
> > Williams Syndrome in people.  I mentioned that on the list maybe a year
> > ago, but have’t gone to find the link myself.
> >
> > The thing about vigilance as an important defining dimension of the
> > PTSD phenotype comes from the Jonathan Shay book I mentioned, and
> > probably also Tim OBrien’s The Things They Carried, though not
> > emphasized there the same way in its own name.  Seems to correlate with
> > being surprisingly strong while being surprisingly skinny and not
> > needing to eat much (or having an interest I eating much), and with a
> > portfolio of health problems that shorten lifespan.  Shay thinks that
> > hypervigilance, as a requirement for survival, is one of the drivers of
> > PTSD and not only a symptom; the other major one being betrayal within
> > what was supposed to have functioned as the social in-group and support
> > structure.  That was the connection to the SFI talk on “Living with
> > Distrust” as a locked-in low-benefit social state (anthropological
> > study of a small village I Romania).
> >
> > Are wild animals like that?  I do have that impression, with about as
> > much depth as my other impressions.  Getting close to a wild fox seems
> > very very hard.  Raccoons too.  I think of big male domestic cats as
> > being pretty menacing (having been attacked by one in the dark one
> > time), but the reputation is that faced with a fox or a raccoon, they
> > don’t have a chance of surviving.  Makes me imagine that bobcats look
> > like slightly enlarged big domestic cats, but probably aren’t like them
> > very much at all.
> >
> > I was having this discussion with someone once, sitting outside a small
> > artificial lake in a little forest glen, watching the birds fight
> > continuously with each other in every pairing over territory.  Thinking
> > “These animals are really willing to make an effort.”
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
> >
> >> On May 30, 2023, at 4:27 PM, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> "Somehow not the domain of peace and spirituality that I think
> first-worlders like to project onto first-nationers, and which might even
> be true for the first-nationers, since they are also from a milder time by
> a lot than a large extinction."
> >>
> >> IDK, man. Are wild animals different from us in any significant way?
> Are they actually never lazy, never unvigilant, etc? Or, perhaps, is the
> attribution of vigilance (and hence never unvigilance) an illusion born of
> othering? A standard whipping post for me is this "Are you a cat person or
> a dog person" cocktail party ice breaker. Admitting the false dichotomy,
> dog people tend to think of cats as non-social, selfish, blahblah. Cat
> people tend to think of dogs as slobbery, vapid, etc. It's complete
> nonsense born of arbitrary delusions.
> >>
> >> But of course, there is something to be said of the built environment.
> It would be difficult for a human reared in a city to navigate the
> Mongolian desert. But is that difference any greater than plopping a city
> dweller 13,000 years in the past? Are office or political games
> significantly different from the "games" wild babies play under the
> vigilant eye of their den mother? Yeah, I know. I'm putting too much weight
> on "significant". Obviously, everything's different from everything else.
> (I regret not being able to engage more with Jon's exploration of Deleuze.)
> But my conservatism tells me that objective othering would rely solely on
> coherent traits, fingers vs. claws, hair vs. fur, cortex or no cortex. A
> human now would be insignificantly different from a human then. If the
> apocalypse doesn't transform us into something other than human, whatever
> is rebuilt will be strikingly similar to what we have now.
> >>
> >>
> >> On 5/28/23 11:29, David Eric Smith wrote:
> >>> I’m not sure elitist, Steve,
> >>> That’s one bad habit that I don’t think they have.
> >>> More along the line, I suspect, of “out of ordinary people who mostly
> get mowed down, here and there will be some pockets that started to pay
> attention and got lucky enough to have time to make a culture of it, of
> sorts”
> >>> Wes Jackson likes the term “saving remnant”.
> >>> I happen to be in Sweden just now, and it has me thinking about sci-fi
> futures, ad also Nietzsche’s “last man” etc.
> >>> Also on this theme is the very interesting SFI lecture “living with
> distrust”, which signals things I have seen (Ernst Fehr?) and others say
> about the Ache and Machiguenga and other groups.
> >>> What do I think the saving remnant will be?  I imagine people who lost
> all the epigenetic marks associated with domestication, and took on hormone
> profiles more like chimps.  Or “born this way” to PTSD.
> >>> Take any wild animal, and contemplate just how _different_ they are
> from us.  Never lazy.  Never un-vigilant.  Or read Jonathan Shay’s Achilles
> in Vietnam.
> >>> Suppose all the people who remain have survived only because they are
> that.  Unwind not only the past 70 years of developed-world tranquility,
> but the history of human domestication since at least the younger dryas.
> Maybe a lot longer ago than that.
> >>> What is it like to have your Time Machine and go spend a weekend with
> those guys in their home?  Jared Diamond would be jealous.  Somehow not the
> domain of peace and spirituality that I think first-worlders like to
> project onto first-nationers, and which might even be true for the
> first-nationers, since they are also from a milder time by a lot than a
> large extinction.
> >>> I wish I had the imagination to be interesting.  It would be
> invigorating to read someone who could really imagine a different world,
> and a different us, and take you there in some convincing way.
> >>> Eric
> >>>> On May 28, 2023, at 6:55 PM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Eric -
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks for passing this link around here.   I suspect most here have
> the background to appreciate/parse this < insert Steve Martin's "hear me
> now and believe me later" SNL skit> but maybe not an "affordance to know"
> the more acute implications of it.
> >>>>
> >>>> One of the things I find (most) interesting in the RGND rhetoric is
> their (appropriate) invocation of Complex Systems ideas as well as the
> convergence of human consciousness (mostly from a neuroscience perspective)
> and the complex systems which are the techno-social-economic systems that
> are our energo-materio culture which is the engine that is spinning the
> earth-systems out of the orbits they were in pre-anthropocene (150 or 15000
> years?)
> >>>>
> >>>> I may be reading them wrong, but this feels like "yet another"
> elitist trope, this time on (nanotech?) steroids:
> >>>>
> >>>>    /In short, we think it’s probable that MTI civilization will
> collapse catastrophically but that pockets of people with a rising level of
> consciousness and awareness of our eco-predicament will survive and act as
> the seeders of a new world.///
> >>>>
> >>>> I particularly appreciated your pithy observation:
> >>>>
> >>>>    /But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the
> GNDers.  The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of
> the ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves
> the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of
> being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win./
> >>>>
> >>>> /
> >>>> /
> >>>>
> >>>> Thanks to Sabine (as Cassandra) and Eric and Marcus for raising this
> to my attention...  queing it up to provide background for my read lead me
> to her Collective Stupidity episode <
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng>.
> >>>>
> >>>> I am left wondering if/how LLMs reflect/relate to Wisdom/Stupidity of
> Crowds?   Seems like LLMs are literally the encapsulation of collective
> knowledge.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sabine's invocation of "Information Cascades" was interesting in
> contrast with entrainment and canalization.   Will LLMs in some way help us
> avoid these short-circuits/shunts?  Or aggravate them?
> >>>>
> >>>> - Steve
> >>>>
> >>>> On 5/28/23 2:46 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> >>>>> This comment leads to an interesting angle that I haven’t heard.
> >>>>> Bill Rees, whom you can find here:
> >>>>> <d8f080_78c1ab7b00b045ff9bbc01a273b00173~mv2.jpg>
> >>>>> Home | The REAL Green New Deal Project <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,s4xLfGynLIjkrUt9NbN7gTjzG9OOoaJe64vBX3p4819H6jFz9AJSSe-qv9yDN4qwXF8gSayAREexT0axFnHBthp_EmNYm91Bl5Edsist24GG&typo=1
> >
> >>>>>
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2frealgnd.org&c=E,1,o-jD2Pd3Y2XABKHYvdjInzR4x3ep6uYbwcsXC-DFCaj9q_hjiE7VWqV3KWC2P3ekWNDW6V-PTSH_3BQuFildW1lxnqFkgyRufuDcSLp4&typo=1
> <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,mLU-zLi9KLRqdV1LCSsLf4xAqRPWhhLSvzK0ajNxs-Bl31f_tDo3AuTO8FftJArhBwcEpVAtKd58f8Nn8HWN8QWG-poN1K4CsHllfzctVyYuePFkCMo,&typo=1
> >
> >>>>>
> >>>>> <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.realgnd.org%2f&c=E,1,ui2uypSQ13uMOEz7hzM4YulUakJ2dduLZEW4fMauG5gh85fLSDmPC9mu3saCYT5TA1zSp3f4E7hrdi7Iu-Yxbt88L44PzeI9TxTtDQBN6mNsS-h87nJxhCE,&typo=1
> >
> >>>>> writes numerous papers about how 90% of us need to die, or that this
> is just what will happen whether we articulate such a need or not.  I won’t
> go so far as to say that Rees “wants” 90% of us to die (see the smiling
> grandfatherly bearded ecologist photo in the pages), but after a long life
> of writing Jeremiads and not seeing the world change its ways, he seems so
> defeated by frustration that I read in him a deep and now constitutive
> misanthropy.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> (btw: the Real GND website is best read while listening to Sabine
> Hossenfelder’s song My Name is Cassandra, Prophet of the Dark.  Thanks
> Marcus for making me aware of her oeuvre, I had never noticed it.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Usually, the problem with the bait-and-switch of new technologies is
> “look, it will save so much labor we will all have leisure to be creative
> while still having comfortable levels of consumption”, when what actually
> happens is classic Marx: the few who can enclose the new services, either
> because they are exclusive or just through market-gravitational effects,
> now own an even larger sector of all income, and the expanding remnant is
> made increasingly desperate.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> But here, we can maybe somehow combine the capitalists and the
> GNDers.  The concentration in the rate and provision of services, and of
> the ownership of the proceeds by whoever the rulers turn out to be, leaves
> the rest of us free to die off in peace, and not carry on the guilt of
> being ecological criminals.  It’s a win-win.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I worry that that story is probably incomplete, and maybe thereby
> wrong.  The concentrating advantage of advanced autocomplete services might
> only be a transient while our current stock of primary knowledge is
> “enough” and “not fully mined”.  Maybe all the inefficient activity of
> ordinary people is somehow a diffuse source that actually expands the
> primary base.  Certainly my impression of ecological organizations is that,
> below any small population of charismatic megafauna, there is a whole
> pyramid that goes down to an astonishing number of nitrogen-fixer bacteria.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> But I don’t know, what organizations are necessary by physical,
> mathematical, and biological laws, and which might be possible that we just
> haven’t ever seen before.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Eric
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> On May 28, 2023, at 7:27 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Looking at the recent rapid release of open source LLM systems like
> Falcon and Mosaic ML, Llama, etc. there is more going-on than titans like
> Microsoft, and Google battling it out with giant closed systems.  These are
> human know-how crystalized into open-source deliverables.  Why not share
> knowledge representations in this way?   Consider the cost and time that
> goes into medical or legal training.   Sure the energy requirements of
> digital systems are high, but so are the energy expenditures of a planet
> full of humans.
> >>>>>>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>>>>> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Steve Smith <
> sasmyth at swcp.com>
> >>>>>> *Sent:*Friday, May 26, 2023 2:06 PM
> >>>>>> *To:*friam at redfish.com<friam at redfish.com>
> >>>>>> *Subject:*Re: [FRIAM] crackpots and privilege
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> My grandsons' girlfriends (twenty-somethings) say that they think
> babies are disgusting.  I hope they change their minds.  In any case, what
> does a shortage of babies have to do with AI?
> >>>>>> Babies *are* (can be) disgusting, but same for puppies, kitties,
> and garden-soil from the right (wrong) perspective!
> >>>>>> Maybe the point is "nobody left for the AI overlords to lord over" ?
> >>>>>> I think the key is "existential threat"...    I didn't look for
> Schmidt's statement anywhere, so I'm just speculating that maybe he's doing
> a mild echo of Musk's idea that a collapsing (first) world population is
> somehow a *bigger* existential threat?
> >>>>>> With my techhead hat on I am inclined to imagine that AI will help
> me (well, not ME anymore, but people vaguely like who I once thought I was
> or wanted to be) solve micro-techonomic problems like the ones that lead to
> Teflon(tm) and Velcro(tm) and higher density/faster-charge EV batteries,
> and higher density/dynamic range pixel-displays, and neural lace to wire
> (grow?) into my brain/ganglia, and microbes that can convert moon/mars-dust
> to Soylent/Huel/Water/??? etc.
> >>>>>> My PsychoHistory hatted self (Asimov - Foundation <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>and
> thenon-fictional variant <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory#:~:text=Psychohistory%20is%20an%20amalgam%20of,stated%20intention%20and%20actual%20behavior.>)
> is inclined to imagine that AI *can* help with the "big problems", the ones
> nominally too large, too interdisciplinarian, too obtuse, too "wycked" (In
> Complexity Science jargon), possibly too counter-intuitive for most (any?)
> human or group of humans to grasp.
> >>>>>> My Ned Ludd (very tight by definition?) hat has me thinking more
> down the rabbit holes of worst-case scenarios where all the arrogant,
> narcissistic @$$h0ii3z of the world (starting at the top with those whose
> names start with Pu Tr Be Zu Mu(r/s) Ne De ... and staggering down the
> hierarchy of potency and scope to most of us here most of the time) think
> they "know what is best" and put their resources to using the AI lever to
> "make it so"...
> >>>>>> Even (especially) me, I constantly imagine that "if they made ME
> King" (or to the point, if *I* was the/wormtongue/in the AI Overlord's ear)
> that I would "make the world safe and happy for everyone, ever after with
> no unintended consequences or unpleasant side effects".
> >>>>>> One *might* guess that the smartest thinkers in the most grounded,
> thoughtful, gentle think-tanks (e.g.  in a Tibetan Lamasary or the "Club of
> Rome" or SIPRI or CESR or the Justice League of America or the people who
> task "jewish space lasers" or ??? ) would be practicing their AI-whispering
> skills right now. Maybe tasking Marcus' Quantum Computer with "the hard
> problem of universal consciousness"?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>  An up-to-date version of Asimov's9 Billion Names of God <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God>?
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> ---
> >>>>>>> Frank C. Wimberly
> >>>>>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> >>>>>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> 505 670-9918
> >>>>>>> Santa Fe, NM
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>> On Thu, May 25, 2023, 12:48 PM Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org
> <mailto:rec at elf.org>> wrote:
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>    Google news decided to surface an article from Fortune today.
> It's headlined "Society's refusal to have enough babies is what will save
> it from the existential threat of A. I., Eric Schmidt says".  The headline
> is accompanied by a very serious head shot of Eric.  Nice try, Google, but
> you're not sucking me down that rabbit hole.
> >>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>    Meanwhile, someone apparently read my mind about the
> rationality of disaster prepping and wrote an epic novel about it 40 years
> ago in Catalan.  The Garden of the Seven Twilights by Miquel de Palol is
> available in English translation and as an ebook
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fonoverdrive.com&c=E,1,i24jZ6qaXt_S4iwj4KlMCQL6JG0XDon8-oMTJAP7ZXZqRuQYl4sOgliRqIdLRRoLtoiRQ33fBCUhyBXnVUXfLmSYt7wqI61-Pu3hh6TNpJiYDl91xrw,&typo=1
> <
> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2foverdrive.com&c=E,1,qiLuQHPdYM-73PUnxLjrSTzI76V8rfL6yb0_zHcdufFpFa1_kCTZkOyfYIh_N_0ysaWtjxXmwlL7kj8mmwGK2wfSP_01M-8QKT_yUEwBhHUL1Wuk-x_ACQBsspQ,&typo=1>at
> your local library.  The narrator crosses refugee swamped Barcelona to
> check on his mom and gets sent off by her to a McMansion'ed medieval
> monastery high in the Pyrenees where the elite are amusing themselves with
> stories while awaiting the resolution of the first war of entertainment.
> Lots of stories about themselves and their friends and acquaintances.
> >>>>>>>
> >>
> >> --
> >> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
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