[FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

[glen ☣]

On 01/20/2017 04:33 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> I dislike the closed-mindedness and willful ignorance of groups I grew up in, probably in a very similar way to the way you do.  But I don’t think that kind of thing flowers as it has, when societies are evolving to make a good life better; more like it grows where people are making an unsatisfying life somehow more tolerable to plough on through.

Collectives can choose to operate in either mode: 1) reach further, sacrificing their components in the process or 2) stay whole, sacrificing opportunities for more gains.  I tend to be a technologist, which biases me toward (1).  That also makes me a neoliberal to some extent.  And my willingness to sacrifice lives (including my own) so that someone, somewhere will make great strides while the rest of us live in squalor and disease makes neoliberals like seem cruel and ignorant.  (This is a false dichotomy, of course, but a useful one.)

It seems especially stupid for atheists who can't count on seeing any sort of return on their investment.  Having children is one way out of that.  It shines a light on occult benefits one can realize while sacrificing their self to the benefit of someone else.  And it raises the concept of externalities and unintended consequences into full view.

But going back to the conjecture, I don't think morality's purpose (human or not) is a regulator or some sort of disruptive heat source _against_ a stable, scale-free distribution of power or money or land or whatever.  Morality seems to me to positively reinforce the scale-free-ness of the system.  That would still fit, however, with the idea that it's a regulator.  But I don't think it is.  It seems to me that morality perpetuates the scale-free, "unfair" distribution.  To see this, perhaps we can consider a stable caste society, where it is moral to stick to the role into which you were born and immoral to cross castes.  Morality is what allows the salt of the earth to look at Trump and think he deserves his plane and kitsch.

This idea that morality is always good or represents a striving for good, e.g. your (8), is utter nonsense.  It is moral to work toward the death of Dylan Roof or Charles Manson, and not because you think "humans will flourish when they're dead", but because morality is as much a preserver of the status quo as it is a cause of delusionary all-good futures.

Personally, I think Robert's essay does point to something (just not the conclusion he draws).  It is that we are are biological system and somewhere inside our mechanisms (at all scales) lies an ur-generator, the cause of the stochasticity, the cause of the churn.  Maybe it's quantum reduction of the wave equation.  Maybe it's Brownian motion.  Maybe the universe is mathematics and it's form of chaos.  Whatever.  I don't know.  But it's that ur-generator (what I've called "twitch") that causes the churn in the distribution of various biological attributes.

And to whatever extent we have the ability to guide or bias the ur-generated ephemerides in and around us becomes technology and politics.


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␦glen?

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☣ glen