[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Steve Smith]

Jon -

Well said.  I often look at our collective (in different chunkings) in
terms of opportunities lost.   Evolution is intrinsically wasteful by
some measure, so it does not surprise me that from a
judgemental/discriminating/big-picture/hindsight perspective *virtually
everything that happens in human endeavor* seems incredibly wasteful.  
I spend (nearly) half of my energy boggled by this apprehension and
(nearly) the other half trying to refactor my perspectives of these
things so that they *don't* seem wasteful/squandered.   Looking for
"method in the madness" and then working the meta-problem of pruning a
variety of obviously delusional overfits to the data at hand.    I
recognize that many/most/all of my throwdowns/gurgitations here are lame
projections of the latter half.  <groan>

I especially appreciate the link to the PDF text of your Borges
reference.  I can rarely put my hands on the original paper texts I read
some of these things in due to multiple hashings of combining libraries,
owning a bookstore, living with a bibliovore ( voracious book/collage
artist), shelving/reshelving/boxing/storing elaborate excesses, etc. 
Here is someone else who has taken a whack at (or reflection on) one
aspect of the problem: Bibliophilia Obscura.
<http://makifat.blogspot.com/>

This particular Borges short reminds me particularly of Vonnegut and
perhaps Harrison Bergeron
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron>, but then I suspect
Vonnegut was significantly influenced by Borges' abstractions. <...
tangent snipped ...>

Oh yeh, and you "can't grep paper" (even if my fragmented associative
memory also often fails to find the right search terms: e.g.
Franklin:faction).

On the topic of "wasteful decadence", I finished watching AlphaGo and
YouTube rolled me into the PBS documentary The Amazon Empire which I
suspect implicates us *all* in one way or another. <... yet another
tangent snipped... >

Carry on!

 - Steve


> Sure my tongue-was-in-cheek wrt redirecting 1/9 of the U.S military budget to
> fund solving this problem, maybe it does detract from my main point. Fixing
> the problem of wasteful decadence is also not on the docket for me this pass
> through. I feel a lot can be said about what a culture burns its resources
> on. Hell, if we must,  à la Ghostbusters, choose the form of the destroyer I
> choose the societal engine described in Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon"[£].
>
> To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative
> voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all
> modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal
> problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone
> apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating
> for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct
> concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity
> is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken,
> great, we now have the opportunity to take others.
>
> [£] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~inceogl4/modernism/lotteryofbabylon.pdf
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200820/1d481d50/attachment.html>