[FRIAM] Santa Fe Plaza Riot

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Yeah, I basically agree. But this takes us back to the discussion of *where* the memory/logic/data is stored. That painful-waste-of-my-time Weinstein podcast talked explicitly about how evolution might happen much faster than we think. And we know that cultural evolution (should use scare quotes, but meh) can happen even faster than biological evolution. 

I've argued emphatically (even if I don't quite believe it) that the human organism's repertoire is so plastic that it's impossible to characterize the long-term trends of socially emergent phenomena. There can be no master equation ... no coherent psychohistory <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)>. 

Regardless, I'm in your camp. My meatspace friends even call me a misanthrope, which is not at all true ... but very truthy. I ran across this article the other day:

The power of crowds
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jun/02/the-power-of-crowds

I honestly cannot relate to any of it. The feeling I get when "crushed" either just my ears in a huge chorus or crushed physically in, say, a sweaty dance club is the same. I get this anxious overwhelming feeling of dread. I used to be able to drink heavily to suppress it. But that's not a good solution.

On 6/3/20 11:44 AM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
> Does it make me a sociopath for me to hope big cities *do* collapse and become a thing of the past? People who know me well understand when I say I like persons, but not people, which is to say that while I treasure individual friendships and relationships, I at best tolerate crowds. I think we have not evolved the psychological mechanisms to live together in great concentrations. Our advanced civilization is much too young to qualify as having stood the test of time, a few measly tens of thousands of years is such a small blip in time compared to the time life has existed on our planet. I personally believe that the Earth would be much better off with under a billion (highly educated) people, with AI and robotics providing for the bulk of our material needs, and that is something we should as a species strive for. But then, I could be absolutely, completely, wrong about all this, and instead just be a sociopath. I hope not.

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