[FRIAM] Selective cultural processes generate adaptive heuristics

[glen]

Exactly. Both of these (low turnover wisdom propagation & "flat" infoscape) fail in my conception because they lack the concrete (definit) particulars. Even if we have one 400 year old vampire telling funny stories to a 30 year vampire about a now-exploded vampire from 700 years ago, the sheer *number* of anecdotes required to capture a 400 year lifespan *forces* some abstraction ... some leaving out of important detail.

And even if the concrete details of why, say, Galileo was such an OCD journaling nerd can be found in biographies or whatnot, actually reading and learning about all the persnickety nonsense that was *crucial* to the arrival at, emergence of, any given inflection point, ... even if that concrete detail is logged/documented out there somewhere, nobody can learn it all. Each learner is forced to take an abstracted slice through it.

What the commitment to meat space interactions is, is a way to ensure that the concreteness remains ... at least within *some* small "open ball", you're getting a high-dimensional opportunity. I think of it in terms of the space vs time tradeoff and (yes, broken record) the parallelism theorem. Sure, a sequential system can simulate a parallel one perfectly, but only if you give it the time to do so ... and the amount of time it takes to do it is related to the amount of space the parallel system uses. Another way to think of it is the project management triangle: cheap, fast, or good. But those are low-dimensional. The space being balanced by organisms in the world is high-dimensional.

On 4/12/22 14:19, Steve Smith wrote:
> Generations past (and under-mobile near-subsistence cultures today) have more intergenerational households and neighborhoods providing the heterarchical/holarchical connection/communication you suggest.   Or so my "just so" story relates.
> 
> The expansive breadth offered by global (near-instantaneous, global) communication/publication/relationship connections possibly makes up for that in the large, a major refactoring of problems and solutions.
> 
> I personally suffer from the lack of cross-cultural, cross-class experience of frequenting a neighborhood "watering hole" (pub/tavern/saloon) in the way Glen seems to enjoy (cultivate). My oldest regular drinking-philosophy buddy would be over 110 today (he died over 20 years ago from alcohol-related illness) and until about 5 years ago I had a small cohort of 30ish imbibing interlocutors.  I blame COVID, but the reasons are probably larger and more nefarious.


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