[FRIAM] The comparative thickness of the tropospheree

Frank Wimberly wimberly3 at gmail.com
Wed Apr 30 12:50:30 EDT 2025 

I lived through half of WW2.  Thanks for reminding me if my imminent
passing.  It is humbling.

Think of two of T's recent opinions:  that he should be King and that he
manages the US and the larger world.   Those suggest that his ultimate goal
is to be King of the World.


---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 10:25 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Yeah; I don’t think it’s right that we get dealt out of our own game.
>
> More complicated than that, and most of the people with the power to take
> big actions are also simplistic thinkers outside their One Thing (whatever
> it is).
>
> I think there are insights in the End Times Fascism article that Merle
> sent around, about what they _intend_ to do that underpins their choices.
> But those people are very simplistic in thinking about ecology, including
> the ecologies of the economy and the society.  They have read too much
> scifi.  They think they can oppress all of the people all of the time, to
> an arbitrary degree, and somehow it will just all keep going.  I think it
> is because they have lived in a world where it has all just kept going
> before now, but that was for reasons they didn’t care to learn about and so
> don’t understand or even recognize.  And none of us really “understand”
> them.  That’s why there just “are” good times and bad times, and our agency
> matters, but it is not clear we should think we control the causation.
>
> Ted Chiang also had part of it right, in that this isn’t a new gig.  It’s
> the same old corporate monopolist thinking re-termed.  But see previous
> point: the corporate monopolists are feasible as parasites on a structure
> that sort of hangs together, but left to their own preferences, they don’t
> support enough dimensions of it to make a long-term stable system.
>
> Jochen brushed against it a few days ago with his contrast of emotion and
> reason as motivators.  I was thinking about replying on the spot but
> decided what I had to say was too shallow, and so didn’t.  But I would have
> said, yeah, I don’t mind that old saw as a kind of ancient framing for
> immediate causes.  But I think “emotion as the driver” is actually true all
> the time everywhere.  Damasio (it’s so not-the-cool-kids to refer to
> Damasio, I know, but I am not one of the cool kids) adduces the picture of
> “mind” as deliberation presenting memory and imagination to the affect to
> be responded to with “toward” or “away” impulses.  To Jochen I would have
> opined that one of the important things that is different now is a matter
> of view about how the world works.  Anne Applebaum is good on this, though
> very hawkish and to be handled with caution.  I think she is right when she
> says that Putin’s point in doing _everything_ illegal in Ukraine is, above
> and beyond any aims in Ukraine, to assert that he is now beyond the reach
> of any law.  And the mob in the U.S. has an element of that.  Oppressive
> violence has mostly been outside their yard for 80 years now, and the
> people who lived through WWII are almost all dead.  So some people start to
> accumulate some aggressive power, and think “the world is full of fat
> sheep; we can just take everything”.  Of course that isn’t what has ever
> happened before, nor what will happen this time.  They will make mistakes,
> their corruption and incompetence will undermine the sources of their own
> power, and in those gaps (and anyway) various groups here and there will
> decide to fight back and some of them will be effective.  The world will
> re-arrange into a posture of everywhere-all-the-time aggression of any
> against any, so that the aggression starts to stalemate but the resources
> put into it, and the destruction caused by it, create a downward spiral of
> misery that engulfs everybody.  At some point it exhaust enough people that
> the argument “you know; we don’t _have_ to be doing this” gets some
> traction.  But in the U.S. right now, the mob is not starving and too full
> of themselves, and they all want to be Putin.  (trump the only actual
> Pinnochio; he wants to be a real dictator; the others want smaller or more
> local facsimiles of that.)  So I would say the diff is not emotion v.
> reason, but an altered and wrong perception of how the world works.
>
> I think Einstein had at least an intuition for the ecological complexity
> in his aphorism: I know not with what weapons the next war will be fought,
> but the one after that will be fought with sticks and stones.  He too, of
> course, could not have understood economy and society and ecology — none of
> us is close — but I think that intuition looks in the right direction when
> the people who believe themselves to be masters of what is going on have it
> all spiral out of their grasp, and get a lesson (which most of them will
> never learn from in any case) that the world is a lot bigger than they are.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Apr 30, 2025, at 11:25, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> thanks...  I saw the self-referential loop connection...  I've got
> Roanhorse's short story on my stack now and the details will probably help
> me get it (even) better.   Glad to know others are appreciating the likes
> of Roanhorse' work.   I appreciate your referencing this particular work of
> hers, I'm surprised I'd missed it since it was yet more broadly acclaimed
> than her novel.
>
> I do think there is a realistic possibility that we will somehow get fully
> dealt out of our own game in pretty short order..  I don't know the term
> for this, I read Bostrom's book on Superintelligence before the current AI
> craze exploded and can't remember if he had any terms more appropriate to
> this than mere "alignment".
> On 4/29/25 6:09 PM, Santafe wrote:
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> Toward the end of Glen’s post, he was commenting on how the LLMs that he
> (the post’s narrator) thought were participating in a scenario of his
> design end up displacing him by being the actual dictators of the scenario,
> and replace him not only as designer but as participant entirely.  So he
> goes to live under a bridge like the characters Suttree visits.
>
> Marcus’s clip about the prompts at the bottom of GTP’s Svejk-like service
> were in a similar spirit, +/- how close any of these resonances is to a
> particular story like AIE.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> On Apr 30, 2025, at 8:11, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
> <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> Eric -
>
> I have read Roanhorse's post-Apocalyptic *Trail of Lightning*... and
> tripped over the controversy over the subtle/complicated claims of Tribal
> identity and cultural appropriation.  I didn't read more of her work
> because after this novel she veered further into *fantasy* which is not my
> genre-of-choice so much.   The description of this short  story (very
> highly heralded) would seem to suggest significant irony regarding the
> criticism she drew for her subsequent novel?
>
> For the PostModernists (or adjacent) among us, I wonder if this whole
> tangle isn't very PoMo with her simultaneous inhabitation and critique of
> systems of representation?  Did Marcus response go full PoMo as well?
>
> All this aside, can you elaborate the relevance of why you injected this
> into this thread at this point?   Stylistic similarity to Glen's
> allegorical character study of obnoxious little green men as LLM? (or
> vice-versa?).   The little green men, very superficially reminded me of
> Spielberg's *Gremlins*?
>
> - Steve
> On 4/29/25 2:41 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Keeping with superdeterminism, I like am pleased to see suggested
> questions at the bottom of George.
> When it truly has omniscience, I will be able to simply click on the
> suggested question and I will be unnecessary.
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On
> Behalf Of *Santafe
> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 29, 2025 12:50 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The comparative thickness of the tropospheree
>
> Written in 2017?
>
> <image001.jpg>
> Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience by Rebecca Roanhorse
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.apexbookcompany.com%2fa%2fblog%2fapex-magazine%2fpost%2fwelcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience%3fsrsltid%3dAfmBOorMb_5eH-Npx7pQHM6zhsiVwcD0uFKkQdsfM2irMp0ut5cJefWc&c=E,1,HAKOPXGfJkuufKKT42w5FMFpVDi973f_-QKX--lc2XIQPv5IjKHwFWQzVDjqmVo31LYOmIjncjem6Q3x89Z00o7SyqLfxngiHtNUzG190g,,&typo=1>
> apexbookcompany.com
> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.apexbookcompany.com%2fa%2fblog%2fapex-magazine%2fpost%2fwelcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience%3fsrsltid%3dAfmBOorMb_5eH-Npx7pQHM6zhsiVwcD0uFKkQdsfM2irMp0ut5cJefWc&c=E,1,UMlbLo9kq6po1OhmGznX2h4YpUAj7WNaS00e1iJ7OtJ3iJdEeaOWYtrnsYuWvV0yhQyUYOBFurJiOfC5ZDaYIxtzleDtUboOszIaQ64FxZyzvWCP1Q,,&typo=1>
>
>
>
> On Apr 29, 2025, at 22:04, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> More like if little green creatures came into my kitchen to cook up some
> stinky fish ... and then leave the kitchen all messy for me to clean up ...
> the whole house stinking of fish for days ... until they show up again just
> when it stopped stinking. And as time goes on, they're going to show up
> more often ... not merely to stink up the house with fish, but to
> re-landscape the yard, paint the house ugly colors, paint garish murals on
> all the inside walls, swap out my truck for a "truck" from Elno, and
> replace the beer in my fridge with fscking *seltzer*.
>
> And they'll eventually get on my keyboard and start doing "work" for my
> clients ... work the clients didn't ask for and don't want ... until they
> convince them they do want it ... then the little green creatures will
> evict me and I'll go live under a bridge.
>
> On 4/28/25 10:14 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> I know.  If small green bipedal creatures landed on earth and started
> tending to yardwork would that also be a disappointment?
> They’ve failed to trim my tall hedge, so curse them!
> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Nicholas Thompson
> *Sent:* Monday, April 28, 2025 9:44 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] The comparative thickness of the tropospheree
> Hi  Marcus,
> I find that George's indulgence with bad metaphor very useful.
> I  also find amazing his ability to grasp the gist of what I am asking.  I
> have essential tremor and a bad keyboard and still George almost always
> gets the message.  Siri will take any opportunity to misunderstand.
> In this case, it was I, not George, who was cranking out the sloppy
> metaphors, trying to find a way to convey just how thin the atmosphere is.
> I was hoping Saran wrap thin, but that appears to be an order of magnitude
> too far.
> Am I reading this wrong? people often talk about LLM's as if they are
> /disappointed/ in them, as if there is something they SHOULD do that they
> aren't doing.  Do you have any idea what the disappointment might be?: What
> is the world hankering for that they don't provide?
> Nick
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 9:37 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com
> <marcus at snoutfarm.com%20%3cmailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>>> wrote:
>    I wonder if the George makers 1) realized that people have an affinity
> to iffy analogies and they should give the people what they want, or 2) the
> LLM was prone to generating them so they just made it a feature?
>    *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <friam-bounces at redfish.com%20%3cmailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>>> *On
> Behalf Of *Nicholas Thompson
>    *Sent:* Sunday, April 27, 2025 8:12 PM
>    *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam at redfish.com
> <friam at redfish.com%20%3cmailto:friam at redfish.com>>>
>    *Subject:* [FRIAM] The comparative thickness of the tropospheree
>    George and I were looking for intuition pumps to help a reader imagine
> how very thin the troposphere is.   Here is what we came up with:
>
> --
> ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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