Apocalypse

October 3, 2024 //
0

1. Revelation
2. Widespread destruction or disaster

Unsettled.

Not in the sense that I feel unsettled in my ‘beliefs’.

In the sense that the world is coming apart. We allow ourselves to be led further and further away from our brethren and, together, from the ‘hard’ reality.

The key concept here is ‘rabbit holes’, not ‘conspiracy theories’.

Each of those theories are nothing but a highly redacted version of the truth, draped in psychological gimmicks. Dangerous but survivable.

It’s the fact that once hooked, those so disposed become unable to see/perceive/accept that no truth is complete or ‘everlasting’. That we need to adapt our beliefs to the ever-changing reality.

On the other hand, it was us who have built this world. The one we currently inhabit.
We have inherited the world and fine-tuned it according to our own wishes. To fit our own desires.

We are also the ones who have to sleep in the bed of our own making.
We are the ones to continue the project.
Or take it apart…

We have arrived at the moment of reckoning.
Like each and every other generation before us.

After all, one cannot build something new before taking apart the old.
This is the only constant truth.

It hurts me to accept that I have been wrong. That my understanding was incomplete or inaccurate.
Yet I have to acknowledge that before starting to build a new, hopefully better, version of the truth.
And I cannot do this alone.

Going forward, I can ‘circle the wagons’, along other like minded people, and attempt to defend the old truth.
Or I can, accompanied by a ‘motley crew’, attempt to see behind the curtains.

To leave behind the ‘safety’ of the rabbit holes and see with our own, very diverse, eyes what lies behind the make-belief shrouds woven by the conspiracy theorists.

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

‘Semantics’

September 30, 2024 //
0

“Complementarity is a principle that illuminates
an “honest anthropology”
based on “the nature of the subjects themselves who are performing the act””
John Paul II

The manner in which people chose to speak about the subjects they consider to be of great importance sheds a lot of light.
On the speakers!

The notion of “complementarity” was coined by John Paul II in 1979-1981. He was the reigning pope at that time.
I must remind you he was born Karol Wojtyla and his native language was Polish.

Well, nobody bothered to tell him that, in English, “complementary” has a rather limited ‘range’.
“Combining in such a way as to enhance or emphasize the qualities of each other or another. “they had different but complementary skills””

The notion was, and continues to be, used as the reason for which women cannot be made priests or deacons in the Catholic Church. And to deny marriage to the homosexual couples.

I find this whole thing rather baffling.

Man and Woman do not complement each-other. Not always, anyway.
Man and Woman survive together.

If you don’t understand the difference, don’t bother reading any further.

Now, if we need a certain ‘interaction’ between Man and Woman for the species to survive, then certainly we need to condemn homosexuality, right?

Wrong!

We have a series of facts here.

For the species to survive, Man and Woman are equally needed.
For the species to survive, it isn’t necessary for all men and women to bear children.
Homosexuality and gender dysphoria are realities. Regardless of what each of us thinks about each of them.

Humankind has survived. For now, at least.
The three facts I mentioned above have existed along the entire human evolution. We’re still here.

Back to square one.

I can ‘understand’, for the sake of the argument, the notion that homosexuality should not be ‘encouraged’. Homosexual couples are not naturally ‘productive’ so they shouldn’t be sanctioned by the church…
But if both Man and Woman are so indispensable, in their respective ‘natural roles’, for the survival of the humankind and “equal”, according to mainstream Catholic theology, then how can be explained the fact that Woman always comes second? And cannot be ordained?

Why do we allow a rather obscure thinker from the IV-th century B.C. to influence our decisions!?!

“The polarity position, first articulated by Aristotle
(384–322 b.c.), rejected fundamental equality while defending the
natural superiority of man over woman.”

Prudence Allen, RSM: Man-Woman Complementarity, The Catholic Inspiration

Buckminster Fuller prodded us to ‘convert our high technology’ into something really useful.

To do that, we need to perform a ‘self-actualization’ act.
Maslow considered self-actualization to be a need. An actual need, on par with the rest of them. Basic resources, safety, a place in society, esteem…
Maslow was right. Even if somewhat ‘incomplete’.

We need to crawl through the first four stages of Maslow’s pyramid in order to reach the fifth level. Where we have the opportunity to perform a self-actualization.
The result is up to us! There’s no rule nor any guaranteed outcome.

Eat and you’ll live another day. Feel safe and you’ll sleep well. Be loved and you’ll find your place. Feel good about yourself and you’ll be more ‘useful’. For yourself and for those around you.
To become a ‘better person’ you have first to find out what ‘better’ means.
And we really need self-actualization. In order to fulfill the first four needs, we’ve changed the ‘environment’. The place we call ‘home’.
We’ve built the technologies mentioned by Fuller! To make life easier…

To accept Woman as Man’s equal, as a full fledged equal, needs accepting that Man has been borne by Woman.
Some believe that Man has been made by God, ‘In His Image’. I can accept that but I must point out that God made only one Man. Adam.
All the rest have been given birth. By Woman. And raised by the extended family. By Men and Women, together.

After all, what’s keeping us from following Buckminster Fuller’s advice?!?
And is there any real difference between not allowing a woman to be ordained and not allowing her to speak ‘publicly’?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, feminism, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Survival

September 27, 2024 //
0

Survival of the fittest?!?
No, only the demise of the unfit!
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is?

An end in itself…

For whom? For the concerned individual?
For the philosopher pondering the concept?
For the ideologue promoting the idea?

And who determines ‘the interests of the state’?!?

“Plato suggests, and all later collectivists followed him in this point, that if you cannot sacrifice your self-interest for the sake of the whole, then you are a selfish person, and morally depraved.”

Since there’s no better judge for ‘sustainability’ than mere history, let’s ‘look back’.

Whenever the powerful of the day considered that everything belonged to them, and that the collective wasn’t worth any consideration, that ‘arrangement’ soon ended in chaos. From Alexander the Great to Saddam Hussein. Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu…
Whenever the meek had accepted everything which came from ‘above’, very soon the ‘arrangement’ also ended in chaos. The Khmer Rouge experiment, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, communism being instated in the Eastern Europe by the Soviets…

As a rule of thumb, individuals can exist only as members of a collective.
None of us can birth itself (?!?)
None of us can educate itself ON ITS OWN. OK, one might teach itself to read. And then devour a whole library. But for that to happen, somebody else must have invented the letters first!
None of us can develop into a conscious human being without living with other human beings.

Furthermore, the same rule of thumb states that collectives which value their individuals, all of them, fare a lot better than the highly ‘hierarchical’ ones.
In this sense, Popper was right. ‘Individualistic’ societies – the collectives which ‘see individuals as ends to themselves’ – fare better than the collectives which allow, for a while, their temporal leaders to lure them into obedience.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Culture, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Why it matters:

September 16, 2024 //
0

Our children have to make do
with the consequences of what we’ve cooked up.

The happier amongst us live in states run as liberal democracies.
Most countries on this planet define themselves, constitutionally speaking, as being democratic.
And except for a very few, all the others behave in an apparently capitalistic manner. Some under a free(ish) market and the rest under a ‘mixed’ regime.

Since we’re speaking about the ‘current’ socioeconomic arrangement, which is in flux, we still don’t have a name for it.
We do have a name, though, for the previous one. Feudalism.
And for the one before that. Slavery.
Or, to use a modern term, all the previous regimes might be bundled together as ‘authoritarian-isms’. Regimes where authority flows from top to bottom and where feed back comes only in the form of revolution. Coup d’etat. Dynastic change… and other euphemisms.

History suggests, and those wise enough to notice implement this lesson where ever possible, that all authoritarian regimes crumble under their own weight.
While liberal democracies tend to survive for as long as they maintain their liberal nature. Their freedom!

What’s the difference between liberal and ‘illiberal’ democracies?

“It’s not who votes that counts
but who counts the votes”
Josef Stalin

Now, speaking seriously – as Stalin style ‘popular democracies’ have crumbled more than 30 years ago, following all other ’empires’ which no longer exist, there is a difference between liberal, a.k.a. functional, and make-belief democracy.
People maintaining a liberally democratic regime take their job seriously.
They speak up their minds. Hence the problems become known.
They listen what the others have to say. Hence the people are not only aware of problems as they arise but people also have the opportunity to understand the nature of those problems.
They respect each-other. Hence they treat all problems, affecting all the people, in a fair manner. Thus maintaining the natural stability of the social arrangement.

It goes without saying that in a liberal democracy everybody can vote and each vote is counted…

An illiberal democracy, on the other hand, is where things are more complicated.
The most illiberal situation is that where it doesn’t matter whether people vote or not. The results have been counted beforehand. The latest example being Venezuela 2024.
A more ‘subtle’ picture is offered by, for example, Hungary. As a matter of fact, it was Viktor Orban, the Hungarian “dictator“, the one who had coined the very notion of “illiberal democracy“. A revamped Constitutional Court, some Constitutional Amends, “emaciated checks and balances“, tight controls imposed over the media…

What about the ‘capitalist’ part of the current arrangement?
I’m afraid we waddle in confusion here.
We no longer make any distinction between ‘capitalism’ seen as ‘hoarding money as a sport’, and ‘using accumulated fiscal deposits as resources for building something new’. New and useful, of course…

‘Fiscal deposits’ – hoarded fiduciary money – have been around since coins have been minted. And IOU notes have been written. But capitalism, as Adam Smith understood it, wasn’t born yet at that time.

Under authoritarian regimes, having a lot of money does offer some leverage. But no immunity!
Consider what had happened to the Templar Monks when France’s Philip the IV-th coveted their money. Or the fate of the richest Chinese, after he had been perceived as being too cocky by the communist regime…
Whenever ‘capitalism’ takes place in liberally democratic settings, the market can be described as being ‘free’. Each economic agent – buyer or seller – decides in an autonomous manner. Takes their own advice and has to obey nobody’s orders. Has to obey the law but doesn’t have to abide to any whims.

Putting two and two together, for a society to remain functional in the longer run, the most importing thing is the ‘free market’.
The key word here being ‘free’. The meaning attached to the word and the understanding people have about the concept.
There is ‘free’ as in ‘free for all’ and free as in ‘freedom under the law’.
‘Free for all’, also known as ‘the law of the jungle’, inevitably ends up as a ‘dog eat dog’ situation while freedom under the law remains functional for as long as The People bring the law up to speed whenever needed.
The ‘market’ part is a lot simpler.
A ‘place’, an ‘open’ space, where both ideas and wares are exposed and exchanged. Amongst those who come to the market, to the agora, to solve their problems. To fulfill their needs.

As long as that ‘space’ remains free – as in ‘open’ for all – most people are able to make ends meet. The situation remains stable. For everybody to enjoy.
As soon as one ‘operator’ starts to ‘corner the market’ – using any of the already known ‘technologies’, the most popular being the old fashioned lie – the situation becomes potentially dangerous.

Whenever ‘The People’ have a sound understanding of what freedom really means, the bullies are ejected from the system. The ‘antitrust’ legislation is put to work and the budding ‘monopolies’ are dismantled before real harm was done.
If not… If von Papen hadn’t helped Hitler to rise into power and if Chamberlain hadn’t led the free world into submission…
Had we not threaded so lightly when Putin snatched Crimea back in 2014….

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2017/03/revisiting-the-2014-annexation-of-crimea?lang=en

“he said abortion bans early in pregnancy went too far,
suggesting Republican candidates needed to be moderate enough on the issue
to “win elections”.”

The point I’m trying to make here being that what candidates say matters.
That we really need to see through their words.
Whether they are interested in solving issues – and which of them – or they simply want to accede to power.

Doesn’t matter? As long as they keep their promises?

Do you really expect a lying bully to keep up with their words? To fulfill their promises?
Are you comfortable with ‘hiring’ a lying bully to mind the future of your children?

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Conscience. A history.

September 8, 2024 //
0

Do you really care about where your car was built?
No, but I am interested in how it works.
I need that in order to use it properly!

‘Ordinary matter’ is ‘lifeless’. Inanimate.
The rules which ‘shape’ the interactions between pieces/portions of the lifeless matter are the same ‘all over the place’. As far as we know, anyway.
The pieces/portions consisting of ordinary matter are more or less similar. There’s nothing to tell apart one proton from another. One rock from another one. One drop/bucket of water from the rest of the pond.

And there’s life.
‘Technically’, the living organisms are made from inanimate matter.
And, anyway, while ‘ordinariness’ is forever, life is temporary. Individual organisms have a limited lifespan, species evolve and life itself has appeared some time after the ordinary matter.
The rules which shape the interaction between the living organisms and their environment are species specific. Further more, individual sets of data set apart each individual belonging to each species. Which means that each species interacts in a specific manner with their environment while each individual organism does have its own particular ‘manner of doing things’. ‘Inside’ the species specific behavior but nevertheless particular.

Then there’s conscience.
Which conscience is nothing but a concept. Like everything else here.
Which concept, like all other concepts, has been coined by us. By us, conscient human beings.
The point being that we, conscient human beings, attempt to understand conscience by thinking about it.
Somewhat similar to looking inside an eye when attempting to understand sight. Or listening attempting to understand hearing.

Freud came up with the notion that studying what’s wrong, out of the ordinary, might help us to understand ‘normal’. But Freud was a psychologist…
Engineers prefer to ‘look from above’. To extricate themselves from the problem in order to see it ‘whole’. And I’m an engineer…

So, what is conscience?
An individual ability and a space/place.

There is life and there are individual living organisms.
Life goes on regardless of a number of individual organisms passing away. As long as one individual living organism continues to be alive, life itself will continue to exist.
Further more, regardless of how life might have appeared, presently it seems impossible to have life, the kind we have learned to appreciate, with only one species being alive. Let alone with only one living organism…

Same thing with conscience.
Humans become conscient through human interaction. Our ancestors had become conscient way before anybody was thinking about conscience. People who, in various circumstances, have had a limited interaction with other people struggle to develop a functional conscience. A full fledged one…

But humans are not exactly alone when it comes to being conscient.
Not exactly aware of their own selves, but still functionally ‘conscient’.

Being alive, individually speaking, means being able to:
Maintain the ‘structural identity of the organism’. As in keeping the inside in and the outside out.
Manage to breathe, eat, drink and excrete.
Life, as larger process, means successive generations of individual organisms transmitting the pertinent species specific genetic information to the next cohorts.
Maintaining the inside in, the outside out and managing to breathe, drink, eat and excrete means behaving in a conscious manner, albeit in a very limited sense.
This behavior being specific to ‘life’ and life being dependent on species specific information being passed from one generation to another means that human conscience – acceded by individual humans imbibing culturally specific information – is nothing but a particular example, maybe the most evolved one to date, of an otherwise widespread phenomenon. As a matter of fact, people who – for various reasons – are not ‘conscious’ – as in aware of themselves – continue to ‘breathe, eat, drink and excrete’. ‘Incompletely’ and only for a short while, if left unattended, but that’s another matter.

Furthermore, there is a ‘continuum of conscience’ starting from plants and culminating with the human awareness.
While plants and fungi manage to stay alive, animals display a widely nuanced repertoire of behavior. From the learning slime to our cousins, the apes.

A hamadryas baboon, Hagenbeck Tierpark, 2009

https://constructivist.info/1/3/091.maturana

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, Trust

Manifest Politic

September 5, 2024 //
0

Toată lumea e de acord:
„Așa nu se mai poate!”

Există doua variante.
Schimbarea din interior sau schimbarea din ‘exterior’.
Schimbare din exterior înseamnă revoluție.
Prefer schimbarea din interior.
Doar că e nevoie ca această schimbare din interior să fie operaționalizată de un grup mare de oameni. De o majoritate.

Unul câte unul, oamenii se pierd pe drum. Îi înghite ‘sistemul’.
Chestia asta funcționează în ambele direcții.
Dacă sistemul e funcțional, îi ejectează pe aberanți.
Dacă sistemul e pe drumul cel rău, îi marginalizează pe cei capabili. Nu-i aruncă de tot – sistemul are nevoie și de oameni care să facă ceea ce trebuie făcut – doar îi ține ‘la respect’. Până se ‘dau pe brazdă’ sau până pleacă singuri.

Suntem într-un fel de cerc vicios.
Foarte mulți dintre cetățeni, adică prea mulți, aleg să nu mai voteze. ‘N-ai cu cine, dom’le’!
Prea mulți dintre oamenii de calitate aleg să nu se implice în politică. ‘Nu vezi ce fel de oameni sunt scoși în față?’
Foarte mulți dintre ‘comunicatori’ crează în spațiul public impresia că ‘politica e murdară’.

Cum ieșim?
Cu toții!
Altfel ne mănâncă – unul câte unul, pe fiecare dintre noi – cei care nu înțeleg că, de fapt, își taie și lor craca de sub picioare.

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Categories 1989, alegerile pe care le facem, an electoral, colaborare, comunicare efectiva, constiinta de sine, Cu pielea la bataie, identitate colectiva, In limba Romana, Manipulare

Living in a Bubble

September 2, 2024 //
0

“The act of redistribution requires confiscation of the fruits of labor.
Marxism is a fantasy…..
a classless society with no private ownership of the means of production.
The mere suggestion invites revolution.
Instead, today’s neo Marxist will allow for private ownership
with a high tax rate and a strangling bureaucracy.”

Life, a natural phenomenon, fine-tunes the environment where it happens to take place.
Living organisms, according to our current understanding of how life works, need to eat. Also to drink and to breathe. And they need to excrete the ‘consequences’ of their ‘imperfect’ metabolism.
By ingesting, digesting and excreting portions of their environment, living organisms slowly transform the space where they ‘do their thing’.

Humans do all of the above. Some of it ‘on purpose’!
Human societies ingest huge amounts of raw materials and ‘excrete’ merchandise and waste.
Human societies ingest huge amounts of information and ‘excrete’ knowledge. As in ‘meaning’ and ‘ideology’.

Living organisms, humans included, evolve in the environment they have inherited from their ancestors. Regardless of the species each of them belongs to.
Human societies have to make do in the environment they have inherited. To do that, to ‘survive’, they need to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. In order to go ‘forward’, they need to identify a ‘meaning’. Which meaning is actually built according to the prevalent ideologies, at each given moment in time.

Living organisms do their thing according to species specific information they have inherited from the previous generation. Individual organisms do have some ‘lee-way’/autonomy but only a very small number of animals are able to actually learn something from their parents. And none, but humans, have the ability to teach.
Humans are under a double determination. As animals, they are still functioning according to their DNA. As cultural beings, they are also heavily influenced by the culture in which each of them had happened to be raised. By the culture to which each of them has the opportunity to contribute.

The practical manifestation of culture, civilization, makes it possible for individual humans to enjoy a far deeper autonomy than the rest of the animals. Not only that humans have a lot more to learn from their ancestors/brethren but they are also capable to ad, in real time, new information/meaning to the very culture to which they belong. And to ‘rebuild’/refine the civilization itself.

Darwinian evolution is a multidimensional thing. The individuals/species endowed with genetic information which no longer fits with the prevalent environmental conditions disappear. Only those capable to survive, those endowed with useful enough genetic information, manage to transmit their genetic information to the next generation.

Human evolution, a process which takes place on top of the Darwinian level, is a three dimensional thing.
We build culture and civilization. While searching for ‘meaning’.
We gather information and use it to build the world we live in. The freshly built civilization, our new ‘environment’, constitutes a new ‘playing ground’ where we gather some more information. Which we quickly use to ‘improve’ our ‘homes’.

Humans, like all other living organisms, are limited. By their material nature. By our making.
We live in a three dimensional space but we only perceive two and a half dimensions. Up/down and left/right are very clear. Depth, on the other hand… is a little bit trickier…

Same thing with the evolutionary dimensions.
At first, when transitioning from animals to conscious human beings, we were mainly concerned about ‘meaning’. Gathering food was ‘natural’ – we did it like our ape-like ancestors used to – and we didn’t need much protection against the elements. But our budding conscience was screaming for meaning.

What’s gonna happen to me? What is this whole thing? Who’s responsible for all this?

That was why our ancestors had invented totems, territorial gods and, eventually, religions.
As an answer to the three questions I’ve just formulated.

What we currently call culture and civilization have been built, by us, to ‘beef up’ ‘meaning’. As a manner of confirming, to us, that our already formulated conclusion was right.
Stonehenge was erected to prove that, year after year, the Sun was rising when it was supposed to.
And so on…

After reaching a certain level of material and psychological comfort – Abraham Maslow’s fourth level, self-esteem – we no longer need ‘confirmation’. We’re comfortable enough with what we have so we no longer need fresh meaning.
As a matter of fact, when Maslow was speaking about ‘self-actualization’ he was absolutely clear.
In this stage, the individual is free to chose.
Nota Bene, self actualization is only an opportunity. Not a ‘sentence’.
An open door to a vast space. Where each of us can do almost anything. Anything of what is possible…

Until the bubble bursts!

I grew up under communist rule.
None of us had any hope that our society could ‘revert’ to being ‘normal’.
The fall of the regime was a surprise for everybody.

I understand now, after 35 years of freedom, that the communist rule was doomed to failure.
Because of the ‘strangling bureaucracy’ which was preoccupied with their own survival.
And which blissfully ignored the hard reality.
Living in the bubble they have built for themselves, the strangling bureaucrats were unaware of the mistakes built one on top of the other as a consequence of the bureaucrats deciding according to their own ideology and without proper feed back from the real reality.
Looking farther down in human history, it is easy to see that this has been the fate of all ‘imperial arrangements’. From ‘political’ empires to ‘economic’ monopolies.

Alexander the Great, Genghis-Han, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler, Lenin-Stalin-Brezhnev…
East India Company, AT&T and now Boeing & Intel.

“Meanwhile, as we reported in a post earlier this week, Lip-Bu Tan, a high-profile board member of Intel, has now resigned, citing the board’s unwillingness to listen to his ideas to make Intel’s contract manufacturing business more customer-centric and to remove the inertia-inducing layers of bureaucracy, including an army of middle managers who thwart innovation at the company’s desktop and server divisions.”

And what about gambling?
“Using datasets showing deposits and withdrawals into and out of online sports betting platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as to and from equity brokerage accounts like Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Vanguard and Fidelity, Baker and his co-authors found that legalization has led to higher credit card balances, lower access to credit, a reduction in longer-term and higher-yield investments, as well as an increase in lottery play — with the effects particularly pronounced among financially constrained households.“
“Financially constrained” people have a tendency to see their future through a glass ceiling. They know it’s there but they have no idea how to reach it.

The “strangling bureaucracy” are busy – but without a real understanding of what they’re doing – casting layer upon layer of fresh glass-ceiling.

And we continue to live in our respective bubbles… built by us, according to our ideological specifications…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Miehkrud

August 30, 2024 //
0

Classic sociologist Emile Durkheim theorizes that crime exists
in all societies because it reaffirms moral boundaries and at times
facilitates needed social changes,
while former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan believes that
Durkheim’s views omit the possibility of too much crime, especially violent crime,
so that deviance as a serious social problem is not addressed.

“Normlessness and deregulation are poor translations of dereglement for several reasons. They did not enter into common English usage until the 1960s and certainly didn’t exist in Durkheim’s time. Dereglement is difficult to render in English. It carries with it in French the connotations of immorality and suffering, but is perhaps best translated as derangement. Anomie as dereglement implies a condition of madness or something akin to sin. This concides with the observation that over 20 words denoting sin were translated as anomia when the Bible was translated by St. Jerome and others.”

Durkheim was right after all.
‘Crime’ does fulfill a social function.
Some deviance, when well ‘managed’, can be useful. The US have somehow managed to transform a rather high level of deviance into ‘speed’. 250 years ago, the 13 American colonies were almost insignificant.
Today, the US is the most powerful/wealthy nation on Earth. While the Union continues to be the most ‘deviant’ among the civilized nations. On all conceivable metrics.

The key words here being, of course, “well managed”!
Maybe the time has come for the likes of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to go back to class. And to finish reading what Durkheim had to say about things.

The problem with the current political class, not only in America, being the fact that too many politicians ‘outsource’ responsibility!
It’s not history’s job to maintain accountability!

The politicians themselves need to provide enough reasonable alternatives for the ‘people’ to chose from!

Durkheim, read from both ends, told us that much.
We are the ones who need to maintain the balance.
For it’s us who will bear the consequences!

No matter who was the culprit, we’ll have to clear up the mess.
So we’d better stop the fan from spreading the mess around!

After all, shit happens. It’s a natural occurrence.
We have to eat so we need to relieve ourselves.
But how about doing this in a civilized manner?
And not rewarding those bragging about ‘inappropriate behavior‘….

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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, Mutual Respect, Rule of Law, skin in the game

Which? If any…

August 29, 2024 //
0

If you use your mind to study reality,
you won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind,
you’ll understand both.
Bodhidharma

According to “William Stein, a technology analyst at Truist Securities“, as of 28th of August 2024, “Tesla self-driving vehicles not ready for big rollout“.

Self driving vehicles rely on AI to navigate. The streets. To relate to, and to avoid, the other ‘objects’ which happen to be/pass by in the vicinity during the feat.
In a sense, each of the self driving vehicles behave as if they are alive(ish).

They take matter/energy from their ‘outside’ and transform it into ‘action’.
They attempt to ‘survive’ by reacting to what’s going on around them. They gather information through sensors and decide according to already learned algorithms. Which algorithms do include a certain lee-way.

So far, self driving vehicles – or, more exactly, those who promote them – haven’t performed convincingly enough to be accepted by ‘the general public’.

The ‘problem’ – one of them, anyway – resides in the manner we, the ‘general public’, understand ‘artificial intelligence’.

Which ‘artificial intelligence’ is a huge misnomer!

‘Intelligence’, the word, means at least two things.
An ‘ability’ shared by most human beings. Unevenly, but this is another subject.
An individual ability, used by each of the individuals to pursue their individual purposes. Each behaving according to their individually ‘accrued’ manners.
In this sense, individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’. Individual intelligence is relative to each ‘individual endowment’. To each individual’s ‘brain power’. The manner in which each individual tends to use their intelligence has been shaped by education and life experience. And each individual is able to choose, inside the ‘parameters’ I’ve already mentioned, what purposes to fulfill. To which ends to use their individual intelligence. And how to behave while attempting to fulfill those goals…

If individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’ then what about AI?

Let’s discuss first the difference between artificial and synthetic textile fibers.
We have natural – cotton, wool, silk – and man made fibers. Tencel, cupro, etc – collectively known as rayon – and nylon, Lycra, acrylic. Tencel is made of wooden cellulose. Cupro – a stand in for silk, used mainly for stockings, around 1900 in Germany – was made from ‘cotton waste’. Meanwhile, nylon, Lycra, acrylic and others are made from oil.
So, basically, both artificial and synthetic fibers are made by man. The artificial ones by slightly adjusting the nature of the original material while the synthetic ones are ‘achieved’ after the raw material – oil – has suffered a series of drastic transformations.

Same thing with ‘intelligence’.

As such, intelligence is an ‘animal’ ‘thing’. It’s the animals who do ‘intelligent’ stuff. We haven’t, yet, identified any intelligent actions performed by plants. Or fungi…
Each animal species has it’s own kind of intelligence. And each individual animal belonging to each of those species has its own level of that specific intelligence. But seldom in the animal world, with a few exceptions and in a rather limited manner, individual animal intelligence is honed through interaction between individuals.
Maybe this is why we, humans, consider some animals to be superior to others? Those who are able to learn? As they live? From us, as well as from other animals?

Compare animal intelligence with it’s human counterpart.
We learn during our entire life. We deposit the consequences of our intelligence – accrued knowledge – for later retrieval. By successive generations of intelligent agents willing to learn from past experience.
In fact, our collective intelligence is the consequence of a collective effort and all of our individual intelligences have been shaped through human interaction. Hence human intelligence, the collective as well as each of the individual ones, is ‘man made’. Already ‘artificial’.

But there’s more.
Life shapes its environment. The place it inhabits. Builds its ‘habitat’.
Yeast dramatically changes the dough, grasses transform soil into meadows and wolves fine tune the ecosystem in the Yellowstone park.

“Back in 1968, said Smith, when the elk population was about a third what it is today, the willow stands along streams were in bad shape. Today, with three times as many elk, (wolves had been reintroduced in 1995) willow stands are robust. Why? Because the predatory pressure from wolves keeps elk on the move, so they don’t have time to intensely browse the willow.“

Life, in general, shapes its environment.
In a natural way. ‘Unassumingly’ and without any intent, the mere interaction between life itself and the environment where living takes place shapes that very environment.

Humans have changed the nature of the interaction between life and the environment.
By assuming to know what they are doing and by having precise intentions about what they want to achieve, humans have started to build on purpose.

And the first thing we’ve built was an ontology.
While the rest of the living takes place directly in what we call “reality”, we live in the image we’ve built, for ourselves, about ‘reality’. While the rest of the living takes place directly in the hard reality – our ancestors had started their evolution in the very same place – we’ve gradually moved out to an ‘alternative’ reality. One – two, actually – of our own making.
We have the hard, but artificial, reality we have built for ourselves. Cities, agricultural fields, means of communication, pollution, global warming… and the image we have about ‘the Universe’.
The ‘stone built’ reality we inhabit and the culturally accrued understanding we have been distilling, since becoming conscious human beings, from the hard realities around us, for our own use.
Nolens volens, our hard reality has to be anchored in the real/natural hard reality. For it was made from the same ‘raw material’. Furthermore, our ontology has to make sense. Otherwise it would be contradicted – as it so often was – by the implacable real reality.

We have currently reached a very interesting moment in our evolution.
Until now, technology – the manner in which we put into practice the understanding we have about the world – was mostly about ‘outsourcing’ physical labour. A tool to extend our ‘practical intelligence’. Then we have invented the computer. A tool used to extent our ‘brain power’. Yet another lever…
At first, the computer apps were used to ‘mechanically’ amplify our individual intelligence. You know what I mean. Even now, if you have enough individuals with pen, paper, adequate knowledge and powerful enough communication means, you can calculate almost everything a computer can calculate.

Machine learning has changed all that.
Not only that we can’t replicate what’s going on inside the machine, we no longer fully understand the process.
‘Machine learning’ actually means that a machine develops its own understanding of something. Its own understanding/image regarding a piece of ‘reality’. Given the fact that machines learn/try to understand starting with/from a data base provided by humans… I have to conclude that the understanding/image developed by an AI machine regards a piece of an already artificial reality. A piece of a man made reality.

Meaning that the intelligence appeared/grown as the consequence of this process is a fully synthetic intelligence. And that the machine generated ‘ontology’ is twice removed from the hard reality.
Twice removed from the hard reality we try to understand by ‘training’ our machines at it…

For this is what we’re trying to do. Willingly or unwittingly…
We attempt to outsource thinking.
By training what we call ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence’ we attempt to build machines which would elaborate an alternative understanding of the world. Alternative from ours…
Will any of those alternatives fit?

Into the hard, real, reality?

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Transparency

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August 27, 2024 //
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Redistribution of wealth is an anti-marxist technology.

Taxing the super-wealthy and redistributing the proceeds towards education, health care and infrastructure makes it possible for the middle class to survive.

Otherwise, the marxist prophecy will come true.

“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.“

Read what Marx had to say about things if you want to avoid the marxist abomination.

Marx’s idea of revolutionary progress was based on the notion that property, hence wealth, must be abolished. Abolished, altogether, and not redistributed!

‘Redistribution of wealth’ means everybody pulling their own weight/contributing their fair share instead of ‘the the already rich taking the lion’s share’.

Redistribution of wealth means preserving the concept of property/wealth and maintaining the functionality of the capitalist free-market.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, democracy, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology
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