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/ >
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