Hm. So you're distinguishing between someone calling the actor "corrupt" versus the
actor, itself, thinking it's "corrupted". I agree that a closed actor proceeds with
(little or) no concern for its neighbors' opinions. But that doesn't mean it's immune to
corruption, even purely *social* corruption. If the environment is changed by one of the other
actors such that the constraints on the closed actor change in some way, then it can send the
closed actor into a self-reinforcing dynamic from which it can't escape. To boot, if the closed
actor has a memory and an anticipatory capability to model itself, then the interactions between
its past, present, and future self is similar to (if not identical with) social interactions, again
allowing patterns like corruption.
If, inside the closed system, the physics is (somehow) open, then the
anticipatory model may not be accurate enough to expect an eventual outcome.
It's model is falsified and whatever faith was placed in the model in times
prior, the system's been corrupted because it differs from the anticipation.
Of course, this is all "angel's on the head of a pin" because there are no
completely closed systems. Even if we accept closure in some dimension, openness is
required in other dimensions.
On 1/24/22 13:23, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Glen writes:
< That's not true at all. Closed systems do have disclosures in terms of the
behavior of their boundary. Granted, one may not have constitutive understanding of
what's happening inside the membrane. But one can profile the behavior of the
surface. And if that behavior changes over time, then it's capable of corruption.>
My point is that if one has enough resources, it simply doesn't matter whether
the constitutive understanding of what is happening inside the membrane is
achieved by outsiders, nor does it matter how outsiders evaluate the changes on
the surface. The closed system simply does not concern itself with such
evaluations as they are of no consequence. It can jump between sets of
principles for any number of reasons, including amusement. I am of course
thinking of Q! (Musk is not quite there.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)>
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen
<geprope...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* Monday, January 24, 2022 2:13 PM
*To:* friam@redfish.com <friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics
That's not true at all. Closed systems do have disclosures in terms of the
behavior of their boundary. Granted, one may not have constitutive
understanding of what's happening inside the membrane. But one can profile the
behavior of the surface. And if that behavior changes over time, then it's
capable of corruption.
On 1/24/22 13:07, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Closed systems don't have disclosures, so there's can't be this social notion
of corruption. I changed my mind today: I'll put new quarters into the
machine and see what happens.
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen
<geprope...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* Monday, January 24, 2022 1:26 PM
*To:* friam@redfish.com <friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics
Well, yeah, I see little evidence of such principle-free attractors too ...
because I'm conditioned to think all actors have prior principles and, when
they achieve power, they slide into corruption. I.e. I see no evidence that
there are no such thing as unprincipled actors. And that means, as an actor
drifts from one set of principles to another, that is corruption. The only way
out of that is to be vague about your principles (plausible deniability) or
make your principles *generic* enough to apply to multiple, parallaxed,
methods/behaviors ... or both.
Arguments that rely on generlized principles are everywhere, from biology
(survival, food, gene transfer, etc.) to psychology to politics. Even if many
of those turn out to actually be vagaries instead of generalizations, those are
the arguments ... and in the context of those arguments, power corrupts.
One of the advantages the Bayesians and postmodernists have is they admit up
front that their ephemerides will change. And as long as they're fairly clear
about how they'll *try* to update their systems in a transparent way, then it's
difficult to accuse them of corruption. Hence, secrecy and closed systems are
more readily corruptible than open ones.
On 1/24/22 11:56, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If what you mean is that there are consequences to indifference to the
environment and to each other, I don't see a lot of evidence of such
attractors. If there are no principles and we are merely beings that notice
attractors and naming them, there's not much point in ideology, religion, and
so on. Perhaps they were always delusions, and it was only the Musk's, etc.
that have found, through their wealth, the autonomy to come to grips with that.
Counterexamples like Putin come to mind, where it does seem to be a
reinforcement issue.
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen
<geprope...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* Monday, January 24, 2022 12:41 PM
*To:* friam@redfish.com <friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics
Scaled need for entropy: It's not clear to me why we'd believe smaller orgs need less
entropy. I agree they have smaller *stores* of "energy". And, to some extent, I
can see that some ways entropy manifests could dissipate those stores more than they
accumulate them. (Regarding meeting objectives as one kind of store ... e.g. using money
to achieve some objective is a - perhaps inefficient - transfer from one store to another
-- since Tom posted about SysDyn.) But I could easily argue that small orgs need *more*
entropy than large orgs.
Semantics of Corruption: Well, I agree that one can't be corrupt if one has no principles
from the start. This is, I think, a fundamental part of the arguments in favor of
open-ended evolution (and extending into metaphysics like parallel worlds). But even if
we gave up on the idea that there's an, in principle, set of values to start with, we can
still arrive at an attractor so strong that the system will never leave it. The argument
against Growth and the need for a "paradigm shift" is exactly such an argument.
We're so brainwashed by that paradigm, even those of us who see the engine's headlight at
the end of the tunnel can't think any differently. So ... how could I say it so you agree
with it? Power is self-reinforcing even when it becomes obsolete?
On 1/24/22 11:30, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Employees in a large organization are in one sense cells, but in another sense
parasites. (The largest parasite being the CEO.) Nevertheless, the
organization needs the diversity of these agents -- whatever one calls them --
to innovate and survive. Without the entropy, the organization is just a
machine, and the people can be replaced with simple robots. It is small
organizations, where there is less ability to take on debt and tolerate waste,
where shared values can help keep focus in a situation of limited resources.
I don't really buy your claim that power corrupts. One could just as well say
that being weak makes one rationalize their weakness. If there isn't a shared
value system, there is no reason to say that it has been corrupted. Perhaps
rather that once entropy is eliminated, then death will soon follow. Entropy
could still be high and inter-group violence common.
Marcus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen
<geprope...@gmail.com>
*Sent:* Monday, January 24, 2022 12:00 PM
*To:* friam@redfish.com <friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] health care logistics
At first, I struggled to see how this mapped to health care logistics. But on
2nd read, it clearly does.
The question that now dominates is a) shared values - even if it's overshoot and we know it's overshoot, do
the exploiters (and their rhetorical victims) care at all about the same things the ... "earthists"
or "humanists" or "biodiversisists" might care about? And b) nonlinear exploitation
power - orthogonal to shared values, is it possible the space/landscape has changed so radically that the
tiny produce we now exploit might have a huge impact going forward? (Or, maybe vice versa, every Joule we
squeeze out now has a much smaller impact than the Joules we extracted in the '60s?)
Those questions translate to health care in the form of motivation comparison
between, e.g., pharma employees. Some are in it for the science. Some are in it
for the money. Some are humanitarians. Etc. Do the executives share the values
of their employees? A little? A lot? The same with insurance undewriters,
financialists at hospitals and offices, etc.
Technically, it's completely reasonable to NOT implement bootstrappable systems, systems "written in"
themselves. We've talked a lot on this list about self-reference and if/where we use the words "tautology" or
"degeneracy". Even if we assume the shared value that earth is just the initial *seed* for life and that
seed will be a dried up husk when we diaspora into the galaxy, *when* will we have to solve the sustainability
question? Perhaps we should solve it for our 2nd planet? Or maybe we iterate slowly from our current non-bootstrapping
algorithm of "growth" toward an algorithm of sustainable?
The same argument goes for the Big Software argument proffered By Dr. Coon.
Sure open source packages developed by some kid in Iowa shouldn't found the
entire Java-based infrastructure. But, similarly, not every piece of crypto or
opsec needs to come from Israel or the NSA. Can we move between and within Big
Software and hacking? Can we move between Growth and Sustainability?
And more importantly, should we all agree on values, like some fascist state?
Or is there room for reasonable disagreement or meandering non-equilibria?
On 1/21/22 13:00, David Eric Smith wrote:
Some of the condensations in this thread, as causal interpretations of social
dynamics, are real gems. They are much more interesting as claims than the
endlessly recycled platitudes that seem to be all I am seeing in punditry.
I have wondered about sending the following to the list, but this is probably a
good thread in which to do it:
https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html> <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html>> <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html>>> <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html>>>> <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html <https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html
<https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html
<https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jeners/v14y2021i15p4508-d601755.html>>>>>
The claims are about important things. They say that the sustainability
rhetoric is so riddled with pie in the sky that it is not clear that an
analysis of what we can actually do would even support goal-setting along the
lines that are currently practiced. For certain apps built on the libraries
of sustainability, like the rhetoric of Green New Deal, the most-central
aspiration (not curtailing population and energy consumption, and just
replacing their sources) may actually be impossible in the sense that perpetual
motion machines are impossible. The other important factor is that we don’t
get the dodge “but in the long run”, because the claim is that in a relatively
short run we are all dead (or at least a great many of us, and the rest have
greatly reduced options for what to do about anything).
The important thing about the article (I know the author Rees) is that it tries
to back up its claims with analysis where possible. Some of the citations I
consider a bit dodgy, but others are probably sound. That does _not_ mean I am
claiming the conclusions of the paper are right. I haven’t done any shred of
the work it would take me to backfill that tree of citations and take
responsibility for deciding which of them I understand to be right.
It is also important (to me, for my own reasons) to say that I do not mean
_any_ blame for hypocrisy or bad faith toward a lot of the serious
sustainability people, or even the GND advocates. They work partly in a realm
of human persuasion, and they are trying not to let the perfect undermine doing
_something_ that might be good, or at least a little better. I don’t know how
many of the GND rhetoricians even have a detailed understanding of our current
situation, and among those (if there are any), how many would agree that it is
as bad as Rees asserts. There might be some, who would still do what
persuasion they can because they don’t have ideas for what might be more
helpful.
I should also add that there is a lot not covered in this particular paper,
where I have listened to claims of large unavoidable cascading failures.
Climate change leading to failure of Himalayan snowpacks that are the
headwaters of rivers that supply drinking water, sanitation, irrigation, and
hydropower to something like 1/4 of the world’s population, through
infrastructure that has been built over a century, and can’t simply be moved or
replaced. That stops working and people start moving, and then all the
stresses we already see around migration get amplified to much higher levels.
etc. Those, too, I have not tried to either evaluate or get sources I can
trust blindly. But if they are real, they belong in view as well.
Finally, I want to distance myself a bit from the affect and some overall
impression in this piece, or by these authors. I have no interest in whether
something is heterodox or any other kind of dox. The misanthropy that comes
through in their scornful delivery in places, but also their claim that there
are “graceful” exits with so little as 1-child policies, are to me departures
(understandable, but still departures) from the thing that makes the article
valuable, which is the substance of its claims about what exists and what can
be assembled into systems. I think one can keep the claims as important
questions and let the other stuff go its own ways.
Anyway, more than I know how to chew on,
Eric
On Jan 21, 2022, at 11:47 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>>>>>> wrote:
Well, except that this solipsism betrays a profound similarity between the
cheerful billionaire exploiter and the unfixable deplorables. It's almost
psychotically self-centered. I can imagine a slow, corrupting process where I
would if I could, as well. But that transformation would have to be complete
closure to prevent any light of empathy or sympathy from peeking in and popping
the boil.
I suppose people like Gates are more interesting than Musk, shambling about extruding
money according to an opaque template ... less transparently ideological than Musk's
profiteering. All philanthropy smacks of this sort of thing, though, Effective Altruism
being the worst of the bunch. Power corrupts. It's not a lesson the non-powerful can
actually learn, though. So it's a good thing to keep around a nicely scaled gradation of
the super rich and the destitute poor, with some walkability up and down the scale. That
way we can, as a collective, re-learn the lesson that power corrupts on a steady basis.
The assumption of equality prevents that lesson from being re-learned. The absurdity of
philanthropy and poverty are "collateral damage" in service of the latent
trait, spoken as a well-off white man born into a racist patriarchy, anyway.
On 1/21/22 08:31, Marcus Daniels wrote:
If anything, Musk is suspicious because he is not overtly apocalyptic. Some
criticisms of Don’t Look Up were along the lines that it fails to try to
persuade a change of course in favor of being condescending. That was the
whole point of the movie: Comic relief among the reasonable who must suffer
those who are just unfixable. Musk is amusing because he is cheerful going
about his billionaire life as it all comes crashing down. Doing what he can to
profit from insane energy policy of the last several generations and making
what contingency plans he can. I certainly would if I could.
On Jan 21, 2022, at 7:48 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>>>>>> wrote:
This video essay concludes with the same point:
The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk
https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y> <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y>>
<https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y>>> <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y
<https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y>>>> <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y
<https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y <https://youtu.be/5OtKEetGy2Y>>>>>
Perhaps a better title would have been "Muskian Futurism is Eschatological". But there's some deeper stuff
there in the middle of the video about the appeal of geezers like Sanders to "the youth", perhaps dovetailing
with our prior discussion of the [opt|pess]imism vs hope-despair plane. The mistake the Muskians seem to make is
conflating Musk's "apocalyptic help the rich survive the end times capitalism" with the good old fashioned
future orientation of classic science fiction ... and, perhaps, even the optimistic glossing of the present by authors
like Steven Pinker. While Pinker seems to be a hypnotized neoliberal cultist, his views still retain some sense of
"shared values" in the Enlightenment, where something, vague as it is, like equality founds the whole
perspective. Egalitarian utopias like Star Trek were, it seemed to me, standard fare for classic sci-fi. Gibson, Blade
Runner, et al turned that dark and brought us (perhaps correlated with the rise of Hell and
Brimstone Christianity) to Muskianism.
But this is all just from my nostalgizing as a dying white man. It would be
interesting to see a disinterested historian present the plectic arcs.
On 1/20/22 14:33, glen wrote:
Even if there are multiple paths to nearly equivalent optima, each unit (human,
hospital, corporation, state) has to share some values with the others in order
for the the optima to be commensurate.
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
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