Glen -
I've not registered my work-life balance on the 5/7 day workweek for
decades (2008?) but fully respect that others do. In fact, when I was
in my LANL day-job, the bulk of my speculative energies were shifted
*to* the weekends, not away from them. As a self-employed person with
a conventionally employed partner, it makes sense to me that you might
well lock in to "unplugging on the weekend".
I think the metronome that is implied by 7 day cycles is a fairly good
"annealing schedule"? I used to track moon phase (very conveniently
broken into 4 7 day periods) more closely than I do now. I live very
close to the LANL-commute highway but in winter, I hardly notice the
traffic...
I do think that model-free governance is a desirable basin of attraction
(oops, I'm meta-modeling governance as a dynamical system?) and I think
it starts with model-free modeling? Does this deny the "Anticipatory"
in Rosen's Anticipatory Systems?
Does today's inauguration mark a saddle point in US governance? Does the
"deep state" present too much inertia (or friction) to actually fall
into a whole new basin of attraction? Is this just another tumble
through the phase space of a heteroclinic system? Is the "traditional"
two-party system a temporary bistable mode in a metastable system.
I think the move to fascism (closely coupled capitalistic industrial and
political systems?) suggests we might be about to escape the bistability
in place since roughly 1828? Or maybe the forcing effects of AI/tech
acceleration will overwhelm the dynamics of the traditional EconoPolitics?
- Steve
On 1/20/25 9:07 AM, glen wrote:
It seems obvious that y'all don't "unplug" on the weekends. Do I have
an antiquated conception of a healthy work-life balance? Anyway, the
idea that natural subsystems don't consume more than they give back is
just wrong ... maybe so ill-formed it's not even wrong. There's some
hint of the naturalness fallacy. There's some over-simplified model of
consumption and recycling. Etc. In every system (natural or not,
whatever "not natural" might mean), each ... uh ... "species" will
take whatever it can get, gorge itself to become fat and lazy,
reproduce until all they can see to the horizon are their babies. Etc.
What stops this from happening is some other species (or collection of
species).
And, for sure, animals can be complex enough such that what stops it
from happening sometimes are intra-individual patterns of
self-destruction (maybe e.g. autoimmune disorders). We could resort to
physics and talk about the interstitial spaces between species (at all
scales) is entropy; you can fill the space up with species like some
space-filling curve. But we don't need all that rigor. We can simply
say there's always some infinitesimal interstitial space that isn't
filled ... if only temporarily as species die and get replaced. If
there is something we might call "natural", it is that space-filling
impetus; the generative principle that all models are always wrong.
Sure, humans (and other large apes) might be a bit different in the
sense that our generality/universality allows for *more*
intra-individual, self-destructive tendencies. But we haven't yet seen
that play out. Up to now, our generality has allowed us to don and
doff overly-simplified models of the world that are just complex
enough to work, but not complex enough to be True. More complex, but
still overly simple, models try to account for "externalities", the
"consuming and giving back" y'all are referring to. But the map is not
the territory. Models are, by definition, not going to give back what
they consume.
What we need is model-free governance.
On 1/19/25 9:47 AM, steve smith wrote:
The idea that "natural ecosystems do not consume more than they give
back" is an example, however, of my maunderings on the "TANNSTAFFL"
paradox. Circular/toroidal economies do seem to be less wasteful (in
some sense) but Life exists situated in gradients and while it's
signature trick is to export entropy from it's immediate context, it
*exports* it, not *avoids* it? It seems as if this is all about
defining "systems boundaries" which of course may be a contradiction
in terms (or a tautology?).
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