from:"uǝlƃ ↙↙↙"

While I don't think most reasonable people would disagree with the gist of 
these goals, I think there's plenty to disagree with regarding their ambiguity, 
how they're measured, the derived measures, and the interstitial spaces between 
the goals. Examining the lives of Palestinians, for example, might show that 
even *if*, on average, 2.3 Goal 3 is trending positive, it's the stability and 
variation in the measure that may hide the pessimistic detail. Or one might 
consider the decline in both the foundations of university education *and* the 
trend away from skilled labor ... or the decrepit state of infrastructure like 
bridges and waterways in the richest country on the planet ... or the unhinged 
reliance on public debt ... or the rarity of medical oxygen in Africa, Latin 
America, and India or that Renee's hospital beds are packed to the rim with 
mental health patients who have no place to go ... or the trends away from 
democracy in many governments ... etc. So even if you can cobble together some 
stats to argue there's upward monotonic progress in a large subset of these 
goals and their measures, the *thickness* and robustness of that statistical 
model will be suspect.

For a good counterpoint, it's useful to keep an eye on this:

The Doomsday Clock
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/

On 5/26/21 12:12 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> I just want to go back to Dave's question to define "progress". I think the 
> United Nations' list of Sustainable Development Goal targets and indicators 
> could be a starting point. From wikipedia: 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Development_Goal_targets_and_indicators
>  
> 
>  
> 
>   *
>   o 2.1Goal 1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere 
> 
>   o 2.2Goal 2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition 
> and promote sustainable agriculture 
> 
>   o 2.3Goal 3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all 
> ages 
> 
>   o 2.4Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and 
> promote lifelong learning opportunities for all 
> 
>   o 2.5Goal 5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls 
> 
>   o 2.6Goal 6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water 
> and sanitation for all 
> 
>   o 2.7Goal 7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and 
> modern energy for all 
> 
>   o 2.8Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic 
> growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all 
> 
>   o 2.9Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and 
> sustainable industrialization and foster innovation 
> 
>   o 2.10Goal 10. Reduce inequality within and among countries 
> 
>   o 2.11Goal 11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, 
> resilient and sustainable 
> 
>   o 2.12Goal 12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns 
>

Re: [FRIAM] Drones to detect wildfires

Yeah, OK. I agree. As with the FinTech payment plan band-aid I posted, our 
nudges can, at least, demonstrate some good faith attempts to "do good". But 
I'd like it better if we were more aggressive in our attempts ... aim high so 
that when you inevitably fail, you'll end up slightly higher than you would've 
if you'd aimed low. But I doubt focusing on profitability is the way to aim 
high. The space of profitable enterprises is *heavily* biased to the low 
hanging fruit. As Eric pointed out awhile back, the majority of high impact 
innovation is launched via non-profit efforts. In that perspective, profit 
limits high impact innovation by diverting resources to low impact innovation.

On 5/26/21 8:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> To clarify, by "remediate" I mean that some consequences are created (e.g. a 
> pandemic, harm to the biosphere), and then there is a problem to solve.
> Pfizer is a remediator.  
> Ford is a potential remediator with the F-150 lightening, solar panel 
> manufacturers are remediators, Impossible Burger is a remediator, etc.  Yes, 
> I recognize some will debate whether some of these are really remediators.   
> Nothing short of sitting around watching fungus grow will satisfy these 
> people. 

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Re: [FRIAM] Drones to detect wildfires

Nah, Dave's right in suggesting not only that *any* attempt to corral all the 
variables will, practically, amount to cherry-picking a subset of variables. 
(That feels almost like a mathematical theorem to me.) So we, literally, cannot 
remediate our worst impulses, much less make it profitable to do so. We *can*, 
I think, bias how we screw things up, though ... just nudge the trajectory 
slightly this way or that way. But even so, the objection stands that we don't 
know enough about the processes to predict the horizons toward which to bias. 
The only solution would be a constellation of high frequency, high dimensional, 
monitoring *adversarial* processes that run alongside each and every 
implementation plan.

On 5/26/21 8:07 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If the earth becomes unhabitable without changing how we live is that a 
> problem?
> 
> Maybe this “harm” is just what it takes to motivate action.   Like it took 
> COVID to bring mRNA vaccines to the forefront.  
> 
> A minority of people sitting around a campfire isn’t going to change the 
> global outcome, if the pattern above is how human cognition works on average. 
> 
> The procedure then is that 1) the majority really screw things up, and 2) 
> science comes to rescue to sort their mess out.   It only makes sense to 
> arrange that #2 be very profitable.   If anything, remediation of our worst 
> impulses isn’t profitable enough.
> 
>  
> 
> *From:* Friam  *On Behalf Of *Prof David West
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 26, 2021 7:36 AM
> *To:* friam@redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Drones to detect wildfires
> 
>  
> 
> The problem is the term " progress."
> 
>  
> 
> First, progress implies a goal state,as in progress towards what?
> 
>  
> 
> The second is teasing out a thread, a sequence of a single factor in a 
> complex data set, and deciding that an increase in the measured value of that 
> factor is what defines progress. [The term progress itself biases against 
> looking for a decrease in some measured factor.]
> 
>  
> 
> For example: We could look at human beings in the U.S. from 1776 to today as 
> a sequence of states. We could then look at the state and pick a variable 
> that changes  — increases  — in each successive state. If the variable we 
> pick is 'average lifespan' then we might be tempted to say that we have 
> progressed. But if we picked the variable 'average BMI index' then it becomes 
> problematic as to whether or not we can claim massive obesity is "progress."
> 
>  
> 
> A third issue is obtaining any kind of consensus as to which variables we 
> should pick to measure progress. Kilotons of nuclear arsenals? Petabytes of 
> video on Pornhub? Tons of food waste from restaurants per day? Average wheat 
> yield in Kansas per year? Number of pure electric cars per capita?
> 
>  
> 
> davew
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> On Wed, May 26, 2021, at 1:00 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> 
>  […]
> I have open questions:
> 
> 1. Admitting that progress hurt the environment in the past, is there 
> reason to believe that it's impossible to have future progress without 
> hurting the environment?
> 
> 2. Provided it's possible without hurting the environment, is there 
> anything wrong with human progress?   

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Re: [FRIAM] How swarms of bees go from preferring one target to preferring another

This reminds me of my (professional) biologist friends' reactions to my 
interest in DIY biology. It's a testament to Wade's objectivity that, here, he 
argues somewhat against the openness and speed of "natural" processes, whereas 
in his book (resoundingly "canceled" by the professionals) he argues for the 
openness and speed of "natural" processes. Still, his reasoning seems 
motivated, even if not as motivated as those who shout Conspiracy Theory.

But the larger regulation issue does intertwine nicely with the discussions 
we've been having on the goodness or badness of our biological trajectory. I'm 
as agnostic as I think Marcus is, though I'm willing to play Devil's Advocate 
for either more or less regulation, for or against our hyper-individualism, 
etc. But that's because I can't bring myself to believe in any of the -isms [⛧].

Where it is my job to care about the consequences of carelessness (e.g. 
small-scope privacy and security of data/code), I have to implement a broad 
spectrum smear of fine- and coarse-grained regulatory measures. So, for 
example, were the US to approach biohacking in the same way we approach nuclear 
proliferation, we'd have not only fine-grained regulation (like laws against 
cloning your children in your kitchen), but coarse-grained regulation (like 
sanctions for countries or labs that engage in cloning humans).

But as this gain-of-function in BSL[23] rated labs discussion indicates, is it 
even possible to regulate *all* the possible variables? At all possible scales? 
And, more importantly, if it's not, then we have to consider the higher order 
unintended consequences of *partial* regulation. Is inadequate regulation 
*worse* than no regulation in a controller-system where the controller exhibits 
less variation than the system being controlled?

What seems to me to be the ur-message, here, is our tendency to punish failure, 
whether it's about "canceling" some moron who misspeaks or accidentally 
allowing a pathogen out of your lab. Failure is ubiquitous and the most 
poignant path to new knowledge. Granted, our defense mechanisms (for both 
individual and nationalist machismo) are difficult to overcome. But if we could 
find ways to internalize failure and learn from it (again at any scale, any 
scope), it would be easier to smear the regulation across scales and scopes.

[⛧] It's not nihilism, but something more akin to "go with the flow", a 
fundamental inability to be conservative or progressive.

On 5/25/21 8:52 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> With your final sentence, I agree.  That is why I consider taking up the 
> problem of good regulatory design far preferable to killing outright the 
> effort to understand a class of questions.  I prefer it enough to be almost 
> categorical, though even that question can be complicated.
> 
> If I worked in this field, or were a higher-up in NIAID, I would know more 
> about how they have been trying to make these decisions, and what kinds of 
> cost/benefit/controllability framings they use.  These are not 
> unsophisticated people.  If I knew that, I could say more useful things about 
> directions for change.
> 
>> On May 26, 2021, at 12:46 PM, Marcus Daniels > > wrote:
>>
>> Yeah, I’ve noticed interesting stuff in SRA datasets.   I have a suspicion 
>> it is underutilized information, but I haven’t really investigated (the 
>> literature).   There are some CDC BAA’s out recently along these lines.  
>> Like high-performance metagenomics tools that can characterize all the 
>> pathogen variants in a sample.  
>>  
>> I suppose one could try to further regulate it, but some countries may 
>> actually sponsor this kind of research in their defense budgets.   And there 
>> are good reasons to understand the potential badness and diversity of viral 
>> / host (human) interactions.    And nature in its infinite spite can come up 
>> with this stuff itself, so it is good to be prepared.   Simply refusing to 
>> investigate or discuss scary topics is pointless.   
>>  
>> *From:* Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> 
>> *On Behalf Of *David Eric Smith
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, May 25, 2021 5:17 PM
>> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > >
>> *Subject:* [FRIAM] How swarms of bees go from preferring one target to 
>> preferring another
>>  
>> I assume you all have been following the following: (?)
>> https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> I had seen bits and pieces of the claims summarized above in other sources, 
>> but they were either technical work that I did not put time into trying to 
>> r

[FRIAM] More capitalist band-aids

2021-05-25 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Fintech takes aim at a $400B healthcare puzzle
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/fintech-takes-aim-at-a-400b-healthcare-puzzle

"Now Ben David, a partner with Israel-based Viola Ventures, is part of a crop 
of VC investors betting on a fintech solution that allows patients to pay for 
healthcare in small increments over months—or even years. That approach could 
make the financial burden of large medical bills more manageable, while helping 
doctors and hospitals increase their payment collection rates.

Ben David led Viola's incubation and a $5 million seed investment in PayZen, a 
startup that works with healthcare systems to offer patients zero-interest, 
fee-free payment plans akin to the buy-now, pay-later options provided by 
companies like Affirm and Klarna."

Ha! Yeah, let's *not* try to fix the problem. Instead, let's try to find ways 
to disrupt the system so that more problems arise and, meanwhile, profit off 
the disruption. We'll be heroes! And rich! Woohoo!

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[FRIAM] undefined semantics

2021-05-24 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Morpheus: A Vulnerability-Tolerant Secure Architecture Based on Ensembles of 
Moving Target Defenses with Churn
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3297858.3304037

"Abstract
Attacks often succeed by abusing the gap between program and machine-level 
semantics– for example, by locating a sensitive pointer, exploiting a bug to 
overwrite this sensitive data, and hijacking the victim program’s execution. In 
this work, we take secure system design on the offensive by continuously 
obfuscating information that attackers need but normal programs do not use, 
such as representation of code and pointers or the exact location of code and 
data.Our secure hardware architecture, Morpheus, combines two powerful 
protections: ensembles of moving target defenses and churn. Ensembles of moving 
target defenses randomize key program values (e.g., relocating pointers and 
encrypting code and pointers) which forces attackers to extensively probe the 
system prior to an attack. To ensure attack probes fail, the architecture 
incorporates churn to transparently re-randomize program values underneath the 
running system.With frequent churn, systems quickly become impractically 
difficult to penetrate.We demonstrate Morpheus through a RISC-V-based prototype 
designed to stop control-flow attacks. Each moving target defense in Morpheus 
uses hardware support to individually offer more randomness at a lower cost 
than previous techniques. When ensembled with churn, Morpheus defenses offer 
strong protection against control-flow attacks,with our security testing and 
performance studies revealing: i) high-coverage protection for a broad array of 
control-flow attacks, including protections for advanced attacks and an attack 
disclosed after the design of Morpheus, and ii) negligible performance impacts 
(1%) with churn periods up to50 ms, which our study estimates to be at least 
5000x faster than the time necessary to possibly penetrate Morpheus."

Two of the more interesting citations are:

Undefined behavior: what happened to my code?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2349896.2349905

Towards optimization-safe systems: analyzing the impact of undefined behavior
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2517349.2522728

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Re: [FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

Only about 100,000 times. >8^D The trick is whether or not you believe that 
sort of modeling is mechanistic or *merely* generative.

On 5/21/21 2:08 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Did I already post this here?
> 
> 
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228446085_Simulation_validation_using_Causal_Inference_Theory_with_morphological_constraints#fullTextFileContent
>  
> 
> ---

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[FRIAM] conversations with the wak!


This is an old article (2016). I wish I'd learned about it sooner. GScholar 
shows 37 citations I *should*, but probably won't, go through.

Changing Conspiracy Beliefs through Rationality and Ridiculing
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01525/full

"Conspiracy theory (CT) beliefs can be harmful. How is it possible to reduce 
them effectively? Three reduction strategies were tested in an online 
experiment using general and well-known CT beliefs on a comprehensive randomly 
assigned Hungarian sample (N = 813): exposing rational counter CT arguments, 
ridiculing those who hold CT beliefs, and empathizing with the targets of CT 
beliefs. Several relevant individual differences were measured. Rational and 
ridiculing arguments were effective in reducing CT, whereas empathizing with 
the targets of CTs had no effect. Individual differences played no role in CT 
reduction, but the perceived intelligence and competence of the individual who 
conveyed the CT belief-reduction information contributed to the success of the 
CT belief reduction. Rational arguments targeting the link between the object 
of belief and its characteristics appear to be an effective tool in fighting 
conspiracy theory beliefs."

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Re: [FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

Well, to be clear, it wasn't (I don't think) Russ' rhetoric but Weintrobe via 
McKibbon. Russ was simply pointing it out to us. 

But further, Weintrobe's argument seems to be (I haven't read the book, only a 
couple of reviews of it) a mechanistic explanation for how we in the northern 
hemisphere have become inured to externalities. She's proposing neoliberalism 
(and/or it's ancillary appendages) is causal. It's fine to disagree with that. 
But it's an entirely different thing to propose a fact-accumulating, fitted 
*hull* of a model like Epstein's as equivalent ... or even similar in kind.

Whether it's beyond any human's ability to *make* the assertion she made is 
obvious. It is within any human's ability to make such assertions. The question 
is, if we take her hypothesis seriously, how do we *test* it? What measures can 
we take that stand a chance of falsifying this causal role of neoliberalism?

And, I think, asking that question ... Can we test it? ... helps distinguish 
between purely descriptive and mechanistic models. If it's your claim that 
Weintrobe is making an untestable hypothesis, that's fine. But in order to lift 
up Epstein's just-so story to the same level as Weintrobe's, we'd have to also 
ask how can we test Epstein's (implicit) hypothesis? 

So, again, my answer is: No, Epstein's case is unhinged in some crucial 
variables, fragile to the inclusion of ignored facts. And regardless of whether 
Weintrobe's turns out false or too weak, because it's mechanistic, isn't 
fragile in that same way.

On 5/21/21 1:44 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> I agree with you. It's very challenging to make sense of the world, and the 
> human mind is amazing at building generative models of the world and those 
> models become the reality for the mind. With the models we can make 
> conclusions and explain how the world actually works. Now the clincher, to 
> make progress, the conclusions must have clear explanations that are 
> independant of the different layers that we used to generate the model to get 
> to the conclusion. 
> 
> I repeat, sure, use a complex layered approach to get to an understanding. 
> But after you have formed your conclusions, don't rely on the complex layered 
> model to explain the phenomena, distil it and get to a clear conclusion and 
> back it up with good explanations. Always try to verify it using evidence.
> 
> For example, in the narrative of Russ, it is assumed that they have knowledge 
> of the effects of Reagan and Thatcher on the world. I argue that it is 
> impossible to have any level of confidence in that. The world is a chaotic 
> complex system and we have some knowledge about what different actors (eg 
> Reagan and Thatcher) did and what consequently happened, but nobody has a 
> clue what the causal relationships were. It is simply impossible to know 
> that. Sure, one can speculate, but tag it as speculation. ABM generative 
> models show some promise in helping humans to understand such complex 
> systems, but it's early days and current ABM models are not even close to 
> answer questions like that.
> 
> I don't know the answers and I speculate it's beyond any human's capability 
> to make statements like */“The self-assured neoliberal imagination has 
> increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it 
> causes,”/* and have any level of confidence in this. Yes, it's a good process 
> to speculate that, but be real and admit that it's only speculation and/or 
> the result of a generative model in your mind and not rooted in the real 
> world. I tag it as "opinion" and respect the person to have that opinion. 

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Re: [FRIAM] Morphogenisis

I'm also wondering if there's a similar result for hypergraphs to the 
"parallelism theorem", which might state that any hypergraph can be perfectly 
"simulated" by an ordinary graph.

On 5/19/21 11:28 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> I can't help but wonder if the hypergraph is something like a *modal* graph, 
> or perhaps a *slice* through a graph. EricS' suggestion of concurrency raises 
> POSET flow. But if the edges and nodes are of different types, then a query 
> like "select a graph with {edges of type E1}" project the thing (whatever it 
> is) onto a (perhaps still hyper-)graph. A query like "select a graph with 
> {nodes of type N1}" produces a similar projection. But a combined query like 
> "select a graph with {e ∈ Ei} & {n ∈ Nj}" produces a graph.
> 
> On 5/9/21 12:58 PM, jon zingale wrote:
>> [1] And yes, I have many other questions there not applicable to this
>> thread as of yet. For instance, how is a hypergraph different than a
>> topology? Are hypergraphs also generalizations of topologies?
> 
> 

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Re: [FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

There's a layering in the relationship between fact and opinion. And what the 
postmodernists warned us about is that many of us are unable to unravel those 
layers. The idea that there exist absolute facts and (mere) interpretations of 
those facts can often be an indicator for the inability to unravel those 
layers. Sometimes, it's evidence of bad faith (e.g. when a fossil fuel 
profiteer funds or advocates for rhetoric on, say, the moral good of burning 
fossil fuels). Sometimes it's just an efficiency problem. It's more efficient, 
for the purposes of some limited scope episode, to take some assertion *as* 
fact in order to get on with assessing the suite of actions available. And 
sometimes it's simply that we're finite creatures and can't continually 
deconstruct everything to first principles all the time.

Here, in this context, Russ points to a well-unraveled attempt at a *cause* ... 
a mechanistic model. Alex Epstein and those who advocate variations on his 
story, like Pinker or Shermer, *truncate* the layering and take a particular 
*slice* of the "facts" abstracting away the rest of the inconvenient goo in 
which their skeleton is embedded. That *sampling* of the data can then be 
fleshed out by something like an interpolation, a shrink-wrap *hull* around the 
"facts" they chose. The model that obtains, the model that has been so 
*induced*, amounts to a descriptive model. No matter how well that model can 
fit the data, it's still an artificial fitting, quite distinct from a 
mechanistic model. Such fitted models have a huge host of practical fragility 
problems. Add a new triangulating fact and the whole model crumbles. Shift the 
distribution to a slightly different (in time or space) distribution of facts 
and the whole model crumbles. Etc.

So, sure, we can often agree on some assertions that we'll take as facts and 
iterate forward from there. But the ontological status of models thereby built 
will always be questionable. Only generative modeling helps us extract 
ourselves from that trap.

On 5/21/21 9:05 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> The world is the better for all not having the same views on everything. 
> 
> Surely there's a difference between facts and opinions? Your  "*/But it is 
> *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational view, any more than a stopped clock is 
> right twice per day./*" is your opinion, it's not a fact.
> 
> Interesting work by Jonathan Haidt on different moral values of libertarians 
> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0042366 
>  . 
>  It's good to be mindful in having a discussion with someone with different 
> moral values, you see the world with different biases.
> 
> *Take for example global warming.
> We might agree on the following facts:*
> The earth has been getting warmer and the sea levels have been rising since 
> the end of the mini ice age circa 1850
> CO2 contributes to the earth getting warmer
> Humans are causing CO2 to increase
> 
> *What we might disagree on is in the interpretation of the facts, for 
> example:*
> The use of RCP 8.5 as reason for alarm
> The accuracy of the models, for example the significant differences between 
> balloon measurements and model predictions
> The empirical evidence that the climate sensitivity is low enough that we 
> probably don't have reason for alarm about global warming
> All the benefits of fossil fuels for humanity
> The climategate evidence of deliberate dishonesty of prominent climate 
> scientists like Mickael Mann
> 
> The facts are not relative, it's absolute, so I don't subscribe to the  
> postmodernists' "relativism" for factual matters.
> 
> Our opinions are guided by our moral values. This is where it;s good to allow 
> others their place under the sun too. 

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Re: [FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

Interesting. We hear from righties like Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro all the 
time how postmodernists' "relativism" is diluting our culture and sending us on 
the path to Hell. Is this such a relativism? 

I'm reminded of the "all sides" fallacy or the snowflake idea that any 
arbitrary opinion of any arbitrary person is just as "valid" as any other 
opinion of any other person. I blame psychotherapy. >8^D Nobody's ever *wrong*. 
We all just have different points of view! And we all deserve trophies just for 
participating.

Last week the concept of a broken clock being "right" twice per day came up. 
This highlights, I think, the differences between a) validity vs. soundness, b) 
descriptive vs. mechanistic models, and c) correlation vs. causation. The 
broken clock is *not* accurate twice per day. The clock is THE canonical 
mechanism. A "stopped clock" is almost self-contradictory. If it's stopped, 
it's not a clock.

So, no. Sure, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels may be a valid view, in some 
unhinged yet logical fantasy. But it is *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational 
view, any more than a stopped clock is right twice per day. Had it been written 
in, say, 1950, I might be more generous.

On 5/20/21 10:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> But there are other valid views of the world too, for example The Moral Case 
> for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein.
> Neither is right or wrong, it simply represents different valid views. 

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[FRIAM] the covid endemic

2021-05-19 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Some good news, albeit pre-print:

Infection and vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody responses to the SARS-CoV-2 
B.1.617.1 variant
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.09.443299v1.full

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Re: [FRIAM] Morphogenisis

2021-05-19 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

I can't help but wonder if the hypergraph is something like a *modal* graph, or 
perhaps a *slice* through a graph. EricS' suggestion of concurrency raises 
POSET flow. But if the edges and nodes are of different types, then a query 
like "select a graph with {edges of type E1}" project the thing (whatever it 
is) onto a (perhaps still hyper-)graph. A query like "select a graph with 
{nodes of type N1}" produces a similar projection. But a combined query like 
"select a graph with {e ∈ Ei} & {n ∈ Nj}" produces a graph.

On 5/9/21 12:58 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> [1] And yes, I have many other questions there not applicable to this
> thread as of yet. For instance, how is a hypergraph different than a
> topology? Are hypergraphs also generalizations of topologies?

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[FRIAM] Schemeflood.com

2021-05-19 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Exploiting custom protocol handlers for cross-browser tracking in Tor, Safari, 
Chrome and Firefox
https://fingerprintjs.com/blog/external-protocol-flooding/
https://github.com/fingerprintjs/external-protocol-flooding

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-14 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Wow. That reads like good, hard science fiction. In my skim, the only thing I 
missed was an adversarial effort, positioning of white, black, and grey hatted 
*attacks*. There was plenty of waterfall-like structure for assessing 
vulnerability. But I missed the adversarial effort. Is it in there? If so, take 
pity on me and toss some clues my way.

On 5/13/21 11:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Finance 4.0—Towards a Socio-Ecological Finance System
> 
> A Participatory Framework to Promote Sustainability
> 
> Download link: 
> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71400-0.pdf 
> 
> 

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[FRIAM] dynamic networks (was: UBI)

2021-05-13 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

So at our (newly formed, but hopefully weekly) pub salon, a praying mantis 
enthusiast [⛧] made the claim that they don't learn. Knowing nothing about the 
beast, I just assumed he knew what he was talking about and assumed the praying 
mantis has no significant ontogenic development. But I still made the argument 
that a non-developmental reinforcement learning most likely takes place, if not 
within 1 of them, but at least between N of them. Looking it up later, I found 
this:

Aversive Learning in the Praying Mantis(Tenodera aridifolia), a Sit and Wait 
Predator
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5882761/pdf/10905_2018_Article_9665.pdf

And, more to the point of this thread:

The fishing mantid: predation on fish as a new adaptive strategy for praying 
mantids
https://jor.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=28067

Trying to parse how Levine's (or the other 2 "level reifiers") work might for 
reciprocity, I hit a brick wall w.r.t. *open* or deeply embedded participatory 
reciprocity. The concept of the trophic generalist is *beguiling*, I think 
dangerously so. I had trouble glossing over the averaging/weighting 
conveniences. But the registration of trophic generalist or specialist is 
something I can't get past. Both averaging/weighting and (resource vs. trophic) 
generalist/specialist seem to encourage us to think the network is definite. In 
order for us to trust the "levels" as derived measures, we'd need high 
frequency access to the species, their diets, hunting territories, body 
mass/size, etc. We'd have to RF tag an entire ecosystem. I've only been to a 
few ESA meetings. And nothing like that's ever crossed my eyeballs. But my 
ignorance knows no bounds.

Now, presumably animals don't change that much. So, whatever approximating 
derived measure we come up with for, say, your standard lake in Texas, would 
stay that way for awhile and be relatively trustworthy. But when trying to 
apply it to open reciprocity in, say, social media, parasocial relationships, 
work environments, PTA meetings, etc., it's difficult for me to believe the 
derivations would survive even the slightest perturbation, much less something 
like a pandemic.

If the little Turing Machines we call "praying mantids" can discover a taste 
for fish, surely even Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson can learn to feel 
"gratitude and selflessness" while reading Deleuze! Right?

[⛧] He's also a Fabian and a huge fan of HG Wells. When I mentioned my ongoing 
problem with whether or not we can separate the art from the artist (e.g. 
anarcho-syndicalism vs. Chomsky), I suggested HG Wells may be problematic to 
some. He was shocked and asked why. But I backed off because of the current 
Israeli-Palestinian escalation. We'd already almost come to blows about the 
free will of the praying mantis. 8^D

On 5/12/21 7:41 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> That's an excellent question. I've only had the chance to glance at those 3 
> cites. To decide how they could help propagate signals would take more 
> investment. It would be helpful if you could give a short blurb about why 
> each one came to mind as appropriate for reciprocity. I remember you 
> mentioned this or another Levine paper in the context of EricS' Beyond 
> Fitness paper. So, I'm wondering if you mention that one by Levine simply 
> because you're steeped in it?
> 
> Regardless, I'll try to do a closer skim of each over the next week or so.
> 
> On 5/11/21 2:21 PM, jon zingale wrote:
>> I have failed to follow this discussion very closely. That said, to what 
>> extent could frameworks like those that underlie spring rank 
>> <https://github.com/cdebacco/SpringRank> or gauge-theoretic price as 
>> curvature <https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.3043.pdf> give reasonable 
>> characterizations of reciprocity over circuits? To what extent does Levine's 
>> <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002251938090288X> 
>> (painfully straightforward) solving for eigenstates?
> 
> 

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-12 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

I think your (and Dave's and Pieter's) conceptions are too limited, too local. 
I don't know what explicit 3 types of reciprocity Dave might register. But I 
guess my thinking is polluted by generic influence, up- and down-regulation, 
correlative and causative. The structure of the network matters, but can't be 
definite [⛧] or fixed. Part of what (I think) Dave is arguing for is openness, 
where the agents are bathed in a complex of fields. 
Hardening/identifying/fixating-on a given *network* is already an abstraction 
too far.

If we view it that way, the shaman might flow in and out of unity. She might 
play the role of "hub" -- well connected node in the network -- one day; then 
her skin/boundary dissolves to play a more holistic role the next day. Any 
other role played by any other member of the tribe may do the same. Alice, the 
expert tanner, as an agent, gives instruction to a budding tanner one day. Then 
the next day she dissolves to be a canonical embodiment of all tanners.

The "network" is a discretized structure that evokes much of the 
hyper-reductionism exhibited in transactional markets. And that makes it 
inappropriate for some things, including paying it forward to Renee's kids. 
It's important to know that by taking Renee' to Mother's Day supper was *not* a 
gift to Renee'. It was a gift to Renee's *kids*, because they are unable to 
fulfill their obligations *today*. A temporal delay (maybe as hinted in the 
challenge to the no-arbitrage assumption) is crucial to the persistence of the 
mesh of reciprocity.

It's almost like I'm looking for a way to "collapse" the fields into a locally 
definite network *as* our lens moves around in the bath ... like while you're 
not looking at the other parts of the "network", it dissolves into goo. But 
when your focus is on some region of the goo, it registers into a network.

Capitalists are predators, with their eyes close together, able to tighten up 
the lens and *harden* the goo with severe and antisceptic focus on "That's what 
I WANT!!!" Perhaps post-capitalists will be less like pure predators and more 
modal, able to cooperate and compete dynamically.

[⛧] That definite/bound is fundamental to so many conceptions of computation 
argues for Dave's otherwise stated complaints about science being too myopic to 
capture so many other types of knowledge.

On 5/11/21 2:55 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> By taking Renee to dinner for Mother's Day, he not only acts as a proxy for 
> her own children in some sense, I would like to believe he did it *because* 
> Renee's motherhood has already been her gift to him... whatever benefits he 
> gets from a step-role, from Renee being a better partner having raised 
> children, etc. and that dinner is to honor and reciprocate for something he 
> has *already received* from her (see 1 above, "gratitude").
> 
> The spectral graph and circuit analysis Jon points to may well be 
> useful/important for measurement/analysis of how well a system is working.  
> Ideally the implementation is entirely local in the sense of agents on 
> networks of transactions.  

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-12 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

That's an excellent question. I've only had the chance to glance at those 3 
cites. To decide how they could help propagate signals would take more 
investment. It would be helpful if you could give a short blurb about why each 
one came to mind as appropriate for reciprocity. I remember you mentioned this 
or another Levine paper in the context of EricS' Beyond Fitness paper. So, I'm 
wondering if you mention that one by Levine simply because you're steeped in it?

Regardless, I'll try to do a closer skim of each over the next week or so.

On 5/11/21 2:21 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> I have failed to follow this discussion very closely. That said, to what 
> extent could frameworks like those that underlie spring rank 
>  or gauge-theoretic price as 
> curvature  give reasonable 
> characterizations of reciprocity over circuits? To what extent does Levine's 
>  
> (painfully straightforward) solving for eigenstates?

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[FRIAM] CS on CC

2021-05-11 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙


http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/05/because-i-am-bored.html

Ranting is an art.

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-11 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Well, as I tried to imply in my response about transitivity, reciprocity is 
*merely* a specific type of a more general thing. And though I doubt 
reciprocity can generate gratitude and selflessness, that general thing might.

That generalized reciprocity is implied in this article:

The miracle of the commons
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth

"The meeting, which lasted several hours, was disrupted by procedural 
inefficiencies, lively sideline arguments and, at one point, an accusation of 
petty corruption. But as the sun sank and the meeting came to a ragged end, I 
realised with surprise that I was exhilarated. During an exceptionally 
difficult year, these conservancy members had taken the trouble to travel to 
the meeting, consider the long-term future of other species, and recommit 
themselves to ensuring it."

The answer to your question lies in that *exhilaration*. I've had arguments 
with Dave, Jon, Nick, and EricC about bureaucracy and our Red-Light tendency to 
only notice badness. What's important is the embeddedness versus the 
abstraction. Reduction to money *abstracts* away participation, those 
connections replete in the societies Dave talks about. And that goes for 
defectors as well. It's the multi-dimensional embeddedness that makes it work, 
whether "it" is shame/shunning or gratitude/exhilaration.

So, how can we walk that tightrope between the efficacy/efficiency provided by 
*abstracting* tools like money versus the emotional good vibes of deep 
participation?

On 5/11/21 9:29 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Yet, even in a utopian society of people who all embodied and practiced the 
> principlesof balanced reciprocity, it would /still /be a challenge to 
> allocate goods, resources, and human effort in a way that satisfies everyone. 
> /
> /
> /It's unlikely that everyone would agree even with good-faith decisions made 
> by davew's ideal people about what balances what.//  How would such 
> disagreements be resolved?/
> /
> /
> It seems that the only solution might be to forgo even balanced reciprocity 
> and build a society of people who appreciate and are satisfied with whatever 
> they get. This would be a world based on gratitude and selflessness rather 
> than reciprocity. 

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-11 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

One of the reasons I have trouble dealing with the logical connective "tonk" is 
the idea that it becomes a reasonable connective in logics where you abandon 
transitivity. This same problem rears in conceptions of N-ary agreements. For 
example, if Alice gives Joe a gift, then Joe re-gifts that to Sally, then Sally 
gives Alice a different gift, is that reciprocity? If we scope our lens to just 
Alice-Joe, or Joe-Sally, or Sally-Alice, it looks like altruism. But if we 
scope it to all 3, then it's balanced in some sense.

What role does transitivity play in reciprocity? Is reciprocity fundamentally 
different from transactionalism?

Any *-ism that fails to incorporate scoping and loop size (and loop density - 
as in Marcus' criticism of Kirkley et al) is fragile to this criticism. Perhaps 
one of the reasons these higher dimensional, low absolute size, societies don't 
scale is an inability to settle on such loop-scoping operators? This is one of 
the reasons I tried to generalize from "too each according to needs, from each 
according to ability" to some sort of spectral analysis.

One of the reasons to pursue something like smart contracts is to use computers 
to follow, find, and collapse loops, which is what Kirkley et al's algorithm 
did, however fragile it may be. I took Renee' to supper yesterday and *named* 
the act as a proxy for a Mother's Day supper that might have been hosted by one 
of her kids, had they lived anywhere near here. Was that reciprocity? WHEN, if 
ever, will I see a reciprocal gesture from her kids? Or, perhaps, the 
reciprocity comes from some homunculus inside Renee' ... filling in for some 
homunculus inside me? Can we imagine that's a collapse of a 3 dimensional 
simplex into a 2-tuple, facilitated by the homunculi?

On 5/11/21 6:43 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> The web of "economic relations" among human beings extends far beyond those 
> that involve money. In some portions of that larger economy, the use of money 
> is insulting (at best), often proscribed, and definitely debasing.  Think 
> love, friendship, marriage, sex,   Would it be possible for a 
> multi-disciplinary team (psychologists, anthropologists, mystics/alchemists) 
> to study those realms of the 'economy' and devise a 'system' of roles and 
> relationships that could comprise a 'system' useful in other aspects of the 
> economy? Don't know.
> 
> Sometime ago I mentioned that anthropologists have identified three forms of 
> exchange used by humans/cultures/societies: general, balanced, and negative. 
> Market economies are, almost always, a subset of negative but can/have been 
> based on balanced reciprocity.
> 
> Even a utopian non-monetary economy that remains at its core an instance of 
> negative reciprocity will suffer from the exact same problems, and over time 
> to the exact same degree, as capitalism using abstract money. Money is a 
> technology, block chain is a technology and simply substituting one for the 
> other will resolve no fundamental issue.
> 
> Money *IS NOT* the root of all evil. Evil *IS *the root of all money. Evil 
> equals a combination of human individual venality and a system of negative 
> reciprocity.
> 
> Could it be otherwise? I doubt it. Examples of economies that are based on 
> general and balanced reciprocity, internally at least, do not seem to have 
> scaled above a ceiling of tens-to-hundreds of thousands of participants. 
> Could they grow larger, or be "nourished" in some fashion to enable scale? 
> Don't know, but might be worth exploring.
> 
> The biggest impediment to change is, in my opinion, the individual human 
> being.To illustrate: consider that almost every 'religion',  and certainly 
> every 'major religion'', (Islam, Buddhism, Vedism, Christianity), incorporate 
> and extol principles of general and balanced reciprocity and yet those 
> principles are absent from the the vast majority of practitioners of those 
> religions.
> 
> If every adherent of of those religions was a true believer who both embodied 
> and practiced those principles it probably would not matter if the world 
> economic system was capitalist, socialist, or other in format, because, in 
> substance, it would be grounded on general and balanced reciprocity.

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Re: [FRIAM] Smart-Contracts: was UBI

Yes! I'd love it if someone more knowledgeable would deign to chip in. As I 
understand it, smart contracts would do the banal computation showing how 
various agreements intertwine. So, if I've signed 5 NDAs with 5 different 
companies, 2 of which were founded by the same yahoo, 1 of which is a deep 
pocketed hydra like SAIC, 2 of which are mid-sized startups, all of which have 
different terms, what are the implications of signing a 6th with a new one? 
Trying to "calculate" all the different domain crossover, especially given that 
I'm only called to participate in a handful of domains, is a PITA. I feel the 
same way when navigating OpenSecrets to, e.g., track the funding of the Reason 
Foundation. >8^D And/or when Renee' sold her house in Oregon, it turned out 
there was a (obsolete, it turned out) clause about adding "out buildings", the 
threat being we may have had to tear down the shed I had built in order to sell 
the house without some government waiver. The whole thing was manually handled 
by the pair of real estate people (buyer's and Renee's), at a great expense of 
time, attention, and hand-wringing.

But I haven't followed the smart contracts area at all. So I don't even know if 
the current meaning of "smart contracts" means what (I thought) it used to. I 
know nothing about Cardano.

A similar *feeling* project was GitLaw, where laws were written with explicitly 
detailed, traceable revisioning. The open government project back in Portland 
was great in the sense that they would hold hack-a-thons to assemble data from 
various Portland municipal data sources into a kind of dash board for citizens, 
all open source, of course. I only went to one, though, for logistics problems.

On 5/10/21 1:36 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Glen (et al) -
> 
> I wonder if we (collectively) can discuss *how* smart contracts as being 
> built on top of blockchain implementations can be independent of "money" as 
> you properly (IMO) apprehend it (and it's limits).  
> 
> I've been studying the Cardano ecosystem (weakly by the standards of more 
> astutely technical of you here) *because* it is not conceived or designed to 
> (merely) be the vehicle for managing an aspiring cryptoCurrency Bubble as the 
> others seem to be (with smart-contracts an afterthought or inner-machinery 
> exposed for civilian use.  
> 
> As I understand it, cryptoCurrency (ADA in this case) is the "reference app" 
> of choice on Cardano for lots of reasons (explicitly) other than creating and 
> inflating a crypto¢bubble, though I can't articulate them well myself.   My 
> NREL colleague and I are exploring how the Ouroborous 
>  (protocol/blockchain machinery) of Cardano 
> and the Smart Contract language/environment (Plutus 
> ) 
> and other fairly *technical* things about collaborative problem-solving 
> environments. FWIW, his design/implementation environment of choice is 
> Haskell.  His teenage son taps the family $$ resources via a webapp which 
> implements a smart-contract that captures the family values around 
> "allowance" or more aptly "allowable expenses".    I share this only for 
> "flavor", not with an indication that it is anything more meaningful than a 
> novelty reflecting his investment in understanding-by-application.
> 
> However... I'm fundamentally *more* interested in how the same concepts (and 
> machinery ultimately) can help us move on past a post-capitalistic 
> socio-Economy toward something closer to it's close cousin Ecology which I 
> believe would have a much stronger flavor of reciprocity, gifting and 
> gratitude vs the nearly *required*??? U-O-Me nature of Money (conceived as 
> IOUs, but distorted to UOMes by ?greed?).
> 
> - Steve

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

On 5/10/21 12:10 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> 
> • civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of 
> cooperation's extent/ubiquity
> 
> Agree. That's one of the reasons Trump's norm-breaking was so 
> destructive.
> 
> • there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on 
> science
> 
> Agree there is no supernatural. I don't see that implies that "all 
> solutions have to be built on science." Most of our norms are not 
> science-based.

That's a reasonable point, as was Dave's w.r.t. belief in the supernatural 
being an encoding for norms. But norms aren't good enough. What's needed is 
more like what EricS invoked way back when in the context of economic mobility. 
We need an (maybe more than a few) error correcting mechanisms for when the 
norms are shown inadequate or obsolete. And it seems to me that scientific 
knowledge is the most stable kind of knowledge. Not "stable" in the sense of 
never changing, but stable in the sense of being *founded* ... on solid ground. 
A constitution is pretty good. But, again, our current problems with 
"originalism" and "living document"-ism show explicitly how that can fail.

> • innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in 
> principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and 
> complex as the natural world
> 
> Is this controversial?

Yes. On the one hand, there are credible arguments that the technology "stack", 
as it were, increases degrees of freedom versus decreases degrees of freedom. 
So, perhaps in the vein of von Hayek (and Pieter), any bureaucracy we put in 
place might be, necessarily, a limiting structure rather than a freeing 
structure. It would be arrogant to assume an engineered structure does a better 
job at some objective than a "natural" structure. This principle takes the 
stance that our structures can increase the degrees of freedom.

> • class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
> 
> Is this controversial?

Yes. There is a significant number of us who believe in meritocracy, where 
poverty can be an *indicator* for something you deserve ... even to the extent 
that some people seem to believe you might have done that in a *past life* or 
somesuch nonsense. This principle attempts a kind of "blank slate" or 
"universally capable" conception of initial conditions. The principle isn't 
well-worded, though, like the rest of these. It partly implies that, e.g., if 
you're born blind, the world and our society are complex enough so that you can 
be just as, if not more, productive and meritorious as a sighted person.

> • the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and 
> should be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small-world 
> networks, etc)  
> 
> Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that it's important to be 
> aware of advances in our understanding of complex organizations, I certainly 
> agree. 

Yeah, I don't like the wording of that, either. What I'm going for is a 
generalization of "to each according to need, from each according to ability", 
which I don't like at all. I'd like to formulate more like the definition of an 
"ecology", where the waste of one is the food for another ... or along the 
lines of the eukaryotic perspective on trees Roger forwarded.

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

OK. If you changed that to say that one of the functions social mechanisms like 
contracts happen to implement are money-facilitated transactions, then that 
would've been fine. But by proposing the 5 principles I did, I was attempting 
to answer your question of what a society might look like without (or with 
drastically fewer) money-facilitated exchanges. I know we can go a lot farther 
than we have, including relying more on co-ops and less on for-profits, 
including drastically increasing contractual tools (like the "plain language" 
movement), like adding ethical sections to standard artifacts like research 
publications, ensuring publicly funded research is freely accessible to the 
public that funded it, etc.

Can we push that to an ultimate limit where no money is ever used? IDK. Just 
because I can't yet envision its practical details doesn't mean we can't build 
it up from principles. I'd enjoy doing that and Dave's provided a good start by 
outlining prior cultures, even if those particular ones don't scale. Would we 
want to completely eliminate money? Probably not. I don't toss obsolete tools 
from my toolbox just in case they're not as obsolete as I thought. 

The question is less about eliminating money and more about relying on a 
reductive hyper-focus on money and being led by our noses into ad hoc responses 
like UBI. UBI is like tossing a hammer to someone who needs to change a tire. 
Wrong tool, dude. But thanks. Maybe I can trade it for a lug wrench?

On 5/10/21 11:35 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Sounds like we're not disagreeing too much. You wrote, "By saying the purpose 
> of contracts and laws is to spell out additional details of money-facilitated 
> transactions ... that that's the purpose of laws, etc. is putting the cart 
> before the horse. We've gone too far, put too much emphasis on the money and 
> not enough emphasis on the otherwise mediated relationships between various 
> parties. Money is a means, not an end, a tool, not the purpose to which a 
> tool is put."
> 
> If I said, "purpose," I should have said "function." 
> 
> Laws typically trump money: OSHA, etc. A company can't (honestly) buy its way 
> out of providing safe working conditions or selling contaminated food. I 
> think that's appropriate. It's not clear to me that I'm "putting the cart 
> before the horse"  as you say. 
> _
> _
> __-- Russ 
> 
> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:15 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> No, I'm not *quite* complaining about the reduction of money to a 
> quantifier. My objection extends further to the ability of any particular 
> money (e.g. wooden chits) to stand in, as a mediator, for what it helps 
> trade. Your espresso machine is not *merely* worth $1000. That is the 
> reduction I'm complaining about, a reduction that the accumulation of capital 
> relies on.
> 
> And, as I've qualified several times, mediating value stores *do* 
> facilitate transactions, perhaps even to an extent that we will *never*, 
> could never, eliminate it. As I've said since the beginning of the UBI 
> thread, I don't *know* if we can eliminate money. But it would be useful if 
> we could reintroduce more diversity into our media of exchange.
> 
> But, I object to your assertion that we have contracts, laws, etc. to 
> flesh out the details that money doesn't cover. That's not *why* we have 
> contracts, laws, etc. We have those things to support the larger 
> *foundations* of society. That they support money-facilitated transactions is 
> a symptom, not a cause.
> 
> Socially responsible mutual funds are one example of reintroducing 
> variables into the calculus by which we accumulate capital. Pressuring 
> Georgia-based corporations into making public statements about voter 
> suppression in Georgia is *another* example. Actually attending annual 
> shareholder meetings for publicly traded corporations, and expressing your 
> opinions about the company's activities is yet another way. Carbon offsets 
> are yet another example. Dave's mention of shunning is another. The examples 
> of introducing these variables are everywhere. That you don't acknowledge 
> them when they're pointed out is worriesome. You asked how we can trade 
> contracts without money. I provided an answer. You go on to cite a definition 
> of money. Weird. It's like a laser-focused attention on money to the 
> exclusion of all else.
> 
> Anyway. My only point, here, is to push against the tendency to do what 
> you've just done. By saying the purpose of contracts and laws is to spell out 
> additional details of money-faci

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

No, I'm not *quite* complaining about the reduction of money to a quantifier. 
My objection extends further to the ability of any particular money (e.g. 
wooden chits) to stand in, as a mediator, for what it helps trade. Your 
espresso machine is not *merely* worth $1000. That is the reduction I'm 
complaining about, a reduction that the accumulation of capital relies on.

And, as I've qualified several times, mediating value stores *do* facilitate 
transactions, perhaps even to an extent that we will *never*, could never, 
eliminate it. As I've said since the beginning of the UBI thread, I don't 
*know* if we can eliminate money. But it would be useful if we could 
reintroduce more diversity into our media of exchange.

But, I object to your assertion that we have contracts, laws, etc. to flesh out 
the details that money doesn't cover. That's not *why* we have contracts, laws, 
etc. We have those things to support the larger *foundations* of society. That 
they support money-facilitated transactions is a symptom, not a cause. 

Socially responsible mutual funds are one example of reintroducing variables 
into the calculus by which we accumulate capital. Pressuring Georgia-based 
corporations into making public statements about voter suppression in Georgia 
is *another* example. Actually attending annual shareholder meetings for 
publicly traded corporations, and expressing your opinions about the company's 
activities is yet another way. Carbon offsets are yet another example. Dave's 
mention of shunning is another. The examples of introducing these variables are 
everywhere. That you don't acknowledge them when they're pointed out is 
worriesome. You asked how we can trade contracts without money. I provided an 
answer. You go on to cite a definition of money. Weird. It's like a 
laser-focused attention on money to the exclusion of all else.

Anyway. My only point, here, is to push against the tendency to do what you've 
just done. By saying the purpose of contracts and laws is to spell out 
additional details of money-facilitated transactions ... that that's the 
purpose of laws, etc. is putting the cart before the horse. We've gone too far, 
put too much emphasis on the money and not enough emphasis on the otherwise 
mediated relationships between various parties. Money is a means, not an end, a 
tool, not the purpose to which a tool is put. And like any tool, it sits in a 
(large) equivalence class of particular tools, each of which can play the role. 
And which tool you choose biases what happens as a result. And if you don't 
deliberately *choose* the tool, just fall into using it by accident, then 
you'll be biased in a cryptic way.

If you still don't see how a complex society can get along with *fewer* 
money-facilitated transactions, then I'm tilting at windmills. How many fewer? 
I don't know. But some, at least. Asserting that because we can't eliminate it 
all doesn't argue that we can't eliminate most of it. The perfect is the enemy 
of the good.

On 5/10/21 10:34 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> As a medium of exchange, I think of money as something like a ruler. You can 
> use it to measure things, to compare the measurements, and to exchange things 
> for tokens of units of such measurements. Certainly, such a measurement is 
> not a complete description of the thing measured. Is claiming that a 
> measurement of a thing is equivalent to the thing itself what you are 
> referring to as reduction? I doubt that anyone would take that position. So 
> if you are arguing against that, I think it is something of a red herring. No 
> one seriously takes such a position.
> 
> Still, money is extraordinarily useful for facilitating exchanges that would 
> be very difficult to arrange otherwise. Of course, if it's a complicated 
> exchange one generally needs more than a ruler. That's why we have contracts, 
> laws, etc., to spell out the additional details. I certainly agree with you 
> about that. But I still don't see how a complex society can get along without 
> something like a money-like ruler as a way to establish basic comparisons as 
> at least the starting points of many if not most exchanges. 
> _
> _
> __-- Russ Abbott                                      
> Professor, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 9:21 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive conceptions 
> of money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity in the usage 
> of the term "money". But it should be clear that, like with languages, having 
> diverse types of money is less reductive than 1 type of money. I'd no more 
> want to rid th

[FRIAM] hypothetical savings in persuading the vaccine hesitant

Lives and Costs Saved by Expanding and Expediting COVID-19 Vaccination 
https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiab233/6267841

"Methods

We developed a computational model (transmission and age-stratified clinical 
and economics outcome model) representing the US population, COVID-19 
coronavirus spread (02/2020-12/2022), and vaccination to determine the impact 
of increasing coverage and expediting time to achieve coverage.
Results

When achieving a given vaccination coverage in 270 days (70% vaccine efficacy), 
every 1% increase in coverage can avert an average of 876,800 
(217,000–2,398,000) cases, varying with the number of people already 
vaccinated. For example, each 1% increase between 40%-50% coverage can prevent 
1.5million cases, 56,240 hospitalizations, 6,660 deaths, gain 77,590 QALYs, 
save $602.8 million in direct medical costs and $1.3 billion in productivity 
losses . Expediting to 180 days could save an additional 5.8 million cases, 
215,790 hospitalizations, 26,370 deaths, 206,520 QALYs, $3.5 billion in direct 
medical costs, and $4.3 billion in productivity losses."

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Using wooden chits *and* US dollars limits overly reductive conceptions of 
money. It's fine to play word games and point out ambiguity in the usage of the 
term "money". But it should be clear that, like with languages, having diverse 
types of money is less reductive than 1 type of money. I'd no more want to rid 
the world of Yen than I'd want to rid the world of, say, Farsi. Here lie many 
of our disagreements about hooking one nation's money to another nation's money.

Options are contracts. You can trade contracts without money. We do it all the 
time with, say, "quit claim" deeds. While the overwhelming majority of these 
trades use money, my claim is that money isn't *necessary*. Of course, it may 
be effective and efficient.

This conversation is about the accumulation of capital and UBI as a band-aid to 
help maintain a society under the tendency to accumulate capital. In that 
larger conversation, reduction to a singular, grand unified measure like a 
single money, like USD, washes away the variation in ways to store value. 
Storing value in Yuan, as opposed to Euros, actually means something (at least 
Putin thinks so). Similarly, storing value in a .25 acre plot of land with a 
fairly maintained building on it is different from storing value in gold. 
Although they can all be *thought of* as money, only a capitalist does so. The 
rest of us think, say, our espresso machine, is different fundamentally from 
our pickup truck.

On 5/10/21 8:22 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> As you say, your alternatives are "money writ large." So how does that 
> eliminate money? It just changes its form. 
> 
> I don't understand how options further your position. How do you trade them 
> without something like money?

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Yes, I agree it's difficult. And I'm not suggesting I have any knowledge or 
expertise. But the principles I listed were intended as a foundation. Given 
that foundation, it's difficult for me to imagine *not* having anything other 
than money in common with any other trader. That extreme case, where one party 
has *zero* commonality with another party prevents us from realizing that in 
the overwhelming majority of concrete situations, there's significant 
commonality between the parties.

So, that's not the problem. The problem is in the quantification of 
goods/skills being traded. While it's reasonable to, say, trade a pickup truck 
for an espresso machine, matching pickup trucks to espresso machines (rust 
spots vs pressure specs, etc.), the measure that is money allows us to quantify 
them. E.g. my pickup truck is worth 10 of your espresso machines. That's the 
technology we call money.

A significant other aspect is that money (at least fiat) can be trasnmitted at 
light speed, which allows me to trade 1 *virtual* pickup truck for 10 *virtual* 
espresso machines and TRUST that reciprocity exists. 

But both quantification and virtuality can be (are regularly) implemented in 
other dimensions. Money isn't absolutely, unquestionably necessary for them. 
(Though it's important that money may, in fact, be the best, most 
efficient/effective for some trades.)

And to go back to the extreme case, where the parties have 0 in common, 
literally *any* other dimension can be used as a 3rd, connective, material. 
Gold is a good one. Wooden chits might work. Marks on a wooden stick, maybe? 
8^D All these are "money", writ large. But we don't have to think of them that 
way. They are reservoirs of value. Even if I don't actually *want* 10 espresso 
machines, I might trade my truck for them because I know 10 locals who do want 
them. 5 of those 10 locals will give me, say, playstation DVDs. 2 of them will 
give me coffee they've roasted. Etc. The 10 espresso machines act as money.

To see this happening today, consider options trading. You're buying the 
*rights* to some thing/action, virtualized things/actions. You might also see 
it in contract clauses like "right of first refusal". Any mediating reservoir 
of value might play the role played by money.

On 5/10/21 7:35 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> I agree that those extra "dimensions," rules, norms, laws, etc. are very 
> important. Do you believe they could all exist without a framework of money 
> to refer to, e.g., for penalties (e.g., for when an agreement is not met), 
> awards (e.g., as incentives for improved or more timely performance), 
> contracts, arbitration decision, etc? I'm skeptical. It's widely agreed that 
> one of the primary values of money is to facilitate trade between 
> people/organizations that don't have specific items to exchange. E.g., person 
> A wants/needs something person B has "for sale" (whatever that means in a 
> non-money environment), but person B doesn't want/need anything person A has 
> "for sale," even though there are others who do want/need what person A is 
> "selling." Money makes such exchanges possible. How do you see it happening 
> without money?
> 
> More generally, how will society allocate human effort and physical resources 
> without money? (I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this earlier. It seems like 
> the core question. I know I mentioned it last time. I surprised myself by 
> finding it.) It doesn't seem feasible to me to have the kinds of 
> agreements/contracts you mentioned at the individual level for each 
> individual. It's still not clear to me how you see it all working.

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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

2021-05-07 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Yes, you're doing a good job of laying out why one's stance on some issue can 
be inertial, robust to perturbation. And it's useful to note that "trust" is a 
spectrum. I don't trust Reason, especially not Gillespie. But that doesn't mean 
I don't read it and, however, negligibly, fold what I read into my world view. 
Further, to be clear, I don't think anyone believes it's possible to persuade 
you out of trusting Reason/Gillespie. That's not the point of calling his 
assertion bullsh¡t. The purpose of calling bullsh¡t is to highlight biases.

If Gillespie had said things like "building on 30 years of hard work", "safety 
testing and other government mandates with *real but perhaps limited* utility 
in this case", etc., then nobody would be calling it bullsh¡t. Such hedging 
qualifiers are hallmarks of credibility. Gillespie, like many ideologues, tend 
to gloss over or avoid such hedges entirely. And, hence, those of us who look 
for them as hallmarks for credibility notice their absence and call bullsh¡t.

Even with hedging qualifiers like that, of course, we're all biased. So any 
opinion we render will be a smattering of facts and imaginary conjecture. But 
the careful among us will make some attempt to say which parts are 
well-accepted fact and which parts are our own imaginary unicorns.

To be clear about Gillespie and his playing fast and loose with the facts, this 
episode is worth noting:

https://newrepublic.com/article/80140/nick-gillespie-responds-and-his-point-i-have-no-idea

Again, my purpose is not to persuade you into changing your mind. My purpose is 
to help you understand why *I* (or anyone else) would call Gillespie's rhetoric 
bullsh¡t.

On 5/7/21 11:07 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Glen,
> 
> I like the letterstoayounglibrarian's 5W's: *Who?* Who wrote this? , *What? 
> *What kind of resource is this? , *When?* How up-to-date is the information? 
> , *Where? *Country of origin? , *Why? *What's the purpose of the source? 
> There are so many conspiracy theories out there and it's sometimes difficult 
> to distinguish BS from valid points and applying the 5W's will certainly help.
> 
> It's of course not the "all and everything". There are many other tools for 
> the job too for example asking whether there is a good explanation for a 
> point. Sometimes I'll accept a point even if I don't have a clue where it 
> comes from provided I can independently apply my mind and conclude that there 
> is a good explanation for what is asserted.
> 
> But I think we are digressing a bit. I'm still interested in whether the 
> statement  "/But of course the article puts up the mRNA vaccines as evidence 
> of how, because the agencies got out of the way (is implied), _BioNTech and 
> Moderna had vaccines in a few days_.  That is deliberate BS, and I doubt the 
> writer is such an idiot that he doesn’t know it."  /is a good argument 
> against Reason.com's article? Even if Reason.com fails on all the 5W's, at 
> least be fair and don't accuse them of something they did not say or implied.
> 
> For me that is important. You don't necessarily trust Reason.com as a good 
> source of information, that's not the point. I trust them and if evidence is 
> provided that they write "deliberate BS" then I'll change my mind. 

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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

2021-05-07 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

The article says directly, as you quote, "almost all of the time that it took 
to bring the vaccines to market was due to safety testing and other 
governmental mandates THAT COULD HAVE BEEN SPED UP WITHOUT ENDANGERING ANYONE." 
All caps are my emphasis.

Reason is an anti-government magazine associated with an anti-government 
organization, with mostly anti-government contributors. It's sole purpose is to 
cherry pick places, issues, and times where rhetoric against the government can 
be effective and persuasive. The rhetoric that none of the safety testing and 
none of the "other governmental mandates" matter at all, serve no purpose, are 
a complete waste of time and effort, is the BS. 

Now, you could argue that, if those words had been said by different people, in 
a different magazine, etc., then you couldn't claim it was *deliberate* BS. But 
coming from that source, with that funding, and that anti-government focus, one 
has to infer that it's deliberate. Were Gillespie pro-government, he would not 
be working for Reason.

And I say that as an avid reader of Reason, in particular, the Volokh 
Conspiracy: https://reason.com/volokh/ Again, the Five W's are ancient but 
still work. Understanding who Gillespie is, what Reason is, etc. is standard 
application of the Five W's: 
https://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com/2016/12/information-literacy-as-liberation.html

On 5/7/21 5:35 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Eric,
> 
> Oftentimes I trust somebody and/or organisations until there is evidence of 
> for example deliberate BS.  
> 
> I trust the organisation reason.com  and the narrator Nick 
> Gillespie. If there is evidence of deliberate BS, then I'm going to change to 
> not trusting them.  I don't alway agree with them, but I've never found 
> evidence of deliberate BS.
> 
> So please help me, I don't understand how you get from, I quote from the 
> transcript  (my underlining) :
> /"Safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines were produced far faster than any 
> expert expected. Yet almost all of the time that it took to bring the 
> vaccines to market was due to safety testing and other governmental mandates 
> that could have been sped up without endangering anyone. By January 13, 
> 2020—only two days after the Chinese researchers shared the genetic sequence 
> of the COVID-19 virus and before most Americans had heard of the disease—the 
> biotech company Moderna had devised the formula for its vaccine. BioNTech 
> launched its COVID-19 vaccine program in January and had _partnered with 
> Pfizer to manufacture it by mid-March of last year._ The first volunteer was 
> injected with Moderna's vaccine on March 16, 2020, yet it was only approved 
> by the FDA last December 17th, a week after Pfizer's vaccine met the agency's 
> approval. Had the agency been faster off the mark and used human-challenge 
> trials and other innovative testing techniques, the vaccines could have been 
> brought to
> market months earlier with no compromise in safety. That would have 
> conceivably saved hundreds of thousands of lives globally/./"/
> 
> to your comment? I quote from your email (my underlining):
> /But of course the article puts up the mRNA vaccines as evidence of how, 
> because the agencies got out of the way (is implied), _BioNTech and Moderna 
> had vaccines in a few days_.  That is deliberate BS, and I doubt the writer 
> is such an idiot that he doesn’t know it. 
> /
> /
> /
> Do I miss something? I don't read in the transcript that they said or implied 
> that BioNTech and Moderna had vaccines in a few days?  Maybe I'm such an 
> idiot that I don't see it?
> 
> Pieter
> 
> On Fri, 7 May 2021 at 00:38, David Eric Smith  > wrote:
> 
> Pieter, there is a good conversation to have here, but these bastards who 
> seem committed to doing _everything_ in bad faith irritate me to the point 
> where I spend time writing FRIAM posts instead of doing anything that will 
> _ever_ benefit anyone or accomplish anything.  
> 
> Yes, the mRNA platform is great, and should be a geme-changer.  Let’s 
> pursue that topic.  I’m fully with you on that.
> 
> And?
> 
> Oh, human challenge trials are an “innovative technique”.  They also 
> explicitly violate the Hippocratic oath.  Do we fail to do them for no 
> particular reason, or has someone thought about whether the Hippocratic oath 
> is an important consideration?  Dunno, h.  How would one decide?
> 
> Oh, public health people admonished Americans away from buying medical 
> masks early on.  Clearly just because those bureaucrats are so dead set 
> against efficiency.  We haven’t had that conversation ad nauseam on this 
> channel already?   We know why they did it; they are communicating to 
> Americans, which is like communicating to a troupe of Tasmanian devils 
> surrounding a roadkill.  They know their words have consequences, and they 
> feel the weight of that responsibility.  Then, somet

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

2021-05-07 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Well, FWIW, posts like this help me. I'm particularly susceptible to 
over-simplification, especially when it comes in an optimistic package. I need 
all 3 of realism, pessimism, and cynicism to keep my episodic forgetting in 
check. In particular, here, your remembering:

• the complicated calculus in trusting agencies under cronyism,
• all the social chaos (BLM, right-wing rallies, etc.) coinciding with 
COVID-19, and
• that each attempt at expression should be as authentic and error-correcting 
as possible

I need continual (not periodic, not discrete) reminders of that last one. 
Thanks.

On 5/6/21 3:38 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Pieter, there is a good conversation to have here, but these bastards who 
> seem committed to doing _everything_ in bad faith irritate me to the point 
> where I spend time writing FRIAM posts instead of doing anything that will 
> _ever_ benefit anyone or accomplish anything.  
> 
> Yes, the mRNA platform is great, and should be a geme-changer.  Let’s pursue 
> that topic.  I’m fully with you on that.
> 
> And?
> 
> Oh, human challenge trials are an “innovative technique”.  They also 
> explicitly violate the Hippocratic oath.  Do we fail to do them for no 
> particular reason, or has someone thought about whether the Hippocratic oath 
> is an important consideration?  Dunno, h.  How would one decide?
> 
> Oh, public health people admonished Americans away from buying medical masks 
> early on.  Clearly just because those bureaucrats are so dead set against 
> efficiency.  We haven’t had that conversation ad nauseam on this channel 
> already?   We know why they did it; they are communicating to Americans, 
> which is like communicating to a troupe of Tasmanian devils surrounding a 
> roadkill.  They know their words have consequences, and they feel the weight 
> of that responsibility.  Then, sometimes they also make mistakes.  Do we 
> criticize to correct, or exploit to destroy?
> 
> And, just by the bye of things not mentioned.  Let’s do a ballpark of what 
> the best-case scenario might have been with very proactive response and 
> people really trying to work together, like maybe some events in US society 
> in WWII.  Instead of having spent maybe USD5Tn by the end of the trump term, 
> with — what was it at the time — something like 450k people dead, I could 
> imagine that with a scaled-up S. Korea like response, the economic support 
> could have been maybe USD 1Tn to 1.5Tn to achieve a similar backstop, and 
> maybe 100k people dead.  That would have been _really hard_ to pull off, but 
> it is the kind of hard that good countries aspire to and sometimes achieve. 
> And the fact that _all_ that didn’t happen is clearly to the fault of some 
> public health people who didn’t know early how much transmission was fomites 
> and how much respiratory droplets?  Or trying to redirect masks to hospitals? 
>  The public health people were _against_ testing?  I believe that last claim 
> is
> flatly false, and overwhelmingly documented to be so.  There was nothing else 
> going on at the time?  Hmm, can’t recall.  Or since?  Or still, even worse?  
> How would one tell?  And Americans have a great record of really being 
> supportive of each other, and using great reasoning based on all the best 
> evidence, but were just thwarted again and again by the public health 
> officials and agencies?  
> 
> And the vaccines were developed so rapidly, this time only because the 
> agencies removed obstacles that they could have removed any time.  Well, for 
> the adenovirus vaccines (a largely established technology)  there is a claim 
> to that effect that can be made fairly.  But of course the article puts up 
> the mRNA vaccines as evidence of how, because the agencies got out of the way 
> (is implied), BioNTech and Moderna had vaccines in a few days.  That is 
> deliberate BS, and I doubt the writer is such an idiot that he doesn’t know 
> it.  (cf. the very useful article in NYT a couple of weeks ago on Kariko and 
> a little about the history of mRNA update and expression research.)  They 
> were done in a few days because of 30 years of work, much of it publicly 
> funded, that was waiting in the wings, and had been postponed earlier, and 
> only pushed through now, only because there hadn’t been a disease structure 
> that enabled the (non-human-challenge) trial at a price the companies were 
> willing to
> pay.  The disinformation on that simple matter of fact has been wonderfully 
> employed by those who will now ensure that we have an endemic, no longer just 
> a pandemic.
> 
> And now there is a fight on about suspending patent limits on vaccine 
> production to open to more operators, and the companies argue that it 
> wouldn’t make any difference because it is current capacity saturation that 
> limits us (Jon’s DW news articles yesterday, which the Canadians say is false 
> even now), deliberately bypassing the obvious intent of the suspension that 
> capacit

Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Heh, I'm not sure we're having the same discussion, here. Those 10 bullets 
aren't things *I* believe. Nor are they things Bacon (the 538 author) 
necessarily believes. They're simply the tenets as he sees them. And I tend to 
agree that those are the tenets.

What you seem to have done in your "larding" is state whether you agree or 
disagree with the tenet. That's like stating, even though I was reared 
Catholic, I don't believe in Transubstantiation. Who cares? The question isn't 
whether Nick agrees with any given tenet. The question is whether these are the 
tenets, generally.

And because I have zero faith you, Nick, will be able to "lard" your way 
through this discussion, I'm not going to "lard" with you. Instead, I'll choose 
one. And I'll use proper email quoting and quote depth so we can be clear who 
said what. >8^D

Who said there are no gender roles? Who are you questioning, here? Gender is 
relatively well-defined. Google is your friend. For a good, if long and too 
dramatic for your tastes, gender/pronoun explainer, look no further than the 
Queen, herself, ContraPoints: https://youtu.be/9bbINLWtMKI

On 5/6/21 1:05 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> On 5/6/21 12:23 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>>
>> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ideas-that-are-reshaping-the-democratic-party-and-america/
>>     6. People should be able to identify as whatever gender they prefer or 
>> not to identify by gender at all.
> 
> Really?  Are you sure.  If there are no gender roles, than what exactly does  
> gender mean?  There is surely some weird contradiction here.

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

No, that's not a principle of Wokeism. It may be a reactionary misunderstanding
of what's being said. (More likely it's an absurdist strawman, intended to help
you *avoid* hearing what's being said.) But if you listen closer, you might
actually hear what's being said. This article does a pretty good job of listing
the drivers:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ideas-that-are-reshaping-the-democratic-party-and-america/

"1. The United States has often not lived up to the ideals of its founders
or the notion that it is an “exceptional” nation that should be a model for
other countries. Because the U.S. has disempowered its Native and Black
populations and women throughout its history, America has never been a true or
full democracy.
2. White people, particularly white men, are especially advantaged in
American society (“white privilege”).
3. People of color in America suffer from not only individualized and overt
acts of racism (someone uses a racial slur, for example) but a broader
“systemic” and “institutional” racism.
4. Capitalism as currently practiced in America is deeply flawed, giving
way too much money and power to the wealthy. America’s economy should not be
set up in a way that allows people to accumulate billions of dollars in wealth.
5. Women suffer from systemic sexism.
6. People should be able to identify as whatever gender they prefer or not
to identify by gender at all.
7. The existence of a disparity — for example, Black, Latino or women being
underrepresented in a given profession or industry — is evidence of
discrimination, even if no overt acts of discrimination are visible.
8. Black Americans deserve reparations to make up for slavery and
post-slavery racial discrimination.
9. Law enforcement agencies, from local police departments to the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are designed to defend America’s status
quo as much as any public safety mission. When they treat people of color or
the poor badly, they are working as they are designed. So these agencies must
be defunded, abolished, disbanded or at least dramatically changed if the goal
is to improve their treatment of people of color and the poor.
10. Trump’s political rise was not an aberration or a surprise. Politicians
in both parties, particularly Republicans, have long used racialized language
to demean people of color — Trump was just more direct and crude about it. And
his messages resonated with a lot of Americans, particularly white people and
conservatives, because lots of Americans have negative views about people of
color, Black people in particular."

On 5/6/21 12:07 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> One of the first principles of Wokery is that I get to say what you call me,
> right?

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Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

For the Frank's among us, it's important to note that this paper is unrelated 
to hydroxychlorquine and its applicability to COVID-19. That's a troll baiting 
the reader into some rhetoric about postmodernism and the relationship between 
[in]formal methods.

But regardless of the trip down the rabbithole w.r.t. Popper and fallacious 
reasoning, I think he lands on the *correct* conclusion:

"A better approach may be a clear pathophysiological method where we would rely 
on basic science and look for mechanisms of the diseases and the mechanisms of 
action of the agents. The method that we need should be the method that 
corresponds more to the subject of the investigation that belongs somewhere in 
between pure science, medical science and social science. We need to know the 
mechanisms of actions, cause-effect relations, and the patients

in all their sophistication. And before all, we need morally fully justified 
methods, and we, certainly, need Reason."

I say *correct* because I *AM* a mechanistic simulant and I regularly, 
religiously, antagonize my phenomenal modeler colleagues (which is why I love 
the Gisin and 't Hooft points about the ontological status of real numbers, 
even if I don't really grok it).

As for dialogue with Pavlovic on a forum like FriAM, it would be fantastic to 
have him here. In particular, questioning his questionable assertions on 
[in]formal logics would be a lot of fun if he's got a thick skin. And it's 
always helpful to get more criticism of clinical trial methodology. It's too 
easy to strawman work being done authentically and earnestly. It's quite 
another thing to be constructive and design better trials.

So there, Nick. Is that what you're looking for? Or are you actually concerned 
with some super-specialized medical advice some few doctors might give their 
patients?

On 5/6/21 11:40 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Yes, of course, and, thank you.  I wait with 'bated breath.  
> 
> n
> 
> Nick Thompson
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Thursday, May 6, 2021 11:49 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc
> 
> Not hearing back is not the equivalent of being ignored. I got as far as the 
> 1st few paragraphs, then checking Pavlovic's credentials. I decided I'd read 
> it. Then completely forgot about it. We have to check our American 
> tendencies. "I want it all! I want it NOW!" 8^D I'll respond after I've read 
> it, *if* and only if I have something that might be interesting to say.
> 
> On 5/6/21 10:32 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Dear Phellow Phriammers,
>>
>>  
>>
>> I have noted that most of what I have written here of late has been 
>> ignored, and that’s ok, actually.  Usually, it is the possibility that you 
>> MIGHT read what I write that keeps me writing and, behaviorist to the last, 
>> writing is what I need to do in order to think.
>>
>>  
>>
>> But this situation is different.  I really don’t know what to think about 
>> Pavlovic’s  paper.  
>> There may have been some trouble with the cloud version, so I have attached 
>> it to this message.
>>
>>  
>>
>> So, this is a case where I really need some help.  I realize that you 
>> are all engaged in this excellent correspondence about UBI, which has 
>> revealed all sorts of “-ists” that I never thought were alive and well in 
>> the world, let alone in this group.  I would not interfere with that for a 
>> second.  But, could a few of you take a look at his paper 
>>   (very short, a 
>> commentary, actually).  I think he is actually a candidate for this group.  
>> He is an MD, Phd, anaesthesiologist, retired in Paris, who has participated 
>> in hundreds of scientific papers,  who is passionate ( I worry, perhaps 
>> sometimes a bit too passionate) about dozens of different things and 
>> suspicious of everything. He wants, for instance, to dig a gigantic tunnel 
>> to bring large ships directly from the danube to the Mediterranean.
>>
>>  
>>
>> I, of course, live in a bubble, but I don’t like to have that fact 
>> thrust in my face as powerfully as when he reveals to me that the two 
>> HAAA=VUD papers denouncing Chloquoroquine were retracted a year ago, and I 
>> never found out.  I can’t get any sense of whether there has been any 
>> attempt to revive them or to redo the original clinical study that suggested 
>> HCQ’s efficacy against CoVid.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Any little bit of help you could give me would be great.
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>  
>>
>> Nick Thompson
>>
>> thompnicks...@gmail.com 
>>
>> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
>> 
>>
>>  
>>
>> *From:* thompnicks...@gmail.com 
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 5, 2021 9:48 PM
>> *To:* 'The F

Re: [FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

Not hearing back is not the equivalent of being ignored. I got as far as the 
1st few paragraphs, then checking Pavlovic's credentials. I decided I'd read 
it. Then completely forgot about it. We have to check our American tendencies. 
"I want it all! I want it NOW!" 8^D I'll respond after I've read it, *if* and 
only if I have something that might be interesting to say.

On 5/6/21 10:32 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Dear Phellow Phriammers,
> 
>  
> 
> I have noted that most of what I have written here of late has been ignored, 
> and that’s ok, actually.  Usually, it is the possibility that you MIGHT read 
> what I write that keeps me writing and, behaviorist to the last, writing is 
> what I need to do in order to think. 
> 
>  
> 
> But this situation is different.  I really don’t know what to think about 
> Pavlovic’s  paper.  
> There may have been some trouble with the cloud version, so I have attached 
> it to this message.
> 
>  
> 
> So, this is a case where I really need some help.  I realize that you are all 
> engaged in this excellent correspondence about UBI, which has revealed all 
> sorts of “-ists” that I never thought were alive and well in the world, let 
> alone in this group.  I would not interfere with that for a second.  But, 
> could a few of you take a look at his paper 
>   (very short, a 
> commentary, actually).  I think he is actually a candidate for this group.  
> He is an MD, Phd, anaesthesiologist, retired in Paris, who has participated 
> in hundreds of scientific papers,  who is passionate ( I worry, perhaps 
> sometimes a bit too passionate) about dozens of different things and 
> suspicious of everything. He wants, for instance, to dig a gigantic tunnel to 
> bring large ships directly from the danube to the Mediterranean.   
> 
>  
> 
> I, of course, live in a bubble, but I don’t like to have that fact thrust in 
> my face as powerfully as when he reveals to me that the two HAAA=VUD papers 
> denouncing Chloquoroquine were retracted a year ago, and I never found out.  
> I can’t get any sense of whether there has been any attempt to revive them or 
> to redo the original clinical study that suggested HCQ’s efficacy against 
> CoVid.   
> 
>  
> 
> Any little bit of help you could give me would be great.
> 
>  
> 
> Nick
> 
>  
> 
> Nick Thompson
> 
> thompnicks...@gmail.com 
> 
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> *From:* thompnicks...@gmail.com 
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 5, 2021 9:48 PM
> *To:* 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' 
> *Cc:* 'Prof David West' 
> *Subject:* Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc
> 
>  
> 
> Dear Colleagues,
> 
>  
> 
> I attach a paper  
> written by an internet acquaintance I made some years back, Dragan Pavlovic.  
> I am sending it along for two reasons.  First, it reveals (to me, at least) 
> that the two negative studies on Hydroxychloroquine use in SARS-CoVid-19 
> treatment were based on unverified data and were withdrawn by their authors 
> almost immediately.  (Have the rest of you known this for the last year and 
> not told me?  I cannot believe, after we pilloried poor Dave for advocating 
> for it, that he has not gloated about it. ) Second, Pavlovic raises the 
> intension/extension distinction in the context of the interpretation of 
> scientific results and also questions Randomized Control Trials as the "Gold 
> Standard" for discovery. Thus, I think he is a kindred spirit, being a bit of 
> a grumpy contrarian like many of us here.  I have promised to forward any 
> comments you make to him, so be polite but speak truth.   


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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

This larger issue of problematic sources for good ideas came up again the other 
night when someone chastised me for owning a Ford, because, you know, he 
donated to Hitler's campaign. It was the opposite of my argument that attacking 
a brand isn't attacking the person. In his case, he was attacking Ford the 
person, not Ford the brand. I feel the same way about HP Lovecraft, I guess. 
But it's even more complicated because Lovecraft's "horrors" were a direct 
description of his prejudices. Can we separate anarcho-syndicalism from 
Chomsky? I'd like to think we can.

But the [im]practicality of anarcho-synicalism reared its head (in me) the 
other day in response to a union lobbyist who represents prison guards. Our 
local brewery is a member of the Local 66, a sheet metal union. They had a May 
Day celebration. That's fantastic. But how can we draw the line between 
syndicates that support the abuse of an oppressed caste (prisoners) and 
syndicates that support the freedoms (making enough money to live where they 
work, taking time off to birth a kid, etc.) of an exploited caste (service 
industry staff who mostly work those jobs because they can't find other work).

I'm 2 episodes into "Exterminate All the Brutes" 
 and Raoul's hypnotic narration has 
drawn me into the most objective-feeling [⊥] long-arc-of-history state of mind 
I've ever been able to achieve. I came close during the interview of Kehinde 
Andrews, whose criticism of the Enlightenment gave some flesh to Raoul's, 
wherein I regretted my lack of experience with alternate canons. *Almost* made 
me wish I were a "voracious reader". >8^D Alas, I can't even competently parse 
't Hooft's or EricS' papers, much less wade through piles of Persian or African 
literature. Back when my eyeballs worked well, maybe. Not anymore.

EricS' reframing of the means of production into tools was welcome, though. It 
bent my lens just slightly in:

1) considering the Facebook Oversight Board's recent ruling on Trump's 
*indefinite* ban. I'm staunchly anti-Facebook. But talking about N-ary 
contracts in light of anarcho-syndicalism shows their oversight board *concept* 
approaches social responsibility so much better than, say, socially responsible 
stock funds 
,
 which I support in concept, if not in practice. I can't help but wonder if the 
other members of MAGA (microsoft, amazon, apple, google) will either a) follow 
suit and create similar structures or b) following Nick's idea, join Facebook 
in using the oversight board as a kind of "digital court".

and 2) the recent uptick in social media re: Right to Repair, e.g. 
.
 Software as a Service (SaaS - and all the other *aaSes) have always irked me. 
That my new truck helps the cops spy on me isn't a good thing 
. Thank 
the gods that I'm white and middle class. Otherwise, I'd be fscking stupid to 
drive such a vehicle and hook my phone up to it. But, oh. my. god. does modern 
radio suck. I have no choice but to hook my phone to any rental car just to 
stay sane, giving the cops full access to everywhere I go and everything I do.

Oh, never mind. I forgot what I was talking about.

[⊥] Is that a contradiction? Can one feel objective? Is it even possible to 
have an objective perspective? What hellish nonsense am I even saying, here?

On 5/6/21 4:21 AM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Hi Pieter,
> 
> Not that it matters (to anything), but No, zero support for Chomsky from me.
> 
> He is the archetype of a bully and a demagogue.  It was his MO in linguistics 
> his entire career, a field that was susceptible to that sort of thing, and to 
> which he has done great harm.  It’s a shame, too, because as you say, he is 
> smart, and some of his early ideas were interesting and insightful.  
> 
> That is not an ad hominem to the side, it is a propos de his political 
> writing.  I do think some of his criticisms of the predatoriness of the 
> American system are correct, and they benefit from his intelligence and 
> energy.  But I think your criticism that all he does is stand in judgment 
> from the sidelines and not bear human responsibility for what happens when 
> you get things wrong is just the right one.
> 
> Have you noticed that there are some people who seem deeply grounded in a 
> concern for others’ wellbeing, and seem to work tirelessly to help?  I have 
> the impression that, for instance, Karen Bass (a US congresswoman who was for 
> a time considered for Vice President) is such a person.  The best kind of 
> people who rise within civil rights movements and causes.  I am struck by how 
> often they have no interest in blaming and judging; it is a distraction from 
>

Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

2021-05-05 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Well, there are smarter people than me, who know more about Marxism than I do, 
on this list. But it seems there are ~5 principles to guide it:

• civilization is already a cooperative enterprise, it's just a matter of 
cooperation's extent/ubiquity
• there's nothing supernatural, so all solutions have to be built on science
• innovation, technology, culture, etc. are limited only by nature; so in 
principle the things we build (including governments) can be as big and complex 
as the natural world
• class is a cultural construct; we create it; hence we can eliminate it
• the spectral signature of organization sizes is present in nature and should 
be mirrored in society (e.g. power laws for org sizes, small world networks, 
etc)

None of this implies the elimination of money. Reduction to a single dimension 
is just fine *when* it works. But when it doesn't work, it has to be "fleshed 
out" with other structure. Contracts are such a structure. We use contracts all 
the time to flesh out our money-based transactions. And contracts need not be 
simply pairwise (as Pieter seemed to imply with his conception of a free 
market). Contracts can be between any number of groups or individuals ... they 
nest.

The trick is with the legal system and spatiotemporal extension. When the 
lawyers draw up a contract and the courts judge an alleged breach, there's 
spatial extent that we can't codify (unintended consequences, externalities). 
And do contracts have higher order effects (extend to descendants, siblings, 
business partners, etc.)? Designing a legal system to align with the 5 basic 
principles above would, I think, produce something very unlike capitalism ... 
but maybe not whatever it is the Marxists imagine would emerge.

I'm sure the above is too vague. But it's the best I can do. As I tried to make 
clear *I* have no idea what could replace capitalism. I don't even understand 
socialism. Smarter people than me would have to work it out.

On 5/5/21 4:15 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Earlier, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ said: If we're stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If 
> we can get out from under capitalism, then I'm not.  Nick added: it is the 
> "triumph" of capitalism to reduce all relationships to money. 
> 
> I wonder if this is not assuming that there is an alternative to what you are 
> calling /capitalism/. As uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ points out, co-ops can work on relatively 
> small scales, but if we are going to live in groups of larger than ~150 
> people, how are you imagining that we will arrange interactions without 
> something like money? Even on small scales, how will a collective without 
> money organize itself in anything other than a very static structure? And on 
> larger scales, what is the organizing principle other than power? It's not 
> clear to me how an alternative that uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ is supposing possible will 
> actually work.  uǝlƃ ↙↙↙, would you mind elaborating what you have in mind?

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Yeah, I agree. But as the miscommunication about the dimension of simplices vs. 
orthogonal dimensionality seems to indicate, reduction need not imply 
linearity, and if reduction is used iteratively to discover interestingness, 
that provenance/method/algorithm need not be lost (1st order Markovian). A 
practical example might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_pursuit

Like abstraction <-> concretization, there's de-objectification that's part of 
a complete skill set. Competent objectifiers retain enough history to at least 
approximate the starting point. 

On 5/4/21 1:37 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> """
> Reduction is a triumph if it captures what you're looking for.
> """
> 
> When reductions capture what one is looking for then the resulting
> categories
> make for powerful rhetoric. IMO, it is exactly that reductions to crisp
> objects
> capture what *some* want, while obfuscating the desired objects of others,
> that
> makes the whole reduction-objectification game so insidious in practice (a
> kind
> of conceptual imperialism?). Sometimes objects can be presented with such
> clarity
> and precision that it becomes difficult to imagine any others, to dislodge
> unproductive beliefs or practices, or to remember that the objects are
> fantastic
> shorthands.

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

This bleeds back into my response to (c), which in essence was that we *need* 
diversity. One huge problem with technology is that tools bias the projects 
within which they're used. (To a hammer everything looks like a nail.) 
Hearkening to Ashby, if the diversity of the robots fails to match the 
diversity of the cultural and biological world, technological progress will be 
constrained by the culture set by the prior technology. And if that "funnel" 
from diverse to homogenous goes on too long, it'll crack, perhaps 
catastrophically, perhaps merely "disruptively". And if it's catastrophic, then 
we regress.

But with the transhumanist rhetoric (as opposed to the strong AI rhetoric), the 
diversity is more likely to maintain. Some of us rely on robots, others implant 
neural links, others edit our germlines, etc. The question is well put in the 
Ezra Klein podcast (I think Nick mentioned), where they ask whether we let the 
market decide who becomes transhuman and risk the same wealth asymmetry we see 
now or should we democratize it somehow? And if so, how?

On 5/4/21 12:07 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> I speculate that there is hope for Glen's wish to have some revolutionary 
> change to the current money-based system. With the technological progress 
> that's happening right now all the products and services all of humanity will 
> be provided in abundance by robots and AI without humans at such a low cost 
> that even if we have money, the cost would be so low that it's not worthwhile 
> to sell it, it'll be free.
> Of course there are no guarantees, we just don't know what's going to happen 
> in the future. My speculation is simply based on the premise that the 
> technological progress that's been happening for a long time will not stop. 
> Why will it stop?

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Reduction. All things in moderation, including moderation. Reduction is a 
triumph, if it captures what you're looking for. And fiat currency has done 
great things for the world, a cultural technology that allows us to explore 
possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise explored. Financial instruments have 
allowed us to spread ownership across demographics that would never have been 
allowed based on real property.

But those instruments are a reconstruction of the space that currency reduced 
out. And I think we're seeing that the reconstruction is trending 
dysfunctional. So, it's time to reconsider the initial reduction and, 
importantly, why the reconstruction isn't a cover for the original (full) space.

We are doing that in both ad-hoc ways (e.g. the Psychology today article, 
finding other dimensions by which to bolster the reduction) and fundamental 
ways (e.g. transhumanist experimentation of "what are we"). UBI is a reasonable 
suggestion to reduce suffering. But, ultimately, it's a capitalist suggestion, 
proposed by *conservatives* who want to prolong the status quo, to milk the 
current system for as long as they can. That's OK, of course. We try to balance 
exploitation with exploration and nobody knows crisply when to emphasize which.

On 5/4/21 11:16 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Ah, now THIS is the Glen I know and love. Your 10:00 post rekindled old rage 
> concerning the incentive-value of money.  Here I go.  Up on my high horse.  
> Hi, Ho, Silver. Budda bump, budda bump, budda bump, bump, bump.
> 
> The very little Marxism I know tells me that it is the "triumph" of 
> capitalism to reduce all relationships to money.  This seems right to rich 
> people because the richer you get, the truer it becomes.  I can imagine 
> Besos, Gates, and Musk falling asleep at night, musing about which of them 
> will first reach a trillion.  If you've lost your soul and you've lost your 
> wife, what else could they possibly want.  Such people even turn women into a 
> kind of coinage.  (Cue Waspish Moral Outrage).   But isn't that the point of 
> UBI; that it frees people to think about something else?  And yes, what IS 
> this so-called "productivity"?  The "happy ditch digger" and the "carefree 
> slave" are all part of the same self-serving capitalist iconography.  I am 
> sure there are people who love to dig ditches, but if that's what they love 
> to do, give them a thousand dollars a month for free and let them dig ditches 
> for Habitat for Humanity in Peru, if that's what they feel like doing.  
> 
> Glen, keeping your ad hominem firmly in mind, I am again going to use your 
> post as opportunity to flog my old work which argues that it is capitalism's 
> reduction of all ambition to coinage that makes it so toxic.  

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Well, it depends. My preference would be to replace our money-based subsistence 
on something else, some collectivist way of cooperating that differs 
fundamentally from the market-based way we think about these things. But that 
would be revolutionary, not evolutionary. And, unlike the Marxists, I'm not 
convinced the natural next step is ubiquitous socialism. A little bit of 
socialism here and there is a good thing. I'm a member of 2 Co-Ops and they 
perform better than any for-profits I've ever witnessed. But Co-Ops come with 
their own pitfalls.

So, UBI is a nice compromise. And I like the (Yang's) idea that scaling the UBI 
allows for compromise between righties and lefties w.r.t. extant social 
services like unemployment insurance. I.e. stop collecting UI premiums from 
employers and employees, then pay it out when you prove you were laid off and 
simply provide a subsistence income to everyone, regardless of employment 
status. That removes the middle-man insurance industry and makes that more 
efficient. 

But fundamentally, ideologically, UBI is a band-aid, not a solution. If we're 
stuck with capitalism, then I'm for UBI. If we can get out from under 
capitalism, then I'm not.

On 5/4/21 10:03 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Okay, I'm happy with that. It's just that on UBI we probably have very 
> similar views. I also agree with the views expressed by the psychologytoday 
> reference you gave above about You Are Not Your Work.
> 
> But, maybe my reading of your comments are wrong? Do you support UBI?

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

OK. Well, if Andrew were here, I'd be happy to discuss it with him. But he's 
not and you are.

The link you sent is to Ben Shapiro's brand marketing channel. Anyone who wants 
Ben Shapiro to make more money, please watch it and hit those like and 
subscribe buttons. 8^D

On 5/4/21 9:24 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> @Glen, I'm a supporter of UBI and mentioned a couple of points I came across 
> from people that're against it. I don't claim to have all the answers and I 
> am open to listen to the arguments of those against it, that's why I 
> mentioned them, but I don't support those claims so I'm not going to defend 
> them. 
> 
> The whole point of my post was that Andrew Yang answered the criticism 
> against UBI much better than what I can. What I hoped would happen was that 
> somebody would listen to the views expressed by Andrew Yang and we then 
> discuss that.
> 
> It's fine by me if you don't want to listen to Andrew Yang as interviewed by 
> this other guy (who's he again?, I just forgot his name), but then you miss 
> the point of my post completely.

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

In an attempt to answer my own question (a), I found this article:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tracking-wonder/201903/you-are-not-your-work

It's confirmation bias, for sure. But there are some interesting links. And I 
get to add "workism" to my basket of modern -isms, like scientism and wokeism. 
Seriously, though, with the "gig economy", it's difficult for me to imagine the 
person who drops off my food or Lyfts me home from the bar "derives their 
meaning of life" from that work. Most of them, and I try to talk to all of 
them, seem to believe it's the other way around, that their need for a job 
interferes with their ability to derive a meaning of life. (One such Lyft 
driver pumps out some super cool EDM and electronic trance, which he plays 
while driving us drunks around town -- good marketing. It's quite clear his 
meaning of life is not derived from his driving gig.)

A UBI to help sustain them through their derivation of a meaning of life seems 
so much more productive than any $ incentive we're applying by making them 
"buy" a car and depreciate it as they "make" that $. Although I disagree with 
the argument, one could argue that tipping exacerbates the problem, 
participates in the hoodwink that such gigs are in any way sustainable. A 
better answer is to allow them the resources to find more meaningful ways to 
use their time.

On 5/4/21 8:28 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Hm. OK. If you'd prefer to talk about UBI (instead of my postscript), how 
> about responses to these points:
> 
> On 5/4/21 6:35 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> a) How many people need employment for meaning? 10? 1M? How was that data 
>> gathered? Where is that data?
>>
>> Worse yet, in a world defined such that you *die* unless you're employed, 
>> it's circular reasoning to argue that employment gives meaning to life. The 
>> only way to escape such a vicious circle is by providing other options. What 
>> if people didn't die because they can't buy food, pay rent, etc?
>>
>> b) "The economy" is a diverse rhizome, not a needful entity. The concept of 
>> "productive" vs. non-productive work implies an optimization objective. What 
>> objective do you propose distinguishes productive from non-productive work? 
>> Is art non-productive? Is strip mining productive?
>>
>> c) In a world where some people live long lives accumulating billions (soon 
>> to be trillions - Musk? Bezos?) of US dollars, it's difficult to understand 
>> how it might be too expensive. The only way I can make sense of that 
>> argument is if you fundamentally believe in the argument that cumulative 
>> wealth is *necessary* for some tasks (like colonizing Mars). If you believe 
>> that society *must* have cumulative wealth stores (e.g. the government, 
>> Musk, Bezos, etc.) in order to achieve [your favorite objectives], then that 
>> implies the vast majority will need to be poor or near poverty. So, any 
>> attempt to "lift all boats" is "too expensive".
>>
>> But the constraining argument is that those crystals around which wealth 
>> accumulates have to come from somewhere. Efficient governments don't emerge 
>> by accident. We don't (yet) know how to engineer the emergence of Musks and 
>> Bezoses. That implies that we need a diverse pool of talent, most of which 
>> will end up non- or less than optimally productive. But some subset of which 
>> will be kernels needed for making progress on [your favorite objectives]. 
>> And that diversity includes non-productive people who can't pay rent, buy 
>> groceries, etc.
>>
>> Therefore, UBI is necessary for [your favorite objectives].

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Hm. OK. If you'd prefer to talk about UBI (instead of my postscript), how about 
responses to these points:

On 5/4/21 6:35 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> a) How many people need employment for meaning? 10? 1M? How was that data 
> gathered? Where is that data?
> 
> Worse yet, in a world defined such that you *die* unless you're employed, 
> it's circular reasoning to argue that employment gives meaning to life. The 
> only way to escape such a vicious circle is by providing other options. What 
> if people didn't die because they can't buy food, pay rent, etc?
> 
> b) "The economy" is a diverse rhizome, not a needful entity. The concept of 
> "productive" vs. non-productive work implies an optimization objective. What 
> objective do you propose distinguishes productive from non-productive work? 
> Is art non-productive? Is strip mining productive?
> 
> c) In a world where some people live long lives accumulating billions (soon 
> to be trillions - Musk? Bezos?) of US dollars, it's difficult to understand 
> how it might be too expensive. The only way I can make sense of that argument 
> is if you fundamentally believe in the argument that cumulative wealth is 
> *necessary* for some tasks (like colonizing Mars). If you believe that 
> society *must* have cumulative wealth stores (e.g. the government, Musk, 
> Bezos, etc.) in order to achieve [your favorite objectives], then that 
> implies the vast majority will need to be poor or near poverty. So, any 
> attempt to "lift all boats" is "too expensive".
> 
> But the constraining argument is that those crystals around which wealth 
> accumulates have to come from somewhere. Efficient governments don't emerge 
> by accident. We don't (yet) know how to engineer the emergence of Musks and 
> Bezoses. That implies that we need a diverse pool of talent, most of which 
> will end up non- or less than optimally productive. But some subset of which 
> will be kernels needed for making progress on [your favorite objectives]. And 
> that diversity includes non-productive people who can't pay rent, buy 
> groceries, etc.
> 
> Therefore, UBI is necessary for [your favorite objectives].


On 5/4/21 8:24 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> @ Glen, Thanks but no thanks. I'm just not interested in Ben Shapiro and not 
> going to waste my time researching him or even discussing him further. So 
> from my side about Ben Shapiro, I'm outa here and I'm not going to make 
> anymore comments on Ben. 
> 
> My interest when I started the thread was in UBI and I used the video clip 
> where, IMHO, Andrew Yang gave very good arguments for UBI. If you want to, in 
> a different thread, discuss Andrew Yang, I will certainly participate. I have 
> many good things to say about Andrew Yang.
> 
> On Tue, 4 May 2021 at 17:07, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Yes, I understand you might feel that way. But this is part of the 
> shtick. It's a rhetorical tactic that very smart trolls hone and use well. To 
> get a better understanding of who you're listening to (one of the Five W's), 
> this article lays it out well:
> 
> 
> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/how-hollywood-invented-ben-shapiro 
> <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/how-hollywood-invented-ben-shapiro>
> 
> I also understand the typical reaction to apparent ad hominem. But, as 
> I've argued on this list before, most accusations of ad hominem are, 
> themselves, the fallacy fallacy. It may seem like I'm attacking the man, Ben 
> Shapiro. But I'm not. I'm attacking the *brand*, the troll persona he and his 
> agent have worked so hard to cultivate in order to colonize your mind. Ben 
> Shapiro is not Ben Shapiro.


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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

Yes, I understand you might feel that way. But this is part of the shtick. It's 
a rhetorical tactic that very smart trolls hone and use well. To get a better 
understanding of who you're listening to (one of the Five W's), this article 
lays it out well:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/how-hollywood-invented-ben-shapiro

I also understand the typical reaction to apparent ad hominem. But, as I've 
argued on this list before, most accusations of ad hominem are, themselves, the 
fallacy fallacy. It may seem like I'm attacking the man, Ben Shapiro. But I'm 
not. I'm attacking the *brand*, the troll persona he and his agent have worked 
so hard to cultivate in order to colonize your mind. Ben Shapiro is not Ben 
Shapiro.

On 5/4/21 7:52 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> @Glen, re your /"Ben Shapiro is a troll whose shtick is suckering people into 
> "debates" just so he can get air time for his ideology." /
> /
> /
> I'm not knowledgeable about Ben Shapiro, what you say could be true about him 
> in general, I just would not know.
> 
> Did you listen to the video clip before making the comments about Ben 
> Shapiro?  
> 
> After reading your comment I listened to the video clip again and Ben asked 
> very good questions and gave the mic to Andrew Young and allowed Andrew to 
> speak without interrupting or even disagreeing with him. Ben asked questions, 
> listened to the answers and moved on and asked more questions. This video 
> clip certainly does not support the view you expressed about Ben Shapiro.
> 
> You're welcome to do whatever you like, I'm not criticizing you, but 
> personally I like to listen to the arguments of a wide range of different 
> people and refrain as much as possible from hanging labels around peoples 
> necks and attacking the man and not the argument.  

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Re: [FRIAM] The case for universal basic income UBI

a) How many people need employment for meaning? 10? 1M? How was that data 
gathered? Where is that data?

Worse yet, in a world defined such that you *die* unless you're employed, it's 
circular reasoning to argue that employment gives meaning to life. The only way 
to escape such a vicious circle is by providing other options. What if people 
didn't die because they can't buy food, pay rent, etc?

b) "The economy" is a diverse rhizome, not a needful entity. The concept of 
"productive" vs. non-productive work implies an optimization objective. What 
objective do you propose distinguishes productive from non-productive work? Is 
art non-productive? Is strip mining productive?

c) In a world where some people live long lives accumulating billions (soon to 
be trillions - Musk? Bezos?) of US dollars, it's difficult to understand how it 
might be too expensive. The only way I can make sense of that argument is if 
you fundamentally believe in the argument that cumulative wealth is *necessary* 
for some tasks (like colonizing Mars). If you believe that society *must* have 
cumulative wealth stores (e.g. the government, Musk, Bezos, etc.) in order to 
achieve [your favorite objectives], then that implies the vast majority will 
need to be poor or near poverty. So, any attempt to "lift all boats" is "too 
expensive".

But the constraining argument is that those crystals around which wealth 
accumulates have to come from somewhere. Efficient governments don't emerge by 
accident. We don't (yet) know how to engineer the emergence of Musks and 
Bezoses. That implies that we need a diverse pool of talent, most of which will 
end up non- or less than optimally productive. But some subset of which will be 
kernels needed for making progress on [your favorite objectives]. And that 
diversity includes non-productive people who can't pay rent, buy groceries, etc.

Therefore, UBI is necessary for [your favorite objectives].

p.s. Ben Shapiro is a troll whose shtick is suckering people into "debates" 
just so he can get air time for his ideology. It's a symptom of our postmodern 
society that we can't tell good from bad faith arguments. The Five Ws are 
ancient and still work: 
https://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com/2016/12/information-literacy-as-liberation.html

On 5/4/21 1:49 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> a) There are many people who need to be employed to have meaning in life. 
> (please exclude me from this group)
> 
> b) The economy needs to provide incentives for people to do productive work 
> to oil the gears of the economy, UBI removes this incentive.
> 
> c) It will just be too expensive

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[FRIAM] ruined my friday afternoon


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/30/colorado-police-loveland-officers-resign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmtxTWTTdC4

We met a guy the other day who countered our assertion that jury duty is a 
civil duty with "You don't want me on your jury!" He claimed he would *always* 
take the law enforcement side because anyone who's had "contact with the 
system" is most likely a criminal. Both Renee' and I were disgusted by the 
assertion. We later found out he's a union rep for prison guards and is big in 
Washington lobbying for guards' rights to aggressively handle prisoners. I'd 
just gotten over my disgust with that arbitrary dude ... then see this today. 
[sigh]

Fucking cops.

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Well, sure. But it's a good idea to limit the extent to which you embed 
semantics into your syntax. Rationalist, used at the beginning of the sentence, 
when the convention is to capitalize the words at the beginning of the 
sentence, looks no different from Rationalist, used later in the sentence.

But, rest assured, if you acted like, e.g. the Less Wrong crowd, I'd lump you 
in with them. But you don't. I'm guessing you haven't even heard of Eliezer 
Yudkowsky, much less read their canon.

On 4/30/21 10:39 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Arent you talking about a Rationalist as opposed to a rationalist/  Or does 
> the club have to be incorporated.  So I am not a Rationalist unless 
> Rationalist is a trade mark. 

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

No, you're not a member of the population I point at with "rationalist". I 
guess it's ambiguous like "scientist" vs "scientismist" ... or "woke" vs. 
"wokeist".

The rationalists are a fairly well-defined community of tech-savvy 
intellectuals who engage in things like Effective Altruism (e.g. get a job 
making as much money as you possibly can, *then* giving away a large percentage 
of it, like 90%). They also take Bayesianism to an extreme, talk a lot about 
"priors", give their opinions "epistemological confidence" ratings, etc.

But moving to the interpersonal baroque, I don't consider you a rationalist. I 
don't even think you're very rational. Your commitment to metaphysical stances 
is way too strong. Such commitment is faith-based and irrational. But it *is*, 
I think, idealist. And in that context, I would suggest I'm more rational than 
you are. Agnosticism is rational.

On 4/30/21 9:49 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> So, I think I am a rationalist, right?  So if anybody is doing pearl 
> clutching on this list, it's me.  So, here goes. 
> 
> Is rationality the same as rationalism.  You, glen, are patently rational.  
> Does that make you a rationalist?  I want you to clarify the meanings of your 
> words, remove, to the extent possible, ambituities in how you use them, try 
> to extract the same meanings FROM them that you put INTO them.  That seems 
> rational to me.  Does that make me a rationalist?

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Ha! Well, no worries. Not only are liberal arts unis dying rapidly, the entire 
university system is dying, which is why, as problematic as it is, 
https://www.mikeroweworks.org/ is a good thing in principle. The rationalists 
are like refined royals clutching their pearls in response to naughty words 
spoken by (postmodernist, gender studies) libertine "gentlemen". The villagers 
with pitch forks won't distinguish between Karen Barad and David Deutsch.

On 4/30/21 8:28 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Sheesh, Reed, Evergreen.  It's like freaking Ice-9.  :-) 

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Living near Evergreen has helped me come to a similar conclusion, that I might 
learn quite a bit from the rationalist bogeys "postmodern", "gender studies", 
etc. I regularly meet graduates from Evergreen in arguments with libertarians 
and right wingers in the pubs. I haven't met too many rationalists in the pubs, 
perhaps because they're too hell-bent on myopic optimization to kill a few 
brain cells with alcohol. But in these arguments, the agility of the Evergreen 
alum is flat-out amazing. It's quite similar to Oregon. We lived in spitting 
distance to Reed. But we were in Clackastan county, which has fewer righties 
than here in Olympia, but still way more than Portland, proper. So, we'd see a 
nice gradient of rhetorical agility flowing downhill from Reed.

I used to hold it as a priority to live in "university towns". But now I think 
I'm prejudiced to living near liberal arts universities. A tech-heavy, 
rationalist-heavy place no longer looks so appealing.

On 4/29/21 11:08 AM, jon zingale wrote:
> This article makes me think that I would enjoy a course in queer studies.
> I am interested to see how tools developed there are utilized and how
> such analyses can provide insight into questions of boundary, object,
> and identity. I am not sure of many other fields of study where there
> is such an explicit emphasis on developing a rich theory of mereology,
> and it does not take too much imagination to see that creating such
> generalized tools and techniques can be of value to complexity science.
> Glen's Wikipedia reference to Barad's agential realism summarizes some
> of what I am finding interesting and applicable to the philosophy of
> science. There is a distinct deconstructional component to the writing.
> I appreciate that the author's approach is not purely deconstruction for
> its own sake, but part of a larger project of reconstruction. Discovery
> versus construction appears, to me, a difference between science and
> engineering. The article appears to offer more to the former. Maybe
> amoeba's are altruists.

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Obviously. But it's a bit revisionist to project our data-driven inductivism 
back into the past. The not-true, not-false hand-waving McLaren points out was 
not a Noble lie told to prep everyone for the day when induction would work. 
They were spreading bullsh¡t for their own purposes.

Had they been more authentic, like the biologists I've run across, and admitted 
their theory isn't unquestionably coherent, the spread of bullsh¡t would have 
been mitigated.

But whatever, I agree with your previous sentiment that what matters is that an 
insight obtained and tracing the learning algorithm at work. With the 
for-profit Epic holding > 48% market share in EHR, we do stand a chance of 
effective induction, even if Epic's business model is a little too much like 
SAP. Upper ontologies might save our butts at this point, helping harmonize all 
that very crappy and disparate induction-thwarting data.

And I just noticed I conflated a man (Szasz) with a variety of hops (Saaz), 
that must be me observing myself preparing to brew. 8^D

On 4/29/21 5:04 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Following up on Frank's remark, there are these HUGE electronic health & 
> biobank efforts (UK, VA, Kaiser, Explorys), that give testable hypothesis 
> through population-based statistical inference.  They give no insight as to 
> why certain relations exist, but I don't think it is fair to expect there be 
> a "model of the mental order" in order to identify deviations from normalness 
> that are undesired, and then use evidence-based methods to suggest drugs to 
> test.   It is just that until recently it couldn't be done at scale.
> Some of the testing might identify side-effects or long term health risks.  
> That doesn't mean the effort is bullshit.
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2021 4:08 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf
> 
> To make that claim, you'd have to walk through all the medicine that's 
> happening, analgesics, physical therapy, acupuncture, dentistry, etc.. 
> Walking through the psychiatry that's happening is a much smaller task. I 
> agree there does seem to be a lot of it, though ... I just  have no idea if 
> it's *most*.
> 
> As long as I'm logging opinions, I'd answer Jon's question about 
> psycho*dynamics* with the idea I think I got from Thomas Saaz, that it's 
> fundamentally about creating a therapist-patient relationship ... dovetailing 
> 2 types of raw persuasion/manipulation in order to achieve the ends of the 
> therapist or patient (or both). My guess is the tone of that coercion depends 
> deeply on the 2 parties. Some authoritarian therapists may rely on 
> daddy-mommy-child constructs. Others may be more egalitarian, pushing the 
> ethical boundaries on friendship with one's patients. Etc. Lots of people who 
> lack intimate relationships might come to a better place through such 
> intentional relationship forming.
> 
> But it needn't be through psychodynamics. I know a few people who've done it 
> with their fitness coach, or life coach. One guy I knew back in Texas 
> regularly visited a round-robin of prostitutes. I joke with my bartenders 
> that I pay them to be my friends ... Good jokes must have some truth in them.
> 


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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

To make that claim, you'd have to walk through all the medicine that's 
happening, analgesics, physical therapy, acupuncture, dentistry, etc.. Walking 
through the psychiatry that's happening is a much smaller task. I agree there 
does seem to be a lot of it, though ... I just  have no idea if it's *most*.

As long as I'm logging opinions, I'd answer Jon's question about 
psycho*dynamics* with the idea I think I got from Thomas Saaz, that it's 
fundamentally about creating a therapist-patient relationship ... dovetailing 2 
types of raw persuasion/manipulation in order to achieve the ends of the 
therapist or patient (or both). My guess is the tone of that coercion depends 
deeply on the 2 parties. Some authoritarian therapists may rely on 
daddy-mommy-child constructs. Others may be more egalitarian, pushing the 
ethical boundaries on friendship with one's patients. Etc. Lots of people who 
lack intimate relationships might come to a better place through such 
intentional relationship forming.

But it needn't be through psychodynamics. I know a few people who've done it 
with their fitness coach, or life coach. One guy I knew back in Texas regularly 
visited a round-robin of prostitutes. I joke with my bartenders that I pay them 
to be my friends ... Good jokes must have some truth in them.

On 4/29/21 3:47 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> By that definition most of medicine is bullshit.
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2021 3:27 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf
> 
> 
> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306068036_Psychiatry_as_Bullshit
> 
> On 4/29/21 3:21 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Jon,
>>
>> I am sorry I disappointed you.  My understanding of object relations theory 
>> is like swiss cheese and I chose not to provide an inadequate response by 
>> humming a few bars.  By the way, object-relations theory provides a 
>> non-Oedipal alternative to your interpretation as explained by the Wikipedia 
>> article.  I became the withholding bad object to you.  I hope you will be 
>> able to integrate that with the good object I have been at times.
>>
>> Good for Glen.
>>
>> I am not a practitioner of psychoanalytic theory but it may not be for you.  
>> As for psychoanalytic /treatment, /see the last paragraph of the Wikipedia 
>> article.
>>
>> Warmly,
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 4:09 PM jon zingale > > wrote:
>>
>> Frank,
>>
>> To some extent, your response is indicative of the psychoanalytic
>> ends I criticize, the mommy-daddy-me Oedipal construction. Rather than
>> pick up on the opportunity presented by the conversation to engage in an
>> act of creativity (contributing to a forum), you use your agency to make
>> an authoritative (daddy) appeal to an object away from yourself and your
>> agency (the Wikipedia article). This action strikes me as functionally
>> different than Glen's earlier reference, say. While Glen's appeal acts to
>> ground and facilitate a living discussion, yours aims to end one. I felt
>> that the question I asked was fair, to hum a few bars regarding a
>> connection you are making that perhaps could contribute. If this sort of
>> short-circuiting of concepts and conversation is what I can expect from
>> practitioners of psychoanalytic theory, well, maybe it's not for me.

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306068036_Psychiatry_as_Bullshit

On 4/29/21 3:21 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Jon,
> 
> I am sorry I disappointed you.  My understanding of object relations theory 
> is like swiss cheese and I chose not to provide an inadequate response by 
> humming a few bars.  By the way, object-relations theory provides a 
> non-Oedipal alternative to your interpretation as explained by the Wikipedia 
> article.  I became the withholding bad object to you.  I hope you will be 
> able to integrate that with the good object I have been at times.
> 
> Good for Glen.
> 
> I am not a practitioner of psychoanalytic theory but it may not be for you.  
> As for psychoanalytic /treatment, /see the last paragraph of the Wikipedia 
> article.
> 
> Warmly,
> 
> Frank
> 
> On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 4:09 PM jon zingale  > wrote:
> 
> Frank,
> 
> To some extent, your response is indicative of the psychoanalytic
> ends I criticize, the mommy-daddy-me Oedipal construction. Rather than
> pick up on the opportunity presented by the conversation to engage in an
> act of creativity (contributing to a forum), you use your agency to make
> an authoritative (daddy) appeal to an object away from yourself and your
> agency (the Wikipedia article). This action strikes me as functionally
> different than Glen's earlier reference, say. While Glen's appeal acts to
> ground and facilitate a living discussion, yours aims to end one. I felt
> that the question I asked was fair, to hum a few bars regarding a
> connection you are making that perhaps could contribute. If this sort of
> short-circuiting of concepts and conversation is what I can expect from
> practitioners of psychoanalytic theory, well, maybe it's not for me.


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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Literacy is hard applies to the ability to use email clients, too. >8^D It's 
almost as if Jon's comment is *general*.

On 4/29/21 2:30 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Jon, 
> 
> How can we tell which comment you are being snarky about if you don't
> include the thing you are responding to. 
> 
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of jon zingale
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2021 3:25 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf
> 
> Literacy is hard.

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Re: [FRIAM] Natures_Queer_Performativity_the_authori.pdf

Though I can't parse Barad, herself, I do like agential realism: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agential_realism

And this criticism seems useful:

Barad, Bohr, and quantum mechanics
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-021-03160-1

On 4/29/21 3:31 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
>   
> 
> 


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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Now *that's* a reasonable criticism, much better than the simple *command* 
telling me to stop doing something. Had you lead with "I don't think your 
cap-doffing is useful here". I would have probably said "Oh well, maybe you're 
right."

On 4/28/21 12:22 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Well, like all rhetoric, I guess even cap-doffing has its place.  But I don't 
> think FRIAM is it. 
> 
> And, like any quick-and-dirty heuristic, I guess expertise has its place.  
> But I don't think FRIAM is it. 

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Oh, I definitely believe in qualifications and accreditation. My entire 
professional career depends fundamentally on meeting standards and putting some 
degree of faith in "validated" things. So when I tell you I'm a moron, you'd 
best believe it ... even if it hasn't yet "played out" for you, yet. Tomorrow, 
when I call you a moron, you might, then, understand what I mean.

A good example came last night when the bartender at the pub reacted 
emphatically to Renee's [⛧] attempt to persuade him to get vaccinated. I'm no 
biologist. But I (think I) managed to find a joint in his rhetorical armor *by* 
demonstrating that I'm no biologist. His reticence was appropriately *stanced* 
as a typical liberal anti-vax, anti-GMO, blahblah. I walked through many of my 
skeptical questions about the long-term impact (and our ignorance) of the mRNA 
vaccines, compared to the more traditional J&J vaccine. I used, 
characteristically, my lymphoma and the (thick wad of paper for) the class 
action lawsuit that was mailed to me, unsolicited, regarding RoundUp. But 
rather than do a typical tu quoque twist at the end, I simply said "We all take 
a position. Then we stick to that position stubbornly." He went quiet after 
that and you could "smell the wood burning".

By preemptively doffing the biologist/medical-research hat he *might* have 
placed on my head because I was using that jargon that he couldn't effectively 
navigate, I *joined* his in-group and wiggled my way back out of it right there 
in the span of the conversation. He doesn't know whether I'm for or against the 
mRNA vaccines or whether I've been vaccinated or any of that. I didn't have to 
take a stance at all, except on the issue of taking stances.

So, no, I won't stop cap-doffing. And, yes, qualification is a thing.

[⛧] Reneé spells her name like that, with the little diacritic. It's a pain to 
do, so I simply use the apostrophe ('). So, when I'm using the possessive, I'm 
torn between "Renee's" or "Renee''s" or taking the time to hit my meta key and 
do the proper "Reneé's". [sigh] Modern problems.

On 4/28/21 11:41 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Ok, glen.  First, stop with the cap-doffing!  It invokes a standard of 
> “qualification” that I’m pretty sure you don’t believe itn.  Anyway, if 
> */you/* aren't qualified to have this conversation than nobody is, and I am 
> not prepared to accept that obvious truth.  The ONLY  question here is 
> whether we can all get somewhere new by sharing what we do know ... or think 
> we know.  G!

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Re: [FRIAM] What makes you who you are?

It all depends on what you mean by "preparing to eat":

https://physicianschoice.com/blogs/blog/ghrelin-and-leptin

On 4/28/21 11:32 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I dunno... there are plenty of times I feel hunger and am neither
> preparing to eat, nor do I prepare to eat because I'm hungry.   Other
> times, I might find myself eating out of social obligation, idle
> boredom, habit.    I'm not claiming that hunger and eating are
> unrelated, but I find it a bit much to collapse one into the other.
> 
> Do grazing animals (maybe baleen whales in the extreme?) eat because
> they are hungry?   I've had dogs who appear to be hungry all the time,
> or at least anytime they are in the presence of food, or a human who
> might respond to their begging by getting them some food.  
> 
> On 4/28/21 11:28 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> Yes, you do. Interoceptive hunger *is* observing yourself preparing to eat. 
>> The question is, at what *order* of organization (2nd? 10th? Nth? order) 
>> does "I" kick in?
>>
>> On 4/28/21 10:19 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>>>  I do not infer that I'm hungry by observing that I am preparing to eat.  
>>> As you and I have discussed many times.


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Re: [FRIAM] What makes you who you are?

Yes, you do. Interoceptive hunger *is* observing yourself preparing to eat. The 
question is, at what *order* of organization (2nd? 10th? Nth? order) does "I" 
kick in?

On 4/28/21 10:19 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>  I do not infer that I'm hungry by observing that I am preparing to eat.  As 
> you and I have discussed many times.

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Well, I've always admired the Monty Python troupe's ability to *sustain* 
absurdity. It's relatively easy to be absurd for something as small as a minute 
long joke. But to do a 5 minute or more skit is impressive.

If Wolfram adopts his ridiculous tone merely to antagonize people, that would 
be even more evidence of his genius ... and his ability to lie with a straight 
face ... and his ability to lie to himself. Play a role long enough and the 
abyss stares into you.

On that note, this series was very interesting/disturbing:

Generation Hustle
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11210524/

I couldn't help but find myself empathizing with the scammers and some of their 
seeming lack of remorse or even lack of understanding that they did anything 
wrong. Never mind whether what they did (are doing) is actually "wrong" 
somehow. It's like that scene from "Wall Street" when Douglas/Gekko gives his 
famous speech arguing greed is good. Never mind whether it's true. The question 
is whether the role player is playing a role or expressing themselves ... or 
both.

On 4/28/21 9:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> In defense of Wolfram, it is possible he writes in the passive voice just to 
> antagonize people like the author of that article.   He's not a part of the 
> academic world, and doesn't have to use their currency.

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Of course. ... 

I realize I'm making a nonstandard argument. Often I regret trying to push the 
envelope like this because then I have to spend time trying to explain what I 
think, to little avail, probably because my thinking is sloppy. I don't know 
why I keep doing it ... too few nights at the pub, I suspect.

This entry in SEP confirms my argument is nonstandard, or not even wrong:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/#NatSelCulInh

There's this juxtaposition between biological evolution and cultural evolution 
that seems to work well for those of you who know what you're talking about. 
For me, though, the separation between cultural inheritance and natural 
selection seems incoherent. It's part of why the Kirkley paper's formulation of 
a neighborhood caught my eye. And why Frank's "inverted" correlation between 
collider inputs was interesting.

Even if bioEvo were purely "vertical", it's difficult for me to think a 
function's arity (or ploidy) is crucial to the conception of the function, at 
least not extensionally. I can see, for example, how point mutation might [⛧] 
not allow monoploidic inheritance to simulate diploidic inheritance. But 
combine (perhaps a recursive sequence of) non-point mutations with monoploidal 
inheritance and it seems like you could effectively simulate *-ploidy, in the 
same vein as EricS brought up function currying awhile back.

And if you allow for N-ary/N-ploidy inheritance in bioEvo, why isn't "oblique 
transmission" (e.g. retroviruses) part of natural selection? And if it is, even 
if only in some tiny/rare/persnickety biological relations, why not at least 
consider that natural selection operates over culture as well as bio?

IDK. I feel like a crank, like those 't Hooft generously describes as 
"amateurs" here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03179v1
"To many of my readers (the ones who may still be with me), what I just said 
sounds
very much like letters we receive in our daily mail from amateur physicists. 
They are
amateurs because they usually exhibit a dismal lack of knowledge and 
understanding of
modern science. Like many of my colleagues, I quickly discard such letters, but 
some-
times they are fun to read. More to the point, by not knowing how our world has 
been
found to hang together, they could have bounced into some more independent ways 
of
asking questions."

You should definitely *discard* what this ... [ahem] amateur says. Luckily, I 
only pass rule #5:

"5. He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making 
use of terms and phrases he himself has coined" 
http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
I'm admittedly not a genius. If there's an ignorant blockhead here, it's me. 
Nobody persecutes me ... in fact, I'm surprised how generous y'all are in 
listening to my nonsense. And I'll attack anyone, regardless of their status. 
8^D

[⛧] But, even then, the inheritance function would have 2 inputs, the genome 
and where/how to do the mutation. So, again extensionally, that function looks 
a lot like diploid inheritance.

On 4/27/21 9:53 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote:
> Glen, 
> 
> In my limited experience, people who invoke the beaver do so to limit the 
> reach of natural selection, not to enhance it. 
> 
> n
> 
> Nick Thompson
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2021 12:33 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question
> 
> IDK. This thread seems polluted with some sort of arrogant premise that 
> "natural selection" doesn't include cultural selection *or* engineering. The 
> "natural" in natural selection doesn't mean the same thing it means when you 
> see it on a green-washed plastic package in the grocery store or at your 
> favorite pseudoscience driven website. It means something larger, more 
> diffuse. 
> 
> If we can say that beavers *engineer* their dams, and yet that engineering 
> (and the "culture" in which it sits) falls under "natural selection", then 
> any engineering projects we humans engage in will also fall under "natural 
> selection", including CRISPR and the terraforming of Mars. This assumption of 
> a crisp distinction between culture and genetics seems false to my ignorant 
> eye, especially given layers like epigenetics and anthropogenic unintended, 
> but global, feedback.
> 
> Darwinism, without the "neo" genetic mechanism, may allow for us to broaden 
> the *generator* beyond DNA. But that doesn't imply that the evolution isn't 
> "natural". The focus on how many children one sires seems quaint, provincial.
> 
> On 4/25/21 9:51 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> On 4/25/21 10:47 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> Pieter said:
>>>
 /"Humans will no longer evolve."/

 I agree humans will no longer evolve by natural selection. Not that I'm 
 predicting anything, but how can anybody say with any kind of confidence 
 tha

[FRIAM] interesting scoping

2021-04-27 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙


Belief propagation for networks with loops
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/17/eabf1211.abstract

> Our method operates by dividing a network into neighborhoods (20).  A  
> neighborhood  Ni(r)  around  node i  is  defined  as  the  node  iitself and 
> all of its edges and neighboring nodes, plus all nodes and edges along paths 
> of length r or less between the neighbors of i. See Fig. 1 for examples. The 
> key to our approach is to focus initially on networks  in  which  there  are  
> no  paths  longer  than  r  between  the  neighbors of i, meaning that all 
> paths are inside Ni(r).  This  means that all correlations between spins 
> within Ni(r) are accounted for by edges that are also within Ni(r), which 
> allows us to write exact mes-sage passing equations for these networks. 
> Equivalently, we can de-fine a primitive cycle of length r starting at node i 
> to be a cycle (i.e., a self-avoiding loop) such that at least one edge in the 
> cycle is not on any shorter cycle beginning and ending at i. Our methods are 
> then exact on any network that contains no primitive cycles of length greater 
> than r + 2.
> ...
> Having defined the initial neighborhood Ni, we further define a neighborhood 
> Nj  ∖  i  to  be  node  j  plus  all  edges  in  Nj  that  are  not  
> contained in Ni and the nodes at their ends. Our method involves writing the 
> marginal probability distribution on the spin at node i in terms of a set of 
> messages received from nodes j that are in Ni, in-cluding nodes that are not 
> immediate neighbors of i. (This contrasts with  traditional  message  passing 
>  in  which  messages  are  received  only from the immediate neighbors of i.) 
> These messages are then, in turn, calculated from further messages j receives 
> from nodes k∈Nj ∖ i and so forth.


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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Let me say it another way.

I think gene guns are an evolutionary operator like sexual crossover. But that 
doesn't quite get at what I'm saying either, because it still targets DNA. So 
I'll also say that the marketing campaign by cereal companies to get us to eat 
breakfast every day is *also* an evolutionary operator. An older example would 
be the slow modification of bananas so that I can slice up a banana on top of 
my cereal and it'll be genetically (roughly) the same banana you slice up on 
your cereal. We can make a more interesting case with lactose [in]tolerance. 
The engineering of our food is an evolutionary operator.

Sure, the speed of the gene gun is faster than the domestication of bananas. 
But they're of the same category. What I'm disagreeing with is the *categories* 
that allow us to say "humans won't evolve anymore" and think we're making any 
sense. Cultural evolution *is* human evolution. The only difference is the 
collection of evolutionary *operators* in play.

On 4/26/21 3:27 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I want to accede to something here, but I can't quite find what the "it"
> is here to accede to.  
> 
> In the spirit of Cordwainer-Smith's "objects",   there is something
> *like* humanity which is adapting (ok, call it evolving) rapidly,
> especially if you extend  "phenotype" to include our co-evolved
> relations (microbiome,  cohort of domesticated animals,  our persistent
> social, cultural, political, economic and technological artifacts, etc.)
> which I do not intend to quibble with.  
> 
> I don't think our eyesight is getting measureably worse because we
> started wearing glasses a few hundred years ago.   I  do think that
> higher and lower production of melanin is an evolved trait in isolated
> populations of humans who lived closer/further from the equator, and
> similarly for the genes for proteins that are implicated in insulin
> production/sensitivity.   And I think that happened over hundreds of
> generations.    Is this something you are disagreeing with?  It seems
> more likely that you are disagreeing with the *import* or relevance of
> these things?
> 
> Are you "just" criticizing the conventional way of talking about
> genotype/phenotype evolution or are you coining/invoking something
> useful to replace/supercede it?  

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

It would NOT be arrogant to, say, run a component analysis and read off the 
conclusion showing the clusters. What would be arrogant is to then say, "My 
algorithm is perfect, cannot be criticized, and has no flaws."

Sure some processes are faster than others. But the *species* boundary is ... 
[ahem] ... specious! 8^D  I have species inside me right this minute 
influencing how I feel about this very conversation. And those species evolve 
very fast. So will I, as a cross-trophic conglomeration of multiple species, 
fall into your slow evolution cluster or your fast evolution cluster?

I mean, I'm not trying to argue that humans will survive a worldwide 
catastrophe. But that's not what we're arguing. We're arguing about the 
crispness of the cluster boundaries. Where does the human end and B. dentium 
begin?


On 4/26/21 3:07 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Why is it arrogant to notice the apparent existence of 
> "rapid-tempo-evolution" and "glacial-tempo-evolution"; label those observed 
> things "natural" and "cultural" merely, and only, for sake of convention; and 
> then surmise some substantial difference in the enabling mechanisms and 
> processes?
> 
> "glacial-tempo-evolution" is truly glacial only to those species with long 
> lifespans. Fruit flies could evolve almost annually.
> 
> long-lived species will not adapt quickly enough to climate change and will 
> likely perish. Probably, most all short lived species will evolve and adapt.
> 
> Man, being a long-lived species should — and would, if left to 
> glacial-tempo-evolution — perish but may not because rapid-tempo-evolution 
> alters the time-frame for response.
> 
> davew
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2021, at 12:33 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> IDK. This thread seems polluted with some sort of arrogant premise that 
>> "natural selection" doesn't include cultural selection *or* 
>> engineering. The "natural" in natural selection doesn't mean the same 
>> thing it means when you see it on a green-washed plastic package in the 
>> grocery store or at your favorite pseudoscience driven website. It 
>> means something larger, more diffuse. 
>>
>> If we can say that beavers *engineer* their dams, and yet that 
>> engineering (and the "culture" in which it sits) falls under "natural 
>> selection", then any engineering projects we humans engage in will also 
>> fall under "natural selection", including CRISPR and the terraforming 
>> of Mars. This assumption of a crisp distinction between culture and 
>> genetics seems false to my ignorant eye, especially given layers like 
>> epigenetics and anthropogenic unintended, but global, feedback.
>>
>> Darwinism, without the "neo" genetic mechanism, may allow for us to 
>> broaden the *generator* beyond DNA. But that doesn't imply that the 
>> evolution isn't "natural". The focus on how many children one sires 
>> seems quaint, provincial.
>>
>> On 4/25/21 9:51 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4/25/21 10:47 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Pieter said:
>>>>
>>>>> /"Humans will no longer evolve."/
>>>>>
>>>>> I agree humans will no longer evolve by natural selection. Not that I'm 
>>>>> predicting anything, but how can anybody say with any kind of confidence 
>>>>> that humans will not evolve by gene editing in the future?
>>>
>>> And to try to be fair to your point, I think if we replace "evolve" with 
>>> "adapt" the quibbles diminish to nil.


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Re: [FRIAM] for the marketeers amongst us

Yes, maybe we do mean different things. I typically think "free" in the market 
sense means able to trade whenever and for whatever. So, if I want to buy an 
island, I should be able to do so in the blink of an eye. Of course, that's 
physically impossible. So we come up with a principle like "as fast as 
possible". If it takes 3 months to liquify some assets, 1 month of escrow, 2 
months for the lawyers to draft the contract, etc. then the market's "freedom" 
is limited to 6 months at the fastest. Similar "friction" could be built for 
very slow transactions ... the slowest you can perform a human-to-human 
contract would be something like 100 years ... before one or the other human 
dies. So, the market for material X can't move faster than T0 and can't move 
slower than T1. It's not a completely free market.  That's temporal limits. But 
we can also have spatial limits. 

Now, what we normally mean by free is a special case of the above. Someone like 
von Hayek would say we can define freedom in a negative way, where we simply 
refuse to regulate processes we don't "completely" understand. (The scare 
quotes mean "good enough", 80/20, maybe.) So freedom in that sense is a kind of 
ignorance. If you *know* street-dentures kill people, yes it should be 
squashed. But if you don't *know* that, then let it happen (until people start 
dying, anyway).

Ignorance isn't freedom, though, as the conversation about free will 
demonstrates. The wiggle room the market has to optimize to the most efficient 
trading is presumed to be an ontologically real thing. If there are 2 opposing 
regulations we *could* put in place, one of which *frees up* the market so that 
transactions can be faster, slower, more diverse, or whatever, then we should 
choose *that* regulation over the other because it increases the freedom of the 
market.

E.g. if all your people die from toxic dentures, then no people, no market. 8^D

I hope that helps define "free".

On 4/26/21 2:58 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> / "But a contract-governed market isn't any more "free" than a regulated 
> market"/
> 
> Maybe what  we understand by "free" is different? If I evaluate the risk 
> rewards and decide I want to get dentures for 1 dollar from the 
> "pavement-dentist" and the regulators do not prevent the transaction, I 
> consider that a free market transaction. If the regulated market prevents 
> that transaction, I'm still without front teeth. How can you claim the 
> contract-governed market isn't more "free" than the regulated market? In my 
> understanding of "free" the contract-governed market is more free; I end up 
> with dentures and the enterprising man makes a profit. In the free market 
> case the outcome is win-win and the regulated market case lose-lose.
> 
> What do I miss about your point? Maybe if you explain to me how you 
> understand "free" we can sing from the same sheet.
> 
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 at 23:11, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> OK. But a contract-governed market isn't any more "free" than a regulated 
> market, neither of which are maximally efficient. And in the context where 
> all the negotiating power lies with one side or the other, those contracts 
> may end up even *more* restrictive than government regulations. (E.g. if all 
> the multinational corporations get together and put the same boilerplate in 
> their contracts, like routing all breach claims through arbitrage by an AI in 
> St Petersburg.) But even if it's not, i.e. somehow where we regulate the 
> market so that only symmetric contracts stand, if any 1 party entangles, via 
> contract, with multiple other parties without normalizing all their 
> contracts, the mesh of contracts will eventually "gum up". (Anyone who's 
> signed more than 1 non-compete NDA will know what that looks like.) Another 
> (non-free) restriction could be to sunset all contracts at, say, 1 year. So, 
> every entrepreneur has to go back through their mesh of NDAs and 
> re-negotiate/re-sign
> them every year. But 1 year contracts won't work for everything. So, 
> there'd necessarily be a gumming up around how long the mesh of contracts 
> lasted.
> 
> All of this works directly against the "freedom" (including transparency 
> and efficiency) of the market. So, contract markets are not free markets at 
> all. Counterintuitively, a well-regulated market can be freer, more 
> efficient, than a contract market. But if the regulators could *reduce* all 
> the complexities of any contract into merit/outcome (instead of price), then 
> that reductive measure could

Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

It's sentences like "outstrips the phenotype/genotype evolution" that confuse 
me. I can twist my mind into restricting *generators* to mean sub-strands of 
DNA and the machinery that manipulates it. And I can twist my mind into 
restricting "phenotype" to be those traits that *seem* to be more governed by 
DNA and development than not. But it's that twisting that, in my ignorance, 
seems flawed.

If we can't even crisply identify the nongenetic contributors of something like 
type 1 diabetes, how are we supposed to believe that the *generators* are well- 
and/or completely- described by substrands of DNA?

And if we can't estimate how *coherent* our generators are, then how can we 
assert that that stuff moves so much slower than the other stuff? We can't even 
clearly state what the other stuff is, much less that it moves faster or 
slower. E.g. if a "nongenetic" factor in diabetes 1 is exposure to viruses, 
then we have to figure in the (fast) evolution of viruses. Sure, they're 
"snapshotted" during gestation (even 9 months is a long time in viral 
evolution). And that human lives for half a century after that snapshot. But 
then their younger sibling may be exposed, during their gestation (say a year 
later) to a very different snapshot of evolved virii. 

And that's not even the most rate-confounding case given microbiomes and such. 
I'm just really really curious what gives y'all such confidence that DNA 
evolution is so separate from higher (or lower) forms and why you think you 
understand the rate differences. Maybe I'm simply too ignorant to get it?

On 4/26/21 2:25 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> I accept (embrace) that the larger human enterprise that includes our
> myriad social/political/economic/technological systems is the element
> that is "evolving" and that practices such as Engineering "evolve" in
> that context.
> 
> I believe that the rate of evolution in the social/political and NOW
> technological aspects of 'being human' outstrips the phenotype/genotype
> evolution by orders of magnitude...  many of the things that select
> humans for "reproduction success" have been inverted (e.g. "Development
> is the most effective contraceptive") from our pre-industrial selves.
> 
> Trans/Post humanism is already in it's nascent phase if I understand
> your binding of the term.   We may look back at our archives in 2030 and
> laugh at how naive/arrogant we were here.

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Re: [FRIAM] for the marketeers amongst us

OK. But a contract-governed market isn't any more "free" than a regulated 
market, neither of which are maximally efficient. And in the context where all 
the negotiating power lies with one side or the other, those contracts may end 
up even *more* restrictive than government regulations. (E.g. if all the 
multinational corporations get together and put the same boilerplate in their 
contracts, like routing all breach claims through arbitrage by an AI in St 
Petersburg.) But even if it's not, i.e. somehow where we regulate the market so 
that only symmetric contracts stand, if any 1 party entangles, via contract, 
with multiple other parties without normalizing all their contracts, the mesh 
of contracts will eventually "gum up". (Anyone who's signed more than 1 
non-compete NDA will know what that looks like.) Another (non-free) restriction 
could be to sunset all contracts at, say, 1 year. So, every entrepreneur has to 
go back through their mesh of NDAs and re-negotiate/re-sign them every year. 
But 1 year contracts won't work for everything. So, there'd necessarily be a 
gumming up around how long the mesh of contracts lasted.

All of this works directly against the "freedom" (including transparency and 
efficiency) of the market. So, contract markets are not free markets at all. 
Counterintuitively, a well-regulated market can be freer, more efficient, than 
a contract market. But if the regulators could *reduce* all the complexities of 
any contract into merit/outcome (instead of price), then that reductive measure 
could be multimodal (which price can't ... which leads to financial 
instruments). It might also be multidimensional. Outcome could be a vector of 
both some variable like [non]responder and time.

There'd have to be rules about concreteness of outcome-compliance, of course. 
E.g. if side effects from toxic false teeth you bought on the street corner 
kill you from sepsis, you couldn't claim the outcome was met just because you 
no longer need false teeth (because you're dead). But if the outcome were , then the teeth vendor 
could get paid.

In effect, this is what we have already, except "outcome" is diffused through 
the multifarious jurisdictions and power dynamics of who can, and the RoI of, 
hiring a team of lawyers. If the modes and reduction to outcome were more 
algorithmic, it might make the markets more efficient than they can be with 
asymmetric contracts or deep-canon centralized regulation.

On 4/26/21 1:37 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> No, a free market system is not limited to outcome based contracts. Free 
> market is allowing two (or more) parties to have a valid contract on the 
> terms and conditions both (or all) parties agree on. A patient and an 
> oncologist may agree on a contract where the patient pays for the effort and 
> not the outcome, that could still be 100% within the free market system. This 
> is of course provided the authorities don't have regulations stipulating the 
> legal bounds of the contract.
> For example, in Cape Town there are many poor people without front teeth. A 
> while ago an enterprising man, without any medical qualifications, set up 
> shop on a pavement to do false teeth at an order of magnitude lower price 
> than a qualified dentist. He was shut down very quickly. In a free market 
> system he would have been allowed to provide dentures resulting in happy poor 
> people with front teeth who cannot afford a traditional dentist and an 
> enterprising man making good money. With the regulations that protect people 
> we now have an unemployed poor enterprising man and many people who are still 
> without front teeth.  
> 
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 at 19:49, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Should everyone be paid based on merit/outcome? E.g. I go to the 
> oncologist because cytometry tests show I have stage 4 lymphoma. We go 
> through a years long treatment, at the end of which I may be a responder or a 
> non-responder. A free marketeer *should* argue that the oncologist shouldn't 
> be paid until an assessment of response can be made. Nonresponders shouldn't 
> have to pay (or get a refund like you would buying, say, a blender off the 
> internet). Responders have to foot the bill for the whole enterprise.
> 
> Obviously, there are plenty of other options, all of which are negotiated 
> asymmetrically between the chronically fatigued cancer patient and the 
> battery of multinational corporate lawyers driving Teslas. But the gist of 
> the market is merit/outcome based. Right?

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

Both of these (using CRISPR to edit away the problem or where to draw the line 
between selected and selector) seem to miss the larger point, which is that 
"natural" selection is a kind of metaphysical "top turtle". No matter how 
grandiose our engineering scheme, no matter how high and 
total-universe-incorporating it might be, there's always a super-context 
outside it ... and *that's* where natural selection operates ... similar, 
again, to Tarski's argument that you can't define truth from within the 
language (or von Neumann's no finite description, or Gödel's incompleteness, or 
Rosen's no largest model, ad nauseum).

We prolly should lay out the "language" a little more concretely before 
claiming that some operation is not inside that language. E.g. before declaring 
an end to human evolution, perhaps be more hard-nosed about what "human 
evolution" means.

For example, in a recent genetic algorithms talk, the presenter studied (and 
argued) that mutation didn't play a significant role, at all, in finding the 
(locally) optimal individuals. But that wouldn't rule out, with different 
evolutionary algorithms -- and their contexts/runtimes -- mutation might take 
on a more significant role. As we cross the transhuman inflection point, 
perhaps some operators fade, others gain prominence, and still others emerge?

On 4/26/21 12:39 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> And I wondered why the impulse to develop contraception and vaccines, for 
> example, and social welfare programs aren't elements of the environment.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2021, 1:13 PM jon zingale  > wrote:
> 
> I pressed a similar argument for CRISPR on vFriam this week. If the 
> socially
> responsible thing to do is to vaccinate for COVID-19, then perhaps it is
> even more socially responsible to CRISPR away all potential to contract 
> the
> virus for future generations.

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Re: [FRIAM] semi-idle question

IDK. This thread seems polluted with some sort of arrogant premise that 
"natural selection" doesn't include cultural selection *or* engineering. The 
"natural" in natural selection doesn't mean the same thing it means when you 
see it on a green-washed plastic package in the grocery store or at your 
favorite pseudoscience driven website. It means something larger, more diffuse. 

If we can say that beavers *engineer* their dams, and yet that engineering (and 
the "culture" in which it sits) falls under "natural selection", then any 
engineering projects we humans engage in will also fall under "natural 
selection", including CRISPR and the terraforming of Mars. This assumption of a 
crisp distinction between culture and genetics seems false to my ignorant eye, 
especially given layers like epigenetics and anthropogenic unintended, but 
global, feedback.

Darwinism, without the "neo" genetic mechanism, may allow for us to broaden the 
*generator* beyond DNA. But that doesn't imply that the evolution isn't 
"natural". The focus on how many children one sires seems quaint, provincial.

On 4/25/21 9:51 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 
> On 4/25/21 10:47 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
>>
>> Pieter said:
>>
>>> /"Humans will no longer evolve."/
>>>
>>> I agree humans will no longer evolve by natural selection. Not that I'm 
>>> predicting anything, but how can anybody say with any kind of confidence 
>>> that humans will not evolve by gene editing in the future?
> 
> And to try to be fair to your point, I think if we replace "evolve" with 
> "adapt" the quibbles diminish to nil.

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[FRIAM] for the marketeers amongst us

Should everyone be paid based on merit/outcome? E.g. I go to the oncologist 
because cytometry tests show I have stage 4 lymphoma. We go through a years 
long treatment, at the end of which I may be a responder or a non-responder. A 
free marketeer *should* argue that the oncologist shouldn't be paid until an 
assessment of response can be made. Nonresponders shouldn't have to pay (or get 
a refund like you would buying, say, a blender off the internet). Responders 
have to foot the bill for the whole enterprise.

Obviously, there are plenty of other options, all of which are negotiated 
asymmetrically between the chronically fatigued cancer patient and the battery 
of multinational corporate lawyers driving Teslas. But the gist of the market 
is merit/outcome based. Right?

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Re: [FRIAM] thermodynamics of gambling demons

2021-04-23 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Thanks! Unpaywall found this one:

https://acris.aalto.fi/ws/portalfiles/portal/61158210/Manzano_Thermodynamics.PhysRevLett.126.080603.pdf

But arxiv's versioning comforts me.

On 4/23/21 7:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01630 
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 9:20 AM Roger Critchlow  > wrote:
> 
> https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.080603 
> 
> 
> If the demon "decides" to quit while it's ahead, it "wins", and the 
> entropy of the universe decreases.
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> via 
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-maxwells-demon-continues-to-startle-scientists-20210422/
>  
> 


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Re: [FRIAM] types of knowledge

2021-04-23 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

So, I don't know if I'll get a chance to log into the zoom today. But, I've 
written and deleted 2 responses to this (seemingly trolling [⛧]) post. But in 
listening to this during my shower:

Nonreligious Americans Are A Growing Political Force
https://youtu.be/AyRu1OtZutI

I've heard you object to both theism and atheism in a way that seems similar to 
how they're describing the "nones". Despite atheists consistently asserting 
they simply live "without a conception of god", they really are *mostly* people 
who have conceived of (many types of) god(s) and rejected them. So, they do 
think, or have thought, a lot about it. But the nones are, maybe, more the 
people who simply don't think about it very much, or at all. (And if the prof 
in the podcast is right about them being less educated and more concerned with 
making money to survive, etc, then maybe this group doesn't *think* about many 
"high level" things at all.)

To me, any kind of metaphysical belief (or "non-evident" belief) is akin to 
ideas. God is an idea, one of the most dangerous/debilitating of ideas, 
actually. But, going back to Kehinde, the Kantian program (or the 
Enlightenment, even) is just as debilitating (as I alluded to in trashing the 
categorical imperative last week).

And to be clear, just in case your reply was NOT a troll, the ideas, like any 
powerful tool, are only dangerous to the extent by which they *convince* 
someone ... the extent to which the idea *traps* or imprisons you. If you find 
yourself *always* and everywhere referencing a single idea, or using a single 
tool, say, screwing in light bulbs with your hammer, then you are debilitated 
... addicted to that idea.

Those of us (not me) who can don and doff ideas easily may not be aware of how 
debilitating such addictions can be ... like a non-smoker saying "Just quit 
smoking!" And may not see the danger inherent to ideas.

[⛧] Only because it doesn't seem like you've taken any time to understand what 
"idea" means in the context where I used it.

On 4/22/21 3:27 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> """
> including dangerous delusions like "the self", "free will", or "truth".
> """
> 
> Dangerous to whom? I rather like ideas, nature seems full of them.

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[FRIAM] ha! more on water

2021-04-23 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙


Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/climate-crisis-has-shifted-the-earths-axis-study-shows

> The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed 
> glacial losses accounted for most of the shift, but it is likely that the 
> pumping up of groundwater also contributed to the movements.
> 
> Groundwater is stored under land but, once pumped up for drinking or 
> agriculture, most eventually flows to sea, redistributing its weight around 
> the world. In the past 50 years, humanity has removed 18tn tonnes of water 
> from deep underground reservoirs without it being replaced.
> 
> Vincent Humphrey, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and not involved 
> in the new research said it showed how human activities have redistributed 
> huge amounts of water around the planet: “It tells you how strong this mass 
> change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” However, 
> the movement of the Earth’s axis is not large enough to affect daily life, he 
> said: it could change the length of a day, but only by milliseconds.



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Re: [FRIAM] types of knowledge

2021-04-22 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

It took me awhile to figure out why your post caused me a bit of dissonance. 
But I think the 2 comments below sharpen it. *Too often*, people take 
themselves and others too seriously. Once someone's *infected* with the idea 
that ideas are somehow important, they slip-n-slide into taking abstractions 
too seriously, including dangerous delusions like "the self", "free will", or 
"truth".

IDK. I'll always look up to people who do "low level" work more than I will to 
those who do "high level" work. "High level" work is, literally, unhinged. It 
can't be taken seriously. And if a few of the "low level" workers are toxic or 
stubbornly hateful, well, I'll place them right there beside the geniuses who 
kill themselves or die hating the world because nobody takes them seriously. 
Good riddance.

On 4/22/21 12:23 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> The *muck* isn't simply mud or shit, but an ecosystem of hepatitis and
> parasites. Also, there is culture. While working as a laborer to a plumber
> wasn't the worst job I have ever had, the general milieu encouraged violent
> humor and poor diet, discouraged thinking, and a bordering-on-philosophical
> acceptance that we live, breathe, and eat shit. It doesn't take long to
> start to feel the hate creep in, folded into the soul as a consequence of
> being in the world.
> 
> [...] Too often, doing "low level" *essential work* bars an individual
> from being taken seriously.

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Re: [FRIAM] types of knowledge

2021-04-22 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Thankfully, no. It was just white and bumpy, kinda like fine-grained hardened 
cottage cheese ... which I find disgusting ... like most milk products.

On 4/22/21 9:58 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Glen writes:
> 
>> [⛤] I had a nightmare the other night where all my friends were trying to 
>> get me to eat this white fungus. "It's good for you", they said. "It tastes 
>> good", they said. Ugh.
> 
> I hope it didn't have lots of small dots on its surface.


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[FRIAM] types of knowledge

2021-04-22 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙


With millions looking for work, stigmas create a dearth of skilled tradespeople
https://youtu.be/c4s-4fK5r0w

Listening to an interview of this guy 
, I was glad to hear him address 
the sterility of the Western philosophy, the ideal, or "pure academy", or 
whatever, where people value thinking so highly as to get lost in what the 
thinking is *for*. But in the particular interview, he made a claim that 
sounded like a gloss over *types* of doing that I didn't like, something like:

 "Black philosophy says the best way to do philosophy, to think, is to be 
directly involved in trying to change the world." 

While I deeply agree with the position that the best way to think is to be 
directly involved in the world, to do, to act, to be, the distinction between 
being *in* the world versus trying to *change* the world is absolutely crucial. 
The strawmanny self-contradiction is easy to point out. You can't have a clear 
idea for changing the world without that ideal objective toward which you 
change the world. So, that type of action-thinking depends fundamentally on the 
ideal-abstraction, counterfactual pure thinking, he's trying to criticize.

But the less strawmanny criticism is that engineering and science [⛧] are very 
different things. This disambiguation of types of action-thinking is often 
missing from my more practical friends, people who spend the overwhelming 
majority of their time *doing* ... where the overwhelming majority of their 
thinking is tightly coupled to some form of doing. The ones who grok it seem to 
get a lot of satisfaction from activities like, just e.g., disassembling a 
motorcycle just to "clean" it and put it back together again. They're not 
trying to *fix* the thing so much as bathing in its beauty.

The PBS segment (inadvertently) broaches that type distinction, I think. But I 
wish it were called out more clearly. It may seem difficult to appreciate the 
stoic beauty of, say, sewage logistics professionals, all covered in literal 
sh¡t, butt crack showing, bleeding fingers from stubborn pipes, etc. But if you 
don't, you're missing an important anatomical part. To entice them into such 
jobs with money is impoverished. We need to entice them/us into such muck in 
the same way we entice, say, a field biologist into their (often just as 
disgusting [⛤]) muck.

[⛧] Not uniquely science, but also Taoist or other forms of being in the world 
that don't fight the flow.

[⛤] I had a nightmare the other night where all my friends were trying to get 
me to eat this white fungus. "It's good for you", they said. "It tastes good", 
they said. Ugh.

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

2021-04-21 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

That's an excellent point that plays well to Pieter's mention of allowing poor 
people to access desalinated water, Dave's mention of the myth of the 
objective, and our discussion of free will. These 
trajectories-willfull-paths-attractors-whatever need *some* organizing 
"centroid" or something for them to maintain/persist. That's even if such 
purity of intention is illusory in some psychological sense, that "centroid", 
"objective", "targeted state", or whatever it is can be pointed to and studied.

On 4/21/21 9:10 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> I went back to reading Ted Chiang at this point:
>  
> 
> And that is an example, I think, of this general idea that the intentions 
> or the spiritual nature of the practitioner was an essential element in 
> chemical reactions, that you needed to be pure of heart or you needed to 
> concentrate really hard in order for the reaction to work. And it turns out 
> that is not true. Chemical reactions work completely independently of what 
> the practitioner wants or feels or whether they are virtuous or malign.
> 
> 
> Immediately after reading this breaking alert from The Washington Post:
> 
>  
> 
> 
> Baltimore plant with contaminated Johnson & Johnson vaccines had 
> multiple failures, unsanitary conditions, FDA report says 
> <https://s2.washingtonpost.com/31f97bf/608035ece6e81b42e4fd8e45/5972cf2a9bbc0f1cdceb5a63/3/13/608035ece6e81b42e4fd8e45>
> 
> Vaccine production at the Emergent BioSolutions plant was shut down 
> earlier this week after 15 million doses of raw Johnson & Johnson coronavirus 
> vaccine were contaminated by ingredients from AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
> 
>  
> 
> The chemistry only works if the chemists expend the necessary effort to 
> making it so.  When they fail, they generally poison people, destroy the 
> factory, and, in this case, I think they're taking the company down with them.
> 
> Chiang's point is entirely theoretical, in practice purity of intention is 
> absolutely essential.
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 11:16 AM Roger Critchlow  <mailto:r...@elf.org>> wrote:
> 
> There was a book review in Science last week, sort of the book that 
> Google wasn't going to let Timnit Gebru write on their nickel.
> 
> 
>   AI empires
> 
>  1. [reviewed by] Michael Spezio
> 
> Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial 
> Intelligence /Kate Crawford/ Yale University Press, 2021. 336 pp.
> 
> Kate Crawford's new book, /Atlas of AI/, is a sweeping view of artificial 
> intelligence (AI) that frames the technology as a collection of empires, 
> decisions, and actions that together are fast eliminating possibilities of 
> sustainable futures on a global scale. Crawford, a senior principal 
> researcher at Microsoft's FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and 
> Ethics in AI) group, conceives of AI as a one-word encapsulation of imperial 
> design, akin to Calder Willingham's invocation of the word “plastics” in his 
> 1967 screenplay for /The Graduate/ (/1/ 
> <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6539/246#ref-1>). AI, machine 
> learning, and other concepts are here understood as efforts, practices, and 
> embodied material manipulations of the levers of global power.
> 
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 9:40 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Well, Chiang was, I think, arguing that there's a reductionism 
> lurking in the asymmetric *use* of technology. Exploitation of resources by 
> capitalists is just one form it can take. Reducing progressive ephemerides to 
> the influence of superheroes or conspiracy theories is another one. Roko's 
> Basilisk is yet another one.
> 
> To gloss all that into an equivalence class of arbitrarily swappable 
> buzzwords or over-specific irony about the misunderstanding of socialism is a 
> mistake. Eschatological thinking might not rise to being a first order trait 
> ... a crisp category of people. But it's a persistent and prominent pattern.
> 
> I really enjoy optimistic narratives like Pieter's. But I can also 
> appreciate tragic narratives like Merle's. Eric's (and Chiang's) broach of 
> the emergence of detailed and echatologically ambiguous story-telling out of 
> the simpler types hits the right vein of ore. We're seeing more of these 
> ambiguous stories lately ... in spite of the render-farm nonsense Jon laments.
> 
> On 4/20/21 12:54 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> > Yeah.  I’m not sure what they’r

[FRIAM] speaking of eschatological thinking

2021-04-21 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Depression (anxiety et al) seem, to me, like a contributing factor. This
article triggered me yesterday:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/20/psychedelics-depression-treatment-psychiatry-psilocybin

But more relevant to tragic story-telling and pessimism is the effect psi has
on the terminally ill, which was also broached in the Chiang interview, quoted
below. The important part re: psychedelics is the last sentence about *limited
information*. Perhaps psi simultaneously *loosens* up your eschatological
tendencies, provides more degrees of freedom, wiggle room, while doing so in an
abstracting way, which limits the concrete detail. Optimists are notoriously
NOT concrete thinkers, glossing over externalities and unintended consequences.
But pessimists, realists, are imprisoned by their concrete detail ... like a
terminally ill person who not only knows the date they'll die, but precisely
how, what time of day, and the entire (deterministic) causal mesh. By splashing
all that around, the psychedelics may allow in a little more optimistic thought.

"EZRA KLEIN: Let me ask you a question that I think about fairly often, I think
partly because I’m Jewish culturally. If I could tell you, if you could know
with certainty the date of your death, would you want to know it?

TED CHIANG: Yeah, I probably would. I probably would.

EZRA KLEIN: Really? Oh, I would not, under any circumstances, want to know.

TED CHIANG: I mean, it seems like it might be useful so that you could make
some preparations. It might be good to get your affairs in order. We’re not
talking about a lot of detailed information because I think the more
information you have, yeah, the more that it’s going to mess with you. The more
information you have, the closer we get to this situation that I sometimes
write about, where, yeah, if you have perfect knowledge of what’s going to
happen to you, yeah, that, I think, is kind of incompatible with human
volition. But very limited pieces of information could be helpful."

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

2021-04-21 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Well, Chiang was, I think, arguing that there's a reductionism lurking in the 
asymmetric *use* of technology. Exploitation of resources by capitalists is 
just one form it can take. Reducing progressive ephemerides to the influence of 
superheroes or conspiracy theories is another one. Roko's Basilisk is yet 
another one.

To gloss all that into an equivalence class of arbitrarily swappable buzzwords 
or over-specific irony about the misunderstanding of socialism is a mistake. 
Eschatological thinking might not rise to being a first order trait ... a crisp 
category of people. But it's a persistent and prominent pattern.

I really enjoy optimistic narratives like Pieter's. But I can also appreciate 
tragic narratives like Merle's. Eric's (and Chiang's) broach of the emergence 
of detailed and echatologically ambiguous story-telling out of the simpler 
types hits the right vein of ore. We're seeing more of these ambiguous stories 
lately ... in spite of the render-farm nonsense Jon laments.

On 4/20/21 12:54 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Yeah.  I’m not sure what they’re afraid of, or even that they could 
> articulate it.  (And I guess I mean this as a royal “they”.  Not some others, 
> but a Weltanschauung that we can see rising, in which we are immersed)   You 
> are certainly right that the words are just buzzwords, exchangeable at the 
> drop of a hat.
> 
> There is an expression “a full world” that I took up from its use by Herman 
> Daly in papers like “Economics in a full world”, which argues that the 
> problems that need solving are different when everything is occupied, than 
> they were when everything was (for people) a frontier with no effective 
> pushback against their expansion into it.  People’s anxiety and bad behavior 
> is somehow reflective of an awareness that the world is full, and there might 
> not be any room in it for them.  
> 
> 
>> On Apr 21, 2021, at 12:23 AM, Marcus Daniels  wrote:
>>
>> The hypothesis that the latent fear is of capitalism is amusing since the 
>> anti-vaxxers who are afraid of Bill Gates doing whatever he is intent on 
>> doing to them (what is it?) seem to be the same ones so terrified of 
>> socialism.  
>>
>> Btw, someone finally approved by Clubhouse subscription, and so I turned it 
>> on.   Let's just say the "compelling app" is not full of compelling people.  
>>  It is one thing to know that these anti-vaxxer people exist, it is another 
>> thing to realize they have a place to talk, and do so.
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
>> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 10:23 PM
>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>>
>> This was a nice read, Glen, thank you.
>>
>>> On Apr 20, 2021, at 12:11 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙  wrote:
>>>
>>> I should have linked this:
>>>
>>> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chi
>>> ang-transcript.html
>>>
>>
>> Several of Chiang’s observations have a ring of insight to me.
>>
>> On just one, for the accident that it overlaps with another factoid.  His 
>> comment that superheroes:
>> 1. Are magic == special
>> 2. Preserve the status quo
>>
>> I think it was in Jane Smiley’s introduction to the volume of the Icelandic 
>> Sagas that she edited and compiled, that she says the Sagas are considered a 
>> premonition of the modern novel far ahead of its normal place in literature 
>> (the Quixote is I think usually credited as the first) because (for the 
>> Sagas), they realized that the old heroic tales of gods and trolls (e.g. the 
>> Eddas), didn’t have the depth to remain interesting under the retelling.  
>> The Sagas brought the focus “down” to the real troubles and accommodations 
>> and inventions of real people, which were richer, more complex, and more 
>> satisfying over time than the old tropes.  I have come back to her comment 
>> many times, in thinking about what is the cultural role, whether of Eddas, 
>> epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata in India, Gilgamesh, etc.  I think for 
>> all of these, Chiang’s characterization works in both its dimensions, though 
>> perhaps in different degrees for different cases.  
>>
>> So the political right in the US turn to an encompassing paranoia +/= 
>> cynicism and Qanon, and the movie industry (whoever that serves) is 
>> dominated by Marvel Comics franchises.  Having had the modern novel, we are 
>> throwing it away for not even epics, but dumb cartoons of epics, but keeping 
>> the magic and prese

Re: [FRIAM] the tragedy of the voice operated lights

2021-04-20 Thread uǝlƃ ↙↙↙

Ha! We recently had the grandkids+daughter-in-law here, adding 5 for a total of 
7 people, each of which with at least 1 wifi device in addition to our 3 rokus, 
2 phones, weather monitor, PS3, and Renee's laptop. I could *feel* my neoplasms 
growing. (Yes, that's a joke.) I can only imagine what the network would look 
like if our coffee machine, fridge, vehicles, furnace, door locks, light bulbs, 
etc. were all online.

I purposefully bought my desktop and gaming machine without a wifi card. I'm 
thinking about wiring the house and abandoning wifi wherever possible.

On 4/20/21 5:42 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> https://devrant.com/rants/4186069/dev-my-neighbours-have-so-many-fucking-iot-devices-that-they-basically-fuck-over
>  
> 
> 
> The first responder wants to help, the second proposes guerilla war on the 
> neighbors' wifi, OP thinks that would be too expensive.

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

Yeah, when I incorporated back in '01, I did it in Oregon, knowing we were 
likely to move there within a few years. All my advisors said that was a 
mistake, that I should incorporate in Delaware or somesuch. I was more 
libertarian, then. But even then, my ethos was to try to contribute to my 
locale (network or geo). So incorporating in some far flung place just doesn't 
seem right. Since we're still only 2 hours from PDX, I figure it's still 
roughly local.

Just this morning, I saw a van delivering groceries to the neighbors 
. And although everything about it sounds 
good, that they're based in CA makes me resist, perhaps in order to find 
something *local*. We have a cool little store less than a mile away that seems 
responsible and is owned by a long-term family in these parts.

On 4/19/21 11:18 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> If the principals behind Redwood Materials INC are all upstanding long-time 
> NV residents or there were something specifically obvious about their 
> geography that makes them an obvious location for such an operation, then I 
> can give that question a soft pass.   To be fair the principals listed on 
> their website  do seem to have honest 
> credentials, albeit maybe weighted toward having come from places that 
> acutely helped to create the problems they are promising to solve... 

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

But that's (largley) the theme of the Chiang interview, technology isn't 
commensurate with selfish/evil/altruist/good individuals. Technology goes it's 
own systemic way, regardless of the specialness of the components involved. 
Capitalism requires an underclass ... if not *desperately* poor, regular good 
old fashioned poor.

On 4/19/21 8:49 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> the shareholders are too selfish to achieve something like Elysium or even 
> large private water desalination plants.Even if there is a small evil 
> population that kills off the rest, I don't see how capitalism is going to 
> lead to that.   

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

I think what's missing in that story is the context about how it came to be 
that a) there exist desperately poor people who need that water and b) the 
rules/charity system that deigns to gift that water to those people. Pick away 
at the gloss that *appears* kilned into the material, and you'll usually find 
some (often unrecognized) superheroes who made it happen. Order requires energy.

On 4/19/21 8:42 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> I live in a small town Mossel Bay in South Africa with a semi-desert climate. 
> We have a desalination plant that can supply +/- 60% of normal potable water 
> usage. It's not for the rich people only, when the dams supplying water in 
> normal years dry up, everybody, including the desperately poor people get 
> potable water.

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

I should have linked this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html

"It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people 
off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. 
But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then 
you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a 
technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it 
against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their 
profits at our expense?"

On 4/19/21 8:01 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Ha! Sure. ... it still looks like SteveS called it with the Red Queen's Race. 
> Even if such tech solves more problems than it creates, it'll still be 
> distributed according to the power structures in place (e.g. rich people) 
> when the tech's ready to scale.
> 
> On 4/19/21 7:54 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Again technology to the rescue...   Nanotechnology for desalinization.   
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
>> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 7:45 AM
>> To: friam@redfish.com
>> Subject: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>>
>> Copper? Natural gas? Pffft! Water's the interesting one.
>>
>> https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-along-with-the-climate-159092
>>
>> And another one:
>> https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html
>>
>> On 4/15/21 7:59 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>>> Another good example is water rights across states given watersheds, 
>>> flood irrigation, etc. 
>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-per
>>> centers>
>>>
>>> So, the question you're asking (how might "storage" in BTC be less 
>>> preferable to other assets?) isn't really answerable *without* first 
>>> discussing what that reservoir is *for*, what end does it serve?
> 

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)

Ha! Sure. ... it still looks like SteveS called it with the Red Queen's Race. 
Even if such tech solves more problems than it creates, it'll still be 
distributed according to the power structures in place (e.g. rich people) when 
the tech's ready to scale.

On 4/19/21 7:54 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Again technology to the rescue...   Nanotechnology for desalinization.   
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 7:45 AM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
> 
> Copper? Natural gas? Pffft! Water's the interesting one.
> 
> https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-along-with-the-climate-159092
> 
> And another one:
> https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html
> 
> On 4/15/21 7:59 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
>> Another good example is water rights across states given watersheds, 
>> flood irrigation, etc. 
>> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-per
>> centers>
>>
>> So, the question you're asking (how might "storage" in BTC be less 
>> preferable to other assets?) isn't really answerable *without* first 
>> discussing what that reservoir is *for*, what end does it serve?

-- 
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

-  . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-.  . .-. .
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
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)