I like the bit at the end:



A lot of this appeals to me quite a bit. I like the pragmatism pedigree in drawing on Dewey. I like the focus on individual American experience as open-minded continuous self-improvement, and moreover that Whitman's conception of America itself as an experiment existing apart even from the need to please God. Taken at an both individual and a civic level, this feedback loop of honest assessment and adaptation echos the cybernetics of Wiener, McCulloch, and Pitts (whose ideas themselves drew inspiration from mathematical, biological, and electrical engineering sources).

Drawing on both Whitman and Nietzsche to conceive of the American experience through a poetic understanding of the world seems to be a big deal. The semiotics of C S Peirce (founder of pragmatism) seems like a framework a philosopher could could work in order to harness the psychological insights of literature as conceived by Nietzsche, and drawing on Jung, Freud, the Greeks, Shaw, or whomever wrote about the human psyche in literary terms.

We talk a lot about here about how technology has created a lot of harm in the world economically and individually. But what about spiritually? Growing up in America in the `90s, it seems that the austere and narrow worldview of physicists like Feynman has held sway, where "soft" writings by the likes of Freud, or pretty much any fictional work that tried to speak to the soul of the community was mocked as woo-woo. What literature we did study in school that spoke to communal needs, well, it was overwhelmingly seeped in the identity politics of the African American experience. It was informative to read one book in the 7th grade on the ills of slavery, but why six or seven by the time I'd finished high school? Sure, we did read a bit about Thoreau in high school, but it was approached in a very mystical and abstruse way.

I think that the American suburban youth have been told to embrace science and technology, to mock the religious ethos that technology displaces by focusing on counterfactual or immoral interpretations of the bible, and crowded out by militant feminism and identity politics. Where have they gone spiritually? It looks like to video games, anime, and 4chan, but I really think that these communities end up being somewhat isolated from the rest of society (the path breaking effects of technology on the medium seems to have created a discontinuity between electronic art and literature), and promote some toxic masculinity (in the sense of the Mythopoetic men's movement--not some gender studies student's term paper).

Implying that video games, anime, 4chan, and toxic masculinity are cultural reactions, rather than salve for economic burns.

i.e. it's tough to be a kiddult when you aren't funemployed.

Of course you're right that economics is the deeper causal root here. And that privileged and educated folk joining hands and getting into literature and philosophy in lieu of politics would be a sad joke.

But isn't the deeper root of often nefarious social change (economics included) unconstrained technology? I'm talking about all forms autonomous forms of replication that encroaches on human activity.

Given that technology is pretty darn fundamental to what it means to be human (I've read that language developed in early humans in order to endow us with the creative ability to semantically understand how we construct, remember, and evolve tools), and that digital media have changed our relationship with one another, and that political action is an interpersonal activity, I would argue that an examination of our relationship with symbols through technology is a reasonable approach to alleviating both the ill effects of bad economics on culture as well as empowering people to effect political change to the left. And isn't the left famously a literate tradition?

A liberal elite in Menlo Park funded by the office of navel research and connected to MIT and Stanford researchers in the mid 20th century developed the technology that powers 4chan. Yet we lost a non-trivial segment of the youth to the right. Whatever the economic ills that underlie this swing, I like to think that technology, when designed properly and controlled, can be more resilient and less balkanizing than what we've ended up with.

Edit: WTF autocorrect

It also doesn't help when your political opponent's right wing fanaticism is fueled by paranoia about overpopulation and promote clinging to some notion of cultural identity as a means of preservation, when you consider that "overpopulation" and "out of control technology leading to economic inequality" are both variations on the same theme of replication without regulation. I think we as humans need to address our relationship with symbols (in every possible facet of the word--computational, cultural, spiritual, psychological, and even DNA) involved with replication.



[/URL](Disclaimer: I don't agree with David Mumford's obsession with overpopulation, and though that's a huge can of worms, I don't like the paranoia that a lot of mathematicians seem to fall prey to, by their attraction to overly concise descriptions of things outside their expertise... and we already have a profession for this, called economics).

Wait, could Dr. Mumford be the oncologist!? Uncontrolled replication without regulation, further technology to try to stop it....

****ing boomers

I thought it was Elizabeth Warren.

Or... are the boomers the supposed cancer of Jon's post??

When the world is runnin` down, you make the best of what's still around!

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXYW7kZP6jc

Underpants gnomes do Malthus.

I can't think of many economic indicators that are consistent with overpopulation w.r.t. Earth's carrying capacity. There are lots of indications that we just don't need all that many workers to keep everybody housed and fed, though.

Your first remark has to do with Malthusian prognostics, with the term "overpopulation" bandied about--of which I am skeptical myself.

But your second sentence is about replication more generally. Replication of DNA-based machines and other autonomous creatures of technology can be out of control without there needing to be gross overpopulation.

Speaking of replication, since Trump ****ed up his first executive order on immigration, it would seem his recourse is to add another head to a legal hydra and simply write another order, but adapting it now that he's had lawyers to consult.

Well, what I meant is, like, if we had a major overpopulation problem, you'd expect food prIces to skyrocket as demand outstrips the planet's ability to produce food. That hasn't happened. Food prices are down something like ~80% in a real sense over the past century. (Recent commodity price bubbles are fully explainable by futures trading, and were not caused by consumption or constrained production.)

The only expenses that have risen in a major way are administration and finance. I'll leave it to you to work out why we need more managers and money changers to mind fewer and fewer workers, but it's clear that the constraint here isn't excess demand. It's that capital can't figure out what to do with all of the workers we have.

I literally do not understand what you're going on about with this replication and out of control technology thing. Technology has always been disruptive, both socially and economically. Increasing productivity and decreasing costs have displaced labourers for thousands of years, and computers more successfully than almost anything before. This change is always painful in the short term, but in the long term people (or at least their kids) re-skill and get put to work elsewhere. Whether these redundant people are cared for in the meantime is only the mark of an ethical civilization.

Automation will eventually eliminate all jobs. I don't know what that means. Nobody does. Our economies are not designed for a massive surplus of labor. They are designed for a massive excess of work, to force people to pitch in to contribute because there is simply too much to do. But now there isn't too much to do anymore.

Sorry, my words are degenerating into gibberish. For now let me say that we ought to be introspective about our use of technology--specifically, of electronic media. My talk about some vague notion of 'replication' in general was a soft attempt to characterize economic disruption as a special case of technological disruption, and therefore simply another chapter of anthropology (since you like to bring up economics and class as underlying causal reasons, relegating my cultural concerns to the periphery).

My basic thesis is that the parameters of social media are not at all fine-tuned for healthy spiritual activity. On the one hand, I liked a lot of the Vox blog post on Richard Rorty which Eversor posted, because it relates philosophy, literature, and psychology to identity politics. With the kind of cesspool that has grown in reaction to identity politics on 4chan in mind, I think this is an opportunity for some enterprising programmer-philosopher to figure out just what parameters of human interaction lead to bad spiritual outcomes, especially at scale. (As a first approximation, consider that text-only communication has most emphatic channels of communication filtered out.) I think the technology, if not a precise analytical model to avoid bad modalities of interaction (consider /pol to be the worst possible extreme) is clearly here, but the incentives are not (so I suppose here we are at economics again). In fact, in the podcast that Eversor posted, Tim Wu talks about his book, The Attention Merchants, which apparently makes the case that advertising itself is much to blame for the terribleness of media in general, going back to 1830 (but apparently some neutral or even good things as well, like the whole idea of a national conversation, where everybody is paying attention to the same story, for example).

I do think that this is still a good starting point for social change, rather than economics, because: I am not a leftist mastermind, or even a politician for the Democratic Party, but I do know how to write software. And in a democracy, the people still need to organize before they can vote for change. I do think it would be easier to do that if there was less confusion and anger resulting from nefarious incentives built into communications media themselves.

This surely isn't as simple as that, right? Be "not making them feel threatened" we must include angry right-wing media who constantly wax about how bad everything will become tomorrow? I mean what's a reasonable course of action for your average man.



The true world proletariat lives mostly in Asia, and yeah, most people in the West are basically bourgeoise class.



I suppose there could be a degree of actual disconnect in what they're doing, that they don't comprehend the political consequences of what they do? Not sure.





I've been predicting the rise of right nationalism since about 2013, however I didn't expect it to get a president elected a few years. As Jon said, this is due to frustrated expectation. I would expect it to get worse.

"Just get a job and buy a house." Realistically only available to upper-middle class Americans, a shrinking category. Even true middle class, meaning working class people who can afford a house, well their kids mostly cannot do this. You hear it constantly, people who blame millenials for being lazy or whatnot, despite every objective way of judging this says the opposite. Similarly, every American is forced the lie that living in America is totally ****ing great and anyone who works hard can succeed! Which if anyone was noticing, was exactly what the Democrats were pushing in the election in response to Trump.

When you have this mainstream message that, well, your worth is your income, and if you don't succeed well then you're the worst, and since that's a big lie, you have lots of people who feel completely socially alienated. I think it's important to understand then, that, sometimes antisocial behavior manifests itself due to this very feeling, if you really feel you don't belong, then you turn this into an antagonism with society. That's why so many Trump supporters are just so happy to see "liberal tears", it's anger against a society that doesn't include them. I mean, they're basically wrong linguistically in their analysis of who's ****ing them, because whatever exists of the left doesn't have much to do with Clinton liberalism, which is a problem.

And yes, MRA and alt-right are symptoms of this.



Trump is too stupid for that.



Left and right of which aisle? For a long time we've been served two flavors of liberalism.



This is more the case, we're actually at a point where enough particular events could end Western supremacy and hegemony in the world.



I've been reading more too. But there's no impending collapse incoming.



I fail to see where anything Nietzsche said could be used to justify an American's life. The "life as literature" reading of Nietzsche's comes from Alexandre Nehamas who, well, I'm not a fan. I also think that line about self-improvement doesn't match too closely what Nietzsche conceived.



If you want to read good books, you have to do it yourself. Though I agree American schools pick poor books.



A huge difference in society that's easy to overlook is how more often we are isolated than people in history were. I'd have a hard time imagining it's had anything but a purely negative effect on society.

Spiritually, there is a tendency to turn technology into religion. Just look at /r/futurism on Reddit, we've all seen the Elon Musk worship. Also remember, a very large amount of people are people like this.

The biggest thing people lack is any sense of purpose.

We should at least be thankful it was only Trump who got elected, and not someone competently evil.

People with AIDS should rest assured that, unlike infections such phnemonia and Staphylococcus, HIV is rarely deadly.

Completely unrelated to anything in the thread: grading on a curve creates a perverse studying incentive. Game theory suggests it's best for the most talented to form a small cabal study group, increasing the disparity between the class average and the talented's grades on a challenging exam.

It causes the people who need help most to get ignored. I can't immediately think of a good solution.

I wouldn't call it simple. The most difficult task is providing for them while still making them feel useful. (There are a lot of people in western countries who can't find personal meaning without work. Thanks Malthus, assuming you can hear me over your own screams from way down there in hell.)

But yes, it does involve cracking down on fear mongering and fake news. The media (incl social media) exaggerates stupid things like race/identity politics and terrorism, while downplaying legitimate threats (like the literal ****ing subversion of democracy). Doing this would essentially mean re-criminalizing of seditious libel, as it was in the early United States by inheritance from British common law, even under the 1st Amendment (also as I'd assume the framers intended it to be).

The most urgent problems aren't isolated to the United States. They aren't even isolated to the west.

Let's say it only takes 10 people to provide for 100. Any economic system with compulsory labor would be designed to, naturally, compel all 100 people to work - but it can only provide jobs for 10 of them. The other 90 would be unable to find work, and would be punished for laziness (i.e. starve to death). But then the population has dropped by 90%, so you don't need all 10 workers to provide for everybody. You only need 1 of them. So the other 9 get laid off, and are punished for not working (starve to death). Now the population has been reduced by 99%, so you don't need all of the workers. Ad infinitum.

All political and economic systems known today are based around compulsory labor - communism, capitalism, fascism, state corporatism, market socialism, social democracy, all of them. Every single known political and economic system collapses when there is less work to do than available workers.

This is literally the problem Keynesian economics was intended to solve. It's all about creating artificial demand for labor. Keynes literally said, you should bury pallets of money and pay people to dig them up again - so you'd have laborers back at work, and they'd have money to buy things, which creates more demand. But this only works when the labor demand shortfall is cyclical. What happens when the demand shortfall is structural? We all get ****ed, is what happens. China, US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, all of us. ****ed. Because everything about our cultures and governments say that when someone is unnecessary and unloved, they die. And people who are marked for death usually aren't all that happy about it.

How the **** did the dam operators up in Oroville (Butte County, California) screw up so badly? So as of now it looks like there might not be a massive flood in the central valley, buuuut damn.

The dam was 100% full and it's expected to rain later this week. Basically they are worried about the top 30 feet of the emergency spillway failing, which would turn the town below into a big river. :-/

Apparently it's going to cost $100 to $200 million to repair the spillway. Why would it cost $200 million to repair a ****ing spillway?

This is a very large dam--the tallest in the United States, apparently. According to the 1966 Army Corps of Engineers report, the entire Oroville Reservoir project (which includes all sorts of things beyond the actual dam), would cost $299,869,000, or $2.4 billion adjusted for inflation.

As for the price tag on the repairs... well, the "forceful release" of water has created a ton of erosion, not just to the secondary / emergency spillway (which is just a concrete lip on top of a mound of dirt), but to the main (concrete) spillway (and the earth and rock below it), which had been shut off due to its own erosion problems earlier this week, until the emergency required them to open it again, now with the water being released at an even greater rate (due to the damage to the emergency spillway, which has decreased the capacity of the dam).



I've read somewhere that this year's winter season has been especially warm and wet, perhaps due to climate change. Moreover, just coming out of a drought, the spillway structures had been in disuse and perhaps untested. Unfortunately, there is still a ton of snow up in the mountains, and what looks to be a rainy spring will start up again on Wednesday.

But I am sure we'll have federal funds for some relief.

Maybe Trump can help us pay for a "wall" to keep water molecules from coming into our state....

CA has been having a ridiculous amount of rain this season.

This is good news--maybe it won't cost $100M to repair....

I'm intrigued by the whole mess with Flynn and the Russian ambassador. We haven't actually discussed the Russian meddling in the elections, have we?

Anyway, it's amazing Trump claimed to not know about it on Friday, after the thing having been on the news since Thursday, not to mention all the White House officials that had to deal with the mess. I find it hard to believe that nobody informed Trump, or that he magically missed the news for 24 hours straight. Or maybe certain news channels "underreported" the news?

Anyway it's Monday now, and Trump is still "looking into it".

They're not off to a smooth start, are they?

Some good local reporting on the Oroville dam stuff:

http://www.kcra.com/article/water-stops-spilling-over-oroville-auxiliary-spillway/8736758

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/11/02/non-partisan-congressional-tax-report-debunks-core-conservative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/#70750416431b

In 2012, a non-partisan study found that lowering taxes on the wealthy does not stimulate economic growth. Republicans suppressed the report ahead of that year's presidential election as it goes against conservative economic theory and one of the points Mitt Romney ran on. This isn't really the thread for this, but I didn't want to make a new one.

So that really is a huge question, what purpose do most of the people on this Earth have? What can they be given? I don't think everyone can reasonable become an artist, or just skip around in meadows all day.

I mean, maybe the future can be local competitive events world-round? Or maybe teach everyone math and put them towards solving open problems.



It probably would be a good thing if that happened.



Eh, you think this is an actual possibility? That people will starve to death because they're superfluous to economic development?



I think Marx did envision this; are we to look back to him? High unemployment leads to people revolting, sure, but if they're cared for will this still have an effect?

I mean, the truth is, the political and social systems of the world are at the foothills of a mountainous crisis. Our political climate is going to change. We may not have a solution for how that works, but it should bring us hope.



Huh. Well the average age of death is going down in rural America. Marked for death (economically) I suppose describes it.

I get the impression that you're suggesting the future holds some kind of utopian socialism.

I think the truth is, there's little to go on to actually prove Russia was meddling in the election.. so nobody's saying anything. It's at least a pure lie that they hacked any voting machines (despite a sizable amount of Democrats believing this), and despite the assurances I don't think there's rock solid evidence it was Russian state actors behind the Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks stuff. Guccifer I find most plausible, Wikileaks possibly.

Don't forget the myriad of baseless conspiracies: Wikileaks was conspiring to get Trump elected, Wikileaks had material on Trump and didn't release it, Wikileaks is a Russian front, I mean basically everything has been thrown out by partisan Democrats.

Glenn Greenwald had a good news bit on it. I mean, the basic claim is that "it's consistent with Russian actions". Even in the EU, recently German intelligence released a report saying there's no evidence of Russian disinformation, but rather ****ty journalism.

So does that mean nothing happened? I don't know. I mean, Russia does do something, but there's healthy room for skepticism.

This is literally what competitive sports is, which of course is already huge in many people's lives (if only as a spectators). In a way it is simulated violence, like the gladiator matches of Rome.

Also, there is the widespread popularity of video games, which IMO sounds like a possible factor in the drop in violence in the 90's / 00's. On the other hand, giving people internet connections may have ruined what seemed to be a brief moment in America where people focused their aggression mostly on isolated, inanimate objects... now it gets channelled into anonymous members of opposing tribes, which ultimately is realized as actual violence when somebody like Trump is elected as a result.

(Then again, we all know that Doom was a murder simulator, that heavy metal destroyed Christian souls, etc.--if only we could go back to those simpler times!)

Yes, Mr. Flynn, you are oh-so-distinguished....

Damn, this again? Bernie lost the primaries. Get over it.

The fact that Russia interfered in the election wasn't a conclusion made by journalist based on publicly available information, or even on the basis of anonymous leaks. It was revealed by intelligence agencies in a declassified report. Numerous American intelligence organizations have stated they have reliable evidence that Russia interfered in the election and intended to help Trump win. They indicated that they couldn't share the evidence for their claims, because it would possibly reveal the means they used to acquire the evidence, and thus damage their intelligence gathering capabilities in the future. Glenn Greenwald's response to these arguments wasn't much more than "you can't trust the CIA and the NSA! They're proven liars!"

Healthy skepticism? Or perhaps ideologically motivated skepticism? It doesn't matter. At this point, even Trump, who has more reasons than anyone to deny Russian interference, has acknowledged it. I would say that if you're still agnostic on the subject, it's not skepticism so much as denial.

IMO, the amount of skepticism you seem to have for people who would make charges against the administration of sundry funny business in Moscow isn't really called for, given the list of pirates that have staffed Trump's campaign and now his cabinet.

Characterizing their activities as a "conflict of interest" would be to put it dangerously mildly. The whole lot of them ought to be fired by Congress.

When you have malicious foreign state actors consistently looking for ways to sabotage and harm you, it sort of makes sense to use a logic which is opposite from the regular skepticism with which we civilians normally react to "conspiracy theories".

Basically, when there are a bunch of traitors in the White House, concerning signs need more attention, not less.

Also:



Maybe some misinformed Democratic voters who are prone to conspiracy theories believe this, but I haven't seen anything in, say, WashPo or NYT, or anything from a Democratic congressman suggesting that this happened.

Damn. It's almost worrisome that Kellyanne Conway got put into a corner like this.

https://twitter.com/MarlowNYC/status/831480793839046658

When this administration collapses, it's not going to be a triumph for the Democrats, or even for the republic. It's going to be a terrifying and uncontrollable train wreck.

While I agree that a systemic collapse of Trump's cabinet would leave the government in disarray, and would certainly be disconcerting, one thing to keep in mind here is that the real reason Flynn got caught in a lie with the Vice President (and with the media), was that senior career bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies, pushed by a holdover from the Obama administration (Sally Yates), had been investigating Flynn's vulnerability to blackmail as a result of his misrepresentation of his conversation with the Russian diplomat.

But it was only the career bureaucrats who were going to hold Flynn accountable for his lies. Sure, Flynn pissed off Mike Pence, but the investigation was precipitated by bureaucrats. By the time enough of those bureaocrats are marginalized, have resigned, or are fired (as Yates in fact was, days after she finally had success in interesting FBI director Comey in actually contacting the administration about the potential for Flynn to be blackmailed), Trump's cabinet will still be staffed by hacks and loyalists, and whatever lies they want to propagate won't so easily upset their autonomy.

At least until an actual crisis reveals their incompetence.