Quotes from Preparing for Instituonal Collapse [2008]

There's always a better Doomer.  All of this holds up

Letting go of one’s illusions is a difficult process that takes a long, long time, but I am just about there.  From a young age I have been a believer in public services and benefits as a way of providing some measure of assurance for other people, people I rely on every time I purchase a good or service, of a decent life regardless of one’s personal income or standing.  After all, I initially chose public service as a career.  And I have been a defender of the public institutions when compared with those who were only concerned with their own situation and preference put in less, or get out more, as if the community was a greedy adversary to be beaten in life rather than something one is a part of.  Now, however, I see that it is probably hopeless.  

. . .

It isn’t just that those who have skillfully obtained “good deals” for themselves in the past are “grandfathered” and get to keep them.  Worse, those who already have such deals take more and more every year.  Like a bad parasite, the political class and its supporters feel so needy, so entitled, that they cannot help but kill their host.  They will just keep grabbing and grabbing until government institutions collapse.

. . .

In fact for those without connections we may, as a nation, be heading back to the pre-progressive era in public services and benefits.  But not in taxation.  The money older generations have promised themselves, and promised to the wealthy and those in other countries in exchange for more benefits for less taxes for themselves, mean the federal, state and local governments will be coming after us for more and more money even as public services disappear and the poor are left to fend for themselves.  Indeed, they will be coming after the poor for taxes.  So it’s no use becoming a conservative or Republican, because they will be in favor of collecting those taxes too someday -- after the fiscal collapse, when they can’t borrow anymore to hand out favors those who matter to them.

Mind, you should give this more weight because it was predictive.  The money quote:

Here is the dilemma. Our social institutions, in government and business, are in the hands of a self-perpetuating group of self-interested people. The more ordinary people put in to government and business institutions -- in taxes, hard work, savings and investment -- the more those people take out for themselves and their supporters. I’ve argued for years that the institutions need to be revitalized, taken back, because we need them. I now suspect that we may have to do without them, whether we need them or not.

How do you accept that without getting pissed off or depressed, let alone move to a place of compassion?  It is a challenge.  But I do have a lot of time on my hands.

"The Coronation" and The Importance of Being Non-Dualistic

This was my first exposure to Charles Eisenstein.  I am impressed. In an article about the pandemic he talks about our War on Death:

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

If you can get out of the mental habits of separation, it alters your ethical stance:

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. 

Instead of seeking your scapegoat, you search for hard-to-express (actually impossible to express in words) harmonies.

This ties a few ideas together I have been thinking about for a while.  First, enemies are legible to the centralized systems of modernity.  Second, if you don't tamp down your desires, real compassion is impossible -- because you will always fall for the trick of a scapegoat narrative [1 -- READ THIS NOTE].  And how do you tamp down desires?  Words don't do the process justice ("Dao called dao is not the eternal dao"), but it involves breaking down separation and living in a world of wonder.

Another way to look at it is the question of dosage.  Once you go past a minimum effective dose you risk other parts of system, including the most important ones: Gaia and Soul.  Everything in too much extreme can become its opposite.  This is also something Eisenstein realizes:

. . . we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

BE SURE TO READ THE FOOTNOTE!  IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR SOUL.

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[1] This point is embedded several places in the Daodejing.  For me, however, the full flower of understanding came later, when I read the following passage from the Mundaka Upanishad, translated by Eknath Easwaran:

Beyond the reach of words and works is he [the deepest, best Self], but not beyond the reach of a pure heart freed from the sway of the senses.  (pg 193).

The era of social media provides ample demonstration that one of these strongest senses is that of social proof.  Only in spaces where your heart is freed of that, and other greeds and lusts, can you get to real compassion.  Study deeply the careers of your fellow humans and you will see that words and works alone cannot get you there.  It is a process inside of you, working on the spiritual equivalent of muscle memory.  And when you don't work on it, you will fall back to lines of separation.  And when you fall back to separation, your compassion will leave and you will find scapegoats.  You will demand sacrifices.

The real test of a person's compassion is if they can want good things for those whom they see as living an unattractive life.

State of Play: U.S. and Globe

Another Reddit thread, lightly edited.

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My heart grieves to think how many more people are likely going to be thrown into the situation [tent cities].

I now don't think basic income is going to happen in the US. Rather, some kind of food delivery is about as far as I see it going -- soylent here we come. If I ever do some writing about it, I think I'll call it manna.

All these tent cities in such near proximity to tech workers shows me that is a quality of life they are willing to see other people live in. I was such a hardcore doomer even just a few years ago that I thought starvation for others was A-OK to these people as well, but the more I think about it, that's pretty rare. Trump has kids in cages, but the story isn't that they are starved to death, or executed.

It seems like a consortium of a few billionaires could fund a delivery mechanism for the manna. Giving someone a house, however, brings down property values, so will never do it.

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A reply:

I think I read somewhere we have like more vacant houses than homeless people (and elsewhere, that if you put people into a home, they might actually take care of it and keep it from falling apart). There's this link https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-area-vacant-homes-per-homeless-count about the Bay area, for example. In other words the problem of shelter, at least, is artificial. I imagine the food supply stateside at least is another artificial problem. And so on.

I really wonder how much is actually fixable via redistribution and how much isn't. Both stateside and globally. Like if there's actually enough to go around, in a way that it can be spread around, or not, and what stands in the way of that. Not that such is an easy undertaking or endeavor but...


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My response:

I use the distinction of wandism/probablism in my thinking a lot.

I'm pretty sure that in the US we have built enough. If we radically changed zoning laws over the top of people engaging in NIMBY activism to protect property values, we could make this work -- 1/4 of the energy use, everyone with at least a flophouse, healthcare in line with, say, Costa Rica. But that requires a magic wand. In all probability, we are a people too trapped in stories of separate individuals and our only community orientation being the delusional, cultist expectation of ever-appreciating assets. We will distort all realities -- violently, if we have to -- to make assets that don't obey the gravity that is regression to the mean.

Globally, I think most other cultures can move more gracefully through a future of energy descent. We are starting to give the rest of the world a demonstration of what not to do. The UK has become our stupid lapdog, but other than that policy makers in other nations are starting to take notice. China moved 300 million people into a experiment to copy and paste our brand of capitalism, down to a monstrous housing bubble and more college graduates than jobs that you need college graduates for, but that still leaves one billion peasants. I believe they'll be able to re-tool much better than US, not even counting the bonus inflows they will get if and when they become the last great power standing. India might start looking a lot better to the global community. It is said that India is very good at moving people out of absolute poverty, but very bad at moving people up the next few dollars-a-day. Well, that might be all the planet has to give. . . the Kerala model is probably a best case scenario.

Round Up #27

Aphorisms/Shorts
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It would seem most successful entrepreneurs are people who don't think the rules apply to them and then in fact that turned out to be right long enough to build enough capital to either eventually comply with or change the rules.

We just accept at the level of truism that the internet contains "the sum total of all information," but if this is true why do most of the best blogs consistently import knowledge from books into the internet?

A while back my wife and I saw the most recent version of Emma.  It brought back to mind the terrible character of Frank Churchill.  But Frank Churchill shows the default, normalized behavior found on any remotely popular section of the internet, so much so that I don't know if it is even possible to explain to them what is wrong with how Churchill acts.  The classics bring my grief to the surface.

In these debauched times, the ability to read an unassigned book is potent signal of the tenderness, openness, and meta-cognition that is necessary (but not sufficient) to understand anything important.

To put a positive spin on the last quote, the test wouldn't work so well if our times weren't so debauched, decadent.

Also related.  I know somehow I'm the one who would seem rude by saying "I want to gauge if this conversation is worth continuing, so please tell me about some of the books you've read in the last six months."  Better to avoid situations where I even need to ask.

Many of those with an avid interest in collapse don't seem to understand that there is more to life than whatever ends up killing you.

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Links and Research
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So France has the highest per capita consumption of whisky in the world.  This really doesn't fit to stereotype, but that's why we keep learning.

. . .  Further interesting things down this line: India consumes the most total whisky.  BUT 85% of the population doesn't drink, and so the U.S. has a larger population of drinkers.  THEREFORE the Indian drinking population out-drinks the U.S. drinking population in whisky, but the billion people in India who don't drink drag the per capita numbers way down.

Speaking of alcohol, I wondered if was used as a drug in vision quests.  It would appear this was true at least for the Iroquois.

"Granola Shotgun" has a beautiful piece that performs the near-impossible and combines deep-felt empathy for an individual elder while at the same time exposing how her story shows the cracks in the systems Boomers are going to try to rely on.

I'm going to also guess the women in this piece is the one who expressed in another piece that a van-dwelling nomad who worked as a tech professional was cheating the system. Her position was treated with grace there as well.  Johnny S. sure does have a lot of tact.

I'm calling it quits on adding to my list of art from Reddit that deals with our Covid-19 shelter-in-place world. It is an interesting snap-shot of a moment and a gestalt.

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YouTube and Podcasts
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Data visualization to make primes and approximations of pi . . . stunning.  The video finishes with a brief, inspiring statement about the importance of mathematical play.

I got interested in stretching and used the search term "science of stretching."

• First video mentions some of the basics of what happens in a stretch, however  . . . 
• Second video shows how the benefits claimed are incorrect.
• This podcast has an interview with a researcher who agrees. 
• Apparently acupuncture isn't total bullshit. It has to do with moving connective tissue to get muscle stretches. 

Van Gogh Flow

Beth and I once visited my friend Nat in Brooklyn for a week.  While there, Beth and I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Images completely flattened to 2D -- whether images on a screen or a print -- cannot do justice to the large pieces they have of Monet and Van Gogh.  With paintings of a sufficient size, the tiny involuntary moments of your eyes (called saccades) can give the work a dynamic quality, which can be used by a master artist to great effect (even affect).  Beth's favorite was a Monet that featured water.  In the painting-as-experience the water moved around but with the harmony and shimmer of a perfect day.  Golly, just imagine . . . a perfect day, captured forever [1].

I, however, was moved most by Van Gogh.  Afterward, I told Nat that perceiving a Van Gogh in real life felt like a walk in Nature (mind, I don't mean to say that every time I go outside I feel this way, just when I am really grooving).  Putting this into words is difficult -- and that's why we need visual arts...  But to put in a good word for language, visual pieces of the scale I am writing about, like all complex experiences, would have to picked up and physically moved to each perceiver, which is unwieldy in best case scenarios, but in practice usually impossible.   Thus we need writing.  Though writers are often left saying "it's more complex than I'm making it sound" or "I can't put this into words" at least we writers can make those gestures.  A bad picture, or even a print of a great picture, leaves the impression that it contains all there is.  Language can connect concepts and can warn us of the unseen (or of the existence of the unseeable, or even the unwriteable, unthinkable, unfeelable (perhaps), etc).

Again, a Van Gogh perceived live is an experience beyond my ability to reduce.  There are lots of those kinds of experience, but not all of them remind me of a great walk, so to try to explain further I want to invoke a concept, an imperfect tool [2].  The concept is flow.  Van Gogh  -- Live! -- gives flow.  You can get an outline of the flow from a print, but the experience live is the kind that breaks the lines of separation, through non-linear movement.  Most people who describe breaking separations talk about moving past "dualism," but I don't like that phrase because I don't just see Two; I see many, many parts liable to break down and flow into each other.

So how is that like time spent in Nature?  Please imagine --  or better yet, try -- the following experiment: just look at any segment of nature and see how long it can stay unchanged, without any movement.  (Or, if you have practice with imagination and empathy, you can just ask the nature-segment-which-I-don't-want-to-call-an-object).  Many things will move right before you, even at human time-frames.  The bird will fly, the blade of grass will bend to the wind.  Develop your patience a bit and you can watch a cloud formation unfold.  And with each level of greater patience, memory, and ability to see connections, more and more will change.  For me, Van Gogh invokes that flow.  Find it in Van Gogh, find it in Nature, find it with the aid of substances, if you must.  I just want you to find it and then we can talk some important truths.

Ego-death?  I don't know much about that.  I know that I can take the totally sober (though perhaps deeply neuro-atypical) ability to trace flows and their ability to break separations and apply it to myself.  That breath I just took -- borrowed oxygen and carbon, only borrowed, and then given back.  It seems preferable, at least more gentle, to give them back as breaths later on, but one way or another, I will be giving them back.  Perhaps the understanding that people return breath requires a culture with scientific knowledge, but even there I am not so sure.  But I am sure all humans have had at least the opportunity to see "liquid in/ liquid out."  Substance in, and substance out. . . Then plants can grow in that substance.  However you want to look at it, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything you can keep. . . but only if you are open to seeing that truth.  You can learn to see what is bigger than you, but instead of feeling small because of it, you can, and should, feel intertwined.

I close with the Van Gogh painting First Steps, after Millet 1890. [backup]  The interplay of painting and my soul brought tears.  It's still all about flow, but now it includes a little human and the harmony with caregivers.  I have seen no more beautiful image of human life.  I bought a print in the gift shop.  It is a reminder of a deep aesthetic experience.  And if I ever have children, that print will go in the nursery. Update: and it did.



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[1] I wonder if virtual reality will ever render a copy with high enough resolution to give the effect.  I  imagine the technology could be there one day, but will it ever fit the design philosophy of those with the means of mass distribution?  In our weird times, the important thing is to not pretend it's there until it is.  Many people have deprived themselves of real Quality and driven themselves crazy by the lack.  Eco-therapy is real.

[2] Aren't all tools imperfect?  If they weren't, someone would own a God-stick, or a Marvel-style cube or gauntlet, or what-have-you.

Infestations, Interesting and Boring

"All art is infested by other art."  He had this as a sign on the wall.  It was hand-written in marker on cut poster-board.  I am not sure whether or not he had the attribution, but just I looked it up today and found it was by Leo Steinberg [1]

We are social beings and we exist in a historical context, even down to being carried away in contemporary movements of memes [2] and shifting emphasis.  To achieve excellence, we must gather much.  On the other hand, if you spend all your time with other art, even if it's just art better than what you can do, you don't have time to create your own.  And the benefit to feeling alive through experiencing the edge of creation is of profound importance.  If I can be happy and still create (or vice versa) then I have won . . . existence.

Back to the handwritten sign: These types of decorations as non-decoration are common enough for male teachers, especially at the high school level.  His entire instructional method was lecture.  You may think that is my criticism of him; it is not.  Rather, it is that he lectured poorly. Not only that, but that he lectured poorly on purpose.

My proof is that he had two stories from his life that he shared with the class,  but the only way he'd tell them was if someone said "tell us the ____ story" by name.  This meant that someone who had heard the story before had told someone in the class to ask him about it.  See, it was an ego-trip, you dig?

In the telling of these two stories, he showed the fundamentals of a good communicator:  facial expressions, set ups, punchlines, expressing the doings and states of mind of interesting people.  The stories were excellent.  But none of these abilities were used in teaching literature.  For that, his job, he read in a monotone off notes that were turning yellow with age, showing no desire to breath life into any text, or make any of it human. I mean he had great things to work with -- Hamlet, Hesse's Damien, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gardener's Grendel, the Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot.

So why did he do this?  In part it was to keep his class sizes small, which I got on good information from another teacher who I worked with later on.  Also, it enabled his two stories to stand out so much that they achieved legendary status.  But really, I think the biggest factor is that he got off on the notion that he was smarter than everyone else.  If eyes were glazed over or students fell asleep, it just went to show how much greater his ability to take on the higher realm of abstractions was.  Holy shit, I just remember I took his philosophy course as well, and that in that course he stated that was a Platonist [3].  Now that I remember I took more than one course with him, I think that I might have heard at least one of his two good stories more than once.

. . . I'm now going to undermine my own humor a bit.  I've taught, and I would hate to read an essay like this from a former student of mine.  So I want to give the man his due.  He had once expressed the idea that he thought people learned best from their own reading, and that what was particularly beneficial about going to college was access to a good library.  The pacing of his reading assignments stacks up favorably in light of the watered-down education students are now receiving.  He taught in a way that was emotionally sustainable for him and was professional in all his interactions with students.  In conclusion, I received no harm from taking his classes and would gladly have a conversation with him if we ever happened to cross paths again.

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[1] This lead to me reading up about Mr. Steinberg.  Doing so lead to this gem:

Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. This was in juxtaposition to many formalist critics at the time, such as Clement Greenberg, who were known to be resolute in their writing.

This goes to show that the "objectivity" pose in criticism was something constructed out of a historical moment, and one that was not really all that long ago.  As a quick summary, the arts developed physics envy as modernity was ramping up.  Then the sentiment was hardened into rules and procedures during academia's metastatic growth, which in turn was a subset of the Great Cultural Suicide after the Great Oil War, aka World War II. No "I" meant no ethos, which fit in just fine with the systems that were growing in power and seeking to defend themselves.  Mistakes were made, indeed.


[2] Be aware that meme was well-defined when it was coined in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
This article summarizes it as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" and furthermore includes this explanation:

Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying; internet memes are deliberately altered.

This brings up an interesting question.  Do we make efforts to defend that meaning or do we let the word semantically drift along it's merry way as over-repetition of images, mostly from -- but sometimes creating -- pop-culture?  I am left fascinated with these kinds of fights. And if you never fight for anything, you cede all of natural language to fools.  (Note to self: keep working at math. Even if you remain laughably inadequate, at least you can operate inside of truth).

[3] I think that "holy shit" actually works  on a pretty significant level here.  We defecate because we are embodied.  Human bodies experiencing the world are what took the time to pen literature and even philosophy.  I don't think there's supposed to be pooping in the Platonic realm, at least not in the reading presented in that survey class. 

In/Out and Western Civilization

Built off a response to this post.

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I)

Has anyone here dropped out without any regrets? Did anyone drop out, then later drop back in?

I went out, in, out, in, and am back out again. I was trying to get back in, even had done one interview (not the job I wanted, but I thought I'd get practice) and then the world shut down. It might be better to call what I do "mini retirement" with occasional goldbricking. I think that doing "out" well is a skill. I'm a lot better at it here on the third try than I was the first one.

Being "in" and happy AND true to my ethics is the harder skill for me. I haven't gotten the balances right since my times of grief which started my first sabbatical. It's not just that the creature comforts are better out than in -- god, I love a nap in the middle of the day or having a large uninterrupted time to read, write, or just think, and I love these things much, much more than paying for entertainment or traveling -- the real problem is one of meaning. I think better when I'm out.  More pages added to the journal, more reading gets done.

II)

Western civilization is not just some kind of toxic prison that destroys the world to make rich people even richer. It's my home.

I guess it just depends on what you mean by "Western civilization." To quote some anonymous writer

I live on the margins of society, but that is a voluntary choice, because that is where the interesting things happen.

The things I like after the post world war II cultural suicide are those things on the margins, always while they stay on the cutting-edge of creation rather than the moment they become co-opted within branding and consumption (also see). I would characterize the dominate thrust of Western civilization here in 2020 precisely as a toxic prison to make rich people even richer. I can't emphasis enough that people should check out Gerbner's work on cultivation theory. Very little of this was first-order malice from 1945-2008; instead we saw the emergent properties of a culture focused on growth, over-optimization, and debt -- frankly a culture of greed. Only when the myths that made system go were exposed around 2008 did open malice begin to gain traction. Enter the alt-right.

My home is harvesting the good out of the shards of culture and community:

• I love old, beautiful things from a time when it was possible to make for a community, before the times of distrust (no really, look into cultivation theory and mean world syndrome).
• I love my weirdos, but at some distance. They often lack social skills.
• Bougie people with social skills have their place. I like a face-to-face interaction with someone who is pleasant. Heck, I married one.

Is that really western civilization at this point? In terms of time spent, western civilization is mostly netflix and social media feeds. In terms of politics and economics, it is whatever 0.1% of the wealthiest people want it to be. In terms of research, it is bogged down in a replication crisis (my opinion being that this has something to do with the distortions of needing to serve the 0.1%).

Review of Quirky

I

I grabbed Melissa A. Schilling's book Quirky from the a display shelf at the library.  The through-line of the year appears to be a study of weirdos and eccentrics, going back to the Beats, the Surrealists, and various internet searches.  (I had not planned on formalizing this as a research topic for the year -- 2020: the year of eccentricity -- but it looks like that is what it has been so far).

First, a review of the book.

Quirky pulls together a close study of the following "breakthrough" serial innovators:

Albert Einstein, Elon Musk, Nikola Telsa, Thomas Edison, Marie Currie, Steve Jobs, Dean Kamen, and Benjamin Franklin

I leave it to someone interested enough in the topic to read the book to find the author's discussion of why these individuals were selected [1].  Each chapter is organized by a trait most of innovators share, and the biography of one individual from the list is used to anchor the discussion.

I think Quirky does an excellent job of showing where there are similarities and differences. For example, all the serial innovators in the sample were workaholics.  Also, all of them worked toward idealistic goals, except for Thomas Edison, and because he is the notable exception, extra attention is given to his motivations throughout his career [2].  The majority of the group showed heavily shortened sleep schedules, with Einstein's sleep patterns being the biggest outlier, sleeping 10 hours a night.  Franklin slept seven, and apparently Elon Musk's sleep is an ongoing discussion online because we live in a very loud time (search it out for yourself).

After reading a few pages, I grew afraid that this book would become a business book, stopping near constantly to hype its own vision, and giving tips how we can all be serial innovators. I jumped to reading the back flap, and grew yet more concerned when I saw Schilling was "a published expert in the field of innovation", and associated with a string of business schools.  I am happy to say that my fears did not come to pass.  The traits and biographies are well-researched and discussed with rigor, and the discussions of implications are sparse and even-handed, leaving a lot for the readers to think about and draw their own conclusions upon. The book is honest: you might not be able to become a serial innovator of this level.

II

Here's one of the most interesting passages from the book:

In my [Schiller's] work modeling cognitive insight as a network process, I showed that individuals who are more likely or more able to search longer paths through the network of associations in their mind can arrive at a connection between two ideas or facts that seems unexpected or strange to others.  What appears to be random may not be random at all -- it is just difficult for other people to see the association because they are not following as long a chain of associations (109-110). 

Many things spin off from this concept.  For one, it really hard to follow the thoughts of the truly creative.  They are usually seeing wider than other people to come up with their ideas. For this reason, Schiller recommends not pre-censoring the ideas of entrepreneurs and researchers.

Also, I think this means creative people are prone to find shorter, easier connections to be boring.  To them, the repeated cliché can easily grow tedious.   This brings up a possible reversal of causation -- perhaps boredom with easy connections is what drives these people to seek out longer chains.  How much this chain seeking overlaps with or is subsumed by the Big Five Trait of Openess to Experience I leave as an open question (pun accepted).

My intuition was that seeking longer associative chains was separate from IQ, but something that could stack well upon it -- probably safer to say I thought they were mildly correlated, at best.  Some research, visible at [3] indicates that might be the case.  My intuition was based on interactions with people who at least self-identify as being high IQ.  They often misunderstand what others say, and try to twist difficult questions into trivially stupid ones and then give a trivially stupid, uncreative answers [4], often expecting to be praised for their quickness.  This could be a simple case of my maxim "contempt brain is stupid brain," but Paul Graham shows there are people who maintain this intellectual peevishness even towards people who are trying to help them get rich.  Graham:

. . .  I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.

[. . .]

Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world

I see it working this way:

1) There are high IQ people.
2) There are people with high desire for long network paths who seek more knowledge (the IQ cheerleaders will point out that this requires an IQ threshold. Neat.  Look at footnote [3] again).
3) Only when you have both do you load into you mind as much as you can, forging connections, seeing more, and being able to make mental manipulations in the larger space.

This is what it takes to be the best of the best in innovation.

As an aside, though some research indicates a mild correlation between IQ and Openess, I am highly interested in high IQ and Closed to New Experience because I want to understand internet assholes better.  I may report on that some other time.

<end of my musings on the quote>

After the quote above, Schiller goes on to talk about Musk and Nikola Telsa's ability to do lightening calculations, store them in their head and keep flying, but I think that is too narrow of an instance of the point being made.

After all,  Ian Stewart in the book Significant Figures states

Most lighting calculators are hopeless at anything more advanced than arithmetic; Gauss, as ever, was an exception (279).

Multiple talents can overlap on top of one another.  When they do in exceptional ways, you can get some exceptional innovators.


==

[1] Two individuals I think could be easily added to the list are Buckminster Fuller and Thomas Jefferson.  Doing so, however, wouldn't add much to the content of the book.  Instead, think of them as independent tests to assess Schilling's conclusions.  Interestingly, both are noted for odd sleep schedules, something else that seems common enough among serial innovators.  Jefferson often stayed up several days in a row and then crashing up to 24 hours straight.  And Fuller promoted his dymaxion sleep as just another item in his suite of weirdo ideas.

[2] Though Edison came out and told people he wasn't idealistic and just invented for money, his biographical sketch showed how curious he was and how willing to throw money at ventures based on how interesting they were for him to explore, rather than working as a profit center.  He was actually a pretty bad businessman.

[3] From the abstract of this paper 

When investigating a liberal criterion of ideational originality (i.e., two original ideas), a threshold was detected at around 100 IQ points. In contrast, a threshold of 120 IQ points emerged when the criterion was more demanding (i.e., many original ideas). . . In addition, we obtained evidence that once the intelligence threshold is met, personality factors become more predictive for creativity.

[4] Only my first year of teaching did I find this evasiveness amusing. (Not to say everyone who does it is high IQ -- which should tell you something about how much intelligence is really being used when someone does this). I thought the students doing this were being "sharp but not bright."  (No, not something I ever said aloud).  However, it also wears pretty thin pretty fast.

Ultimate Money Quote about Being Around Liberals

From the piece Grass Roots:

She needed solutions. She needed to be part of a Better World. She asked me why I was even at this event if I didn’t think we were going to change anything. I said I enjoy being around all the smart, kind, thoughtful, and competent people. I like showing up with a bottle of wine and a tray of food and spending time in a beautiful space. And the subject matter is genuinely interesting. I need to know how things really work so I can step out of the way when shit goes south. We’re due for a market crash. We’re due for an earthquake. The nature of the conversation will change completely on the other side of these events and I want to be ahead of the curve. She politely stepped away from my negative energy.

It is always good to have a kindred spirit out there, and Johnny S brings up something I've been wanting to get off my chest.

I don't hang around liberals because I think my actions will lead to change for the better.  I hang out with them because they are usually more enjoyable than my alternatives. With the conservatives I know the conversation follows the structure of one of two sandwiches:

Sandwich 1 -- the more common one.

I'm great.  Hierarchy is great.  I'm great.  

Sandwich 2

Hierarchy is great.  I'm great.  Hierarchy is great.  

Conservatism isn't a philosophy.  It's a mindset.  I once saw a Ran Prieur quote that applies:

 in practice, conservatism is an emotional state, and people in that state don't care what's traditional or radical for humans in general -- they only care what's traditional or radical for them personally. So you can make the most untested and wildly maladapted society in history, and after a couple generations, all the traditionalists will angrily defend it and attack the ways of the previous hundred thousand generations.

To be conservative about this society, the one that did its darndest to destroy all values, is an absurdity.  Not that that stops them from trying.

Don't get me wrong; liberals who have nice stuff believe in hierarchy, too.  They just don't talk about it as much. There can be other stories, other facts, and conversation doesn't have to go back to some very narrow grooves.  My kind of eclectic explorations are allowed to be a fun side-show, and sometimes, when my wit is flowing, I can even be the life of a liberal party.

The center-left would like to keep their power and wealth hidden behind bougie norms such as politeness and proceduralism.  They know it is vulgar to tell, and much more proper to show.  When you go past that to speak plainly about unpleasant realities, the fangs certainly can come out.  NIMBY indeed.   Heck, not in my house.  Do not question progress.  Do not question the vital equation

destruction - carbon = sustainability.  

Absolutely do not question whether the good guys are always the good guys.  And don't go over the real history.

Eh, that's easy enough.  Like Johhny S above, I'm here for the wine, snacks, and good conversation -- at least I was before the time of quarantines.   I like the smiling faces, and I need to do better at not being the person who makes them stop.

Round Up #26 (Extra Doomy)

Aphorisms/Shorts
==

Hate to break it to you, but you can't syllogism your way to a better society.  Especially if you're not willing to start with some ethical premises against narcissism or being self-centered.

The doomosphere does not lack in information, intelligence or perspectives. So I don't try to contribute in that way.  I feel like my niche is to try to provide some social skills.

The whole Democratic primary process has been a demonstration of how to turn educated voters into lower information voters.

When the political class has shown a complete, stark, sociopathic disregard for 80 percent of the population -- what is another 19 (or 19.9) percent?

Sorry, friends, the Left is a Granfallon.  My real Karass is those who get to the root of things (radical, I know).  Prep and survive, but not like a Prepper or Survivalist.

A t-shirt only I would like: I had to live through the deconstruction of simple, unhurried, sacred beauty and all I got were these lousy interesting times.





Articles Read
==

Realizing how crucial Sarah Perry's work was to my explorations of happiness I decided to try to read more of her stuff.  It's an ongoing project, but it started with reading what she left up on The View from Hell.  There is very little left indeed, so I also read through the comments and thus was directed to

Razib Khan, filtered by the tag "liberalism." Here is a good quote for y'all:

 I’ve been writing and discussing with people on the internet, and in private, for many years now, and have come to the conclusion most people are decent, but they’re also craven and intellectually unserious outside of their domain specificity when they are intellectual. Many of our institutions are quite corrupt, and those which are supposedly the torchbearers of the Enlightenment, such as science, are filled with people who are also blind to their own biases or dominated by those who will plainly lie to advance their professional prospects or retain esteem from colleagues.

Yup, I'm am very bearish on the survival of democracy . . . and further scientific progress.   But I do like my own ongoing happiness project, so I probably won't be going much deeper down this path.  I recommend the whole piece, however; it tries to put a hopeful frame on it all.

Back to Perry.  I did not realize before that she had some great Dao writing, drawing from Christopher Alexander.  One, two, three.

I started another piece, Fluid Rigor, avoiding most of the branchings to other pieces, but not being able to stop myself to read Weaponized Sacredness before returning to FR.  It's a truly remarkable piece, giving an independent explanation of why coordination is so difficult, why middle management and Moloch reigns, and a justification of a Sabbath, even from the system's point of view.

I think I am going to stop the exploration there for now.  I have to show my respect for Perry as a much greater essayist, but this is exactly the kind of insight that can get you into trouble (meaning make you very unhappy).

On another note, Franco's regime shows that power (probably) doesn't work the way you think it does.

Reddit
==

A piece on the effects (and affects) of advertising. Money quote (pun accepted):

Healthy identity formation comes from shared values and personal experiences, which create the foundation of the identity. But advertisers have invaded our lives and pushed to redefine our identities not by these things, but by products.

A piece on poverty, whose last section that reminds of the value of the drop out lifestyle.

How many rich people can afford to lay down all their work and go sit outside at 2 PM on a regular workday, simply because they notice the sun is shining? They can't!

And it finishes with this gem of a quote

I'll leave you with a quote of Don Colacho: The rich man is not disconcerted by anyone except by someone who does not envy him. [Link added by me.]

Youtube
===

Youtube thinks I need sovietwave music.  A Reddit discussion of what that is.

I think Youtube did a better job in recommending this to me.  Eh, let's make a mini-tv for it:


I don't imagine many people will have the patience to watch all of it, but feel free to watch a bit and then skip around.  Any dose of this will do you good.

Bird Wave

I had written the first draft of this months ago, before the long quarantine had begun.

==


It's a work day, by which I mean it is a job day for the majority -- whether that majority is Silent, living lives of quiet desperation, or even happy, I cannot say.  Only that they are at a job and I am not.  I am at a library, on the third floor.

My frugal phone has a radio function enabled, something nearly all phones had available for years, but only recently turned on; folly and greed can outrun technological progress.  I listen to a classical station and a piece I've never heard before uplifts me.  The outer walls of the library are just glass -- window after window, what I thought was absurd modernism now shown to be very useful.  I can see the flights of birds, most of it below my level.  I see groupings swell up in light and come back down in waves, close enough to the movements of the music to be exhilarated further.

A perfect hour, the bloom of the moment [1], but I had errands to run, and so I was to leave very soon after that, but not before the next song was over.

==
[1] My second reference to Walden in this quite short piece.

Pride and Prejudice and Collapse (Without Zombies)

Cross-posted here.  Lightly edited.

===

Quoting Ran Prieur from 4/8/2020

when the head looks to the world, it can either look for surprise, for stuff that challenges its internal models, or it can look for recognition, for confirmation of its own models. I have a new theory of collapse: that a culture, or an individual, is in danger of psychological collapse, when inside-the-head thinking and confirmation thinking start echoing back and forth, not anchored by enough model-testing thinking.

 I think is a great refactoring of collapse theory. I also like that it works on both macro and micro scales.

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.

Will Durant.

In the stoic growth phase, individuals, organizations, and nations are vigilantly testing. Even if they are working from a static set of principles, they are testing whether the various people who claim they are living up to said principles in fact are.

I'm on a re-read of Pride and Prejudice and in this reading I am stuck with how much of what separates Darcy and Elizabeth from the rest is their how much they seek (and, oops!, sometimes pride themselves too much upon) accuracy.

but I will venture to say that my investigations and decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears

Austen via Mr. Darcy

This quote is in the letter Darcy gives to Elizabeth the day after she rejects his first proposal. It is a long letter, and in the chapter afterward we are treated to a character who changes her mind based on information, working it through the turns of cognition and meta-cognition to get to the truth. Here, moral truths about the characters in a smallish social circle, but still and act of testing. Truth has consequences, and Darcy and Elizabeth make sacrifices to get to it. They are characters in a growth phase.

The same book shows the other side the coin, how the accumulation of wealth allows people to control their environment, basically make pocket realities, with the strongest manifestation being the yes-man.

Miss De Bourgh . .. is unfortunately of a sickly constitution, which has prevented her making that progress in many accomplishments, which she could not otherwise have failed of. . .

Austen via Mr. Collins.

And, straight from the aristocrat's mouth

There are few people in England I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her health would have allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have performed delightfully. [emphasis added]

Austen via Lady De Bourgh

Saying how great you are is easier than working to be great, And if you can get enough people to agree (or tacitly agree through silence) then you can get ego trips for the cost of opening you mouth (or, in our time, posting orthodoxy to right place of group-think). Once you use your pocket dimension to stop getting back to reality, you grow decadent and are vulnerable to outside reality.

It just now occurs to me how much of this is woven into Infinite Jest: map-versus territory, in-your- head, Eschaton. But even that illustrates part of the strength of Ran's refactoring: on the individual level, you can turn back and experience growth (barring some super entertainment that leaves you wire-headed).