Let's try looking back at the Foundation universe... which some of you have read... considering Isaac Asimov's sci fi classic in light of his acknowledged influences - Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and Karl Marx... which I would venture almost none of you have read. Indeed, I am less well-read in those three than I ought to be, though I am very well-read in Asimov! And hence, let me attempt to do my main job...
...to be interesting. To offer perspectives you may find nowhere else.
== Isaac Asimov knew them all! ==
Fans of Asimov’s Foundation series often cite Isaac being inspired by Gibbon’s classic, The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, and of course that is apt…
... though in Foundation’s Triumph I point out that Asimov’s future Galactic Empire based on Planet Trantor has many traits that are more Chinese than Roman. Especially the way it is run by an all-powerful caste of eunuchs. (The robots obedient to Daneel Olivaw, who are sterile and loyal, but relentlessly manipulative, behind the scenes.)
== Applying this to today ==
So what does any of this have to do with the politics of here and now? Both the confident prediction-incantations of Marx and the whole notion of psychohistory appear… well… kinda quaint to modern minds. Allowing us to shrug-off and even forget how compelling both were to both the masses and all wings of intelligentsia, a couple of generations back.
Well, there’s no room here for detail. Though there's plenty to discuss! (See "Class War and the Lessons of History.") ... Like how old Karl and his followers mapped out as ‘inevitable’ a series of events in oppression of an increasingly skilled working class whose resentment of owner-oppression could only follow one, ordained path.
Alas, having transformed himself over time (as Freud did) from brilliant researcher into a tendentious guru surrounded by acolytes, Marx came to believe incantations could overcome inconvenient human nature. It never seemed to occur to him that hundreds of thousands would actually read his books! And find them convincing. Convincing enough to decide to alter the apparently ordained path! Changing course through incremental, rather than sudden, reform.
Above all, Karl Marx never imagined that scions of wealth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his circle - would be persuaded to buy off the workers, by leveling the field and inviting them to share in a strong Middle Class, whose children would then (as recommended by Adam Smith) be able to compete fairly with scions of the rich.
It was a stunning (if way-incomplete) act of intelligence and resilience that changed America's path and thus the world's.
Among many mistakes, neglecting to consider that possibility was Old Karl's (and Lenin's etc.) biggest. Assuming that humanity is stupid and predictable is almost as dumb a glaring error as assuming that we’re smart!
Anyway, the Rooseveltean Experiment worked, far better than even its believers and enactors expected. For decades the US labor movement was hugely effective at counterbalancing the lords of wealth. Disparities hit levels lower than any great nation across history. And marginalized groups - races and genders - overcame resistance to enter the bargain. For a while, Marx seemed consigned to the dustbin...
Only now his tomes are again flying off the shelves, at almost every university on the planet. Why?
== He's baaaaack! ==
Why? Because our insipid world aristocracy is largely made up of buffoons and doomsday 'preppers' and inheritance brats whose addiction to flatterers has left them unable to read, let alone argue over the historical lessons of class taught by 6000 years of history. Or especially by the innovations of the Greatest Generation.
Show me one of today's oligarchs with the brains of that smart crook, Joseph Kennedy, who supported FDR for one reason:
"I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution."
Any aristocrat who actually, actually thinks the R word is not on the table, amid his caste's all out war against not just labor but increasingly fed-up nerd professions, is truly too smug, too dumb and incurious ever to know or care what the word 'tumbrel' means, until he is riding in one. But it's a cart that can find its way even into deep, Patagonian prepper fortresses.
== So, is it a cycle? ==
A some of you know, I have a deep and abiding dislike toward yammers about so-called "cycles of history" like the insipid, recent Fourth Turning fetish that's so beloved on the lobotomized U.S. right. (That's okay, the mad left, while much smaller, has its own insipidities.)
What ... all cycles, Brin? Even one that is… predictable? Well, I will quickly grant that there are strong attractor states, the worst and strongest being feudal or monarchal pyramids of privilege, ownership and power that dominated 99% of human societies for at least 6000 years. A natural - if toxic - outgrowth from mammalian male reproductive strategies that have only ever been stymied in a few Enlightenment Experiments. Like ours.
And yes, as the younger (smarter) Karl Marx pointed out, capitalism can either follow the recommendations of Adam Smith and remain flat-fair-transparent-competitive-creative, or else... it will follow the far more familiar path of parasitism by cheaters... and decay back into a form of feudalism, yet again.
One of you (Paradoctor) put this ironic contradiction cogently, in light of the Rooseveltean Miracle that kept capitalism flat-fair, for a while...
“When the capitalist class takes seriously Marx's predictions of mass immiseration and political unrest, then they enact mixed-economy reforms to ensure the stability of the middle class, as insurance. The reforms work; while inconvenient to their exercise of lordly whim, they protect the owner families from revolution and Marx's predictions are falsified."
Paradoctor brought it back around to Isaac Asimov's grand thought experiment.
“This is an instance of Seldon's Paradox: that accurate psychohistorical predictions, once made known, set into effect psychohistorical forces that falsify the prediction.
"But the Paradox has more work to do. When Marx's predictions fail, then the capitalist class stops taking those predictions seriously. Therefore they stop supporting opportunity-uplifting semi-socialism and a flattened-fair social order, turning back to cheating to benefit their own inheritance brats. The reforms unravel, resulting in mass immiseration and political unrest, as Marx predicted."
In other words, what we are seeing now... a massive, worldwide oligarchic putsch to discredit the very same Rooseveltean social compact that saved their caste and allowed them to become rich... but that led to them surrounding themselves with sycophants who murmur flatteringnotions of inherent superiority and dreams of harems. Would-be lords, never allowing themselves to realize that yacht has sailed.
“So to the capitalist class, Marx is as true a prophet as he is a false prophet. Likewise for the Seldonian psychohistorian: when first stated, the prediction sets into motion forces that deny it; yet when the prediction is denied, the forces against it abate, and it comes true. Therefore to the society, the psychohistorical prediction is as confirmed as it is denied.”
What we're seeing, alas, is final proof that Adam Smith was right, as were the U.S. Founders who rebelled against dullard inheritance feudalism... as were subsequent reformers who had to ratchet forward those incomplete reforms, one grindingly too-slow step at a time.
We can and should(!) argue over the details! And the Seldon/Marx paradox will likely be with us for a long time... and even longer under AI-eunuch lords?
But the central conundrum remains: that rule by narrow aristocracies was always deeply stoopid across all of human history, a litany of bad governance, delusions and horrors that was only finally broken by the Enlightenment Attractor Alternative. An alternative that perhaps - across the galaxy - only humanity ever stumbled into... which may rank as a top explanation for the Fermi Paradox
The conundrum has a basic answer. Our path out of the age-old macho, feudal trap was (primitively) shown by the social contract generated by the Greatest Generation and the equalizing/elevating power of the GI Bill and civil rights and the drive to argue new reforms openly and fairly.
And hence, when you see would-be lords dissing that process, you must recognize the old, reflexively unsapient enemy of all our ancestors, all descendants, all sagacity... and all hope.
106 comments:
Dr Brin in the main post:
I point out that Asimov’s future Galactic Empire based on Planet Trantor has many traits that are more Chinese than Roman. Especially the way it is run by an all-powerful caste of eunuchs. (The robots obedient to Daneel Olivaw, who are sterile and loyal, but relentlessly manipulative, behind the scenes.)
Ah, but that is not the Foundation universe that Asimov wrote about in the 40s and 50s. It's only what that universe became once he merged it with the robot novels.
Ok, what does it mean that I'm reading this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/google-big-tech-work-culture.html?showTranscript=1
— it sounds incredibly grandiose. Larry Page said, if only we could have two million people working at this company, think of all the good we can do in the world. Think of all the problems we can solve that governments can’t. And so he said, his job, as the leader of the company, was to make sure that every person had meaningful opportunities to basically do social good. I mean, it was quite high-minded philosophical stuff. It was not BS from what I thought at the time.
At the same time as Dr Brin just linked to this old posting from 2015 which happened to have the following comment underneath it:
Jumper:
You can predict Google a few years out, but you can't predict Larry Page.
"How much longer can I go on being an atheist?"
Dr. Brin,
I've raised this disagreement before, but you don't have to go to China to find a powerful organization of eunuchs deeply involved in imperial government. Eunuchs were a fixture in the courts of the Eastern Mediterranean pre-Roman domination and the later Roman Empire had fully adopted this custom. For every Cheng Ho (sorry, Zheng He in modern transcription) I can find you a Narses.
Pappenheimer
Dr Brin in the main post:
Well, there’s no room here for detail. Though there's plenty to discuss! (See "Class War and the Lessons of History.") ... Like how old Karl and his followers mapped out as ‘inevitable’ a series of events in oppression of an increasingly skilled working class whose resentment of owner-oppression could only follow one, ordained path.
Just today on Hal Sparks's radio show, Hal mentioned something that always nagged at me about Marx's path to communism, but I could never put it as well as Hal just did. He was discussing how bizarre it was that Marx thought communism could only come into being on the back of capitalism. That capitalism had to first build the means of production, and only then could the workers take control of them.
As Hal put it, "It would be as if you called yourself a vegan, but the only way you could get there is to bulk up like Schwarzenegger on just meat for decades, and then one day stop eating meat. And that this was your ideal of how veganism could work."
(It also reminds me of Dave Sim, a prolific womanizer in his 20s and 30s who then found that sex had lost its luster and wasn't worth putting up with women's demands for. From this, he counseled that boys should avoid sex altogether, as if foregoing sex after satiation and exhaustion in one's 40s and 50s has anything in common with going without from puberty.)
((And to scidata--see? Nothing about Batman))
David Brin:
Thank you for quoting me.
Part of the corruption of power is that power corrupts the intellect of the powerful. The only known solution is the circulation of aristocracies. Democratic institutions exist to make the circular flow laminar.
Before the Rooseveltean Experiment (which worked superbly) Bismarck - The Iron Chancellor - did a lot to make the lives of the German workers better for exactly the same reasons
Capitalism has a lot of problems with cheating - Adam Smith's buying the levers of power
But even before that capitalism is inherently a Positive Feedback process - the more that an individual HAS the easier it becomes to get even more
This is a "problem" - and a sensible society will act to try and level the playing field
Interesting article20 Ways to Win the Future of War, and Not One Is a Balloon
https://www.military.com/daily-news/opinions/2023/02/24/20-ways-win-future-of-war-and-not-one-balloon.html
WHat I find interesting is what is assumed... the very same attitude toward agility, constant feedback-under-criticism and submission to civilian authority that George Marshall inculcated into the military after WWII.
==
Alas, LH Hal Sparks revealed (if you convey accurately) a stunningly shallow grasp of Marx. I mean OMG, there WAS an effort to build toward proletarian communism via socialist central control. It was called Leninism. China's done much better, using a central leninist despotism whose myriad fingers are quasi Japanese Zaibatsu capitalist. But it shows zero signs of any inclination toward empowerment of the proletariate.
The closest was (arguably) US employee owned companies... a trend deliberately sabotaged by US capitalists.
DC good pt re Mismarck... and a caution.
Carumba, Sparks doesn't even know enough to be smartly WRONG! Marx was not prescribing a design path for implrmenting a desired outcome. He was predicting a path made systematically inevitable by social and class forces that would take effect whether or not both rulers and the ruled were aware of them. Sparks wasn't even talking in the general DIRECTION of plausibly commenting on Marx.
The very notion of steering cause and effect by policy volition is such an American conceit and that's probably one reason why Marx under-rated the possibility of rooseveltism.
Notably, Marx thought the final formation of full industrial capital (we now know to be an utterly absurd notion in its own right) could only happen through diversion of worker-created income into capital. One can imagine that diversion happening 1) voluntarily or 2) through leninist force (for the good of all) but Marx assumed it would largely require 3) theft from the workers by capitalists. When all individual humans have full sovereignty in zero-force true communism, that theft won't be possible.
Of course we now know one of many flaws in Marxism is that capital is NEVER 'fully formed.' in fact re-tooling and re-investment needs ACCELERATE.
Adam Smith was long before Marx
But re-reading the Wealth of Nations I was struck by just how slow the changes were - and how much "capital" it took to make the improvements
Marx was doing his stuff in the 1860's - 100 years after Smith - but 160 years before today
The world back then was closer to Smith's world than to ours - with the way that change has accelerated it was much much closer to Smith's world
IMHO that makes Marx's work much more relevant - in THAT world it does make more sense
In todays world - not so much - we have a few more "workers" but a few million times as much "capital"
Makes me glad that I at least mentioned Marx in passing in my 2011 article on computational psychohistory. At the risk of being teased again about how everyone reminds me of Seldon, let me list two more, one imaginary and one real. Father Perrault in Hilton's "Lost Horizon" is the former - prescient, a 'numinous' humanist, and virtually immortal. John Kemeny, co-inventor of BASIC, is the latter - wicked smart (worked with Einstein, Feynman, Church, and von Neumann), obsessed with psychology, and a crusader for computational thinking.
I'm inspired to re-read "Foundation's Triumph". Did anything ever come from the epilogue?
Hi Scidata
Read Psychohistorical Crisis
It not "cannon" but it has a much more realistic "take" on the future
which I would venture almost none of you have read
I've read Smith's Wealth of Nations, including the rather tedious diversion on silver prices. I recommend the Everyman's Library version, which has excellent annotations and footnotes. I suspect Smith and Saunders would get along nicely — Smith's attitude towards bankers and business owners is rather negative.
Started on Gibben, but got diverted by more modern archaeologists.
Marx? He's on the list. Tried a few years ago, but it was slow going and I had so little time. I need to find a decent annotated edition.
Took the link back to the 2015 posting.
Once can only wonder to what extent the entanglements Asimov's universe became enmeshed in were because of the parameters he built to evade the influence of John W Campbell--which our host mitigated with the brain virus in Triumph.
I forgot how to spell a few words and ended up skimming some reviews of the books. Funny to see how Asimov's readers dissing the 3B books with remarks that show they never read anything after second foundation. More readers incapable of putting on the different hats and having historical empathy, particularly toward Gaia, Galaxia and the mess the 3B books needed to clean up.
As Asimov returned to SF in the 1980s you might notice similarities between the roles of R. Daneel Olivaw's robots and Larry Niven's protectors. The protector guides and defends its breeder offspring much like a robot follows the 3-laws and suicides unless it can find a (zeroth-law) cause. Did Niven and Asimov have a friendship?
Wasn't to hot for the TV Foundation but it's off the rails enough I guess I can hope maybe if it diverges further I can just enjoy it and pretend it has nothing to do with Asimov. With the whole cloning angle, it's impossibly stupid for the Mule to not have an offspring, unless they are also a religious nut or something.
I love the Kennedy quote, but can't find its source. Can you point me to it?
I could spend hours dealing with your misunderstanding of Marx. But instead I want to cite another influence on Asimov: Oswald Spengler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
Marxian ‘universal laws of history’ would need some detailed explanation from you, to make any comments that you might have worth reading.
—
Btw, did Spengler actually say that “optimism is cowardly”?
Alan Brooks:
Btw, did Spengler actually say that “optimism is cowardly”?
It probably sounds better in the original German.*
* Meant as a joke which is no doubt muddied by the fact that he really is German.
When Dr Brin links back to old posts, I always peruse the comments section as well.
This one of mine from the 2015 Asimov post still holds up.
During the part where the characters were guessing different possibilities for the location of the Second Foundation, and ruling them out one by one, I wondered if Asimov's surprise revelation was going to be that there really was no such thing--that the existence of a mysterious Second Foundation to keep the plan on track was a myth planted in the minds of the Foundationers via the simple expedient of Seldon mentioning it to them. From then on, their belief that there was a power looking over them would be a psychological crutch to keep them optimistic, much as religion often is. It would also work the opposite way on enemies, such as the mere idea of the Second Foundation really did work (in the book) against the Mule.
I know that's not how the story turned out, but in some ways, I would have liked to see it.
Btw, did Spengler actually say that “optimism is cowardly”?
Yes. Full quote:
"Time cannot be stopped, there is no wise reversal, no prudent renunciation. Only Dreamers believe in ways out. Optimism is Cowardice. We have been born into these times, and have to steadfastly go the way to the end that is destiny. There is no other [way]. To hold out on lost ground, without hope, without salvation, is our duty."-Man and Technology, 1931
is? Didn’t he go south?
Viel zu denken.
Maybe this is a quibble, but you seem to be saying two slightly different things.
It never seemed to occur to him that hundreds of thousands would actually read his books!
And also:
Above all, Karl Marx never imagined that scions of wealth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his circle - would be persuaded to buy off the workers, by leveling the field and inviting them to share in a strong Middle Class, whose children would then (as recommended by Adam Smith) be able to compete fairly with scions of the rich.
These are not the same thing. It is not (I think) that Marx believed that no one would read his books, but that the capitalist classes would be unwilling to do what was necessary to avert a revolution.
Given when he was writing, that does not seem unreasonable. Where he was mistaken, I think, is in failing to realize just how productive capitalism would be. When he was writing, there was never enough, and also no signs that there would be enough, to satisfy the capitalists and also "buy off" the workers.
We should not forget how strong that unwillingness was (FDR just barely managed to succeed) and remains to this day (see not just the increasing concentration of wealth but the desires of the wealthy for things that will allow them to escape the consequences of the problems they are creating, rather than doing anything to address those problems).
Der Oger quoting Spengler:
"...Optimism is Cowardice. We have been born into these times, and have to steadfastly go the way to the end that is destiny. There is no other [way]. To hold out on lost ground, without hope, without salvation, is our duty."
I'm not sure that "optimism" means what he thinks it does. Maybe from a revanchist, right-wing perspective, the word could be taken to mean "expecting a return to lost glory." In which case, his anti-optimism sentiment is in direct opposition to right-wing revanchist authoritarianism.
In a more general sense, he seems to be saying, "It is what it is, so don't expect anything ever to change." And wouldn't his argument work against pessimism as much as it does against optimism? It's not an argument against optimism so much as against time itself.
Unless, the point is that time's arrow of entropy inevitably makes things worse, never better.
Back to Foundation, I'd like to see if the likes of ChatGPT ever get to the point where it could write a second trilogy covering the years between 376 and 1060FE in the style of the original trilogy.
And it's not that I don't think a real human author could do so. It's just that no real human author feels that it would be a worthwhile endeavor to do so. Speaking more generally now, that might be a benign use that AI would be good at--creating things that another human could maybe do for you, but no one who is capable of the skill sees the benefit of doing so.
Julie I cannot say that I am not guilty of passing along a ‘truism’ with the Joe Kennedy ‘quotation.’ It is possibly attributable to someone else. If you track it down and report here, you’d do us all (especially the truth!) a favor.
Red Dave: Yes, Spengler was circulating then. A wretched horror whose closest modern analogue is a fellow called Mencius Moldbug, or Curtis Yarvin, who (with comparatively microscopic versions of Spengler’s education and incantatory skill) is very busy supping at bones tossed to him from the oligarch’s table, yapping that the Enlightenment Experiment is in “decline.”
Was Isaac influenced by Spengler… well… even hating O.S., Asimov would have felt the power of those memes. But fortunately almost no human being was ever proved more spectacularly wrong than Spengler.
LH: In a sense that’s what my ‘full circle” notion for FOUNDATION was all about.
GB: you puzzle me. You don’t see an overlap? “These are not the same thing. It is not (I think) that Marx believed that no one would read his books, but that the capitalist classes would be unwilling to do what was necessary to avert a revolution.” It’s like the fact that no earthling in AVATAR ever seems to have seen AVATAR… or that the civilization Cameron is preaching for never listened to him or a million others seeking better behavior
AB: Marx could see that near zero education a capital would lead to societies with tribal structures, then villages under local bosses and - with some metal working and real agriculture – then feudalism. Roads and river trade let this lead to an alliance of town bourgeoisie/guildsmen/crafters with the kings who could open up trade, making each other rich while taming the local lords. A trend pushed farther by plague population winnowings.
Eventually, rising industry and trade leads to a much larger bourgeoisie who demand a say through empowerment of their class…. Mostly via class restricted Democracy, as in Athens, then Holland, England and finally France. Marx saw Bismarck’s reforms as a smart inclusion of the PETTY bourgeoisie, offering them benefits and the fruits of vast factories and consultation, without real power, which was retained bu the top industrialists and top nobility.
He then EXTRAPOLATED that trend and concluded the workers… getting more educated to run sophisticated factories, would grow more radicalized while the top capitalists wiped out the lower ones, creating a new overlordship of capital… which was NECESSARY in order to complete the final formation of industrial capital, buy stealing the workers’ labor value… the phase that Ayn Rand deems the truly happy goal of human existence.
Marx extended this, with the phase Rand despised and wrote out. Proletarian revolution simply taking over all the factories and such from no-longer-needed capitalists.
WWI showed how stupid the extrapolation was, when the MOST ‘advanced’ working classes, became the MOST patriotic and fervent supporters of the war declared by insipid inbred monarchs and the LEAST advanced – Russian – workers (and later Chinese peasants) proved most eager for ‘marxism.’
This contradiction deeply puzzled Lenin…
…but no where was marx more refuted than in the USA under FDR, where the most vigorously anti-Stalinist element of society was the US labor movement.
“Given when he was writing, that does not seem unreasonable. Where he was mistaken, I think, is in failing to realize just how productive capitalism would be. When he was writing, there was never enough, and also no signs that there would be enough, to satisfy the capitalists and also "buy off" the workers.”
One of MANY mistakes, like assuming there would ever be and ‘end’ to the need for organized re-capitalization.
But yes, GB my main point is that if the FDR reforms are reversed by insanely stooped oligarchs and their flatterers, then Marx will return to relevance.
Dr Brin:
LH: In a sense that’s what my ‘full circle” notion for FOUNDATION was all about.
Yes, and I appreciate that ending. But with no disrespect to you, I had long wanted something different concerning the intervening years between Second Foundation and the end of the interregnum, something which did not feel the need to incorporate the divergent styles of the later novels or the robot stories. More like "What if Asimov had actually kept the series going in the 50s?"
I get that that was different from what you were doing. I'm not claiming disappointment that you didn't cater to my personal whims. But I'd be curious to see what an AI could do catering to my personal whims.
And if the result sucks, no harm has been done to anyone else in the process.
Dr Brin:
It’s like the fact that no earthling in AVATAR ever seems to have seen AVATAR…
I used to imagine amusedly that Star Trek would surely still be around in re-runs during the time of the five year mission, and that there must at least be a few Trekkies on board the ship.
Even something as innocuous as Soylent Green was set in a future so close that the older inhabitants of the period would surely remember seeing themselves depicted in an old movie back in 1973.
You know how to tell if someone truly groks evolution?
They rarely use words like 'destiny' or 'fate'.
The stock market is a much simpler model to explain what we see. The prices and returns are predictable over the long term - i.e.psychohistory is possible in that domain. Nevertheless, those with the resources try to chase short-term trends (momentum traders) and manipulate prices to try to gain an edge. This is very much like the oligarchs chasing wealth now in the hope that they can get away with the gains in the short term. It can be a cognitive effort to just buy index funds and let them ride, rather than trade actively.
I agree with the commenter who stated that you are not talking about Asimov's original Foundation trilogy but adding his and others' novels later. Asimov in particular wanted to merge the 3 universes of his earlier novels into a consistent universe. IMO, he should have taken the advice he was given and left them alone, especially as the 3rd and 4th robot novels effectively undermined the logic of advanced robots in the galactic civilization.
"What if Asimov had actually kept the series going in the 50s?"
By 500 FE the first foundation was militarily pre-eminent and hence you'd have to do what was done in PICARD... decay and civil war. But how many times.
Even worse from IA's POV... you verge on a peaceful and mature society of crativity and freedom and where's the (sci fi) fun in that?
scidata: depends on if you include attractor states, e.g. when a new ecological niche opens up.
Many of us were angry at Isaac in the 1970s for combining two incompatible universes. I never imagined I'd have to be the one to fix that mess! Alas, it required introduction of 'chaos' to explain why humanity never outgrew the playpen.
For those of you who don't have PenceNews subscriptions*, they are currently pushing the story that three recent fires in Mexican oil refineries are Biden's fault:
"Coincidence? Three fires happen at 3 separate Mexican oil refineries on the same day The climate change and energy ideologues within the Biden administration are doing everything within their power to raise energy prices, specifically oil and gasoline. This is part of the strategy to make the green new deal energy programs hold financial viability as an alternative."
*I don't — not an American, and like most in my country well to the left of Bernie — but an American with my name who doesn't realize that his gmail address isn't his name (because I got there first) keeps subscribing. Pence, Haley, Trump, DeSantis, Hawley, Banks, the NRA… this chap ticks all the reich-wing boxes. Also likes 1940s music, based on his Amazon history.
@Robert
There's a cute commercial up here I've seen recently where a kid is being admonished by an adult for not behaving himself like the others. He replies, You know who else always behaved as they were told? The Nazis.
Re: attractor states
On this day in 1616, Galileo was formally served with the Inquisition's decision that the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture"
IMHO young Asimov was too entranced by Boltzmann. Perhaps it's a chemist vs physicist thing. Even though he likely meant it as a jab at my lack of scientific rigor, I rather like Alfred Differ's label of 'evaporation'. Doctrine is the mind-killer.
It’s like the fact that no earthling in AVATAR ever seems to have seen AVATAR…
My inner script has a curious Eyewah perusing the memory banks of the first expedition.
It doesn't find 'Avatar', but it does find 'Pocahontas' (and 'Solaris'), and proceeds to create the first four limbed Na'vi to play reenactments.
Closest self-referential material I've actually seen is Scalzi's 'Redshirts'.
... and maybe the 'Heterodyne shows' of Girl Genius.
... and Avengers: the Musical
... and Asgardians commemorating Jurassic Park with stage plays featuring Sam Neill
Best antidote to Spengler is a couple of quotes from Alex Steffen:
- "Cynicism is obedience."
- "Optimism is a political act."
Time cannot be stopped, there is no wise reversal, no prudent renunciation. Only Dreamers believe in ways out. We have been born into these times, and have to steadfastly go the way to the end that is destiny.
This is a truism much despised by our most intelligent optimists:
History does not 'end' when we wish it to end; it must always run its course from its beginning to its end; and we cannot simply declare an issue 'resolved for all time' as in the case Fukuyama's 'Triumph of Liberal Democracy', Brin's 'Revenge of the Nerds' or Smith's 'Ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie'.
Every ripple that rises must also fall as in the case Gibbon's 'Roman Empire', Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich' & the Enlightenment's 'Pax Americana'.
Any aristocrat who actually, actually thinks the R word is not on the table, amid his caste's all out war against not just labor but increasingly fed-up nerd professions, is truly too smug, too dumb and incurious ever to know or care what the word 'tumbrel' means, until he is riding in one.
This is exceptionally true as the R word is NEVER off the table, a fact which proves the nouvelle aristocratic nerd caste to be so exceptionally stupid, as they imagine that the ebb & flow of history will somehow end when they are large & in charge.
But, the nerds & other 'fact users' DESERVE to rule, unlike all those other feudal leadership pretenders from yesteryear, we hear our nerds proclaim, over & over.
And where, exactly, have we heard this type of 'divine rule' fallacious reasoning before?
I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution.
It's a common sentiment & delaying tactic, the technical term being 'dane-geld', the problem being that the practitioners will never be free of the proverbial 'dane' from the moment that they decide to submit to this extortion.
And why should the oppressed masses settle for just HALF of what the ruling nerdish caste possesses anyway, especially when they can seize it all for the price of a chopper to chop off their heads?
That history is not necessarily circular, I agree with Dr. Brin, but such argument does not change the fact that many great endeavors contain the seeds of their own destruction, as in the case of all known human civilizations being built upon an implicit extortion and/or foundational corruption.
Perhaps this is why Brin's 'Foundation' clings to the inhumanly incorruptible robot as a potential 'way out' of a circular future history, even though we can't really call it 'history' once we deliberately delete the human factor from 'his story'.
Behold the end all & be all of eons of human evolution:
It's is a TOASTER***
Best
_____
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
***This was cute & creative plot twist when Asimov first came up with it in 1956, but how does one describe it now??
locumranch:
"Time cannot be stopped, there is no wise reversal, no prudent renunciation. Only Dreamers believe in ways out. We have been born into these times, and have to steadfastly go the way to the end that is destiny."
This is a truism much despised by our most intelligent optimists:
History does not 'end' when we wish it to end; it must always run its course from its beginning to its end
I'm still confused as to what Spengler--and you too apparently--consider optimism to be. If history doesn't end, that necessarily implies that change is always coming. So why can't that change be for the better?
Larry,
Because if you don't think things can get better, you can think you have no responsibility to make things better.
That's the trap of the cyclic view of history. I actually created a saying of a China-based empire in the first world I designed to DM:
Tiggri Whil'pa Snet.
1st meaning - everything moves in cycles
2nd meaning - who the hell cares
Pappenheimer
Tony your Avatar scenario is similar to mine in Vivid Tomorrows.
Skimmed briefly and saw “Every ripple that rises must also fall as in the case Gibbon's 'Roman Empire', Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich' & the Enlightenment's 'Pax Americana’.”
Let’s see, One of those lasted 12 years … The American Experiment which rose steadily into today’s pax, for 240 years… Rome the city kept rising for 1200 years… and 2000+ if you include the eastern empire. There is no evidence* for ‘cycles’ whatsoever, just frantic cultists seeing what they desperatley want to see, while their comfy arm chairs squat on the shoulders of all the millions who strove and ratcheted things upward and forward.
Utter idiocy but less so than another sample that’s utterly opposite to absolutely everything in my book: “Perhaps this is why Brin's 'Foundation' clings to the inhumanly incorruptible robot as a potential 'way out' of a circular future history…”
What a lamebrain.
==
*There ARE failure modes and attractor states like ecological stupidity - as described in J Diamond's COLLAPSE and the bad governance almost always displayed by feudalism. Those are not life cycles but something else, entirely
Because if you don't think things can get better, you can think you have no responsibility to make things better.
Oysterband nailed it, I think:
I fall asleep with the TV on
Wake with an ache it's another week gone
And consider how my light was spent
And where it was that the real thing went
I asked a wise man for advice
I told him once and I told him twice;
My life is one long damage limitation
He smacked me hard around the head
He handed me a card that read:
Work like you were
Living in the early days of a better nation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTAh7OPNC20
And somewhat appropriately, it turns out that the injunction to "work like you were living in the early days of a better nation" (based on a line by Alisdair Grey engraved on the walls of the Scottish Parliament) are actually paraphrased from a line in Dennis Lee's poem "Civil Elegies":
And best of all is finding a place to be
in the early days of a better civilization’
https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/
https://books.google.ca/books?id=mE5Wp7V4VQsC&source=gbs_similarbooks
Lee is Canadian, so I have hopes my local library can get a copy of the book. I need to read more poetry.
Dr Brin:
Skimmed briefly and saw “Every ripple that rises must also fall as in the case Gibbon's 'Roman Empire', Hitler's 'Thousand Year Reich' & the Enlightenment's 'Pax Americana’.”
Let’s see, One of those lasted 12 years … The American Experiment which rose steadily into today’s pax, for 240 years… Rome the city kept rising for 1200 years… and 2000+ if you include the eastern empire. There is no evidence* for ‘cycles’ whatsoever, j
The point seemed to be that nothing lasts forever. Probably with a corollary that therefore, everything is futile and nothing is worthwhile. Like young Alvy Singer in Annie Hall who won't do his homework because "The universe is expanding!", so "What's the point?"
For the vast majority of human existence (most versions of hominid) we were nomadic hunter gatherers numbering no more than a few million across the entire Earth. I have no doubt there is an attractor of some kind that held us in that state of mind. I also have no doubt that the tiny numbers of us who broke away to become the hominid we are today did 'something' that changed us in some small way that destroyed the attractor's dominance. We can still go back and orbit the thing, but we are no longer held as evidenced by a world of eight thousand million of us while most HG nomadic behaviors are as scarce as hen's teeth.
For the most recent millennia (post ice sheet retreat) we were agriculturalists living under a set of behaviors broadly described as feudal. I have no doubt there is an attractor of some kind that held us in that social state. I also have no doubt that tiny numbers of us broke away to become 'The West' that economically dominates the world today. The break from this attractor also involved a small thing that disrupted its dominance, but I'm NOT sure of is that this break is solid enough to have changed us in some way that would allow us to return to a small orbit of the older attractor without becoming trapped again.
I'm not convinced there is a third attractor for the Enlightenment civilization we've created, but the change that disrupts the Feudal attractor obviously is still spreading. For me the jury is still out on the existence of a new attractor, but it looking more likely with each passing generation.
———
While Aristotle didn't include Hope among his list of virtues, I think it should be there. It doesn't matter how the universe will work itself out for us to feel that Hope is a good character trait for human beings.
Anyone wanting to live in a world where Hope isn't a virtue is likely to be a lot more depressed about things than I am. Be that way if you want, but I consider it a vice.
In a Bayesian sense, I am willing to believe in an attractor for our new social mode. I'm hopeful it is stronger than the others as I think there will be a whole lot less misery in the world if that is the case. Lots of other belief systems also offer hope for this, but the Enlightenment mode is the only one that makes any sense to me.
———
scidata,
I don't recall intentionally jabbing at you. I'm not a purist about scientific rigor… but I am known to fall into professor mode (I have a few different soapboxes for different topics) when I make assumptions about what someone doesn't know.
Unfortunately, though, I've said so many things (and made them up as I went along) that I can't recall what you think I meant by 'evaporation.' 8)
But yes. Doctrine throttles little baby Curiosity in the crib.
Dave do you ever worry that growing up in this very unusual period of the mid-20th century middle class society messed with your priors about what the possibilities under capitalism are? It seems very plausible that the great compression era was more a fluke than a stable vision of balance between labor and capital - Rooseveltian miracle indeed. It seems like people from that era trade that temporary ceasefire between opposing social forces as a default, while those born before and after that have a better understanding of the fundamental conflicts within of our society that can't just be papered over.
Alfred Differ: I don't recall intentionally jabbing at you
You didn't, it was one of those 3-or-4-way discussions that got started with your proper and solid defense of (in this case) statistical mechanics, and my usual (Bayesian) knee-jerk caveats about it.
I wish I had employed this whole attractor thing when I was writing about Asimov, psychohistory, and the Enlightenment a dozen years ago. It's a tidy word picture. I do remember saying that it's hard to recognize a revolution in thinking when you're still in the middle of it. Like SETI, it's best to just keep working and learning before making final pronouncements. Calculemus.
Larry_H says that he's still confused as to what Spengler--and you too apparently--consider optimism to be. If history doesn't end, that necessarily implies that change is always coming. So why can't that change be for the better?
For all his talk about 'failure modes & attractor states', Dr. Brin is perhaps better equipped than I am to explain probabilistic outcomes to simplistic binary thinkers like Larry.
Yes, of course: Change can always be for the better if change is always coming, but it need not be so, as change is in no way restricted to binary (better or worse) outcomes.
Change for the better is rare, unlikely & improbable because 'failure modes & attractor states'; change for the worse is less rare & more probable for the same reasons; and change that is for neither better nor worse is most likely & probable.
In this sense, (1) an optimist is someone who expects an unlikely & improbable outcome; (2) a pessimist is someone who expects a slightly less rare & more probable outcome; and (3) a realist is someone who expects a largely spurious & random outcome that is neither better nor worse.
What Spengler is asserting is akin to Newton's Laws of Motion:
That an object, event or circumstance in motion stays in motion and it does not pause, alter course, or reverse itself until it achieves equilibrium, as only the worst sort of credulous doofus expects Deus Ex Machina or Maxwell's Demon to intercede on their behalf.
And, once events are set in motion, certain causal consequences become unavoidable, and all your wishing, hoping & whinging will not alter the outcome by one whit.
Best
locumranch:
Change for the better is rare, unlikely & improbable because 'failure modes & attractor states'; change for the worse is less rare & more probable for the same reasons; and change that is for neither better nor worse is most likely & probable.
...
What Spengler is asserting is akin to Newton's Laws of Motion
Sure, if all you are is a passive observer, then entropy always wins. But an optimist is an agent for implementing change in a positive direction.
Spontaneous evacuation of heat from a colder area to a warmer one doesn't happen either, but it is not unrealistic to believe that a refrigerator can work.
I can't reproduce the visual map here, but it's there in the article comparing the 1976 (Jimmy Carter) electoral vote to 2020. The point of the piece is how much has changed. I note that Illinois and California--the entire Pacific coast actually--went for Republican Gerald Ford in '76, while Texas (!) and almost the entire solid south voting for the Democrat, Carter. And the only Confederate state voting Republican in '76 was Virginia, which was one of only two Confederate states to vote Democratic in 2020.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Feb27-10.html
One of the best things about "The Mote in God's Eye" is that one author (I assume Niven) introduced the concept of Crazy Eddie into the deterministic, Spenglerian future history of the other (Pournelle), and noted that we are a species full of Crazy Eddies - the nut jobs who want to try something different to make things better. Crazy Eddie mostly fails, but when they don't, it's glorious.
Pappenheimer
Talk about feudalism as an attractor state. Nature baked it into the Moties from the get go. They evolved to be feudal, and then they doubled down by using artificial selection to crystalize themselves into a far more rigid feudalism than nature had managed.
I'm guessing that the motie society was Pournelle's idea of communism run to its logical extreme, but it always sort of seemed to me to be Pournelle's ideas of what a proper society should be run to their logical extreme.
Alfred, excellent summarizing in entirely different words of my notion that we stumbled into an attractor state that enables a much larger (imperfect) degree of delusion/error discovery and correction, a process that MAY (possibly) enable us to sapiently design a fourth kind of society that maximizes exploration of optimizable/diverse pathways to success.
Oh, “Quite Likely:” setting aside your smug tone, sure. Marxists have their teleological ‘sequence’ that got spoiled – (they prefer ‘deferred temporarily’) by the Rooseveltean Compact. Ironically and most-tellingly, Locum and his fellow troglodyte-romantic-fascist-dyspeptics SHARE QL’s eager-beager cynicism and hope for a failure of the Western Experiment… even though in support of a very different teleology.
Unlike the Marxist dream goal of class-and-capital-propelled endless heavenly utopia, the right raves for endless gloomy cycles of vigorously rapey-conquering barbarians, followed by effete ‘civilized’ artsy-fartsy grandchildren, whose collapse cycles back to struggling pre-barbarians, over and over again.
These ‘inevitable’ destinies ARE very different visions of our future! And ironically the non-Randian libertarians share a lot of their dreams with Marxists! While Randians are wholly compatible with the fascist-Nazi cyclicalists.
But what they all share is a desperate need to proclaim (as do the Patmosian droolers over the Book of Revelations) that the victory of their forecast paradise is ordained by Fate. And further they share declarations that ALL the smarty pants scientists and liberals and the rest who believe progress is achievable through science, work and negotiation are doomed to smolder in a heap of regret, at their feet.
… just as Oswald Spengler predicted in ‘Decline of the West’… just before the West’s era of spectacular success and achievement.
So sure “Quite Likely.”
JoBee and the Liberal/Union coalition MAY fail to revive and re-stimulate the Rooseveltean reforms and contracts that led to every comfort and ability and hope that you rely on daily/hourly. I am sure you rub your hands relishing the prospect and will do everything in your power to help block the necessary compromises and trigger the violent struggles that you are so, so sure will lead to glorious days ahead.
(Judging from Lenin, Stalin and Mao, it is far more likely your efforts will help make Locumrach right, than Karl Marx.)
--
A quick skim informed me Locum had lapsed back from Howard Beale fulminating-jeremiad mode to Howard Beale sit on the floor and sigh dolorously mode. Less disgusting (a little) but just as utterly moronic about life and human nature. No, lad. That’s how YOU live your life, such as it is.
Pappenheimer good note re Crazy Eddie. And DarrellE.
scidata,
Ah. I remember some of that. I defend statistical mechanics because I still remember how gobsmacked I was when I finally comprehended that interpretation of entropy. I also recall being serious suspicious about assumptions they make about the distribution of microstates in a macrostate (uniformity), but I've since come to terms with it. Given time, an improbable distribution would become a more probable one via scatterings. There are still issues if the underlying states are continuous (infinities appearing), but there are ways to tackle them too if one wants to risk putting them in a physical model. (I don't assume continuity anymore.)
I don't think Boltzmann gets the credit he deserves… and Mach should have been smacked.
This can be recommended to scholars of all ages:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387737446i/41835.jpg
locumranch,
…once events are set in motion, certain causal consequences become unavoidable…
There is a huge assumption built into that statement that few realize they are making. It is an untested belief many share that initial conditions contain enough information to determine future states. Very Newtonian.
What if they don't? What would the universe look like? I've seen excellent arguments for the universe being 'open' in this sense.
If initial conditions don't have enough information, Laplace's daemon has a hopeless task.
Alfred Differ: Mach should have been smacked
Heh, I know someone who thinks Mach should be posthumously dragged before the Hague to answer for the Vienna Circle and leading Einstein astray. His descendant, Marilyn vos Savant* apparently has the highest IQ ever measured, and once interviewed Isaac Asimov I think.
* Savant - an even more pretentious moniker than 'scidata' :)
When I'm in a most hopeful mood, I label social organization attractors we've seen and ponder possible future ones. Humanity has direct experience with at least two.
1. HGNomad Attractor - We organize as bands numbering no more than a couple hundred (+/- 100) and then organize bands into tribes.
1A. I suspect the earliest version of this attractor discouraged trade outside our bands beyond the sharing of children in marriage for the sake of security. The evolutionary advantage is obviously genetic diversity.
1B. I suspect the later version of this attractor encouraged limited trade outside our kinship groups by enabling a softer meaning to 'kin'. This required a relaxation of our xenophobic inclinations, but not an elimination of them since xenophobia serves to defend groups against transmittable diseases. Relaxing this restriction, though, enabled us to specialize our labor which encourages innovation. The evolutionary advantage is obviously about more efficient use of resources.
2. Feudal Attractor - We organize as Farming/Shepard communities of several hundred to a few thousand and then organize those into 'nations' ruled by relatively common trade and defense groups.
a) I suspect the transition to #2 requires people to be in #1B instead of #1A.
b) I suspect the transition to #2 was forced by climate change necessities when the ice retreated last time.
c) I suspect transitions to #2 occurred where population was densest.
I'm not sure if there is more than one feudal attractor. It does take many forms, though. The Chinese Bureaucracy is a wonderful example of one of them. Absolute Monarchs backed by an aristocracy and Church exemplify another. Weaker monarchs are another variation. What they share in common is a class structure that looks pyramidal where a bee hive provides an approximate metaphor.
———
Of these two attractors, the feudal one got us closer to the stars by enabling behaviors that support a total population of several hundred million souls. The HG attractor doesn't come anywhere near that. Neither will get us to the stars, though. Both will eventually lead to extinction.
———
If we are currently drawn to a third attractor (Enlightenment Attractor) it is one that required large numbers of us trading in markets that are almost impossible to regulate. It's not that no one CAN regulate them, but recent history suggests we broke away from the feudal attractor where the princes and priests were weakest. Free people engage in self-regulation (what we call the unwritten rules of justice), but enforcement of them is irregular and often arbitrary.
Maybe things will settle out over time with a soft landing involving flat, fair markets composed to well educated participants, but I'm skeptical. I think it more likely we fall back to the feudal attractor when we attempt that regulated soft landing. I lack a belief in the existence of an Enlightenment Attractor, so I'm inclined to prefer the chaos we get with weak regulation as a kind of thermal agitation that drives us into very distant orbits of the feudal attractor that just MIGHT be open… or large enough to find a new attractor.
———
All of this is a personal view of things. I don't expect a lot of people to agree and I'm fine with that. Constructive arguments and rebuttals are welcome… and make my intellectual life more enjoyable. 8)
If LoCum didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. He isn’t convincing, but of all naysayers he comes closest to being convincing.
What is his core message?: that no one is objective, not even those who attempt to be? Old hat.
The more I read about the Vienna Circle, the less inclined I am to blame any single one of them. There was an interesting group-think dynamic going on there.
Logical positivism is satisfyingly addictive. In small doses it is useful as a tool for sharpening one's mind, but an overdose kills science. Mach went WAY over the limit.
Fortunately, logical positivism contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Nothing to add that all of you haven’t said better. Except Locum, who’s an anomaly; worth reading as a reminder of how self-pity can alter the best of minds. Not necessarily for the better.
Which segues into people I do know well: the patmosians. Self-pity is a greater part of their pessimism. Have lost count of the patmosians who’ve been divorced—and think their bad marriages are a sign the world as we know it is ending.
They say that a decade from now China (‘Magog’) will be at its peak, which coincides with the 2000th anniversary of The Crucixion. Afterwards, their problems will be over.
It's not the dyspeptic grouchiness and self-pity or even the Get Off My Lawn raging at a cloud.
Nor even the fact that his strawman attempts to portray my positions are never even on the same part of any horizon as I stand.
Nor do I blame his cripple inability to conceive 3 dimensions or colors of positive sum, even in abstrract.
No, it's the frantic screeches of denial THAT such dimensions or colors could possibly exist.
Alan Brooks:
They say that a decade from now China (‘Magog’) will be at its peak, which coincides with the 2000th anniversary of The Crucixion. Afterwards, their problems will be over.
Waitaminute. When I was on campus in the 80s, they claimed that Russia was Magog.
Larry,
It's like the other Signs of the Apocalypse. Current events get shoehorned into prophecy; there's always a new Antichrist, too, though none of that crowd seems to notice they've been voting for the most likely recent candidate. Sama-sama with Nostradamus' quatrains. It does weird me out that there are plenty of humans hoping and praying for the end of the world, particularly since 1945 (or, as Asimov put it, Zero Ante Atomic).
Pappenheimer
The Our gang series was extremely liberal for its day and banned in many southern states. And yet...
You can imagine the laughter (and assumptions) of audiences 100 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rke9HsiYojQ
The new Tencent miniseries of THE THREE BODY PROBLEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HJVhC80vIE
"They say that a decade from now China (‘Magog’) will be at its peak, which coincides with the 2000th anniversary of The Crucixion."
OMG do I EVER get any predictive credit?
AB got a link for that?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/23/opinion/putin-ukraine-toughness.html
...
But back to the war. The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”
None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.
Discussion on my Facebook posting about this blog make me explain this re Marx:
1) Any citing of Hegelian 'dialectic' automatically knocks anyone down five pegs. Hegel was a flaming horror, detestable and disprovable on any level. Fortunately for Marx, his lip service to Hegel was just a sop to German philosophy-mystics.
2) Marx was a HISTORIOGRAPHER. and by far his greatest contributions regarded advancing from Adam Smith the notions of capital formation that he saw going on the the previous 300 years. At SOME level his description of human advancement through phases dependent upon technological level and society's capital (roads, factories, etc) was simply and obviously true. As was the notion that capitalists played an important role by retaining much of what workers created, in order to invest it into new capital.
3) Alas, he tried to systematize that insight with an insanely dumb notion - the Labor Theory of Value. But in the most general sense his patterns were correct...
...up until his actual present. At which point (4) we see (for the millionth time) that explaining the past does not make you a prophet of things to come. There were almost ZERO Marxian predictions that came true, leaving Lenin, Mao and others utterly puzzled, till they concocted rationalizations to makes themselves czars /emperors, with Marx serving as their validating prophet.
No, Marx's greatest effects were in the WEST! Where he was read as a gifted SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR spinning plausible TALES of a near future that terrified enough powerful men that they decided to try staving it off with reform. And that was where, by being canceled by reform, KM actually changed the world.
And I will eat a bug if any of the commenters knew any of that. I say that with no rancor or hostility. No one seems to know shit, nowadays.
DB,
one of countless such links:
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1165&context=jats
—
LH,
Some simply don’t know:
they get it that Canada and America are separate nations with different systems—but don’t comprehend how the same applies to Ukraine and Russia.
A good friend (horse rancher, veteran, retired from IBM) said in defense of Putin:
“at least America and Russia [unlike China] have something [substantial] in common.”
I knew all that, but only due to being history and sociology obsessed. And polisci, psych, religious studies... Reason I’ll read commenter you-know-who’s posts all the way through is: because of his training as a doctor. You figure he must know Something we don’t.
Larry, I think this admiration for swaggerers is rather obvious in Dirtnapninja.
And in seeing strength as being aggressiveness, bravado and swagger they ignore stoicism and their leaders' lack of it. Is there anything more whiney than Trump?
And in the pandemic stoicism was required and bravado was worse than useless. No wonder they try to trivialize the pandemic. It showed that what they saw as strength was the opposite.
Dr Brin:
No one seems to know shit, nowadays.
Especially no one on Facebook (or Twitter).
Lloyd Flack:
And in the pandemic stoicism was required and bravado was worse than useless.
It was similar immediately after 9/11. I used to argue that the best thing we could do to the terrorists is to brush ourselves off and go about our business, letting them know that their significance to us is trivial (while a special forces unit or two effortlessly picks off Bin Laden like swatting a fly).
Instead, we did just the opposite. Changed our entire society and economy in the single-minded pursuit of impotent fury. We made it clear that they can pull our strings as easily as if they had commanded us to compute to the last digit the value of pi.
DB,
don’t know why you would think we weren’t aware of what FDR did.
Elementary.
No one seems to know shit, nowadays.
I suspect you'll find that's not the case. There's quite a lot of information out there on it, actually.
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/how-to/identify-wildlife/how-to-identify-animal-droppings/
Hi Alfred,
Hopefully I can help make your intellectual life more enjoyable.
"b) I suspect the transition to #2 was forced by climate change necessities when the ice retreated last time."
This is an old hypothesis. See The food crisis in prehistory: Overpopulation and the origins of agriculture by Mark Nathan Cohen. It used to be a popular argument, before infrastructural determinism went out of fashion in the social sciences. It has some good arguments, but it uses a lot of circular ones, and like all deterministic hypotheses, it dramatically oversimplifies the archaeological record. Yet it's still pretty compelling. That's why it's still in print, but it takes a lot of background knowledge to get down to brass tacks with it.
https://www.amazon.com/food-crisis-prehistory-Overpopulation-agriculture/dp/0300020163/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Q0GLB87QUFZE&keywords=the+food+crisis+in+prehistory&qid=1677598469&s=books&sprefix=the+food+crisis%2Cstripbooks%2C173&sr=1-1
"1A. I suspect the earliest version of this attractor discouraged trade outside our bands beyond the sharing of children in marriage for the sake of security. The evolutionary advantage is obviously genetic diversity."
If 1A ever existed, there's no evidence for it as far as I am aware. The record pretty well demonstrates that marriage ties between communities have always served to mediate material exchanges, to vice versa. In the earliest of times these exchanges were purely in the form of exotic materials, probably used by people who wanted to be leaders to awe the rest of their community with their divine favor. Peer Polity Interaction goes into this.
I would be tempted to argue with you about the Enlightenment Attractor. While the attractions of dictatorship are ever-present and powerful, so are the attractions of egalitarianism. In fact, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment is a return to some of the kind of egalitarian conditions that the human race spent most of the last quarter million years in. Remember what I wrote about how instincts work?
Bon appetit
PSB
Dr. Brin,
If you have to eat a bug, please be sure it's not a Thranx. I like Thranx, even if their Creator wasn't the most deep thinker in the SF community.
PSB
In this crazy, mixed-up weather year, the start of the six consecutive months will less-than-seven letters in their (English) names will be more wintery in Chicago than most of the six consecutive months with seven-or-more letters were.
Still, I always look forward to the transition.
Larry Hart,
I hear you. In Florida, due to the weather, I was in a rush to get new plantings in for my herb garden earlier than expected, and meanwhile my brother in law in California is experiencing blizzard conditions.
Speaking of which, was there some sort of tarragon armageddon or something when I wasn't looking? Can't find tarragon plants or seeds anywhere in my town.
PSB,
Re: Thranx
Agreed that Alan Foster's Commonwealth doesn't have deep psychohistorical underpinning, but it does have the distinction of being in the top 3 SF universes I'd move to tomorrow. It doesn't ignore prejudice and greed but is based on tolerance (and the Stingship class weapons platform). It's basically a place for ADF's avatar to play tourist (or, in the words of my Traveller ex-scout, "see as much of the universe as I can before it kills me").
Not moving to Midworld, though.
Pappenheimer
@Darrell E,
In Chicago, it's been a very mild winter, with temperatures regularly in the 40s and sometimes the 50s. However, when we did get wintery weather, we had:
+ Below zero at Christmas (unusual that early in the season)
+ Heavy wet "heart attack" snow in January (usually that's a March thing)
+ An ice storm in February
That last storm also brought what was called a "historic" snowfall in Minneapolis, and I don't even want to think about what that must mean.
Also, apparently both sides in the Ukraine war had to adjust their tactics to the fact that the dreaded Russian winter never really took hold. During the Christmas arctic blast that I mentioned above, it was consistently warmer in Kiev than it was in Chicago. Heck, it was warmer in Kiev than it was at my in-laws' place in Austin, Texas.
Sorry, I should have spelled that "Kyiv". Old habits.
* * *
Apropos nothing except perhaps on the subject of the world upside-down, this thought popped unbidden into my head:
Having UCLA in the Big Ten is only slightly funnier than inviting Russia to join NATO.
Dr. Brin dismissive comments about Oswald Spengler, the man who predicted the ‘Decline of the West’ long before the West’s era of spectacular success and achievement, reminds me of that old joke about the optimist who jumps off the top of the Sear's Tower & could be heard muttering 'so far, so good' on his way down.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that this 'leap of faith' is going to end very badly for the above-mentioned optimist who'll wind up as splattered as a watermelon at a Gallagher performance.
Furthermore, Larry's stunning & brave attempt to 'rebrand' the delusional optimist as 'an agent of change' is worse than useless, especially when the delusional optimist can serve only as human compost, indistinguishable from the many 'change agents' once found scattered liberally over Pol Pot's killing fields.
Fancying every loser a hero & every victim a winner, the once enlightened West has degenerated so far into failure worship that I actually sympathize with Dr. Brin's decision to reject a human future in favour of one dominated by robots & artificial intelligences, as evidenced by his 'Foundation's Denouement' teaser that features an eternally young Robot Seldon rising Christ-like from his packing crate as our glorious leader.
We are not a serious people, and the West's collapse seems increasingly imminent, assuming the non-appearance of one of Dr. Brin's fanciful robotic messiahs.
Best
Pappenheimer,
Traveller? Now there's a blast from the past - my very first RPG, even before I was subjected to D&D. Loved it.
What are your other two? On the theme of more recent work in SF, I'll take Elizabeth Bear's White Space universe or Becky Chambers' Galactic Commons.
PSB
locumranch is an acolyte of Bart Simpson.
Bart: I can't believe this. You're the one who told me that I can do anything if I just put my mind to it.
Homer: Well, now that you're a little older, I can tell you that's a crock. No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you.
Bart: Gotcha. Can't win. Don't try.
Hello all you Brin-o-maniacs,
If anyone here could help me with a memory issue, I would greatly appreciate it. If I were an author I could promise to make you into a character, but accepting that, I can't think of any reward I can give beyond kind words. Anyway.
A few nights ago - Friday, I think - I caught the tail end of a show on the radio that explained a recent test of the idea that taking away social services forces people to go get jobs (under the assumption that they are naturally lazy, just like Ronnie and Adolf said. It wasn't really an experiment, just an examination of the data from one state where a whole lot of people had been booted. I think it might have been from Food Stamps, but I can't trust my intermittent memory. The data showed that kicking people off of social programs had no effect on their employment whatsoever.
I was listening to my local NPR station, but I couldn't find any reference to it on their website. Google didn't help, either. I couldn't come up with a lot of search terms. Anybody else hear this one?
PSB
Lena:
Making someone a character is kind words. Or maybe mean words. In either case, words.
As for the fallacy of punishing people into virtue, I find the following snark to be an adequate send-up:
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
Locumranch:
The "so far so good" jest says that up is down. Not figuratively; literally. With that half-witticism, you can dismiss any good news whatsoever. If you believe that underlying conditions contradict surface appearances, then name those conditions and make your case, don't just state it. Automatic negativity is not political insight; it is psychological distress. I prescribe chocolate.
PSB,
Chambers' Galactic Commons has the disadvantage that you are a member of the scattered remnant of a self-destructed species, but otherwise - I'd go.
Now that I'm thinking about it...in no particular order...I can't give the 2 others, but have to give 3.
the Trek 'Verse UFP - mostly enlightened space socialism, few galaxy-ending threats as long as you avoid the areas where a certain starship is assigned.
Anne McCaffrey's FSP (Helvaverse) - again, a good place to raise kids of all kinds
The Culture. AI-assisted* Dionysian Badass Space Communism. Who wouldn't go.
* "assisted" may be a charming understatement here
Pappenheimer
P.S. Paranoia notwithstanding, I have long leaned towards the idea that providing basic services to all citizens is too important to be done by humans, and should be offloaded to AIs as soon as possible. The problem is that the AIs cannot be allowed to either acquire human prejudices from their machine learning or be deliberately programmed for unequal outcomes. I say citizens instead of humans because, 1. this is Dr. Uplift's blog and 2. I just bingewatched the entire SAO Alicization Arc in 2 days.
P.P.S. Traveller was great fun. When I played instead of GMing, I usually provided the Type S Interstellar Midsize Camper (sleeps 4!) and some expertise in getaway driving (grav vehicle) when the heavily armed and armored idiots got into trouble.
LH:
To you and Bart I say: You can't win, but you can truce. Good enough is good enough.
LoCum,
You get extreme with slippery slope. You take ‘agent of change’ and go straight to Pol Pot’s corpses—in one paragraph.
And did you ever consider that Spengler may well have contributed to the decline of the West?
Pappenheimer,
I think both Chambers and McCaffrey made the same mistake. In both series, the only major bad guys are pirates, so if you want to know who the bad guys are, it's always the same answer, and it's always the same agenda. If I were writing my universe, there would be many competing factions with differing motivations. I would not, however, want to live in my universe. It's a pretty depressing place. It certainly doesn't provide basic services for anyone who isn't rich - basically the conservative agenda come real. Nasty place. Don't go there. I do like your idea of using AI to apportion resources equitably. All other systems are brought down by the corruption of human actors. But then, an AI could be hacked, so even that's not a perfect system.
PSB
Paradoctor,
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
That sounds like almost every manager I ever had outside of my long lost anthro career.
PSB
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
I heard once--possibly it's apocryphal--that in the old Soviet Union, University entrance exams had "Jewish questions" which were impossibly hard questions given to Jewish applicants in order to keep them out. And to add insult to injury, even if the Jewish applicant managed to answer correctly, he was still denied admission.
I'm reminded of that in this context--that even if morale somehow miraculously did improve under those conditions, the beatings would doubtless continue anyway.
snork.
dyspeptic gloomists of the past...- even if they weren't impressed by space & science & almost zero heavy poverty and toys - half of em would topple before the refutations offered by Adderall & pot & shrooms. Jeez man give em a try.
A few months ago At CB DP suggested: Simplest and best congressional reforms:
1. Repeal the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It permanently set the maximum number of representatives at 435. Hence all of the distortions in proportional representation since each state gets at least 1 representative. It's just a majority law.
2. Then legalize the Wyoming Rule, where the number of representatives each state gets is proportional to the population of the least populous state (aka Wyoming with 578,803) which gets 1 rep. California (population 39,237,836) gets 68 reps, an increase of 16 over its current 52. That increases the number of reps to 573. Also make DC and Puerto Rico states (both have more population than Wyoming). DC would get 1 rep and Puerto Rico would get 6, further increasing House membership to 580."
Now someone with a WaPo sub tell us if this says the same thing? The House was supposed to grow with population. It didn’t. Let’s fix that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/28/danielle-allen-democracy-reform-congress-house-expansion/
PSB,
There is an inherent contradiction between "Where I want my kids to grow up" and "interesting, conflict-laden milieu." DeCamp pointed out in one of his Viagens Interplanetarias tales (I think) that the definition of adventure is "somebody a long way off having a VERY hard time of it".
"Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland: cautionary tale or Holnist how-to manual?" It's easy to write a story where enough humans made the wrong choice. It's harder for me nowadays to envision a future where my younger friend (fellow history major who is seeing the same trends I do, and decided not to have children) is wrong. Not that I'm going to join Loc in the corner, mind you.
Pappenheimer
Here's a gift link to that Washington Post article so everyone can read it:
https://wapo.st/3Zbgsjd
I do not see a mention of the Wyoming rule but there are links to 2 bills that have been filed relating to enlarging the House.
PSB,
I'm deeply skeptical of all arguments for and against the origins of agriculture that predate our understanding of the Y-chromosome bottleneck and its connection to the collapse of lifespans. Knowing that second and third sons often failed to reproduce relative to second or third daughters in the span between 4-8K years ago is a BIG deal when combined with lifespan shrinkage. Arguments made before the genetic evidence arrived might survive crushing falsification, but the books promoting them will likely look antiquated.
Regarding the transition to #2, I suspect that our HG nomadic ancestors already seeded fields before the ice retreated. They'd be well aware that seeds put where they belong lead to a more predictable carb intake. How much effort they made to do this can be debated, but unless we find good evidence for domestication in what they gathered, I'd be inclined to think they seeded the ground because it helped a little and not because it helped a lot.
With the retreat of the ice sheets and climate change, the lands they used changed. IF they couldn't move due to hostile neighbors, only then would it make sense to put more effort into seeding.
Same goes for domestication of animals which we know fairly well took a LONG time relative to human lifespans. Sure… we got started on wolves->dogs long ago. We had the mental tools to do more before the ice retreated, but not necessarily the pressure on us to do it.
———
The reason I suspect 1A existed is I'm including other hominids in our ancestry besides our version of homo sapiens. Our version blossomed very recently and appears to be the only hominid that trades outside kin groups for things besides genetic diversity. Whether it is for shiny shells or makeup, WE DID while most other hominids DID NOT… and it gave us an enormous evolutionary advantage. Whatever happened in our heads to suppress reasonable xenophobia displaced attractor #1A for #1B.
Occasional swapping of sons or daughters between groups has obvious advantages. Swapping for shiny shells does not when reasonable xenophobia helps protect against communicable diseases.
———
The primary reason I'm skeptical about the existence of an Enlightenment Attractor is our return toward egalitarian behavior looks more like a return to #1B to me. It certainly could be #3, but I think it is too early to tell.
#1B is still out there and many of us find it… attractive. SO MANY of us find it attractive we want to make the social rules of the band apply to larger communities. Some of us want this SO bad, we are willing to force it against evidence proving it can't work. That desire in us IS indicative of an attractor, but I suspect it is #1B pulling at us.
#1A is also still out there. When we hear people talk about digging a hole to hide from society, I think we hear the echoes of #1A. I suspect one or two of the folks who post here might prefer #1A to #1B.
Pappenheimer,
I've had more than enough of the Interesting Life. It's actually quite boring, but exceedingly stressful. I would like to live in the kind of place I want my kids to grow up in. Too late, though, they've graduated from larva to full adult form. Besides, there's no place currently on Earth that I would want to raise them in. That's why I love SF, though I am still drawn like a moth to the familiar kind of dystopia I grew up in. Reading Chambers was quite a relief from the endless ugliness of our collective views of the future.
It doesn't take a whole lot of wrong choices to lead to a dystopia. One gem of wisdom I learned being a teacher - both direct instruction and personal experience - is that in any given group of hominids, there is a small %age who will always do the right thing, a small %age who will always do the wrong thing, and the rest go wherever the wind blows. It doesn't take much to tip the scales in the wrong direction. And once it breaks, it is much, much harder to fix, and will never go back to its original shape. That's why history never repeats but it often rhymes. That corner smells so bad it would knock us out.
PSB
PSB.
Like Alfred (I presume) I have a child that will never be truly independent. In full-fledged Nazi Germany he might be considered a useless mouth suitable for liquidation.
And yes, Chambers displays hope in her writing and allows her characters to fall in love and pursue happiness without reservation (though I've found from my own attempts at writing that an author's characters, once established, will often have their own say in how their lives and loves roll).
Alfred,
Re: diseases spreading in early HG societies, my own and quite dated reading suggests that there wasn't as much danger as you suggest from small bands of humans meeting and...mingling. The kind of plagues that devastated whole communities needed 2 things - greater population density to keep diseases endemically circulating and a pool of diseases to jump to humans from - i.e., domesticated animals (sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens). (Note - may apply to temperate zones only.)
Pappenheimer
Speaking of declines, Tweetie is starting to show a distinct list to port: no longer showing timelines.
@Dr Brin,
Malcolm Nance, speaking on Stephanie Miller's show, mentioned how he deals with trolls who insist that he never actually served in Ukraine. He bets them. And he's not fooling around. "I've got ten thousand dollars here. Let's go!"
In writing, I know that comes across like Romney, but you have to hear Malcolm Nance deliver the challenge.
He's doing you proud.
University entrance exams had "Jewish questions" which were impossibly hard questions given to Jewish applicants in order to keep them out.
A couple of decades ago I heard that over time the SAT scores of 'disadvantaged' children (who are disproportionately non-white) tend approach those of more advantaged children (ie. rise faster), until the next time the SAT is revised at which they drop down to where they were before, and the process repeats.
Last time I checked the correlation between SAT score and family financial status was larger than the correlation between SAT score and academic success. Those SAT coaching courses and tutors make a significant difference.
One clue to neolithic trade networks is seen in linguistic analysis like the Indo European stably remaining static and uniform across Eurasia. It implies a vast trade network that involved foot-bearers whose grandsons might talk to amber diggers in the Baltic and trade Aegean seashells.
One could wager $10,000 with a Republican on the GOP nominating an a-hole next year. This guy is a piece of work:
https://www.graydc.com/2023/02/28/vivek-ramaswamy-running-president-anti-woke-vision/
Alan Brooks:
...on the GOP nominating an a-hole next year
Owning the libs really is their entire program. Or maybe more cynically, that's all that their voters want--demand--from them.
LH, "Anti-Democrat" seems doubly fitting.
Pappenheimer,
…there wasn't as much danger as you suggest from small bands of humans meeting and...mingling.
I'm with you at some level, but I think modern homo sapiens are much more resigned to toughing out the crap we catch because the way to avoid it all has become somewhat unthinkable. Look at the pushback many offer against wearing masks. This isn't that bad! It's like the flu! We'll manage!
I DO like not having caught anything for the last three years and can only dream about a world where our ancestors never faced influenza for the simple reason that the only birds they were near were ones they killed and ate immediately. No domesticated ducks transferring viral agents to domesticated hogs who pass them to us. SO many vectors vanish if we stop relying on non-existent barriers to disease transfers.
Still… I suspect our HG nomadic ancestors were not as tolerant of living in their own filth as we are. That's not to say they were clean of disease and parasites, though. They weren't. Especially the larger parasites our immune systems can't kill without killing us too. Trade with distant cousins didn't just bring the sniffles. Lots of things ride along with us as we travel that we do not call disease.
———
Ultimately, though, I'm not sure the 'plague' question is answerable about our most distant ancestors. It would require a lot of evidence to know what they faced. We have more evidence than I thought we'd ever have, but ancient diseases are tough to identify.
I suspect our HG nomadic ancestors were not as tolerant of living in their own filth as we are.
Few species live in filth, given the choice. Pigs get a bad rap for it, when given the choice they are clean animals. (OK, mud-bath sometimes to cool off, but clean mud not their own droppings unless they are penned up with no choice.)
onward
onward
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