Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Brian Slesinsky: I worked on this specific problem for most of a
decade. Eventually I distilled it down to a single easy to read
short high level briefing document.

In essence it says this: whatever happens, people must not be too
hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, ill, or injured. If they die it will
be of one of these six causes. Most of the time the risk is
concentrated at the systemic level: a flood kills a few, but
epidemic waterborne disease spreads afterwards as sanitation fails.
That sort of thing. There are huge commonalities: almost any really
dangerous epidemic is going to be spread through the air, so N95
masks block danger across a wide range of scenarios, both known risk
and unforeseen future hazards. Add bleach and gloves. The
commonalities between crises are strong: people's basic needs and
basic biology do not change - they must have water, whatever the
circumstances.

http://resiliencemaps.org/files/Dealing_in_Security.July2010.en.pdf

That's the doc with the model. It was designed for multidisciplinary
groups of non-specialists (mayor, chief of police, hospital
administrator, power company rep, water company rep, big box food
store rep) to be able to do short range planning work after a crisis
has become inevitable or (more realistically) after a crisis has
already started.

It's a pretty light read. The real impact does not come until you
draw out the diagrams for yourself, and map your own life on them. 

Then it will open your head like a can opener.
  

    
Interesting.

Vinay, regarding your <384>, yes I do remember Hakim Bey and his work
may indeed be the proximate cause of some persistent metaphysical chaos.

But I'm much more impressed with the hard work Daniel Kahneman and
others have done to establish "a cognitive basis for common human
errors that arise from heuristics and biases" (as his Wikipedia page
puts it).  He got a Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.

But economic thinking is just an instance of human thinking. The real
discovery is that human rationality is not what we thought it was!
                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  

    
Craig Maudlin: I think the point where deep thinkers started to
integrate the idea of rolling your own reality, and then living
inside of it, was really Hakim Bey. John Lilly, Tim Leary, Robert
Anton Wilson, Antero Alli all worked with the notion but largely as
an *individual* phenomena. "Programming and metaprogramming the
human biocomputer."

Hakim Bey's breakthrough was to tie this phenomena to a *place*
rather than to an individual: in this *place* - this zone - the
rules are different. Two realities, one square reality outside of
the zone, and something more customized and comfortable inside of
it. Sneaks out by degrees until Burning Man.

But a mutated form of that viewpoint latches elsewhere, leading to
the whole "reality based community" schism 20 years ago where the
American leadership made it perfectly clear that *they* decided what
was real and the world would follow them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community From there to
the present situaiton where *EVERYBODY* is creating new realities
and trying to force people to live inside of them.

Interestingly one thing which has gotten left behind in all this
customization of reality is the idea that other people's realities
are just as real as ours are. Once the metaphysic of "we create our
own reality" is pushed beyond the individual - to groups, to
governments, to places - it starts to require enforcement. Getting
people to conform to a world model is a fundamental drive in many
social movements now, up to and including the anti-vaxxers and the
flat earthers.

Perhaps there are good reasons why knowledge about the subjective
nature of reality was often a closely held secret.

But the cat is out of the bag now and it looks to me like our sense
of *what is real* is going to keep on shattering until either we hit
some new universal boundary, or (more likely) the world becomes an
unintelligible mosaic and we define our position in it by action
rather than by understanding.

Absolutely right about cognitive biases: I'm sure they are being
weaponized at scale too (how much of targeted advertising is just
spaced repetition so that when you want something you buy the thing
you saw a few weeks ago?). That's a huge discovery.

I feel like this is sort of a two level thing: reality tunnel type
thinking broke the map, and the limits to rationality then cause us
to be unable to clearly read the street signs: no wonder we are so
lost.
  

    
I suppose this is also "death of god" territory: religious
conservatives trying to force reality back into a single world model
with two genders and gender roles fortified by things like limiting
access to first abortion then birth control. 

It's hard to govern or make law across a society which doesn't exist
inside of a single broad consensus on *what is real*. Do vaccines
work? Are a lot of people harmed by them? Was covid a lab accident
or did it get started in a meat market? Was Jan6 an abortive coup or
just a hysterical crowd acting out?

I feel like people much sharper than I am about this stuff
(anthropologists?) have written a lot about it, perhaps in more
veiled and indirect terms, but this breaking of the world into
Bable-like shards is going to be with us for a while yet, and I (for
one) don't know how best to navigate it.
  

    
Texas's power grid was developed in isolation from other states in
order to avoid federal regulation. The power companies don't pay
attention to the in-state regulators who warned that the grid was
vulnerable to extreme weather. The grid needs to be rebuilt with the
flexibility that would enable effective use of wind energy,
including transmission from places where the wind is blowing right
now to places where it isn't and interconnects to other grids for
import and export of electricity. These changes would also make the
grid more resilient when the weather gets really bad. 
  

    
More effective use of wind and renewable energy will be helpful
longer term, but the near term issue is weatherization of power
plants and transmission systems. 
  

    
Which wouldn't have been as disastrous if it had been possible to
import electricity, for example from the TVA.

The changes that would make possible more effective use of wind
energy would also decentralize the grid and make it less brittle.
  

    
(really like response #398).
  

    
Looked at from a security standpoint, relying on electricity
transfer between regions seems risky? That's a very long supply line
and could be vulnerable to either wildfires or enemy action. It
seems like it might be infrastructure for a more peaceful and stable
climate than we have?

I guess they could be combined as long as you do a disaster drill
now and then. Regular service outages, as some areas in California
have to worry about due to fire danger, will tend to encourage more
disaster preparation.

If outages don't happen on their own then you need to schedule them.
  

    
> The changes that would make possible more effective use of 
> wind energy would also decentralize the grid and make it 
> less brittle.

Maybe, but that would require a political shift that is happening
too slowly in Texas to get us where we need to be before the next
ice storm. Which could be any year, even this year.

I heard a legislator (don't recall which one) saying that a huge
part of the problem was freezing at gas transmission facilities,
which should have been designated to retain power during emergency
shutdowns. He said part of the difficulty there was identifying all
of the facilities that would need to be included. I'm not expecting
a quick fix, though hopeful that overall the energy providers are
taking the deep freeze weatherization need seriously.

> relying on electricity transfer between regions seems risky

My understanding is that it's not unusual, but Texas won't allow it
because it would open the state to federal regulation and fees.
  

    
Meanwhile in supply line news, just protecting the cargo is becoming
an issue. It's not just Somalian pirates anymore:

Rail thefts leave tracks littered with pilfered packages
<https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-16/rail-theft-soars-los-angel
es-pilfered-packages-littering-tracks>

> Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since
December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County.
The railroad didn’t release specific data on what was stolen or the
value of what was lost, but it said the increase in crime cost the
company at least $5 million last year.

> A bottleneck in the supply chain and the presence of homeless
encampments near rail lines have contributed to the thefts,
officials said.

> “Organized and opportunistic criminal rail theft ... impacts our
employees, our customers in the overall supply chain industry,” said
Adrian Guerrero, a director of public affairs for Union Pacific.

> Guerrero estimates that about 90 cargo containers a day are
compromised, sometimes by an organized group that has halted trains
and recruited people living on the street to ransack the containers.

> Union Pacific is deploying more drones, has brought in extra
security and enlisted the Los Angeles Police Department, California
Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to
combat the thefts, Guerrero said.
  

    
<410>: That's a sane way to address the problem. I'm under no
illusion that Texas will do it.
  

    
Vinay Gupta:

> I think the point where deep thinkers started to
> integrate the idea of rolling your own reality, and then living
> inside of it, was really Hakim Bey.

I mean to take nothing away from Hakim Bey. There is certainly a sense
of 'constructed reality' for which I completely agree with you.

But consider magic -- literally (I was a Magician for a short time).

We might say that a magician constructs an alternate reality and extends
it to encompass an audience. Today, magicians do this to entertain. But
there's evidence that early forms of magic ritual practice have always
been part of human culture. Not for entertainment purposes but to more
directly influence (or manipulate?) the behavior of others. It was
used as a kind of show of power.

If we look at magic in terms of the physics, psychology, neuroscience,
and a bit of the semiotics involved, we can see pretty clearly how Magic
works. Cognitive biases, heuristics, and illusions all seem to be
related. The difference between illusion and reality may just be belief.

But the magician's constructed realities are highly constrained -- the
opposite of anarchy. Part of the trick includes keeping the audience
from seeing the limits -- and encourages the audience to accept that
what the magician has done means that anything is possible.

> But the cat is out of the bag now and it looks to me like our sense
> of *what is real* is going to keep on shattering until either we hit
> some new universal boundary, or (more likely) the world becomes an
> unintelligible mosaic and we define our position in it by action
> rather than by understanding.

I'm hoping that a better understanding of how the magic tricks work
will expose more of the constraints (the aspects of the magician's
reality) that's being hidden.

So, for the small percentage of flat earthers that are true believers,
we can move from asking "How can they possibly think that?" to "Oh, now
we can see why they think that way and *why*!"

And the 'why' includes understanding the motivations of the actors
(the magicians) involved.
  

    
<401> that's a great abstraction for security issues, thanks!

As you say it needs to be get fleshed out with specifics. People who
are willing to do their homework could come up with something
meaningful to them.

I'm thinking, though, that most people won't. Seeing it fleshed out
for someone else's community might be interesting, though.
  

    
There was a derailment today at the train looting site, if that was
done on purpose to loot more cargo it's rather an escalation.
  

    
Brian Slesinsky: Thank you!

Yes, it's proven to be a *hard* sell - http://resiliencemaps.org has
a very well worked out case for the Canary Islands in the event of a
respiratory tract infection pandemic (a pandemic flu, but much the
same as covid in general trajectory). Other than that, *crickets*.

Some of this is because people perceive it as bleak: "can't you make
it six ways to live?"

It also starts with the individual and works up, rather than
starting with Continuity of Government and working down as most
people in the industry would find natural ("that's why it starts
with the individual, sir, because normally it would start with
you").

https://archive.org/details/TheGuptaStateFailureManagementArchive
the Ireland video in there is a group of Irish climate change /
financial system doomers in a workshop making a total population
mortality estimate for Ireland in the event of a global economic
collapse resulting in a loss of all imports and exports.

It's surprisingly not that bad, around 3%. This is because Ireland
has a very low population density, due to the famines and mass
migration out of the green isle. The same methodology produces about
a 30% mortality estimate for America under the same circumstances.

Cheery.
  

    
Craig Maudlin: An awful lot of things which are considered to be
magic in the west, literally *magic* like ritual magic etc. are
considered to be normal parts of an average person's religious
practice in India.

You know, all those statues we keep around? They're ritualistically
infused with the life-breath of the practitioner, brought to life,
considered to be alive, treated as alive, treated as sacred, and if
they have to be moved or something they're *de sanctified* by
withdrawing the breath of life from them and then they're simply
objects again and can be put in a crate. When you have an entire
civilization that works that way on a fairly regular day to day
basis, you can imagine what the serious students of The Art are
learning under titles like Raja Yoga and Jnana Yoga or Kriya Yoga.
In India it's just kinda how things are done, nobody thinks of it as
mystical or esoteric, but if you put those routines into the cant of
the Golden Dawn it would be three days of ceremonial ritual
purifications for the moving guys before they were allowed to take
the statue down and put it in the van!

It's all the same *stuff* it's just in India its at such a scale and
so normalized that in no way shape or form is it perceived as magic:
it's just like good manners and politeness to the gods and other
people, a sort of "take your shoes off at the door" procedural
psychic hygiene that looks like magic in a low-magic culture, but
looks like hand washing in a high magic culture.

The reason I'm zooming in on Hakim Bey is this: I think Hakim Bey
subtly broke the world. Like I think he's patient zero for the kind
of postmodernism which enables people to want to force their reality
tunnel on the world *knowing that it is their own construction and
not actually real*. Robert Anton Wilson and co very carefully didn't
discuss how reality tunnels spread between people, how people are
recruited into reality tunnels and so on. They kept it as an
individual practice.

Bey makes it clear that groups share reality tunnels: temporary
autonomous Zone.

Well, that winds up as Tumblr Autonomous Zone pretty quick: people
are brewing up reality tunnels of their own (see: otherkin) and then
insisting to other people that these homebrew realities are
*completely real* and on a par with (say) medical science or orbital
mechanics. They organize vicious cancellation gangs to try and force
their reality tunnels on each other, using a sense that to go
against and outside of the Otherkin reality tunnel makes somebody
into A Bad Person because they're violating somebody else's human
rights by not believing they are a reincarnation of some specific
Pokemon.

I trace this like an infection back to Bey, because I think he gave
the idea of shared reality tunnels as active processes to a lot of
people - not least the San Francisco Cacophony Society - who then
ported it to Burning Man. I think it went through Genesis P Orridge
through TOPY/TOPI into Tumblr, although I don't know who the
intermediaries were. It's a genealogy of ideas, and a practice.

A bit like how chaos magic took root on the far right before Trump
got elected
https://datacide-magazine.com/a-fascist-tulpa-in-the-white-house-right-wing-me
me-magic-and-the-rise-of-trump/ and then they all freaked out because Trump, *in practice*, was the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.

So I think the patient zero for "design your own reality then export
it to everybody else" is Hakim Bey. And of course the problem with
Bey is the extremely intense proximity of his personal life to
various aspects of pedophilia. The pain of that discovery broke
hearts all over the anarchist world.

I don't want to dig all of this out here, but I want to suggest that
a very dangerous and flawed variation on the idea that "how you see
the world is your mental furniture and you can rearrange it whenever
you like" has taken root in the culture. People are taking belief
systems which *are not OK* and are harmful to the people sucked into
them - shitcoin ponzi schemes in the blockchain space are often
built around a charismatic leader - and they're consciously
exporting these realities to other people *who then believe them as
if they are real*. 

It's an explosion of what amounts to secular cult activity as these
warring reality tunnels smash into each other through social media
and cancellation events: "you are no longer part of our reality, JK
Rowling."

I don't know if there's any way of getting this particular
postmodern genie back in its bottle. Maybe some kinds of sacred
knowledge, no matter how dangerous they are, become parts of the
vernacular and there's no getting them back. "we all create our own
reality" goes from a hippie truism to a presidential platform in a
couple of generations.

If we can't recontain this insight or somehow persuade the general
public to lose interest in it - and that seems *VERY* unlikely given
the explosion of psychedelic capitalism happening as drugs are
decriminalized in America - then we're in a position where we're
going to be teaching reality tunnel management and point-of-view
hygiene to the public, hoping that they'll learn to maintain their
own minds and become resistant to weaponized memes intended to
over-write their reality tunnel with that of the psychic aggressor.

Virtual reality and drugs are both very likely to put
ever-increasing stress on the idea of a single monolithic "real" -
the cartesian plane filled with people and things and events. But
regulating people's realities and protecting them from bad realities
sounds like a reign of magician-kings more than democracy.

Trump as a bad magician-king, pulling people up the pied-piper path
into an alternate reality in which covid is a democratic disease and
Q might be a close friend of his?

What kind of politics can fight that? Not Princess Moonbeam, not
this time, that's for sure
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/marianne-williamson-drops-out-2
020-presidential-race-n1113676
  

    
Loss of all imports and exports is quite the doom scenario. When I
think of a collapse of trade I think of North Korea or Cuba. Living
under economic sanctions on purpose seems weird? (Which is why I
think Mars is silly. There are many remote places here on Earth, any
of which would be a warmer place to live and with lower shipping
delays.)

As an electronics tinkerer I am very aware of my utter dependence on
distant electronics factories, global shipping, and hardware
distributors.

It seems more realistic (we've lived it, briefly) to prepare for
supply chain brownouts and delays rather than total blockades? The
kind of disaster preparation I'm into is about getting cut off for a
limited time, though maybe longer than you'd ideally like.
  

    
Brian Slesinsky: the Irish were concerned, if I remember correctly,
that a global financial system meltdown would hard-stop world trade
for years, a bit like a black grid - and they're a small island
without much money, not America.

Doomers gonna doom. They were a bit disappointed that it was 3%
mortality  at the end of the workshop, not 50%.

The memory of the Famine is strong. They thought it would be like
that again. It wasn't.
  

    
Craig Maudlin: back to cognitive biases.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-cognitive-biases-in-the-modern-world/

This sort of stuff seems like a modernized tarot deck to me, where
one introspects on each card and finds the places in your life where
that cognitive bias has led to bad outcomes.

The notion of a modern mystery tradition built around cognitive
biases strikes me as more or less where the Rationalist community
got started - maybe they didn't realize they were a mystery
tradition when they started, but hey... rationality turns out to be
hard and paradoxical in extremely unexpected ways, and they've
turned Less Wrong into some kind of weird Silicon Valley accelerator
for new cults (I think.)

What do we do with the limits to our own rationality, once we can
define them?
  

    
When you start seeing the cracks in Rationality, it's time to check
out David Chapman's writing, such as <https://metarationality.com/>.

(It's unfinished, but I think it's a pretty description of the
limits of logic and statistics, and the distinction between
"reasonable" and "rational" thinking is pretty good.)

--

Speaking of cognitive biases, I usually think of aesthetic
considerations as fairly shallow but you can't deny their impact in
making things seem familiar or foreign. We might take the polarizing
aesthetic that cryptocurrency has for example. What is going on
there?

The moon rockets, diamond hands, laser eyes, and bored apes clearly
have their appeal to a core crowd and that's why companies in this
space lean into it. Even traditional finance has gotten into the
game, the better to attract the meme stock crowd.

So it's understandable. But it's hard to give cryptocurrency a fair
chance when I find the aesthetic repellent. (Not that I'm entirely
immune. I got into DogeCoin because I thought it was a fun joke, but
that was when I thought we were throwing coins at each other on
Reddit *ironically*, something like Mardi Gras beads.)

Giving a gold bar a jokey name might help it sell better than your
average everyday gold bar, and even get some people to consider
buying one who wouldn't ordinarily think of buying a gold bar at
all. But it isn't going to make Ricardian contracts seem
respectable, is it?

But I'm out of touch and probably the last person anyone should
listen to for marketing advice.
  

    
"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true
mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...." oscar
wilde. because really, we all respond to the cues that tell us 'is
this for me? or is this not of my tribe?"
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

According to the NYTimes, the daily death toll of COVID in USAmerica
was 1964 on January 16, 2022.  I thank them for that information and
the good piece on the development of mRNA vaccines they recently
published.  When I wrote there is little to no mention of this fact,
the fact I was referring to is the very little coverage I’ve seen
about the ongoing ramifications of that daily death toll.  At least,
not in the papers I read (NYTimes, WashPost, BBC, Guardian…)  We are
not publicly processing the reality of this number of excess deaths,
not actively facing what it actually means.  The best I’ve seen on
the historic overview is this interview with Nick Christakis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZhr8Hz03jY

I saw a tweet today which went:  what if we all got vaccinated,
locked ourselves down for a month, wore N95 masks when we went out
for essentials only.  That would, in all probability, end the
pandemic right there.  If ALL of us really did that.  But we’ve
muddled into an endemic pandemic and the new normal seems, now, to
be a regular rotation of new variants and boosters with no end in
sight.

This kind of refusal to deal with obvious ramifications, existential
ramifications, (and obvious solutions) also applies to climate and
the inability to imagine anything other than tweaks to business as
usual.  It is odd to me that the Green New Deal and Build Back
Better are, in some ways, less ambitious than Jimmy Carter’s 1979
energy plan which called for 20% of our energy from renewables by
the year 2000 (we’re about there now, 20 years behind his schedule)
and insulating 90% of our homes to higher standards by 1985.

Personally, I believe that we can draw enough carbon down out of the
sky by the end of the century to return to pre-industrial levels,
about 270 ppm (we’re at over 418 ppm now), by using geotherapy,
helping existing ecosystems amplify the natural carbon cycle,
consistently and globally from now on.  The best resources on
geotherapy I know of are at
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2021/04/geotherapy-not-geoengineering-please.html


Of course, we will have to zero out greenhouse gas emissions too in
order to accomplish this.

But again, I don’t see this geotherapeutic possibility in the public
conversation.  I don’t see us discussing a unifying vision of a
positive future that we can start building now, which is the only
way, I believe, you can build a future.  I’d start from Solar IS
Civil Defense, prepare for the next weather emergency whatever you
think about climate in a way that will increase resilience (and
speed the necessary transition), and proceed from there to solar
swadeshi.  I say that every year here to little discernable effect
though I still think it is a practical and affordable way forward.

For me, the livable future was pioneered and modeled by New Alchemy
Institute but it seems it takes too much work to ever catch on.
  

    
George Mokray:

I've got a slightly dim awareness of New Alchemy - "living machines"
that purify water and produce fish and fertilizer is what I
remember.

What else did they do? What's good to read about NAI? I hear they
were absolute wizards, but it's harder to get hold of their material
than (say) Buckminster Fuller!

Could you post some links, please?
  

    
Xi Jinping is Green-New-Dealing it over at Davos.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-01-17/Full-text-Xi-Jinping-s-address-to-2022-W
orld-Economic-Forum-16TN5povxKM/index.html

– China will stay committed to promoting ecological conservation. As
I have said many times, we should never grow the economy at the cost
of resource depletion and environmental degradation, which is like
draining a pond to get fish; nor should we sacrifice growth to
protect the environment, which is like climbing a tree to catch
fish. 

Guided by our philosophy that lucid waters and lush mountains are
invaluable assets, China has carried out holistic conservation and
systematic governance of its mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands,
lakes, grasslands and deserts. We do everything we can to conserve
the ecological system, intensify pollution prevention and control,
and improve the living and working environment for our people. China
is now putting in place the world's largest national parks system.
Last year, we successfully hosted COP15 to the Convention on
Biological Diversity, contributing China's share to a clean and
beautiful world. 

Achieving carbon peak and carbon neutrality are the intrinsic
requirements of China's own high-quality development and a solemn
pledge to the international community. China will honor its word and
keep working toward its goal. We have unveiled an Action Plan for
Carbon Dioxide Peaking Before 2030, to be followed by implementation
plans for specific sectors such as energy, industry and
construction. China now has the world's biggest carbon market and
biggest clean power generation system: the installed capacity of
renewable energy has exceeded one billion kilowatts, and the
construction of wind and photovoltaic power stations with a total
installed capacity of 100 million kilowatts is well under way.
Carbon peak and carbon neutrality cannot be realized overnight.
Through solid and steady steps, China will pursue an orderly
phase-down of traditional energy in the course of finding reliable
substitution in new energy. This approach, which combines phasing
out the old and bringing in the new, will ensure steady economic and
social development. China will also actively engage in international
cooperation on climate and jointly work for a complete transition to
a greener economy and society.