Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Vinay, 

Wikipedia has an article on New Alchemy Institute:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Alchemy_Institute>

The NAI website is here: <https://newalchemists.net/>

Here's a good article about NAI:
<https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-new-alchemy-institute-d0992ce33a68>

A pdf of "New Alchemy's First 20 Years":
<https://newalchemists.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/new-alchemys-first-20-years.
pdf>

Links to issues of The Journal of the New Alchemists:
<https://newalchemists.net/publications/new-alchemy-1971-1991/>
  

    
In <382> I erroneously posted that "... Tuesday the 17th is our last
day, though people might hang out and keep posting past that date."

Obviously, today (Monday) is the 17th.

So today is the formal last day of the conversation, though
participants can keep posting as long as they like - we're a long
way from the potential maximum number of posts.

I want to thank Bruce, Vinay, Emily, and all the others on and off
the WELL who've contributed posts. Barring apocalypse (which seems
increasingly possible), Bruce and I will be back in January 2023.

I'm not thinking we came to any conclusions, as usual, but I hope
we've been raising the right questions. And who knows? By the end of
the day today, we might see a post that wraps the current state of
things all up in a neat package, with a bright red bow on top.
  

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

Thank god *somebody* is doing the right thing. Pray god the American
far right doesn't start seeing US environmentalists as being
unpatriotic and corrupted by the Chinese!
  

    
Jon Lebkowsky: wow. It's been amazing - I've read these religiously
for so long, I can't believe I've done one now. <pinches self> must
be dreaming.

Thank you all!
  

    
Open Infrastructure Map https://openinframap.org/#8/32.661/-97.06
  

    
Insightful take on China and India, Bruce. The geopolitical center
continues to shift away from the post-WWII order of the U.S./NATO vs
… whatever, without the USSR to organize around, and in China’s
direction. I think that needs to be factored in to so much of what
Putin is doing on Russia’s western border, from the cyberattacks of
the Baltics to squashing Georgia to reabsorbing Ukraine. The former
KGB apparatchik was born into a global superpower and wants that
back desperately, even though there’s no ideological or geopolitical
reason for Russia to go back there.
  

    
Vinay, infrastructure that can be turned into a bomb is a problem.
People have been pointing this out since “peaceful atom” propaganda
appeared not long after the U.S. used warlike atoms to usher in the
post-WWII Cold War. 

There’s a line of historical analysis that argues the U.S.
atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prevent the USSR from getting
occupation forces into Japan first. I don’t know that it’s
conclusive, but I find it persuasive.

Advocates for renewable energy have been pointing out for decades
that you can’t make a bomb out of a solar panel or a windmill, the
way you can with an oil refinery or a fossil fuel pipeline. They’re
up against more than a century of fossil fuel firms habituating the
public to using these incredibly dangerous, toxic substances in
daily life. A product like gasoline could never be approved for the
consumer market today.

However, I don’t think the problem is infrastructure. 

Many of the problems in the U.S. begin with one problem: endemic
racism among a majority of white Americans. 

From there a lot of things flow. For example, there was the Roger
Ailes generation of crafty, smart and resentful (Nixon resigning)
media people and political operatives harnessing that bigotry, using
successive waves of modern media: newspapers, cable TV, talk radio,
online engagement algorithms dictated largely by revenue goals
rather than human rights or strengthening democratic institutions.

One of the ideas they’ve been using these media to spread for more
than a couple decades now is the falsehood of insecure elections.
Liberals look back almost fondly now on George W Bush, now that
they’ve run the gauntlet of four Trump years. His administration is
the one that took this election fraud bullshit from local and state
party levels to the national.

Then we had a smug and sequestered class of liberal politicians who
were (and many still remain) congenitally unable to grasp and act on
how debased their “friends across the aisle” were becoming. They
have to raise money too, right? So, many of them let civil rights
coast on the legacy of the Civil and Voting Rights acts,
triangulated to support free trade, didn’t blink too much when James
Hansen told them in 1988 that climate disruption was already
underway.

THEN there’s the mainstream journalism sector with its collective
head in the sand, covering all this stuff like stenographers so that
it can keep elbows with the powerful at the Washington
correspondent’s dinner every year, regularly invoking its rights
under the First Amendment while never saying out loud that it
believed in democracy, because that would be expressing an OPINION,
good grief.

Then there’s the successful multi-decade campaign to transform the
legal interpretation of the Second Amendment into “owning guns is a
civil right.”

I could go on.

Ultimately, the cure for most of this is not gonna be a refugee-like
mass transfer of populations across state lines based on political
preference or affiliation, or creating American city-states. It’s
the slow incremental process of creating progressive change via mass
civic engagement. 

Building support for: defunding fossil fuel companies from their
public subsidies, nailing the politicians who’ve allowed themselves
to be bought by Big Carbon, restoring the rules that prevented media
consolidation and breaking up the consolidated, regulating social
media companies, reviving civics education…

…in my experience, people typically don’t like this answer. It lacks
a techno-magical edge.
  

    
The concise way to say “endemic racism among a majority of white
Americans is “white supremacy.” Too bad using those two words
together in the U.S. became such a big reputation killer for 30 or
40 years.
  

    
Thanks for inviting me, Jon. Thanks for the interesting and
challenging posts, Vinay and Bruce and everyone who’s joined us.
This has been the best conversation-in-a-coffee-shop I’ve had since
early 2020.
  

    
Thank you, everyone, for this conversation. I always check in to 
SOTW but I've not before felt so engaged in it. 

let's continue

(and George Mokray, via meail:
>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.<

That tweeter is right, it would work *temporarily* if we shut all
borders to travel. Or else it would have to be the whole world doing
it. China sort of tried it at the very beginning.)

In all my voracious sf reading as an adolescent, it was always the
case that whole planets did things. "The people of Earth" - well,
that seems to be one of the more fanciful conceits of science
fiction. We are a planet of cats.
  

    
I've got to catch a plane and head to Bidenistan, so I reckon I'll
sign off.

*I feel better for having done this.  Although the tone of these
State of the World is often brutally frank, there's never been a
time when I felt worse for going through it.

Every day is a gift!
  

    
Well, thank you. So much good stuff.

but, as <435> suggests: let's continue...

This alternative, from Vinay in <417>, it the one we already occupy,
imo:

> ... 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.

We are there and have been for quite some time, perhaps. And journalism
has always had a hand in this, I think.

The link to the 50 biases in <420> is fun. But why 50? And where are
the heuristics and illusions? Humans love our categories, but beware
the category mistakes! It's the layer just below this where
neuroscience is giving us hints about the semi-chaotic systems from
which 'reason' emerges.

Perhaps the domain in which we will finally come to understand (and
master) our cognitive biases, heuristics, and illusions will be more
like a color space or color palette. A continuous, multi-dimensional
space of relationships between communication and control. If it didn't
already have a different meaning, a good name for his would be:
Cyberspace.

> 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.

But isn't this completely human? Don't we always work our way through
what we later say were just the stages of our early ignorance?

It does seem like tarot sometimes. But maybe it's more like the
'old Alchemy' -- which gradually transformed into Chemistry through the
painful application of scientific rigor and evolving knowledge
techniques.

At every stage, we are part of an ongoing process.
  

    
And thanks for the link in <421>, Brian. Along similar lines:

   "When logic fails to make sense of a world noisy with inconsistency,
    paraconsistent logics hold out (im)possible solutions"

<https://aeon.co/essays/paraconsistent-logics-find-structure-in-our-inconsisten
t-world?utm_source=rss-feed>
  

    
From Vinay in <420>

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

I say we do what humans have always done with limits -- build tools and
techniques to overcome them.
  

    
Emily Gertz:

You're describing the strategy which has been tried for 60 years or
more, and it's given us Donald Trump. It's failed. Teaching people
to be less racist washed out the window immediately the economy
corpsed in 2008.

I can point to specifically where the "teach people to be less
racist" agenda breathed its last:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic
-assault-american-liberty America's first black president shredded the Constitution and the Geneva Convention. He followed the long lineage of first female premiers who were deeply inhumane: Thatcher, Mier, Bhutto, Aung (Aung San?), Gandhi and a few others. While a lot of Americans are racist, the fact that a black president was an active participant in breaking down rule of law even further should cure us of any idea that the fundamental axis is race. Neither race nor gender is the fundamental axis. Obama put his weight behind the fascist tendency, and less racial tension in America is not going to fix a society where even the progressive black president was still a fascist: NDAA was an act which can never be forgiven.

So if race isn't the fundamental axis, what is?

The fundamental axis is money.

Even if we teach people to discriminate less against women or black
people it will not fix the problem, because those people (including
the women and black people) are still going to discriminate against
the poor and the helpless. We can move the oppression around, we can
shift the lines, but as long as people have freedom they're going to
discriminate against the poor, the ugly, the unlucky - even in
societies radically free of racial and gender prejudices, there's
still plenty of hierarchy to go round. American Asians are pretty
good at academia and capitalism, they're doing well, making bank,
richer than almost all other social and ethnic groups: they may
experience some racism but it's not hampering them getting what they
want very much. Why isn't there more racism against us?

Because we've got money.

The whites in America are fighting against taxation to fund social
programmes because *they feel they are getting poorer year on year*
and they are right. They're voting with rich people to cut taxes
because they think rich people are creating a society which will let
more people get rich, increasing the odds of any given individual
American becoming rich. They want a president who will print more
winning lottery tickets, not one who will check the game is not
rigged. Slavery was an economic institution at heart, with racism a
simple way to justify the game. But in Ireland they had institutions
of astonishing brutality, administered by much the same people who
ran slavery, and those systems ran on religion, catholic vs.
protestant. Racism, slavery, religious prejudice, gender
discrimination... 90% of the fuel is financial. Unpaid labour of
wives.

This is why my first question to anybody talking about race in
America is "so where do you stand on reparations?"

I know it's the end of the show now, we've done the State of the
World, but I can't resist asking... 

so where do you stand on reparations?
  

    
Thank you all .. as a (mostly) reader.
  

    
Craig Maudlin: I think jury trials count as an attempt to manage
cognitive bias. Judge had a bad lunch? You're in trouble, unless
it's a jury trial.
  

    
>The fundamental axis is money.

Yes. Even if you think it is race, it's important to realize that
money was at the root of America's race problem. 

The reason the South seceded wasn't because they hated Blacks, it's
because they understood chattel slavery to be the source not only of
their wealth but also their power. And the North understood that
too. The efforts of Republicans in preventing the expanse of chattel
enslavement into new states and territories was the wedge that led
to the Civil War. And after the Civil War, preventing Blacks from
voting enabled state governments to continue to operate in the
interests of white landowners.
  

    
> where do you stand on reparations?

Reparations by whom, for whom?
  

    
Well, there's one answer.
  

    
Vinay Gupta:

> Judge had a bad lunch?

Ha! Yes. Just before I joined the Well in 1990, I was seated as
a juror in a kidnapping case -- as I recall, the accused was a father
who had forcibly taken his young, adult daughter and transported her
to a location where she was held captive for the purposes of cult
de-programming -- her parents felt she had joined a cult.

The defense admitted to all the physical allegations: the taking from
a public place, the use of force and restraint, the transportation, and
the captivity. The only defense was that the daughter really wanted
this to happen in order to get a cash settlement from her father!

It's embarrassing to say that it took a day or so for me to realize
that this was not a kidnapping defense! (IANAL) There must be some
cognitive biases at work there. I asked the jury foreperson to give a
note to the judge. In the the note, I was essentially asking the judge
to confirm my logic, to double-check me for unconscious bias.

The result was classic. Jury sent away from the courtroom for a few
hours. Once we are called back, the judge's response was (and I quote):

   "I know what I would like to say, but the answer is,
    there is no answer."

!!!    Need better anti-bias tools.

In the end, to my dismay, it was jury nullification.
  

    
Jon Lebkowsky: try this for starters - reparations for black
Americans who got inferior education in segregated schools, to be
paid for by the Federal government on the basis that these people
were taxpaying citizens and had an equal right to education as white
people.

Clearly calculate economic damages - the victims are still alive -
and the entity which did the damage is still incorporated.
  

    
Doesn't that have to be calculated over more than one generation?
  

    
I *think* this instance is fairly straight forwards: these people
were educated imperfectly, they've taken a career hit.

Could it be extended further? Of course. But it would be quite nice
to get the base case established and built from there. 

The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
  

    
It wouldn't be reparations for the enslavement of their ancestors,
though. It would be remediation of a racist educational system.