Decline of the Empire

Computers Will Be Smarter Than Ray Kurzweil In 15 Years

Oh, man, I gotta say it. For me, what is the most maddening thing about human beings? There are many to choose from, but Crazy Thing #1 for me is the fact that there's some nutcase running around, he's batshit crazy, he's not getting the medication he desperately needs, etc. BUT this total wacko is well-respected, people take him seriously, clueless mainstream media-types write articles about him, he's got a good-paying, high-prestige job, blah blah blah.

In short, humans are staring crazy right in face, and they don't have the psychological wherewithal to recognize it! They're not competent enough to see it!

I see this incompetence over and over again. Well, that's Flatland for you.

Constructing A Decent Society?

This is a short follow-up to my long essay Moral Failure In Liberalized Market States.

Paul Krugman is a lot like the blind squirrel who finds an acorn now and again. And so it was today.

James Surowiecki makes an important point:

if you want a society in which everyone has a decent life, you need to construct a society in which everyone has a decent life — not a society in which everyone has a small but equal chance of living the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

Not that we’re anywhere close to the second condition, anyway — the most important factor in whether you can become rich is whether you chose the right parents. Most people are going to end up with socioeconomic status close to where they started.

But even if that weren’t true, those moving up the ladder would be matched by an equal number moving down. Since anyone could find himself or herself downwardly mobile, social mobility arguably actually strengthens the case for a strong safety net.

America's Governing Elite — The "Deep State"

I've been writing about America's social power structure lately—the Elite, the Beneficiaries of the status quo, and the Disenfranchised.

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Mike Lofgren on America's elite.

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.”

In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

NOT Rationalizing The Status Quo

After about three months of protest and much violence during this last month, February, 2014, a large faction of the people of Ukraine have in effect overthrown the tyrannical and corrupt rule of Victor Yanukovych, perhaps the only asshole on Earth who owns (now formerly) a golden crapper.

I wrote a post Friday called Rationalizing The Status Quo in which I noted that Americans remain passive (submissive?) in the face of large and growing social and economic inequality.

As some who commented noted, such docility raises the question of just how bad things have to get before disenfranchised Americans rise up to take back what is theirs. For example, we find this passage in a study of social stratification I quoted on Friday.

Rationalizing The Status Quo

Ever since the President made a speech about income inequality and lack of opportunity in America, we have been inundated with handwringing about those subjects in the mainstream media. Allegedly thoughtful people, two years after the much-despised Occupy movement ("we are the 99%") withered away, have all of a sudden discovered that America is run by a predatory elite. Obama apparently gave them permission to think about it, and now they do!  [Graph source here.]

Not that anything is going to be done about astonishing inequality in America. To quote George Carlin, the "owners of this country don't want that" for reasons which are all too apparent.

The Human Relationship To Other Species

In my recent post The Argument From Ignorance, speaking of Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, I wrote the following—

Kolbert is too polite to say it, but the book is not "a call to action" because there are no collective actions that would fix the mass extinction problem. Humans would have to be something other than they are. And if we were a different species, there probably wouldn't be any need for a "call to action" because we wouldn't be detroying ourselves and large parts of the biosphere. That's the essence of determinism. Humans are a species, so what you see is what you get.

I want to illustrate these points today. This story is about Atlantic leatherback turtles, and serves as a microcosm of the human relationship to other species. Here's the abstract of a recent paper with the unwieldy title Pan-Atlantic analysis of the overlap of a highly migratory species, the leatherback turtle, with pelagic longline fisheries (Proceedings of the Royal Society, February 12, 2014).

Telling More Than We Can Know

In the late 1970s, two cognitive scientists, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, wrote a groundbreaking paper—still worth reading more than 30 years later—called "Telling More Than We Can Know," which reviewed dozens of studies showing that human beings often have no idea why they do the things they do...
    — Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist and author of Guitar Zero (p. 153)

Nisbett & Wilson

The Pivot On Which The World Turns

Recent experience tells me that writing DOTE has been a largely pointless exercise, a truly sad fact which actually follows from my own views on how humans work. That's depressing to me, but there it is.

For the record, this blog, especially since early 2012, two full years ago, has taken Human Nature as its subject. This is not a Doomer blog. How many times do I have to say that? Apparently, there are those to whom I could say it a million times, and explain it a million times, and never would that message be received.

In so far as a "good-enough" perspective on Human Nature yields certain unfortunate results about the longer-term future of humanity, I write about those things. And they are coming true, gradually on the human time scale, but in less than the-blink-of-an-eye on the geological time scale.

Thus I am not engaged in baseless Doomer Prophecy, as I said in The Argument From Ignorance. I am not some version of Nostradamus, although I see that quite a few of my readers are mindless adherents of his modern-day equivalents, who shall remain nameless here. But I know who they are, and so do my more perceptive readers. Those people live in Flatland; there is nothing special about them as human beings, although they think otherwise, which itself is not surprising.

That said, the difference between trying to get closer to the truth about ourselves and clinging to typical human delusions is the pivot on which the world turns. That is impossible to explain to Flatlanders who don't have the psychological wherewithal to see the difference, but let me try for the 253rd time.

If  humans could understand themselves sufficiently to get a clearer perspective on the destructive things they do, and if  they could use that improved understanding to consciously change their own behavior, they might have a chance of getting to the 23rd century with some semblance of their global civilization still intact.

Regardless of the probability that such an understanding will miraculously spring forth, and thus Homo sapiens will be reborn, it is always true that those trying to achieve such an understanding reside on the side of the angels, while those who remain mired in ignorance and delusion are merely bit players in the ongoing Human Tragedy.

So it doesn't matter when some of the more tragic consequences of Human Nature play out. It may matter to you personally, but in the greater scheme of things, that's of no significance. That's beside the point. Predictions about timing are merely Doomer Prophecy. Nobody has a crystal ball. And blind optimists are even worse.

Regarding the timing and consequences of future events, science exists. Truths can be approximated, trends identified. We don't need any more false prophets. Optimists or pessimists, we've got too many of those as it is. That's just more human blindness, more of the same ignorance and delusion which got us into this 21st century mess in the first place.

The greater undertaking attempts to answer Gauguin's Questions.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

Maybe you won't like the answers, but there won't be any authentic answers unless you look for them.

Deja Vu?

 

Janet Yellen testified before Congress today. Monthly tapering will continue but interest rates will remain pegged at nearly zero, perhaps forever.

The stock market is up, but a scary chart is making the rounds. Deja vu.

Does history repeat? (or rhyme or something...)

Humans! — Take The Dave Cohen Challenge!

As I've said over and over again, I am a determinist. My views of the human prospect are based primarily my understanding and confirming observations of how humans work—we're a species, so what you see is what you get—and, secondarily, on all the science which tells us that humans are gradually and systematically destroying the Earth's biosphere. There is some uncertainty, but the science is rigorous and the trends are clear.

In a recent post called The Argument From Ignorance, I laid out those views again in the context of the publication of Elizabeth Kolbert's new book The Sixth Extinction.