Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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On a side note I did read a rather terrifying article by Vox on Accelerationism this morning. I really hope that doesn't become a thing. If it does the whole of the public are going to be forced to eat a crap sandwich in terms of almost fully uncooked not even half-baked ideas, draw battle lines, and any hope of there having been any ability to come out the other side of this period better for the wear will have been lost.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Papus79 wrote: May 22nd, 2020, 9:34 am I think the main my main areas of agreement with GameB would be as follows - 1) the structures of power that accumulate in capitalism of the GameA type are autopoitic. Certain strategies win, those who win at all costs take the top, and thus the results are baked into the rules and we're learning - at least in more granular detail than in the past (where history was strained, edited, or even rewritten by the victors) - that the ways in which structures interact with humanity's less mutable traits and even the immutable aspects of game theory set us on something of a one-way track toward certain conclusions written into the rules and when the rules are like that (ie. what it takes to win and, ultimately, continue your germ line with some hope for their own future) and the best one can do when confronted with such rules is throw regulations in the way of those conclusions, which can slow it down and keep civil unrest below a certain threshold but that's only staying the ultimate outcomes. 2) The goal of GameB seems, as far as I can tell, to be about leveraging something that GameA threw out the window, ie. the sort of small group cooperation that David Sloan Wilson has been talking about, thinking about seeding it in groups of Dunbar size, and the idea is that cooperative behavior could have superior outcomes to GameA 'devil-take-the-hindmost' behavior, and that as the system is collapsing these units will be what's left standing and where people will go to find competence, honesty, and integrity in business dealings and perhaps will even try adopting GameB values in light of seeing it work where GameA was self-terminating and ended up with most of society essentially redundant, unneeded, and headed toward a place where - under that system - only the most rarified talent and/or their children (which will usually not have that in common with their parents) would have any right to reproduce let alone live.

My biggest concern with GameB is that it might be too little too late. Especially if things really start unraveling within the next five years and a few little villages pop up around the US and Europe with maybe a population of 1,000 in total, it'll just be a bunch of irrelevant fringe weirdos that no one cares about and things will simply move on in the direction they were going to go without them having any influence.
Following this logic of GameA vs GameB, I wonder if, looking from an historical perspective, wouldn't it be required to have a mixed approach depending on the circumstances. For example, there may be a need for a GameA confrontation to get a more stable, leveled ground, from which then GameB strategies can be launched. I mean, could it be that something applied from current GameA institutions, which is not within the reach of GameB to change, is preventing any entry of GameB influences?
Papus79 wrote: May 22nd, 2020, 9:34 am The thing I'm trying to sort out, being on the autistic spectrum so mildly that it doesn't show up in actual social behavior but only in certain things I don't do, just how aggressively everyone looks for any sign of difference - whatsoever - to slap put a huge invisible wall up and project the assumption that if the person's not a serial killer, cannibal or baby-rapist that they eventually will be. I think this is part of why my understanding of this leans so heavily on game theory and Darwinian psychology - it seems like what people are doing and wanting to do has little or anything to do with truth and if anything the obsession seems to be over identifying people who might be best thought of as 'genetic copying errors', measuring them with the most crooked/wavy measuring stick they can find, measuring them shoulder to shoulder with it, and declaring them a midget. To me that's hardly behavior fit for an animal fit for an animal that we'd call 'human', it's something closer to a chimpanzee that can talk, drive, and text.
I just think there are many contrasting tendencies within human possibilities, but they manifest in direct proportion to the influence of the social environment. You may know the parable from the popular internet meme:
Two Wolves - A Cherokee Parable

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

"One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.

"The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

"This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"

The old chief simply replied,
"The one you feed."

Papus79 wrote:On a side note I did read a rather terrifying article by Vox on Accelerationism this morning. I really hope that doesn't become a thing. If it does the whole of the public are going to be forced to eat a crap sandwich in terms of almost fully uncooked not even half-baked ideas, draw battle lines, and any hope of there having been any ability to come out the other side of this period better for the wear will have been lost.
I think I know what article you are referring to and I remember learning about that particular case recently. You might have heard also of the black jogger that was lynched by two armed, militia-style folks in the US.

But actually, what strikes me is the tendency in the US and other mainstream media to label some violent actions with fancy names when it's talk about their own society, while using less sophisticated labels for the same things coming from abroad. This accelerationism thing is nothing but good old right wing terrorism, urban warfare, paramilitary militias, etc., some of them created and funded by governments. They have been around for a while, and usually gain more visibility in times of social distress due to economic crisis. And they usually fit the typical description of ur-fascism, as Umberto Eco called it:


The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 26th, 2020, 2:55 pm Following this logic of GameA vs GameB, I wonder if, looking from an historical perspective, wouldn't it be required to have a mixed approach depending on the circumstances. For example, there may be a need for a GameA confrontation to get a more stable, leveled ground, from which then GameB strategies can be launched. I mean, could it be that something applied from current GameA institutions, which is not within the reach of GameB to change, is preventing any entry of GameB influences?
That seems to be something that we don't have a lot of historical track record for inquiry on - ie. clarity on to what degree GameA and GameB dynamics are corrosive in zero-sum ways toward each other and to what degree they could both be seen to have vital roles and what it would look like to keep them in dynamic equlibrium where we were getting the best of both.

GameB seems like it's a reaction to both the Robert Putnam 'Bowling Alone' type stuff combined with the kind of cutthroat meritocracy we're practicing (I don't know if you heard Sam Harris's Making Sense 205 with Daniel Markovits on the topic of how that's mixing with the Covid situation - it was pretty good). TBH I'm pretty sure that we have had GameB dynamics before, the first set was the Abrahamic religions as they're larger subsets, Christianity and Islam, caught on in late and early-post antiquity. Then it's probably just as important to point out that Christianity was turning into such a patchwork of internal battles by the 17th century that in the early 18th you had the proto-humanists coming about and really the story of Freemasonry seems to have been about trying to take society back from the idiocy of torch, crown and tiara, the sorts of people who'd today be out in Silicon Valley wanted to better understand what sort of world they lived in and so they made use of secrecy for the sake of being able to examine everything that was important to them to gain understanding of.

I commented to someone else yesterday (different non-philosophy forum), on one hand it seems like market liberalism of this sort, at least for now, has been societally centrifugal in that the less people needed each other the more they ran away from each other, the more civic organizations broke down, and to some degree individuals without support structures are vulnerable to larger structures and losing the leverage in society that family backing provides. At the same time it really seems like there's something happening in the way of resources, perhaps a bit beyond just the background stories that we're chewing through the biosphere, more like were catching certain kinds of bottlenecks that we're running as hard as we can against and getting less for our efforts. Some people would say it's our lack of physics innovation, some would say it might be hitting the hard limits of nature, on that last part I feel like I'd want to know what the specific bottlenecks are because without that I don't really have a coherent enough story. The other part, as far as people being animalistic, it does seem like this was at least held in abeyance when we were in a more collaborative pattern and the question is what economic, social, and perhaps memetic, archetypal, even spiritual elements allowed for that and, knowing them, are they something we can optimize for or is it a matter of the need for well-built systems meeting rare or semi-rare opportunities in the environment?


Count Lucanor wrote: May 26th, 2020, 2:55 pmI just think there are many contrasting tendencies within human possibilities, but they manifest in direct proportion to the influence of the social environment. You may know the parable from the popular internet meme:
Two Wolves - A Cherokee Parable

An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...

I think this is also echoed by Solzhenitsyn:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil."

I do remember in my childhood that things were not like this. In part I get that, for the adult world when I was that age, this sort of competition was likely happening and middle and upper middle class children will not always but often be sheltered by the efforts of their elders to create a protective dome of sorts around their development. That's actually one of the things that makes this difficult to read. In one sense I know that the passage from childhood to adult experiences, on the personal level, makes inquiry into history to see how much set and setting have changed can be opaque. On one hand things were clearly far, far worse than today for most people in the 19th century and earlier. The 20th century was a tremendously mixed bag with the last half working out better for most people but it was far from uniform. What we seem to have right now is a situation where I think we're concerned because we could see, I have to call it this because IMHO any system meant to distribute goods either through work or just being is some aspect of it, our social welfare system collapsing under the strain of technological changes, particularly because in many places it's based on work and driven by people running on the wheel with the promise of status, mate selection, etc. and when that all breaks down people start defecting and bit by bit that disassembles systems.

Another piece - I was watching David Fuller and Charles Eisenstein last night on Rebel wisdom talking about the mythic element of conspiracy theories and around the middle of that they got into the problem of a very narrow sort of technocracy placing KPI's on everything and the question of what it looks like when the police stop doing what they'd historically have thought of as their job and instead chased KPI's, and what would happen if we turn into a culture where the norm is to collapse your work into chasing your performance indicators and metrics. That clearly does sound like it would have disastrous consequences. On one hand I get why quantifying performance is critical for routing incompetence and mismanagement of funds and resources, at the same time, just to fill out some kind of balance, there has to be not only rewards for out-of-the-box solutions and performance over and above KPI's but also some type of path to bettering one's skills in those areas, otherwise people will have a lot of incentive to just stick with what they know works and in many cases do little more.

Count Lucanor wrote: May 26th, 2020, 2:55 pm I think I know what article you are referring to and I remember learning about that particular case recently. You might have heard also of the black jogger that was lynched by two armed, militia-style folks in the US.

But actually, what strikes me is the tendency in the US and other mainstream media to label some violent actions with fancy names when it's talk about their own society, while using less sophisticated labels for the same things coming from abroad. This accelerationism thing is nothing but good old right wing terrorism, urban warfare, paramilitary militias, etc., some of them created and funded by governments. They have been around for a while, and usually gain more visibility in times of social distress due to economic crisis. And they usually fit the typical description of ur-fascism, as Umberto Eco called it:

On one hand if an ideology coagulates and becomes a 'thing' it can take on more power, at the same time I do noticed that the kind of accelerationism that Vox was talking about is a bit arcane / esoteric for most people's ways of thinking. I remember, for instance, stumbling on CCRU just because I was a huge fan of UK drum n bass, detroit techno, etc. at the time (still am) and there was a lot there intertwining music, philosophy, and politics in interesting ways. Clearly CCRU had no resemblance to the far right, I think that was mostly a Nick Land turn of events later, but suffice to say I can't imagine many of these people getting very far into Steve Goodman or Kodwo Eshun's essays nor much content like them.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Count Lucanor »

Papus79 wrote:That seems to be something that we don't have a lot of historical track record for inquiry on - ie. clarity on to what degree GameA and GameB dynamics are corrosive in zero-sum ways toward each other and to what degree they could both be seen to have vital roles and what it would look like to keep them in dynamic equlibrium where we were getting the best of both.

GameB seems like it's a reaction to both the Robert Putnam 'Bowling Alone' type stuff combined with the kind of cutthroat meritocracy we're practicing (I don't know if you heard Sam Harris's Making Sense 205 with Daniel Markovits on the topic of how that's mixing with the Covid situation - it was pretty good). TBH I'm pretty sure that we have had GameB dynamics before, the first set was the Abrahamic religions as they're larger subsets, Christianity and Islam, caught on in late and early-post antiquity. Then it's probably just as important to point out that Christianity was turning into such a patchwork of internal battles by the 17th century that in the early 18th you had the proto-humanists coming about and really the story of Freemasonry seems to have been about trying to take society back from the idiocy of torch, crown and tiara, the sorts of people who'd today be out in Silicon Valley wanted to better understand what sort of world they lived in and so they made use of secrecy for the sake of being able to examine everything that was important to them to gain understanding of.
I'm trying to look at this idea of GameA vs GameB, trying to leave out my prejudices at such approach, at least momentarily, to see if I can get something out of it. As defined, GameA stands for a "rivalrous civilisation that is replete with destructive externalities and power asymmetries that produce existential risk". GameB as a "metastable society emphasizing human wellbeing built on good values that we will be happy to call home and we will be proud to leave to our descendants, with four fundamentals: 1)self-organizational 2) network-oriented, 3) decentralized, and 4) metastable for an extended period of time at least a few hundred years."

TBH, I don't really see how the Abrahamic religions could fit into some GameB scheme, for a variety of reasons. First, for quite an amount of time, they were not associated to a stable hegemonic power, which is what you would need to run a society by consensus, that is, without permanent use of force. The Hebrews had a couple of brief and small kingdoms and were almost all the time under the rule of other powers. In general, the prevailing climate during the times of the Old Testament was of religious and political rivalry, military seizes and occupation, slavery, etc. And the ideologies they advocated in their religious texts were pretty much aligned with this social paradigm, endorsing violence, slavery, death, etc. If we follow the definitions, this is completely GameA right from the beginning. And then, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the situation remained the same and sometimes even worst.
Papus79 wrote: I commented to someone else yesterday (different non-philosophy forum), on one hand it seems like market liberalism of this sort, at least for now, has been societally centrifugal in that the less people needed each other the more they ran away from each other, the more civic organizations broke down, and to some degree individuals without support structures are vulnerable to larger structures and losing the leverage in society that family backing provides. At the same time it really seems like there's something happening in the way of resources, perhaps a bit beyond just the background stories that we're chewing through the biosphere, more like were catching certain kinds of bottlenecks that we're running as hard as we can against and getting less for our efforts. Some people would say it's our lack of physics innovation, some would say it might be hitting the hard limits of nature, on that last part I feel like I'd want to know what the specific bottlenecks are because without that I don't really have a coherent enough story. The other part, as far as people being animalistic, it does seem like this was at least held in abeyance when we were in a more collaborative pattern and the question is what economic, social, and perhaps memetic, archetypal, even spiritual elements allowed for that and, knowing them, are they something we can optimize for or is it a matter of the need for well-built systems meeting rare or semi-rare opportunities in the environment?
This goes back to what we talked at the beginning. We run a hyper-individualized society because that was a premise for the organization of productive forces since the dawn of capitalism, which requires the sale and purchase of the labor force of free individuals. The material conditions of production demand a social atomism that is the breeding ground of cultural alienation and other modern ills, including a relation to nature and technology, and between groups and individuals, that promotes and reproduces irrationality. Interestingly, this happens at the same time that such a system demands the integration and socialization of many activities in concentrated spaces, producing modern cities and mass culture, with its particular type of mental life. There are indeed then two contradictory forces, one that tends to alienate and satisfy private interests in detriment of the general well being, and the other that tends towards large scale cooperation strategies and subordinates individual interests to social well being. One could easily identify GameA with the former, and GameB with the latter. That's why perhaps GameB has some socialist flavor, although as defined in the previous comment, it looks a lot like utopian socialism. The appeal to "good values" adds a dubious moralizing ingredient to the formula.
Papus79 wrote: Another piece - I was watching David Fuller and Charles Eisenstein last night on Rebel wisdom talking about the mythic element of conspiracy theories and around the middle of that they got into the problem of a very narrow sort of technocracy placing KPI's on everything and the question of what it looks like when the police stop doing what they'd historically have thought of as their job and instead chased KPI's, and what would happen if we turn into a culture where the norm is to collapse your work into chasing your performance indicators and metrics. That clearly does sound like it would have disastrous consequences. On one hand I get why quantifying performance is critical for routing incompetence and mismanagement of funds and resources, at the same time, just to fill out some kind of balance, there has to be not only rewards for out-of-the-box solutions and performance over and above KPI's but also some type of path to bettering one's skills in those areas, otherwise people will have a lot of incentive to just stick with what they know works and in many cases do little more.
I have always had mixed feelings about technocracy. At the end I concluded that technocracy is not the solution to our society's illnesses, but it must be part of any solution. I had an interesting epiphany when I took a master degree and was introduced to organizational theory, which runs on some type of microsocial science (BTW, you know how they start all these courses: with Sun Tzu's Art of War, doesn't that tell you something?). The thing is, I realized that all these business strategies can be stripped of their greedy motivations and transposed to other fields, including public administration and left politics, and they would work just as fine. I also think the public sector and non-profits can gain a lot if they had strategic goals and copied the good practices of successful business organizations, I mean the fair-playing ones, of course. I wished someone measured the KPIs of our politicians!! In any case, you know Drucker's aphorism: "culture eats strategy for breakfast". There must be leadership and inspiration to drive change.
Papus79 wrote: On one hand if an ideology coagulates and becomes a 'thing' it can take on more power, at the same time I do noticed that the kind of accelerationism that Vox was talking about is a bit arcane / esoteric for most people's ways of thinking. I remember, for instance, stumbling on CCRU just because I was a huge fan of UK drum n bass, detroit techno, etc. at the time (still am) and there was a lot there intertwining music, philosophy, and politics in interesting ways. Clearly CCRU had no resemblance to the far right, I think that was mostly a Nick Land turn of events later, but suffice to say I can't imagine many of these people getting very far into Steve Goodman or Kodwo Eshun's essays nor much content like them.
Having a second thought, and perhaps from a purely tactical point of view, leaving aside the driving ideology and whether is good or bad, accelerationism could make sense. Many times, sustaining a bad situation for a long period without allowing it to reach the breaking point, can mean a long agony, like a dissonant chord in music that never resolves into the tonic chord. Not only the solution is delayed, but other anomalies begin to grow and develop to the point of creating completely new social dynamics that complicate matters even more. It's like new stages of social decomposition. In other words, keeping the patient (society) indefinitely in agony and just trying to control the fever, eventually makes everything worst. Sometimes the system reaches the breaking point by itself, or because it has run in state of decomposition for too long, but sometimes it might need a little extra push. That would be the point of radicalization.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 30th, 2020, 12:41 am TBH, I don't really see how the Abrahamic religions could fit into some GameB scheme, for a variety of reasons. First, for quite an amount of time, they were not associated to a stable hegemonic power, which is what you would need to run a society by consensus, that is, without permanent use of force. The Hebrews had a couple of brief and small kingdoms and were almost all the time under the rule of other powers. In general, the prevailing climate during the times of the Old Testament was of religious and political rivalry, military seizes and occupation, slavery, etc. And the ideologies they advocated in their religious texts were pretty much aligned with this social paradigm, endorsing violence, slavery, death, etc. If we follow the definitions, this is completely GameA right from the beginning. And then, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the situation remained the same and sometimes even worst.
I think the way I'm looking at the two examples I gave is a bit more like 'these were instances where we were actually able to push back against maximal destructive competition as a species and win at some level. My horror these days is largely the degree to which people act like dutiful servants to a collapse that they'd all see coming but what's worse - you either can't get them to see it or admit that they're seeing it, and it goes back to something Donald Hoffman said about animals that see truth always losing the Darwinian foot race to animals of equal complexity that can see none of the truth and only fitness payouts. If anything but full speed social Darwinism is a miraculous anomaly I'm curious to look back through history at the various ways that we actually did combat it and win, and those were the two examples I'd think of where such push-backs did do something that counter-levered that dynamic.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 30th, 2020, 12:41 amThis goes back to what we talked at the beginning. We run a hyper-individualized society because that was a premise for the organization of productive forces since the dawn of capitalism, which requires the sale and purchase of the labor force of free individuals. The material conditions of production demand a social atomism that is the breeding ground of cultural alienation and other modern ills, including a relation to nature and technology, and between groups and individuals, that promotes and reproduces irrationality. Interestingly, this happens at the same time that such a system demands the integration and socialization of many activities in concentrated spaces, producing modern cities and mass culture, with its particular type of mental life. There are indeed then two contradictory forces, one that tends to alienate and satisfy private interests in detriment of the general well being, and the other that tends towards large scale cooperation strategies and subordinates individual interests to social well being. One could easily identify GameA with the former, and GameB with the latter. That's why perhaps GameB has some socialist flavor, although as defined in the previous comment, it looks a lot like utopian socialism. The appeal to "good values" adds a dubious moralizing ingredient to the formula.
I think I'm even more pessimistic about human competition and arms races. It seems like humanity, at the best of times is some stack of highly flammable material and any survival-level competitive arms race is like the fire someone lit by throwing a match into that stack of material. At the very best it rained the day before or there was a morning mist that hangs out on it for a while which makes it harder to kindle. Right now unfortunately it seems like we've got fires on several angles and any one of those tends to be a positive feedback loop that just keeps drawing just about anyone in who makes contact with it. Where I'm at with GameB - I really can't think of a better alternative. They're considering data-driven approaches where they start different small villages or Dunbars throughout various countries to really focus on how they'll work with their social rule systems, how they'll keep it running smoothly, and they'll be comparing notes on what works. I think there needs to be some subset of the population performing these sorts of experiments deliberately and building little islands of cooperation where, as I think Greta's put it often lately, you have mass defection in most places and very few people being able to keep their integrity while forced to live with that on all sides.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 30th, 2020, 12:41 amI have always had mixed feelings about technocracy. At the end I concluded that technocracy is not the solution to our society's illnesses, but it must be part of any solution. I had an interesting epiphany when I took a master degree and was introduced to organizational theory, which runs on some type of microsocial science (BTW, you know how they start all these courses: with Sun Tzu's Art of War, doesn't that tell you something?). The thing is, I realized that all these business strategies can be stripped of their greedy motivations and transposed to other fields, including public administration and left politics, and they would work just as fine. I also think the public sector and non-profits can gain a lot if they had strategic goals and copied the good practices of successful business organizations, I mean the fair-playing ones, of course. I wished someone measured the KPIs of our politicians!! In any case, you know Drucker's aphorism: "culture eats strategy for breakfast". There must be leadership and inspiration to drive change.
I just think too many of them still come from a 20th century baby boom mindset that hasn't really come to understand the existence of, and have proper humility in the face of, truly complex systems. This is part of where most of our attempts at social engineering fail and where we botch incentive structures all the time. To do technocracy the tone-deaf way is also a great way to shove of externalities with plausible deniability. I'd agree with you that technocracy is a technique, and we do need to leverage data, but we also have to remember that those of us who can wade through it know that not all data is alike and a great many people can't even be bothered to think about it that far, in fact the worse it is the better it is for either tribal heraldry that they can take in and fuel their tribe or something they can use against the tribe or tribes that they identify as the enemy. It seems like no matter what we try to do we'll be bringing the dead weight of a lot of permanent children with us.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 30th, 2020, 12:41 amHaving a second thought, and perhaps from a purely tactical point of view, leaving aside the driving ideology and whether is good or bad, accelerationism could make sense. Many times, sustaining a bad situation for a long period without allowing it to reach the breaking point, can mean a long agony, like a dissonant chord in music that never resolves into the tonic chord. Not only the solution is delayed, but other anomalies begin to grow and develop to the point of creating completely new social dynamics that complicate matters even more. It's like new stages of social decomposition. In other words, keeping the patient (society) indefinitely in agony and just trying to control the fever, eventually makes everything worst. Sometimes the system reaches the breaking point by itself, or because it has run in state of decomposition for too long, but sometimes it might need a little extra push. That would be the point of radicalization.
I'd think a good well-known off ramp could serve the same purpose though? I'd agree with you that if a dynamic goes on for long enough then power and perverse incentive structures keep racking up in bad places. For the most part though I think that's the vision of the future if in the next five to ten years we have no viable alternatives that people can move off into - of the GameB sort or other similar aims and goals - where the idea is to be productive, work together, try to enjoy life, and - actually bringing back Ed Dutton into the conversation - bring slow life strategy back to culture rather than fast life strategy (ie. K selection rather than r).
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Count Lucanor »

Papus79 wrote: May 31st, 2020, 11:11 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: May 30th, 2020, 12:41 am TBH, I don't really see how the Abrahamic religions could fit into some GameB scheme, for a variety of reasons. First, for quite an amount of time, they were not associated to a stable hegemonic power, which is what you would need to run a society by consensus, that is, without permanent use of force. The Hebrews had a couple of brief and small kingdoms and were almost all the time under the rule of other powers. In general, the prevailing climate during the times of the Old Testament was of religious and political rivalry, military seizes and occupation, slavery, etc. And the ideologies they advocated in their religious texts were pretty much aligned with this social paradigm, endorsing violence, slavery, death, etc. If we follow the definitions, this is completely GameA right from the beginning. And then, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the situation remained the same and sometimes even worst.
I think the way I'm looking at the two examples I gave is a bit more like 'these were instances where we were actually able to push back against maximal destructive competition as a species and win at some level. My horror these days is largely the degree to which people act like dutiful servants to a collapse that they'd all see coming but what's worse - you either can't get them to see it or admit that they're seeing it, and it goes back to something Donald Hoffman said about animals that see truth always losing the Darwinian foot race to animals of equal complexity that can see none of the truth and only fitness payouts. If anything but full speed social Darwinism is a miraculous anomaly I'm curious to look back through history at the various ways that we actually did combat it and win, and those were the two examples I'd think of where such push-backs did do something that counter-levered that dynamic.
Sorry, but I got lost somewhere. You will have to elaborate on the specifics, because I have no idea to what you're referring to when you talk about Abrahamic religions being close to a GameB scheme.

I experience that same horror of people going like sheep to their own sacrifice. Nothing Darwinian there, except that we are not that far from our prehistoric hunter-gatherer predecessors.
Papus79 wrote: May 31st, 2020, 11:11 pm
I think I'm even more pessimistic about human competition and arms races. It seems like humanity, at the best of times is some stack of highly flammable material and any survival-level competitive arms race is like the fire someone lit by throwing a match into that stack of material. At the very best it rained the day before or there was a morning mist that hangs out on it for a while which makes it harder to kindle. Right now unfortunately it seems like we've got fires on several angles and any one of those tends to be a positive feedback loop that just keeps drawing just about anyone in who makes contact with it.
I'm pretty sure human civilization might be a historical contingency that could disappear as fast as it emerged. 12,000 years is nothing, compared to the 160 million years that dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Papus79 wrote: May 31st, 2020, 11:11 pm
Where I'm at with GameB - I really can't think of a better alternative. They're considering data-driven approaches where they start different small villages or Dunbars throughout various countries to really focus on how they'll work with their social rule systems, how they'll keep it running smoothly, and they'll be comparing notes on what works. I think there needs to be some subset of the population performing these sorts of experiments deliberately and building little islands of cooperation where, as I think Greta's put it often lately, you have mass defection in most places and very few people being able to keep their integrity while forced to live with that on all sides.
Papus79 wrote: May 31st, 2020, 11:11 pm
I'd think a good well-known off ramp could serve the same purpose though? I'd agree with you that if a dynamic goes on for long enough then power and perverse incentive structures keep racking up in bad places. For the most part though I think that's the vision of the future if in the next five to ten years we have no viable alternatives that people can move off into - of the GameB sort or other similar aims and goals - where the idea is to be productive, work together, try to enjoy life, and - actually bringing back Ed Dutton into the conversation - bring slow life strategy back to culture rather than fast life strategy (ie. K selection rather than r).
Another thing that seems to be common in all these alternative-life movements is the idealization of small town life, which of course is what directly predates the modern era of urban concentration and high technological capitalist development.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Papus79 »

Count Lucanor wrote: June 5th, 2020, 9:35 pm Sorry, but I got lost somewhere. You will have to elaborate on the specifics, because I have no idea to what you're referring to when you talk about Abrahamic religions being close to a GameB scheme.
Really taking it's growth as Rome fell. Christians impressing the Romans with their heroism when they were thrown to the lions in the Colosseum. The fraternal and charitable aspects of the doctrines which eventually lead to hospitals, education, ideas that later permutations of similar ideas in the way of secular humanism and John Stuart Mill's philosophy tried to run with. I also think back to some of the stoics of the Roman era and what they wrote of the behaviors of the rich, ie. throwing a serving girl to the eels for having dropped something at a party. In history there were plenty of times and context where killing was even entertainment and the collapse of a society that was quite a bit - psychologically in its military sense - like Japanese feudalism but with feasting and orgies for the upper class and a culture that even hit the kinds of high strangeness that we're going through right now, Roman culture seems to have hit a point similar to where we are right now - so in that sense as things were on the fall and most of the pagans were looking for what they could loot from the system you had an increase of Christianity as something like the escape vessel.

That's not denying any of Christianity's problems, and similarly it's evils of the past looked a lot like Islamic fudamentalism of today, but the idea is that you have a system of thought that works - rather ingeniously - as an extension of Gemeinschaft to a much larger group than what simple blood bonds could offer. In that sense it was an incredible sociological hack, the only problem with it - and Islam as well - is that there was a cheat we couldn't pick up and use again, ie. the idea of eternal salvation or perdition based on personal choices.

What it proves at least, and to a similar degree Freemasonry's victory over torch, crown, and tiara, is that there are systems of logic that can come forth in cultural emergencies as a counter-measure. I see a lot of what Rebel Wistom, Stoa, etc. is trying to do as attempting to strike a similar think on something more of a meditative/psychedelic/spiritual atheism/agnosticism where we try to send more people back to exploring their own minds, relationships with others, what they can create together through cooperation, etc.. While I think enough people are disgruntled with the current system, and unfortunately all too often have their framing of current problems locked into something like a political version of soccer hooliganism, it could well be that they haven't hit the inflection point where they'd be looking for a different system with real desperation and that might unfortunately be what it takes for a real tipping point back toward that sort of thing to come about.
Count Lucanor wrote: June 5th, 2020, 9:35 pm Another thing that seems to be common in all these alternative-life movements is the idealization of small town life, which of course is what directly predates the modern era of urban concentration and high technological capitalist development.
I'd have to hope that there's more current sense going into that than backward-looking nostalgia though, we've had a lot of the later, it seems to come up with almost every Republican presidential candidate in the US talking about 'returning to values', and there's not necessarily a direct regress down the paths we got here by - it wouldn't match the flows of inertia or where human knowledge is headed.

What I get of the Dunbars - the idea is that the average person can know around 150 people on a relatively intimate level, past that it's too many to keep track of. I think there are some arguments that some of the down sides of anonymity, lack of responsibility to other people, etc., comes from dealing with people - for the most part - that we know nothing about and then that circles back to what measuring sticks that they'd evaluate us with. I also see where, in a global culture where people are trying to compete for attention and importance on social media it seems like dignity and honesty will mean not much attention, similarly you have all kinds of people trying to apex absurdity as a desperate strategy to be noticed and it seems like in a culture that's gotten this large and lost so many people in the shuffle you get to a place where that system is so emergence-lead that it's no longer selecting for the better of human values, rather it's selecting for what I might think of as edge-cases in game theory. We used to think for example, of the baby who repeatedly dropped their spoon on the floor, their mom picked it up, and they made the association - by dropping my spoon I have power over my mom - we regarded the kinds of people who came out that way as monsters, now they seem to be something close to the primary shapers of culture and we're seeing that the passivity and thoughtfulness of many people means that they'll do whatever they can to avoid the wrath of someone whose got a good case of cluster B personality disorder - ie. they get their way, it's of too little immediate benefit or importance for most people to stand up for themselves, and along the lines that Nassim Taleb brings up with his minority rule - a prickly minority can get people to plan ahead around them for being the squeaky wheel. We then end up rewarding not just disagreeability in the 'Truth doesn't care about your feelings' sense but rather people who know that one of the quickest and dirtiest ways to have power in this world is have a legion of inner demons on a leash to terrorize the people around them with, and the problem with that trick is it's indifferent to whether they're actually bringing anything of proportional value to the table to offset the cost of doing business with them.
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