Peace

Old empires, like the Arab or the Spanish, claimed they needed to conquer so to spread their true religion and save as many souls as possible. That was doublespeak for their wish for power. Power to satisfy an unlimited desire fueled by greed, a feeling of superiority, an infantile need to dominate. These stories were made to convince their people, to gather legions, and perhaps to convince themselves. Recent empires have the same needs, the same hunger. However the discourse changed. The British wanted to spread civilization, Soviets to promote communism, Americans to deliver freedom. But these pretensions, in the end, only preceded guns, theft, and death. The desolation of imperial peace.

Preferences

How could the same people who were used to wrestling with the ethics of eugenics and torture (issues you might have imagined were more clear-cut) think that all there was to say about professor-student sex was that it was fine if consensual? Many philosophers prefer to see complexity only where it suits them. -- On (Not) Sleeping With Your Students, Amia Srinivasan

Abductive Reasoning

Summaries are measures made to tame complexity. They quickly tell something about a system by condensing its manifold dimensions into a single number. Every summary compacts the information about the system like an hydraulic press. They are used to evaluate the system's progress, even considering all the potential problems that come from excessive simplification. But why do humans have the tendency of transform them into goals? This reification of summaries, results on Goodhart's law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. GDP (gross domestic product), for instance, is not just reified, but even deified. Policies are made, and societies suffer, to increase GDP. It does not matter if something is productive, or destructive, or parasitic, if the final result is the increase of overall GDP. It only knows sums, because subtractions are taboo. And everything not measurable in GDP terms, like ecological services, humans' well being, or social inequality, are seen as irrelevant zeros. Because someone said, long ago, that economies that progress had seen increases of GDP. Then, the superstitious flocks that rule economic schools, by a kind of abductive fallacy, flipped the idea to defend that because GDP grows, the economy progresses. And for that, as a sacrifice to this grotesque god, the world burns.

Context

A scientific theory always bends when faced with reality. But is the bent insufferable? And what options remain if we reject its distortions? We decide about theories not only on their merits, but also in our circumstances.

Target

Don't you see how useless it is to know the answer to the wrong question? -- Ursula K. Le Guin

Digestive System

We are creatures of meaning, we search it and find it and eat it, even when meaning is not there. It is hard to face the reality that there's no meaning outside our minds: the wandering galaxies that make the universe represent a limitless desolation. And our hunger is not easily satiated. It makes us consume randomness and chaos dressed as order, propaganda and lies as promises of plenty, bullshit as method. It is very hard to understand what to accept and what to reject. One road is trust. Trust the words of someone who does good in accordance to what she says (or said, it might be from a book of a long dead author), and use them as an anchor to trust more things. Be skeptical of parasitic meaning, which is legion, but be open to the those meanings that multiply in you. Be fruitful. A garden.