Simulation as Filter

If you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense -- Scott Aaronson

Hidden Law

A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call "hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition.

Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point it can give way all at once. The showboating narcissist Jack Kevorkian dragged assisted suicide into the open and insisted that it be legalized (and televised). At that point, the deal was off. No one could pretend assisted suicide wasn't happening. Activists framed state right-to-die initiatives, senators sponsored bills banning assisted suicide, and courts began issuing an unending series of deeply confused rulings. Soon decisions about assisted suicide will be made by buzzing mobs of lawyers and courts and ethics committees, with prosecutors helpfully hovering nearby, rather than by patients and doctors and families. And the final indignity will be that the lawyers and courts and committee people will congratulate themselves on having at last created a rational process where before there were no rules at all, only chaos and darkness and barbarism. And then, having replaced an effective and intuitive and flexible social mechanism with a maladroit and mystifying and brittle one, they will march on like Sherman's army to demolish such other institutions of hidden law as they encounter.

The enemy of hidden law is not government, as such. It is lawyers. Three years in law school teach, if they teach nothing else, that as a practical matter hidden law does not exist, or that if it does exist it is contemptibly inadequate to cope with modern conflicts. The American law school is probably the most ruthlessly anti-communitarian institution that any liberal society has ever produced. --  Jonathan Rauch ref

Adequate, not True

... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous. -- Henri Poincaré

Alternatives and Models

A further problem that arises in the use of any test that simply rejects a hypothesis without at the same time considering possible alternatives[...] Is it of the slightest use to reject a hypothesis until we have some idea of what to put in its place? If there is no clearly stated alternative, and the null hypothesis is rejected, we are simply left without any rule at all, whereas the null hypothesis, though not satisfactory, may at any rate show some sort of correspondence with the facts. It may, for instance, represent 90% of the variation and to that extent may be of considerable use in prediction, even though the remaining 10% may be larger than we should expect if it was strictly true. 

Consider, for instance, the history of the law of gravitation. Newton first derived it from Kepler’s laws and a comparison of the accelerations of the moon and of a body falling freely at the earth’s surface. Extending it to take account of the mutual attractions of the planets and of the perturbations of the moon by the sun, he got the periods and orders of magnitude of the principal perturbations. But he did not explain the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn, with a period of 880 years, which gives displacements in longitude of 1196″ and 2908″ of arc for the two planets, and was only explained by Laplace a century later. 

The theory of the moon has been taken only in the present century, by E. W. Brown, to a stage where most of the outstanding errors of calculation can be said to be within the errors of observation; there are discrepancies between observation and calculation that are attributed to changes of the rotation of the earth; but these discrepancies are our principal ground for believing in the existence of these changes. In fact agreement with Newton’s law was not given by the data used to establish it, because these data included the main inequalities of the moon; it was not given during his lifetime, because the data included the long inequality of Jupiter and Saturn; and when Einstein’s modification was adopted the agreement of observation with Newton’s law was 300 times as good as Newton ever knew. 

Even the latter appears at present as powerless as Newton’s to explain the long empirical term in the moon’s longitude and the secular motion of the node of Venus. There has not been a single date in the history of the law of gravitation when a modern significance test would not have rejected all laws and left us with no law. -- Theory of Probability, Harold Jeffreys 1939.

Position(s)

Science deals with measurable events. Anything non-measurable is non-testable and outside the scope of Science. Scientists might favor some of these non-measurable claims, like believing in ghosts or gods, because they are people, and people are complicated. However Science should be neutral towards these claims. Some accept Naturalism, the philosophical position that states anything non-measurable does not exist -- leading, for example, to Atheism and to several skeptical philosophies --, but that in itself is not a scientific position.

Religion is not necessarily opposite to Science. Sometimes a religion claims something that is testable and there is evidence for and against it (including moral claims), but other religious claims are outside measurement and, thus, outside scientific analysis. What's opposite are the processes of Faith and the Scientific Method, which approaches to evidence are completely in contrast.

On the other hand, pseudo-sciences, like Homeopathy or Flat-Earth theories, make fact-based claims that are subject to scientific analysis (and were tested, and refuted repeatedly). Every social relevant position relating to facts can, and must, be validated by Science. People should have the liberty to select their personal beliefs, but facts are socially shared and are only up to debate under the scrutiny of the Scientific Method.

Hidden Reasons

Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent. -- Mark Dominus

Ecological Thinking

Recently I've been thinking about the world in ecological terms. It’s an interesting change in perspective. [...] Instead of focusing on the players, who are waving their hands, making noise, and generally being conspicuous, ecology asks us to focus on the game -- the incentive structures and ground rules under which the players act.

Central to ecology is the concept of a niche. A niche is an abstract space in the environment which some actors may be able to exploit successfully for an extended period. [ref] A niche involves not just location but also behavior. "It is the behavioral space in which an organism moves and competes for resources" [ref].

Here are some examples of ecological thinking:

• There will always be cheaters because there is always a niche for cheating. No sooner does a species develop behavior X than other members of that species develop the ability to exploit X, or another species develops X-mimicry, allowing them to get benefits that they don't 'deserve.' [...] You will never be able to eliminate cheating; the best you can hope for is mitigation.
• In a democracy you get the government you deserve and you deserve the government you get. If a candidate for office makes a promise and breaks it once she's in office, blaming her misses the point. She's just playing a role in a system that allows people to make promises they can't keep. If she didn't make too many promises, someone else would, and we'd elect that guy instead.

So here is the core insight, in two parts:

1. In complex systems, niches exist. They are a property of the system, independent of the particular actors within the system.
2. Niches exert a constant pull on behavior. If there's a niche for a particular type of behavior, and if the space is crowded enough (competition), the niche will be filled.

When you put these two facts together, you start to see behavior as a property of the system rather than the individual. Of course the individual is still proximately responsible for the behavior — and morally responsible, if that's the axe you're trying to grind. But sometimes it's more productive to look at the system rather than the individual. Ecological thinking doesn't give the complete picture by any means. It just provides a different perspective. Sometimes the problem you're facing is one that requires story-thought (attention to the details of individuals), but sometimes it requires systems-thought. You need both weapons in your arsenal.

In biology, ecological thinking doesn't concern itself with individual organisms, but rather with entire species. This is because individual organisms aren't adaptive enough to change their behavior in meaningful ways. A tree, a shrub, a weed, a bacterium, even a snail or a bat — these individual organisms have behavior that is mostly determined by what their genes have programmed for them. If its environment changes, a single tree is going to keep doing what it’s always done; it can’t adapt (much). Species, in contrast, can significantly change their behavior, at least over evolutionary time scales.

What does this tell us about the kinds of systems that are 'ecological'? Let me propose this criterion:

A system can be analyzed as an ecosystem if it has independent, competing agents who can change and adapt to their environment.

So, besides the biosphere, what other systems fit this definition? Lots, it turns out. Communities of all sorts: corporations, agencies, committees, the student body at a high school, nations, online communities (think Reddit). Markets, where firms compete against each other to win resources (employees, customers, investment dollars). Financial markets, where traders try to outwit each other. The dating market. Academia. The media. A corporation is both an ecosystem unto itself (where employees are the agents who inhabit the ecosystem), and an agent within a larger ecosystem (the market, where it competes against other firms).

But in all these cases, remember, it's not actually about the agents. It's about the system and its niches. In ecological thinking, agent behavior is a property of the system, rather than the other way around.

What's powerful about this way of thinking is that it abstracts away from individuals, and allows us focus on the properties of the system that are causing different types of behavior. In the process, it suggests completely different types of solutions to a lot of big, thorny problems. It asks us to stop thinking about the players, and get to work reforming the game.

Let's see some applications of this new mindset.

Office Politics. To reduce the amount of politics in your workplace, it's not enough just to say, "We'll fire people who play politics." Instead you'll want to think about how, where, and why politics occurs. What gains do people feel they can achieve by playing politics, and how can you change the system to make politics less rewarding? If politics thrives where there is restricted information flow (secrets, back-room deals, information brokerage), work on increasing feedback and transparency. Use open floor plans, encourage CC habits, and force people who are avoiding each other to talk. Maybe your office ecosystem has room for politics because there's a leadership vacuum, in which case you should fill the void. Of course the threat of punishment (firing) is one way to narrow the niche, by increasing the costs associated with politicking. It's just not the only way.

Drug violence. Ultimately, drug-related violence isn't caused by drugs or even by drug users or dealers, but by drug policy.Because there will always be buyers, there will always be a niche for selling drugs. Putting pressure on that niche, by criminalizing it, isn't making it go away (this is an empirical fact I hope we can agree on). Instead, it's only making the niche riskier. Since the stakes are so high — jail time or death on the one hand, big big money on the other — the 'drug dealer' niche can support only people who are desperate and/or ruthless. Inevitably the result is violence. And like all niches, the drug-dealing niche exists independent of any actors who might be filling it. Take out the kingpin and the niche is unfazed; someone else will soon step in to replace him. The only way to win is to change the game — treat drug abuse as a medical issue rather than a criminal one, for instance.

How to reform elementary school bullies? On Quora, Yishan proposes an ecological solution to this problem: punish the bully's peers.

One major determining factor about whether bullying is repeated is the reaction of the bully's peers. Often bullies are validated by friends or peers for identifying a victim and leading the bullying. Therefore, authority figures would be well-advised to set up a countervailing social dynamic that discourages bullying through social pressure.

In ecological terms: the niche for bullying exists because the bully gets recognition and reward from his peer group. Turn the peers against the bully and the niche will dry up, along with its corresponding behavior.

Why is there so little originality in Hollywood? Sean Hood gives us an ecological answer: "Hollywood makes more of what audiences pay to see. When more people start showing up for original movies, more originality will come out of Hollywood." In other words, the audiences define the niche, and behavior (of the studios) is determined by the niche. This inversion of blame — from producers to consumers — can be seen in politics (why do politicians lie?), internet culture (why is content so inane?), and all forms of pop culture. The producers are only giving the people what they want.

In complex systems, niches exist. A niche is a property of the system, independent of any agents who happen to be filling the niche. Agent behavior is explained by the niche, rather than by properties of the agents themselves (at least when using the ecological mindset). And finally, when looking at problems that arise in a system, it's often more productive to think about solutions at the niche level rather than the agent level. -- Kevin Simler

Life

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference… -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Propaganda

We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth. -- Terence McKenna

Costs as Guides

A heuristic shouldn't be the "least wrong" among all possible rules; it should be the least harmful if wrong.

-- Nassim N. Taleb

Context

There's no such thing as a bad gene, only bad gene-environment interactions. -- Robert Sapolsky

As Night Closes by

Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best of the lot, but it was pretty much guaranteed to land even deeper in the memory hole than the others. The difficulty was that [William R.] Catton’s book didn’t pander to the standard mythologies that still beset any attempt to make sense of the predicament we’ve made for ourselves; [...] he explained how industrial civilization was cutting its own throat, how far past the point of no return we’d already gone, and what had to be done in order to salvage anything from the approaching wreck.

The core of Overshoot, which is also the core of the entire world of appropriate technology and green alternatives that got shot through the head and shoved into an unmarked grave in the Reagan years, is the recognition that the principles of ecology apply to industrial society just as much as they do to other communities of living things. It’s odd, all things considered, that this is such a controversial proposal. [...] human societies are as subject to the laws of ecology as they are to every other dimension of natural law.

Let’s start with the basics. Every ecosystem, in thermodynamic terms, is a process by which relatively concentrated energy is dispersed into diffuse background heat. Here on Earth, at least, the concentrated energy mostly comes from the Sun, in the form of solar radiation—there are a few ecosystems, in deep oceans and underground, that get their energy from chemical reactions driven by the Earth’s internal heat instead. Ilya Prigogine showed some decades back that the flow of energy through a system of this sort tends to increase the complexity of the system; Jeremy England, a MIT physicist, has recently shown that the same process accounts neatly for the origin of life itself. The steady flow of energy from source to sink is the foundation on which everything else rests. The complexity of the system, in turn, is limited by the rate at which energy flows through the system, and this in turn depends on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters the system, on the one hand, and the background into which waste heat diffuses when it leaves the system, on the other. 

 

Simple as it is, it’s a point that an astonishing number of people—including some who are scientifically literate—routinely miss. [...] one of the core reasons you can’t power a modern industrial civilization on solar energy is that sunlight is relatively diffuse as an energy source, compared to the extremely concentrated energy we get from fossil fuels. [...] Nature has done astonishing things with that very modest difference in concentration. People who insist that photosynthesis is horribly inefficient, and of course we can improve its efficiency, are missing a crucial point: something like half the energy that reaches the leaves of a green plant from the Sun is put to work lifting water up from the roots by an ingenious form of evaporative pumping [...] all told, a green plant is probably about as efficient in its total use of solar energy as the laws of thermodynamics will permit.

That said, there are hard upper limits to the complexity of the ecosystem that these intricate processes can support. You can see that clearly enough by comparing a tropical rain forest to a polar tundra. The two environments may have approximately equal amounts of precipitation over the course of a year; they may have an equally rich or poor supply of nutrients in the soil; even so, the tropical rain forest can easily support fifteen or twenty thousand species of plants and animals, and the tundra will be lucky to support a few hundred. Why? The same reason Mercury is warmer than Neptune: the rate at which photons from the sun arrive in each place per square meter of surface.

Near the equator, the sun’s rays fall almost vertically.  Close to the poles, since the Earth is round, the Sun’s rays come in at a sharp angle, and thus are spread out over more surface area. The ambient temperature’s quite a bit warmer in the rain forest than it is on the tundra, but because the vast heat engine we call the atmosphere pumps heat from the equator to the poles, the difference in ambient temperature is not as great as the difference in solar input per cubic meter. Thus ecosystems near the equator have a greater difference in energy concentration between input and output than those near the poles, and the complexity of the two systems varies accordingly.

All this should be common knowledge. Of course it isn’t, because the industrial world’s notions of education consistently ignore what William Catton called “the processes that matter”—that is, the fundamental laws of ecology that frame our existence on this planet—and approach a great many of those subjects that do make it into the curriculum in ways that encourage the most embarrassing sort of ignorance about the natural processes that keep us all alive.

A human society is an ecosystem.  Like any other ecosystem, it depends for its existence on flows of energy, and as with any other ecosystem, the upper limit on its complexity depends ultimately on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters it and the background into which its waste heat disperses. (This last point is a corollary of White’s Law, one of the fundamental principles of human ecology, which holds that a society’s economic development is directly proportional to its consumption of energy per capita.)  Until the beginning of the industrial revolution, that upper limit was not much higher than the upper limit of complexity in other ecosystems, since human ecosystems drew most of their energy from the same source as nonhuman ones: sunlight falling on green plants.

The discoveries that made it possible to turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy transformed that equation completely. The geological processes that stockpiled half a billion years of sunlight into coal, oil, and natural gas boosted the concentration of the energy inputs available to industrial societies by an almost unimaginable factor, without warming the ambient temperature of the planet more than a few degrees, and the huge differentials in energy concentration that resulted drove an equally unimaginable increase in complexity. Choose any measure of complexity you wish—number of discrete occupational categories, average number of human beings involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of any given good or service, or what have you—and in the wake of the industrial revolution, it soared right off the charts. Thermodynamically, that’s exactly what you’d expect.

The difference in energy concentration between input and output, it bears repeating, defines the upper limit of complexity. Other variables determine whether or not the system in question will achieve that upper limit. In the ecosystems we call human societies, knowledge is one of those other variables. If you have a highly concentrated energy source and don’t yet know how to use it efficiently, your society isn’t going to become as complex as it otherwise could. Over the three centuries of industrialization, as a result, the production of useful knowledge was a winning strategy, since it allowed industrial societies to rise steadily toward the upper limit of complexity defined by the concentration differential. The limit was never reached—the law of diminishing returns saw to that—and so, inevitably, industrial societies ended up believing that knowledge all by itself was capable of increasing the complexity of the human ecosystem. Since there’s no upper limit to knowledge, in turn, that belief system drove what Catton called the cornucopian myth, the delusion that there would always be enough resources if only the stock of knowledge increased quickly enough.

That belief only seemed to work, though, as long as the concentration differential between energy inputs and the background remained very high. Once easily accessible fossil fuels started to become scarce, and more and more energy and other resources had to be invested in the extraction of what remained, problems started to crop up. Tar sands and oil shales in their natural form are not as concentrated an energy source as light sweet crude—once they’re refined, sure, the differences are minimal, but a whole system analysis of energy concentration has to start at the moment each energy source enters the system. Take a cubic yard of tar sand fresh from the pit mine, with the sand still in it, or a cubic yard of oil shale with the oil still trapped in the rock, and you’ve simply got less energy per unit volume than you do if you’ve got a cubic yard of light sweet crude fresh from the well, or even a cubic yard of good permeable sandstone with light sweet crude oozing out of every pore.

It’s an article of faith in contemporary culture that such differences don’t matter, but that’s just another aspect of our cornucopian myth. The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not available for other uses. The result, however you slice it conceptually, is that the upper limit of complexity begins moving down. That sounds abstract, but it adds up to a great deal of very concrete misery, because as already noted, the complexity of a society determines such things as the number of different occupational specialties it can support, the number of employees who are involved in the production and distribution of a given good or service, and so on. There’s a useful phrase for a sustained contraction in the usual measures of complexity in a human ecosystem: “economic depression.”

The economic troubles that are shaking the industrial world more and more often these days, in other words, are symptoms of a disastrous mismatch between the level of complexity that our remaining concentration differential can support, and the level of complexity that our preferred ideologies insist we ought to have. As those two things collide, there’s no question which of them is going to win. Adding to our total stock of knowledge won’t change that result, since knowledge is a necessary condition for economic expansion but not a sufficient one: if the upper limit of complexity set by the laws of thermodynamics drops below the level that your knowledge base would otherwise support, further additions to the knowledge base simply mean that there will be a growing number of things that people know how to do in theory, but that nobody has the resources to do in practice.

Knowledge, in other words, is not a magic wand, a surrogate messiah, or a source of miracles. It can open the way to exploiting energy more efficiently than otherwise, and it can figure out how to use energy resources that were not previously being used at all, but it can’t conjure energy out of thin air. Even if the energy resources are there, for that matter, if other factors prevent them from being used, the knowledge of how they might be used offers no consolation—quite the contrary.

That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall, and what could be done to salvage something from its wreck. That knowledge, however, was not enough to make things happen; only a few people ever listened, most of them promptly plugged their ears and started chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” once Reagan made that fashionable, and the actions that might have spared all of us a vast amount of misery never happened. -- John Michael Greerref

Models

Because models do not aspire to ontological accuracy, it is possible simultaneously to employ a variety of mutually incompatible models in order to gain some purchase on different aspects of the behavior of the same physical entity. -- John Polkinghorne

Goals

You want accurate beliefs and useful emotions. -- Anonymous

Copyright's Three Lines Of Defense

I’ve followed and participated in the copyright debate for years, and I’ve come to realize there are certain patterns that repeat themselves. You can roughly say there are three lines of defense: One that appeals to emotions, one that appeals to pragmatism, and one that appeals to a sense of responsibility. I’m going to take this opportunity and try to break them down.

The first line of defense is the artists, sent out like cannon fodder to appeal to our emotions. The stories of the talented artists who pour their souls into their work and can’t make a decent living out of it are always heartbreaking. But guess what? It was never easy being an artist. You want a secure income? Go for a nine-to-five job. I think Henry Rollins said it best, when in an interview about his days with Black Flag, he said “And maybe you missed some meals, or the cops came and shut your show down, but man, you weren’t flipping burgers and you weren’t filling slurpies, and there’s something to be said for that.” The point here being, that everything is a matter of compromise. Either you get a boring job to secure an income and do your writing or painting or whatever your art of choice is in your spare time, or you go for it full time and expect to miss some meals. Actually making a living out of something you love to do is a luxury. The factory where I earn my pay doesn’t pay me because working there is fun. They pay me because it’s not! If it was fun I would work for free. And that’s why artists have a hard time getting paid; because they have about zero leverage. Everyone they ever negotiate with: club owners, record companies, publishers, et cetera, have leverage over you as an artist because in the end, you will perform regardless of the pay. You’ll perform for free beer in the bar and you’ll even pay to be published just for the sole satisfaction of being published. This is the truth for the majority of artists, and this is why so little of the money in the copyright industry lands in their pockets. But copyright does very little, if anything, to improve the artists’ situation.

The second line of defense is the industry itself. The argument here is that it’s an industry that involves a lot of people and if they go out of business, you may have a serious situation on your hands, with thousands and thousands of jobs lost. [...] Even if you dislike the copyright industry, pure pragmatism may lead you to think that economic depression is even worse. But don’t worry. The copyright industry is fine and they’re not going out of business in a foreseeable future. And even if they were, well, it happens. Things become obsolete all the time. It would be tragic on some personal levels, and it may have effect on communities heavily reliant on copyrighted material. It could turn Hollywood into a ghost town, which would be kinda fun. In this case I believe copyright works – I just don’t think it’s good. It ensures companies long term income for a short term success, it keeps competition at bay since owning the license to a work means you can remake it again and again, while others need to put their effort into coming up with something new. And there’s always the possibility to sue someone. [...]

The third line of defense is the claim “without copyright, there will be no culture”. This argument appeals to a sense of responsibility, like an environmental issue would. And while it could, or should, be hard for a politician to hide behind the second line because policies should not be about keeping an industry alive, and even harder to hide behind the first line for the same reason, this is the argument that politicians really get behind. Because it seems morally right. We have to respect copyright, for our children. We want the future generations to enjoy culture too, right? A world without culture, without the fine arts and the entertainment, what a horrible future that would be. Of course, this is complete and utter bullshit. Culture was created long before copyright was ever invented. And it will continue to be created even if all the copyright laws are flushed down the drain tomorrow. Even if there wasn’t a chance in hell to earn a dime off of your creation, it wouldn’t even make a dent in the flow of culture. People will continue producing culture. How do I know this?  [...] The simple explanation is that expressing oneself is a far more important drive than money. This is also why people continue to remix culture to create new culture, even knowing that they might get sued. Or in even worse cases, why people continue to express themselves and create culture in places where the regime will crack down on them for doing so. There are a few loud voices in the debate leading people to believe that money is the superior drive in creating culture. And while that may be true for them, it’s not for the rest of us. For us it’s about expressing ourselves, receiving a pat on the back for the effort. It’s about the satisfaction of having created something. [...]

Copyright was never about guaranteeing the artists pay. If it were, it would have to be considered an epic failure. Nor was it put in place to ensure that a proper amount of culture would be created. If it were, that would mean no-one created anything culturally noteworthy before copyright was invented. There are caves in France that say otherwise. Copyright originates from a form of censorship. It stems from monopolies given from the state to approved companies to make copies. Hence the word copyright. To be fair, the copyright laws have changed since then and, while wildly ineffective, can be said to protect right-holders’ interests. But it is still a monopoly given by the state, and it is still effective as a tool of censorship. So here’s the million dollar question: If you know that copyright at its origin was a form of censorship, and you accept the statement that culture wouldn’t be created without copyright, why would copyright ever have been invented? Why would there have been a need for copyright if what copyright was to shut up – but ended up protecting – was never there to begin with? You follow? -- Johnny Olsson ref

Alignment

Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. If your thoughts, beliefs, and actions aren't aligned with truth, your results will suffer. -- Steve Pavlina

the application of colonialism to Europe

The conventional opinion is that the Second War should be regarded as a continuation of the First. While the First was produced by competing imperialisms, the Second was the outcome of the very imperfect settlement imposed at the end of the War, and the difference in interpretations as to how the War really ended (was it an armistice, or was it an unconditional surrender). But that interpretation is (perhaps) faulty because it cannot account for the most distinctive character of the World War II, namely that it was the war of extermination in the East (including the Shoah).  That is  where Mazower’s placing of the War in a much longer European imperial context makes sense.

The key features of Nazi policies of “racial” superiority, colonization of land and conscious destruction of ethnic groups cannot be understood but as an extreme, or even extravagant, form of European colonialism, as it existed from the 15th century onward. If one thinks of the Soviet Russia as of Africa or indigenous American continent (as it seemed to the Nazis), then Nazi policy of mass extermination and (more liberally) enslavement of the Slavic population that would provide forced labor for the German aristocracy living in agro-towns dotted across the plains of Russia does not look much different from what happened for several centuries in the mines of Potasi, in the Congo, in the ante-bellum South of the United States, in the Dutch Java or indeed in German-ruled Namibia.

The creation of two ethically and racially distinct social classes, with no interaction and with one openly exploiting another is exactly how European colonialism presented itself to the rest of the world. As Aimė Cėsaire, quoted at the end of the book, wrote (I paraphrase) “Nazism was the application of colonialism to Europe”.

There were, however, some differences that made the realization of this dream of conquest and domination unrealizable for the Nazis.

The technological and military gap between the “master” class and the Untermenschen was much smaller, and at the end it got even overturned in the military sphere. By 1942, the Soviet Union was producing more airplanes and tanks than Germany with all her factories in conquered Europe. The technological gap was indeed much smaller than it seemed to the Germans, and than it objectively was between the European conquerors and the peoples of Africa or the Americas. Tiny forces of Spaniards or English could conquer huge spaces and rule many people because of enormous superiority of their military power. But this was not the case in Europe. In other words, when the technological (military) gap between two groups is small, a complete annihilation of one by another is impossible.

The Nazis were blinded to this, not only by their misjudgment about the technological development of Russia, but also by their belief in rigid racial hierarchy where the very fact that such hierarchy existed (as they believed) made it impossible to entertain the possibility that the lower classes might rise sufficiently to challenge the “masters”. The rigidity of self-created racial hierarchy blinded them to reality.

The second difference between the Nazis and classical European imperialism was that racial hierarchy, pushed to its extreme, and leading to the attempted annihilation of the entire ethnic groups (Holocaust) was not motivated by economic interests of the elite but took place, as it were, outside it. Mazower makes very clear the tension that existed throughout the Nazi rule between economic needs for more forced labor, both in European factories and in the fields in the conquered territories in Poland, the Ukraine and Belorussia, and the ideologically-motivated drive to exterminate the “inferior races”. The military and civilian administrations tended to prefer the former approach (exploitation to death through labor), the SS the latter (pure destruction). This single-minded pursuit of annihilation, regardless of, or even against, economic benefits, was not something that existed in European colonialism.

It is this macabre and economically and politically irrational drive toward extermination that might have differentiated colonialism as applied to Europe from colonialism applied elsewhere. But establishing racial hierarchy, believing in eugenics, being indifferent to the death of the “lower races”, creating a system of forced labor, shooting or maiming people who do not deliver their quotas of produce was not exactly new. Aimė Cėsaire might have been right. --  Branko Milanovic

In-group Dynamics

The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. -- Lies We Tell Kids, Paul Graham

Ruins

A culture as maniacally and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment -- James Hillman

Buddha IV

Buddhism, in origin an Indian ideology, spread over half the ancient world and took root in quite disparate civilizations. Despite huge setbacks, it is still spreading. I would suggest that it acquired this adaptability not by chance, but because the Buddha himself was able to see that local mores were man-made, and could show that what brahmins believed to be ingrained in nature was nothing but convention. In much the same period (though they started somewhat earlier) the Greeks were making the distinction between phusis, nature, and nomos, man-made rule, and drawing similar conclusions.

Making the individual conscience the ultimate authority is both a liberating and a dangerous move. What if someone acts on wrong moral reasoning? Society needs a sanction. That is why it was immensely important for the Buddha, and indeed for the whole tradition that followed him, to keep stressing that the law of moral reckoning worked throughout the universe: that good would be rewarded and evil punished in the end. That, I suggest, is also why the Buddha made belief in this law of karma the first step on his noble eightfold path to nirvana. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha III

If karma is completely ethicized, the whole universe becomes an ethical arena, because everywhere all beings are placed according to their deserts. If this is generalized into a view of the world, as it has been in Theravadin cultures, it means that ultimately power and goodness are always perfectly correlated, both increasing as one proceeds (literally) up the universe. [...] This picture of a universe under control is from one angle reassuring; but in its belief that there is really no undeserved suffering it can also be harsh. Logically it solves the problem of theodicy, but at a price. Many have found this solution as unbearable as the situation it resolves, and it is hardly surprising that Buddhism as it developed after the Buddha’s death became rich in ways of obscuring or escaping such an intransigent law of the universe, often at the cost of logical consistency. Obeyesekere has also shown how it is logical that the ethicization of a society’s eschatology should lead to its universalization. Once ethics is reduced to the simple values of right and wrong, and located in the mind, something common to all human beings, distinctions of gender, age and social class become irrelevant. Moreover, Buddhism - like mercantile wealth—was not ascribed but achieved. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha II

The Buddha taught that all thoughts, words and deeds derive their moral value, positive or negative, from the intention behind them. This does not make the effect of actions irrelevant: Buddhism is no less familiar than is modern law with the idea of negligence. But the basic criterion for morality is intention. Morality and immorality are mental properties of individuals. Metaphorically they were often referred to as purity and impurity. Each good deed makes a person purer and thus makes it slightly easier to repeat such a deed. The same applies to bad qualities, such as cruelty. An intention, carried out, becomes a propensity.

Introductions to Buddhism written for westerners tend to begin by quoting the Buddha’s advice to a group of people called the Kalamas.They had complained to him that various teachers came and preached different doctrines to them, and they were confused about which to follow. The Buddha replied that everyone has to make up their own mind on such matters. One should not take any teaching on trust or external authority, but test it on the touchstone of one’s own experience. [...] If people are responsible for their own decisions, and in particular for deciding which teaching to follow, this sets a high premium on intelligence. [...] In every traditional society, including that into which the Buddha was born, education consists largely in parroting what the teacher says. The Buddha even made a monastic ruling that one of the duties of a pupil towards his teacher is to correct him when he is wrong on doctrine or in danger of saying something unsuitable. That, I think, has few parallels in world history. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Buddha I

Nothing in the world [i.e., that which we can normally experience] has an unchanging essence. [...] Buddha is not primarily concerned with what exists - in fact, he thinks that is a red herring - but with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. For his purposes, what exists and the contents of experience are the same. At this level, if we want a label, his doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism.

in this view of the world, to ‘exist’ is not to change: existence and becoming are defined as opposites. But is change random? Surely not. Even if we and everything around us change all the time, life could not go on if we did not recognize continuities at every step. The change, in other words, is not random. The Buddha axiomatized this in the proposition that nothing exists without a cause. Another, simpler way of saying that all phenomena exhibit nonrandom change is to say that everything is process. -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Concerning Meditation

• A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
• Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
• If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good,  you’ll continue to look for something better in the future, even when things are great.
• Spend more time cultivating a mind that is not attached to material things than time spent accumulating them.
• Peak experiences are fun, but you always have to come back. Learning to appreciate ordinary moments is the key to a fulfilling life.
• There are three layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.
• You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go.
• One of the deepest forms of peace we can experience is living in integrity.
• Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms.

-- Sayadaw U Pandita

Not choosing is not an option III

It is irrational to expect that an economic system that is predicated on externalizing the costs of ecological destruction will somehow automatically stop driving ecological destruction. -- Jason Hickel

Difference

[There's a] difference between problems which are to be solved, and predicaments which are to be endured. -- td0s

The hand you give

The wolves you feed are not your friends.

Respect!

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his  theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -- H. L. Mencken

Analytical vs. what's possible

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations. -- John Von Neumann

Opções

Aceitar o que  a vida nos trouxe é reprimir a ilusão de que merecíamos mais; adaptarmo-nos é não desistir da ideia. Nos intervalos, morangos e champagne (a versão jet set) ou cerveja e futebol (a minha). -- Filipe Nunes Vicente