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2020-11-29 | Virus | Taking Stock

I sat down and was thinking over the last eight years or so of my developing ideas. None of these are uniquely mine, although it may be true I am one of the few that is synthesizing around all of these ideas. Perhaps even more rare, is that I come away with a positive approach considering these ideas. Some of them are more along the lines of belief and guess, like population levels, but they are based in the rest of the statements. Even if we only halve todays population in the next 50 years, that is seriously disturbing to most people, who would call it collapse and/or Armageddon. I've written at great length about many of these ideas, in various forms of sanity and metaphor. It is quite challenging to think all of these things and go to work, talk to people like a normal human, etc. I go around very conflicted, usually feeling like I have to bite my tongue and/or go off and insult people. These are not very congruent thoughts with the way we normally live, but for the most part they seem to prove themselves more and more correct over time (to me). I have something to do, now, a statement of purpose, etc., but it is still difficult and lonely to believe this.

1. Ignoring negative externalizes is the secret to what makes capitalism work.
2. Civilization can’t exist without written language.
3. Humans by nature do not interpret written language the same.
4. Semantic structures like OWL2 and BFO can come much closer to a common understanding, common enough to recreate inference programmatically and consistently.
5. My guess is that world population will be at 1 billion within 50 years.
6. Humans are challenged in real-time cognition of other teams and tools such that they max out at several tools being used towards a common goal against one other team.
7. Models, including written language, can facilitate cognition of more complicated sets of tools and multiple teams.
8. Almost everything comes from fossil fuels, even alternative energy.
9. As systems become more and more complicated, alternative ways of perceiving progress have been utilized. These do not consider longer-term goals, but, rather, focus on narrowing intervals of gauging immediate results. These are not the same thing. If the root system is too complicated to understand, then we need better models, not better ways to perceive forward motion.
10. Complex supply chains hide negative externalities.
11. Complex supply chains provide exponential job growth along the chain.
12. Supply chains, data flow, and many other systems can be modeled utilizing semantic structures. We already do this in bioinformatics.
13. As we divorce ourselves from understanding broader systems, we are limiting our ability to understand broader systems with models, including language itself.
14. There are similarities between alternative ways of perceiving work progress and the use of social media for communication, primarily that knowledge is not captured; we have a stream of effort and/or attention rather than owning an architecture or domain.
15. We are becoming more tribal because we are reverting to our real-time cognition abilities in the absence of models.
16. Broad systemic, quick collapse results from multiple stressors to a complex system. An example would be the collapse of the Late Bronze Age.
17. There are multiple positive feedback loops active right now that accelerate global warming.
18. Humans are generally predisposed to be optimistic and think short-term. This is a biologically necessary trait. It did no good to think about all the animals that wanted to eat us, nor the other dangers we had to face every day. This is related to the long-shot things that appear like goals, but are not (mars escape).
19. More complicated systems are not the answer, neither are more complicated supply chains.

I figured listing as short bullet points was helpful, but if you are struggling to see how this all fits together for me, This essay might help. Even in the opposite direction, the essay gives some context to the points. My concern is that several of these (9, 13, 14, 15, 18) hinder any progress or engagement I might get with this. I am OK with just laying this out and building the tools, even if I just work away my remaining years not doing much with it besides just some websites. The listed points mean that there is sometimes an aggressive response to my ideas. I'm stuck, because I don't really have the patience nor the time (nor money) to go the academic route with this stuff; plus, it is a bit late. I'm in IT, so many of these ideas do apply, as we have complicated our systems to the point that we have to utilize computers to avoid immediate collapse. We tend to focus on 9, though, in IT, so it is a balance to accept that and not be to obnoxious when asking, "Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?"

The weird religious and mythical symbols around knowledge are pretty intense, once you have that kind of slant. Civilization goes back about 6,000 years, about the time of the first written language. Further, the symbolism, the danger of what we would/could/were doing with knowledge coupled with civilization truly did get us thrown out of Eden. This crosses all cultures and religions in various forms (usually a snake, though). Hey... small inside bit here. The X on my Xfig site is superimposed on the art on the Sistine Chapel. That is a snake woman in a fig tree.

Articles tagged with collapse on O.R.N.G.:

2018-12-08: Make Your Own Pink Beam
2018-12-03: The Cost of Computers
2018-10-28: Skittles Lens Cover
2018-10-27: Cultural Transmission
2018-10-15: The Old Mountain Climbing Metaphor
2018-10-13: Where Do We Stop?
2018-10-12: The Same Situation
2018-10-06: Cut-up Collapse
2018-07-23: Burger Run
2018-07-10: Rant about Blue Frontiers
2018-07-10: Plane Crash
2018-05-01: Waiting for the Fish
2018-04-21: The mud that caused thy fall still mirrors ME
2018-02-26: Transmission
2018-02-13: Unicorn Dreams
2018-01-16: Peak Oil, What to do?
2018-01-05: Metropolis II
2017-08-27: Imagination and Cripple
2017-08-11: elegance
2017-06-07: Instant Coffee
2017-04-09: First Poem

Articles tagged with collapse on Agatha Codrust's Blog:

2020-04-24: Middle Aged Men's Fluffers
2019-10-10: Dream Boat

Articles tagged with ouroboros on Mud Hut Club:

2020-12-24: Letter to the Future
2020-12-04: Break Barrier
2020-08-05: End of Dark Angel
2020-07-27: Sumerian Genetics
2020-07-25: Consume Outside 23
2020-06-15: Rogue Spread
2020-05-24: The Big Lie

Articles tagged with ouroboros on O.R.N.G.:

2019-08-07: Knowledge
2019-08-03: Bits of Tree
2019-06-27: Straight Down the Line
2019-05-19: Triple Tree
2019-05-18: Honeycomb Start
2019-05-11: Ouroboros Tree
2018-08-12: Data
2018-07-10: Woman Emerging from Manhole
2018-03-07: Braid of Life
2018-01-11: Train Circle
2017-11-05: Wu-Tang Clan
2017-10-23: proust
2017-10-13: Fire and Data
2017-10-11: risk of frameworks
2017-08-06: Finger Divine
2017-06-25: 1279 BC
2014-05-15: Circle
2010-11-02: Do you see?
2006-08-03: Information Markup

Articles tagged with ouroboros on Agatha Codrust's Blog:

2020-04-29: Victory Lap
2020-04-17: MCJ Tomoe
2020-04-04: MCJ wxPython
2020-03-13: DAGs Splendid
2020-02-29: wx Supply Chain
2020-02-28: Will it scale?
2020-01-10: What is the goal?
2020-01-02: Pause If Weird
2019-12-31: 7 o'clock
2019-12-21: What is the problem?
2019-12-09: Bootstrapping
2019-12-09: Core Structure
2019-11-29: What am I Doing?
2019-11-02: Why? Hope?
2019-10-27: Too Complicated?
2019-10-26: Long Slog
2019-10-22: News Fluffer
2019-10-19: Breathing
2019-08-11: Forward and Backward

Articles tagged with civilization on Mud Hut Club:

2021-01-16: Little House of Information Technology
2020-12-24: Letter to the Future
2020-07-25: Consume Outside 23
2020-07-03: Tech Won't Save Us

Articles tagged with civilization on Agatha Codrust's Blog:

2020-05-05: Where Does Stuff Come From?
2020-04-29: Victory Lap
2020-04-26: Matrix Batteries
2020-04-13: Is it Worth it?
2020-03-17: Nesting Doll Disappointment
2020-02-29: Homebrew Paperclips
2020-02-27: 1 over X
2019-10-03: Standing in the Way of Control

Articles tagged with chimp_notches on Agatha Codrust's Blog:

2020-03-15: System Crisis Management
2019-12-30: Chimp Notches