This is your most frightening piece to date. I hadn't linked it all together in my head the way you so clearly do here. It feels as if we are all now in Hitler's Bunker as the Red Army approaches, partying underneath the Brandenburg Gate with champagne and loud music to drown out the noise of the shelling.
I have to confess: I wrote this one after blinking myself. I was writing a data-led follow-up to the previous speculative article I wrote on the potential for methane out-gassing from the events of the US-Iran war.
I was rather unsettled when found that what I initially thought was strong supporting evidence for the previous article's thesis faded when I expanded the temporal and spatial window on the Copernicus Browser. It has a nice 'Histogram' feature when you can actually plot the area of interest according to value vs frequency, then compare the same area for different years. It's not that the numbers aren't raised, they are, but they've been up all year! I might still finish that one, but I decided to go a little more meta for now.
The story with the frog slowly boiling comes to mind. But there is a deeper layer here. I don't contest the assertions about the psychological mechanism leading to the sigh of relief for not wearing the weight of knowleged that triggers the resposnibility to act.
I think, such articles should provide a blueprint of what could people actually do, i.e. a short letter to your representative with the complain and the rationale and the consequence, the link to the site where one can find the representative and her/his contact, etc. At minimum. I am sure there are more actions individuals could take from the confort of their home.
But the point I was trying to make is first, to dispell the myth of the boiling frog. In the actual experiment, the poor frog had its brain removed. Nobody tells you that. If this correction were to be made and popularized, that would be earth shatering, because the immediat observation would be : "Who has the control of our brain, what happen to our brain?"
In "The Age of Uncertainty" series, Kenneth Galbraith frequently explored how ruling classes and powerful corporate institutions stubbornly resist reform, often triggering their own eventual downfall rather than yielding power: "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." Never mind other people destruction, which is implicit here... Plan B I guess is the fortified and fully stoked bunker in New Zeeland...
Second, I want to point to some mechanisms through which the brain has been removed from millenia, with careful curation, such that there is no other alternative, definitely not better one for the majority. And we are on path dependency now, because the know-how and the immagination have been extirpated and are continuously burried and kept burried with the new technologies. Some fellow seems to have done the work for me on the internets to dig out the skeletons: https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-curated-silences
The Ultimate Avatar of Balance will likely be happy to recognize at least one name among those provided in the link above: Georgescu-Roegen and the Thermodynamic Critique of Growth
Indeed. We don’t often stop to think why we have brains in the first place. There is survival benefit to anticipating future events through having a model of the world—even a simple one—versus pure instinctive reaction to stimuli. Choosing a path through cognitive deliberation rather than random chance may not pay off for the individual, but statistically we wouldn’t exist if it didn’t pay off on average. Socio-political power is the mechanism of suppressing the average ability to choose, or rather the powerful choosing for the powerless.
If you want to read a wonderful book about conscience and cognitive action versus evolutionary adaptation for speed at stimuli, read Peter Watts' Echopraxia.
What I am struggling with is being fully aware of this data and able to grok an article like this, but being surrounded by family and friends who when given this information, look at me like I am mad. My instinct is to liquidate assets and purchase land to collectively grow basic food and raise livestock. But I need buy in from those whom I would undertake a project as such. And their heads are deep in the sand. It breaks my heart.
This time the sky really is falling. This time, the boy really does see a wolf. There are no more Haber–Bosch quick-fixes to the Malthusian/Ehrlichian cliff. The Titanic is not unsinkable after all, but the band plays on.
This is your most frightening piece to date. I hadn't linked it all together in my head the way you so clearly do here. It feels as if we are all now in Hitler's Bunker as the Red Army approaches, partying underneath the Brandenburg Gate with champagne and loud music to drown out the noise of the shelling.
I have to confess: I wrote this one after blinking myself. I was writing a data-led follow-up to the previous speculative article I wrote on the potential for methane out-gassing from the events of the US-Iran war.
I was rather unsettled when found that what I initially thought was strong supporting evidence for the previous article's thesis faded when I expanded the temporal and spatial window on the Copernicus Browser. It has a nice 'Histogram' feature when you can actually plot the area of interest according to value vs frequency, then compare the same area for different years. It's not that the numbers aren't raised, they are, but they've been up all year! I might still finish that one, but I decided to go a little more meta for now.
not partying, at least not for quite a while already.
The story with the frog slowly boiling comes to mind. But there is a deeper layer here. I don't contest the assertions about the psychological mechanism leading to the sigh of relief for not wearing the weight of knowleged that triggers the resposnibility to act.
I think, such articles should provide a blueprint of what could people actually do, i.e. a short letter to your representative with the complain and the rationale and the consequence, the link to the site where one can find the representative and her/his contact, etc. At minimum. I am sure there are more actions individuals could take from the confort of their home.
But the point I was trying to make is first, to dispell the myth of the boiling frog. In the actual experiment, the poor frog had its brain removed. Nobody tells you that. If this correction were to be made and popularized, that would be earth shatering, because the immediat observation would be : "Who has the control of our brain, what happen to our brain?"
In "The Age of Uncertainty" series, Kenneth Galbraith frequently explored how ruling classes and powerful corporate institutions stubbornly resist reform, often triggering their own eventual downfall rather than yielding power: "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." Never mind other people destruction, which is implicit here... Plan B I guess is the fortified and fully stoked bunker in New Zeeland...
Second, I want to point to some mechanisms through which the brain has been removed from millenia, with careful curation, such that there is no other alternative, definitely not better one for the majority. And we are on path dependency now, because the know-how and the immagination have been extirpated and are continuously burried and kept burried with the new technologies. Some fellow seems to have done the work for me on the internets to dig out the skeletons: https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-curated-silences
The Ultimate Avatar of Balance will likely be happy to recognize at least one name among those provided in the link above: Georgescu-Roegen and the Thermodynamic Critique of Growth
Indeed. We don’t often stop to think why we have brains in the first place. There is survival benefit to anticipating future events through having a model of the world—even a simple one—versus pure instinctive reaction to stimuli. Choosing a path through cognitive deliberation rather than random chance may not pay off for the individual, but statistically we wouldn’t exist if it didn’t pay off on average. Socio-political power is the mechanism of suppressing the average ability to choose, or rather the powerful choosing for the powerless.
If you want to read a wonderful book about conscience and cognitive action versus evolutionary adaptation for speed at stimuli, read Peter Watts' Echopraxia.
What I am struggling with is being fully aware of this data and able to grok an article like this, but being surrounded by family and friends who when given this information, look at me like I am mad. My instinct is to liquidate assets and purchase land to collectively grow basic food and raise livestock. But I need buy in from those whom I would undertake a project as such. And their heads are deep in the sand. It breaks my heart.
Same here. I bet lots of people are in this boat.
This time the sky really is falling. This time, the boy really does see a wolf. There are no more Haber–Bosch quick-fixes to the Malthusian/Ehrlichian cliff. The Titanic is not unsinkable after all, but the band plays on.