Even familiar objects present so much information it is hard to understand them completely. Alfred Lord Tennyson famously observed that we could not fully know even a “flower in a crannied wall” in its “all in all” any more than we could comprehend the totality of the universe. This overload is exploited by steganography, an art in which a message is deliberately mixed with many other messages; where one pattern is engulfed in a a number of larger patterns. Messages concealed in this way are hard to detect. The give-away is often the vague sense that something is not quite right about it.
So when George Will says there is something inexplicably entertaining in current American politics he is making the wordsmith’s equivalent of the steganalytical observation that something about today is fishy and maybe we had better search it through for a payload. Something is going on inside the funniness, and it would be nice to know what it is.
Everywhere that Will looks, nothing looks normal. There are Democrats trying to sound like Republicans; Attorney Generals impersonating Vietnam Veterans; there is Tony Rezko reaching out from graybar to ruin the candidacy of Barack Obama’s Senate successor; and Republicans who were against Iraq and were for Afghanistan before they were against it. Now the first instinct of a steganlyst is to suspect things that look funny; they look close at things that vary from the statistical norm because of the possibility that somewhere in that not-quite-right mass of messages lurks the one you are looking for. Similarly the first task of a political analyst should be to ask himself: why does politics look so odd these days?
The easiest thing to do — perhaps the only thing — is to look for the obvious message. EJ Dionne looks at Tuesday’s poll through the prism of whether or not the grassroots revolt has run its course and business as usual is reasserting itself. That is his pattern recognition filter. Matt Bai at the NY Times thinks the power of “the old party clubhouse” is eroding in favor of “new rules” that were exemplified by Barack Obama. “The intraparty rebellions now will be increasingly local, sufficiently financed and built around credible candidates — the kind of campaigns that made Barack Obama president and that may yet give us Senator Paul or Senator Sestak. My gosh, these people in Washington are in for it now.”
John Podhoretz takes the metaphor one step further and declares “the key rule in American politics is that there are no rules anymore. Any politician running for re-election, or seeking election as his party’s anointed one, who faces any kind of a credible challenger, finds himself in history’s crosshairs.”
“No rules anymore?” None of the players want to be told that all the rules have been abolished; because they want to know the rules, even if they’ve changed. They want to know the key to victory so they can turn it. They are eager to pick out the payload in the midst of all these confusing signals. Cut to the chase: what is the takeaway? How do I win?
But win what? To what extent is winning a government position really ‘winning’? Do you really want that job? That depends on how far the rules have changed. Take the Euro. Jim Kramer, commenting on the woes afflicting the Old Continent makes the entertaining argument (hat tip George Will) that if Euro doesn’t collapse in 48 hours then its possible that Europe won’t end, it’ll just get progressively worse, and worse and worse. And by that time everyone will be used to the idea that Europe ain’t what it used to be. Can that also be true of Washington?
Kramer’s takeaway is that there isn’t a single big message lurking in the dramatic financial events of the last few weeks but just a succession of negative small ones. Nobody’s sure what they payload is, but Kramer’s sure that within 48 he’ll know if there is a big one in it or not. Which only proves that some analysts believe that God will eventually tell them what’s up if they wait long enough. One of the boasts of StegFS – A Steganographic File System for Linux is “not only does it encrypt data, it also hides it such that it cannot be proved to be there.” Humanity’s belief that truth will out; that the message will be revealed; that we’ll know how Europe and politics turns out if we wait long enough — and that everything will be clear in retrospect is a testament to the human conviction that there is indeed a payload hidden inside the soup of data. Gotta be. The story will be told, even if “it cannot be proved to be there”.
But even if it is there it is unlikely to be discovered in time to make a difference. The next few years are likely to be an extraordinarily nonlinear time, when outcomes cannot be predicted accurately by reference to historical norms and success cannot be extrapolated too far into the future. We are truly at the edge of shadowy plain and it’s a case of no guts, no glory. In that circumstance those with a faster OODA loop and greater reserves will be a natural advantage. But only in the sense of a group of nomads, crossing into the next valley and wondering whether they will be up to it. What is out there, one might ask? That’s part of the uncertainty. George Will was right. It is an entertaining time.
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I’ll tell you this for nothing: I bet a Stegosaur to a Stenographer that unless the west wakes up to itself and stops being so PC and wimpish (not to mention impecunious), the end of civilisation as we know it is looming large.
Re Kramer: I can’t find it now but just read an article saying, in effect, be careful what you wish for. The anti-establishment candidates who may be elected will be the ones who will have to tackle all the unpopular, tough decisions to get us out of the mess we’re in.
IOW, going out of office may be a blessing in disguise.
#1 blogstrop: Won’t happen. The West is largely led by graduates of Ivy League schools, that by and large have left their charges ill-equipped to run a civilization much less preserve one (with the exception of our host, of course).
No matter how intelligent they might be, if they are steeped in a failed 19th century philosophy developed by some unkempt horse’s a** who expected everyone else to pay his bills for him, their effect on public policy will not be a positive one.
#2 Gordon: Yes, but that’s what Reagan had to do.
My analysis is that we are at the tail end of the collectivist experiment. In the 200 +/- years since the French revolution and Roussos phylosophy followed by Marx/Engles, socialism/collectivism has been tried any number of places and in several forms. Everyone of these experiments has failed because eventually the accountants of the world win; “You run out of other peoples money”.
Capitalism is based in Christian doctrine and hasn’t revitalized itself largely because the elites/intelligencia think they are too smart to be subserviant to a force/idea they can’t see and believe is mysticism.
So we are in transition and waiting for either a new organizational phylosophy to emerge, capitalism to revitalize itself, or worldwide anarchy. If you follow and understand sigmoid growth curves/catastrophy theory we are on the downside of the sine wave/curve heading for a crash.
My personal vote is for a revitalized capitalism because in 10,000 years of recorded history no system has worked so well for so many. But a lot of folks seem to be searching for the “next big thing”. Especially the parasites of the world; politicians, academics, intelicutals, naval gazers of all sorts, and lazy folks. To plagarize a movie title; let’s go back to what works for a bright future!
The Russians have a saying, “Communism is the longest route you can take to get back to Capitalism”.
The fly in the ointment is the fact that Totalitarianism is a self pollinating weed. And as such requires constant eradication. It is a bug in the mental makeup of mankind.
Encryption and decryption are amazing techniques. We should all endeavor to learn how to do it…
Everyone is looking for a single message. I believe that there are a myriad of messages. But if you are looking for one I would say it is the seperation of leaders from those being led. 300 million people have a lot of momentum and anyone trying to make a change have to deal with that momentum. Making significant changes will strain the bonds between leaders and those being led. What we are seeing now is the strain, if the leaders can not effect the change, they will be brought back to those being led rather violently. By violently I do not mean with revolution but by sudden and swift results.
Secret hidden knowledge? Sounds like more Gnosticism. The Law of Large numbers means that over a long enough period of time even unlikely events come to pass. The flaw in the human psyche is that we extrapolate that data into an expectation that the unlikely even could be repeated, despite the logic to the contrary. That is why I am going to buy a lottery ticket today. Any given utopian conspiracy is sure to fail for several reasons;
1. it attracts dysfunctional losers who repel sane people,
2. its adherents prefer convoluted theories to Occam’s Razor,
3. at almost any time society has the tools to destroy the conspiracy.
However over a long enough time period some conspiracies will succeed in taking power and then destroying their host society. It is an error of logic to believe that just because a course of action will be suboptimal it will not happen. Failure happens, it only reduces the ability of the one failing to repeat their error. Examples of utopian conspiracies based on secret hidden knowledge that succeeded in taking power include the Muhammadans in Yathrib in 624, Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, the Khomeinists in Iran in 1979, and the Obamists in America in 2008.
Our language is full of phrases that describe what is about to happen, the most apt being “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. I think we all here at the BC sense that our economic and political systems are rapidly reaching the “tipping point” and that one “black swan” will cause a system crash. And like computers, the economic and political systems will require a “reboot”. What takes the place of the old systems is anybody’s guess. The Tea Partiers hope that the reboot will restore our Constitutional Republic and free market economics. The left dreams the reboot will transform the economic and political systems into their vision and one that they control. What is clear, whatever the outcome, is that the “reboot” is going to be anything but peaceful and “calm”. There will be political and social “earthquakes”, and like their physical counterpart there will be destruction of the “unsafe and unsound structures” and that the survivors will be picking through the rubble and having to rebuild their lives. One can only hope that the “earthquakes” when they come are moderates one and not of the 9.0+ variety.
Bill Murrary’s character relating his experience as caddy for the Dalai Lama in the movie “Caddyshack”,
So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.
7/LOTM:
“However over a long enough time period some conspiracies will succeed in taking power and then destroying their host society.”
Reminds me of the Fight Club quote – “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” It also reminds me of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states “The entropy of a system not in equilibrium will increase over time.” Taken together, I wonder if Asimov’s psychohistorians would thus posit that we are inevitably hurtling toward an event of chaos and death. I am watching events on the Korean penninsula, as the war of words is heating up over the Cheonan incident.
Which only proves that some analysts believe that God will eventually tell them what’s up if they wait long enough.
Or as one of my Greek immigrant friends said about the financial shenanigans overseas, ‘everybody’s waiting for God to come down and write a check’.
I read that the Democratic party victor in the special election was a pro-life, pro-gun, small government Democrat.
Now that the Republicans are purging their RINO’s, it seems that the Democrats are acquiring DINO’s.
How droll. Hollywood couldn’t make this stuff up.
Can’t wait until November.
GO SARA GO!!!!
The anti-establishment candidates who may be elected will be the ones who will have to tackle all the unpopular, tough decisions to get us out of the mess we’re in.
What I particularly like about Chris Christie in New Jersey is that he ran for Governor and won, to perform governance, with no apparent agenda of power everlasting. That doesn’t seem to apply to the majority of Washington insiders – they’re mostly jostling for position at the various troughs which abound there. Governance for the benefit of all citizens (may I say ‘statesmanship’) takes second place to partisan teamwork and perpetual office.
Tennyson’s flower is the flower, whatever the wall, whatever is around it. The flower has value and beauty, even an esssence (oh happy day when one could use such a word without quotation marks). The narrator plucks the flower, and it will die. But surely there are more, or so the poem’s narrator can assume. Our current problem is probably that we are running out of flowers, so to speak, and entering into some kind of economic and social silent spring. We’ll come out of it eventually, I hope.
Whatever living thing gets water thrives. Jesus uses the plant metaphor. You can satirize the plant metaphor by invoking it too much, a la Chance the Gardener. But Richard’s post is about a flower, so that’s the metaphor du jour.
The current social and economic flowers are getting nourished by diverted and borrowed water. Just as the Central Valley is drying up without its water, the current social and economic systems that rely on diverted and borrowed resources, with promises to repay sometime in the future, are going to suffer. The water/resources are drying up.
Some BC commenters have referred readers to The Automatic Earth. The AE writers see the economy as a Ponzi scheme, and it’s hard to disagree with them. It looks like deflation is settling in.
Tennyson lived in a time when he could afford to contemplate questions of beauty and existence. We live in an age that gets to puzzle the question that e.e. cummings posed in ‘buffalo bills defunct’: ‘. . . and how do you like your blue-eyed boy mister death?’
Maybe the Mama Grizzlies will close ranks to protect what matters to them, i.e., family and community, and inspire a backlash against the ponzi schemers. Family is a core value, one that the statists are trying mightily to invalidate, demonize, and marginalize. Statists don’t want people taking responsibility. They want people taking state-issued i.o.u.’s.
Cue the music, via Blanche Dubois:
“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me.”
novanglus,
“The entropy of a system not in equilibrium will increase over time”
The Universe is governed by Entropy and Inertia. That means that things tend to go to Hell and stay there. The countervailing force is called variously Intelligence or Wisdom or Sentience. It is what gives us Reason, including a reason for Hope. We can get the universe off the dime. Our mind and will combine to make Archimedes’ Lever. With them we can achieve amazing things.
To be blogged under the title “LoTM’s Laws.”
People want to be free.
The eye in the heart of the lotus, the world is too much with us, things fall apart the center cannot hold, … and information wants to be free.
A lot of our institutions are being disintermediated by the Internet, by cheap telecom and travel, by globalist economics. The liberal PC mindset we love (not) so much at BC isn’t really new.
What strikes me is the lack of credible, solid candidates for public office. Our real elites eschew leadership, which is surely difficult but maybe not all that much more than in the past. And what passes for leadership even in the business community strikes me as second-rate and dysfunctional compared to the previous generation.
Surely some revelation is at hand, surely the Second Coming is at hand. Er, yeah. Maybe we are just waiting on the next generation to come up, born with these new technologies and not as overwhelmed by them. Unless they ARE all overwhelmed by them, in which case hey, those New Dark Ages I’ve been talking about since 1998 will be a little darker than I thought.
I think this http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0002/0002075v4.pdf application of critical phenomena theory is relevant to both current and many previous posts. According to the theory in the vicinity of critical point oscillations around general trend become fast and violent.
One of the things you never, ever, want to do is let a rocket engine run out of propellant.
Even if you are coming up short on performance, you don’t want the engine to just gulp the last few dregs of fuel and oxidizer before it quits. You want a commanded shutdown. So in addition to a guidance system that shuts down the engine at the proper velocity you have depletion switches that shut it down if the propellants in the tanks reach a very low level.
You don’t want the engine to just sputter out because the most powerful engines, such as the ones used on the first stage, are controlled by providing too much of one propellant, either fuel or oxidizer. And if you let it just run out there is a real possibility that it will get too much or too little of the wrong one. Performance will increase dramatically at the very end – and then the engine will explode.
Even on a vehicle stage you are going to discard this is bad thing, because the whole rocket may blow up before you can fire the next stage ad climb away.
So, given that we are about to hit depletion on all kinds of things – money, energy, good will, and the patience of both people who really pay the bills and those who expect theirs to be paid – it is entirely possible that the Leftist performance increase we have seen over the past few years is nothing more than the result of an impending uncontrolled shutdown. The Tea Parties are the propellant depletion switches telling the engine to shut down.
The good news is that we could going on to a new stage, where things will get better and we will discard the elements of the past that are dragging us down. But first we have to stop the stage we are in from blowing up.
Docbill @ 4 said:
“My analysis is that we are at the tail end of the collectivist experiment. In the 200 +/- years since the French revolution and Roussos phylosophy followed by Marx/Engles, socialism/collectivism has been tried any number of places and in several forms. Everyone of these experiments has failed because eventually the accountants of the world win; “You run out of other peoples money”.”
Correct!
Too bad it had to happen during my lifetime.
novanglus @ 10 said:
“Reminds me of the Fight Club quote – “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” It also reminds me of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states “The entropy of a system not in equilibrium will increase over time.” Taken together, I wonder if Asimov’s psychohistorians would thus posit that we are inevitably hurtling toward an event of chaos and death.”
Another Zero Hedge fan…
Chaos and death always win in the end.
In the beginning, before the Big Bang, there was only chaos. Then something miraculous “happened” and there came into being this isolated “spark of order”. For over 13 billion years, we have been living within that isolated spark surrounded by an infinite expanse of chaos. Unfortunately the surrounding chaos is slowly eroding that isolated spark back to its original primordial state.
Is there any deeper purpose to our lives?
That’s a question I wish I had an answer to.
“Humanity’s belief that truth will out; that the message will be revealed; … a testament to the human conviction that there is indeed a payload hidden inside the soup of data. Gotta be.”
Perhaps its because of a universal ‘pattern recognition filter’?
One not based in mere wishful thinking but in Jung’s collective unconscious, (the inborn racial memory which he believed to be the source of the archetypes or ‘universal’ symbols found in legends, poetry, and dreams.)
A filter exemplified by the Bahai Faith’s concept of the “Manifestation(s) of God”, a concept in the Bahá’í Faith that refers to what are commonly called “prophets”.
The ‘Manifestations of God’ are an explanatory theory that a series of personages, who reflect the attributes of the divine into the human world, appear at significant times throughout history for the progress and advancement of human morals and civilization.
The Manifestations of God are the channel provided for humanity to know about God, and they act as perfect mirrors reflecting the attributes of God into the physical world. Bahá’í teachings hold that the motive force in all human development is due to the coming of the Manifestations of God. The Manifestations of God are directly linked with the Bahá’í concept of ‘progressive revelation’.
Progressive revelation is a core teaching in the Bahá’í Faith that suggests that religious truth is revealed by God progressively and cyclically over time through a series of divine Messengers, and that the teachings are tailored to suit the needs of the time and place of their appearance.”
Many have commented upon the theory of the approaching “singularity”, might it relate not to the emergence of an artificial intelligence but rather the appearance of the next Manifestation of God?
Some lyrics by Jackson Brown seem appropriate;
THE PRETENDER
“I want to know what became of the changes
we waited for love to bring
or were they only the fitful dreams
of some greater awakening?”
FOR EVERYMAN
Everybody I talk to is ready to leave
With the light of the morning
They’ve seen the end coming down long enough to believe
That they’ve heard their last warning
Standing alone
Each has his own ticket in his hand
And as the evening descends
I sit thinking ’bout Everyman
Seems like I’ve always been looking for some other place
To get it together
Where with a few of my friends I could give up the race
And maybe find something better
But all my fine dreams and
Well thought out schemes to gain the motherland
Have all eventually come down to waiting for Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman–
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go, I understand
me, I’m waiting here for Everyman–
Don’t ask me if he’ll show — baby I don’t know
Make it on your own if you think you can but
Somewhere later on you’ll have to take a stand
and then, you’re going to need a hand
Everybody’s just waiting to hear from the one
Who can give them the answers
And lead them back to that place in the warmth of the sun
Where sweet childhood still dances
Who’ll come along
And hold out that strong and gentle father’s hand?
Long ago, I heard someone say, somethin’ ’bout Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman–
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go, I understand
I’m not trying to tell you that I’ve seen the plan
Turn and walk away if you think I am–
But don’t think too badly of one who’s left holding sand
He’s just another dreamer, dreaming ’bout Everyman
“People want to be free.”
True, but there are plenty of people who want to be free to use other people as fodder for their freedom.
RWE @ 19:
“One of the things you never, ever, want to do is let a rocket engine run out of propellant. Even if you are coming up short on performance, you don’t want the engine to just gulp the last few dregs of fuel and oxidizer before it quits.”
You just triggered an off-topic technical question: I’ve noticed that after they jettison a liquid fueled transfer stage, e.g. a Centaur, there is always this process called “blow down” where they blow out the remaining propellant and oxidizer from the jettisoned stage.
Why bother?
If the stage is going into deep space, why is it a problem if the remaining propellant makes the discarded stage explode? If anything, you’d want the discarded stage to explode because smaller pieces would burn up more easily in the atmosphere.
I read a quotation today that was attributed to Albert Einstein which is “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” The current widespread dissatisfaction with our political class seems to jive with this perfectly.
“Humanity’s belief that truth will out; that the message will be revealed; … a testament to the human conviction that there is indeed a payload hidden inside the soup of data. Gotta be.”
Perhaps its because of a universal ‘pattern recognition filter’?
One not based in mere wishful thinking but in Jung’s collective unconscious, (the inborn racial memory which he believed to be the source of the archetypes or ‘universal’ symbols found in legends, poetry, and dreams.)
A filter exemplified by the Bahai Faith’s concept of the ‘Manifestations of God’, an explanatory theory asserting that a series of personages, who reflect the attributes of the divine into the human world, appear at significant times throughout history for the progress and advancement of human morals and civilization.
The Manifestations of God being the channel provided for humanity to experience ‘progressive revelation’.
Progressive revelation asserts that religious truth is revealed by God progressively and cyclically over time through a series of divine ‘Messengers’, and that the teachings are tailored to suit the needs of the time and place of their appearance.”
Many have commented upon the theory of the approaching “singularity”, might it relate not to the emergence of an artificial intelligence but rather to the appearance of the next Manifestation of God?
Some lyrics by Jackson Brown seem appropriate;
THE PRETENDER
“I want to know what became of the changes
we waited for love to bring
or were they only the fitful dreams
of some greater awakening?”
FOR EVERYMAN
Everybody I talk to is ready to leave
With the light of the morning
They’ve seen the end coming down long enough to believe
That they’ve heard their last warning
Standing alone
Each has his own ticket in his hand
And as the evening descends
I sit thinking ’bout Everyman
Seems like I’ve always been looking for some other place
To get it together
Where with a few of my friends I could give up the race
And maybe find something better
But all my fine dreams and
Well thought out schemes to gain the motherland
Have all eventually come down to waiting for Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman–
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go, I understand
me, I’m waiting here for Everyman–
Don’t ask me if he’ll show — baby I don’t know
Make it on your own if you think you can but
Somewhere later on you’ll have to take a stand
and then, you’re going to need a hand
Everybody’s just waiting to hear from the one
Who can give them the answers
And lead them back to that place in the warmth of the sun
Where sweet childhood still dances
Who’ll come along
And hold out that strong and gentle father’s hand?
Long ago, I heard someone say, somethin’ ’bout Everyman
Waiting here for Everyman–
Make it on your own if you think you can
If you see somewhere to go, I understand
I’m not trying to tell you that I’ve seen the plan
Turn and walk away if you think I am–
But don’t think too badly of one who’s left holding sand
He’s just another dreamer, dreaming ’bout Everyman
To me, the inextricable feeling has been that government no longer serves the interest of the people. Not even abstractly. It is implicitly a collection of people who have seized power in a soft coup during a financial crisis and will not suffer the people even to superficially ameliorate them. The sight of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who know how to exploit a crisis leaves this sickening residue. Our way of life has been fundamentally changed and the laws of the land are no longer followed by the federal government for the love of god. When the president can openly flaunt the very laws that he was sworn to uphold and appoint a justice who does not believe in the sanctity of the constitution and who looks suspiciously like Paul Blart, it is looking a lot like the end of the safe and secure world that we lived in and we are going into dark times. The radical left rather rule over ruin than share the wealth of the status quo. God help us all.
It is change that will terrify you and enslave your children. Oh boy.
It’s Jabberwocky! Alice cried
The message must be here!
For surely word things cannot hide
That much is clearly clear
Ah no, my child! the red queen laughed
It’s hidden, don’t you see
To try for it will drive you daft
‘Tis quite a mystery
I smile at those who would decode
Up spake the Cheshire cat
For none knows but the Willow toad
And therefore that is that
Mad Hatter! help me, Alice begged
The message must be read!
Mad hatter cried, I have it pegged!
From A on through to Zed!
See here the words that doth surround
Where other phrases be
That clear in stately praise redound
Upon a cup of tea
Tcobb @ 24:
“I read a quotation today that was attributed to Albert Einstein which is “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” The current widespread dissatisfaction with our political class seems to jive with this perfectly.”
More to the point, not all well defined problems are solvable. The classic example is the quintic equation (5th order polynomial) which Niels Abel proved conclusively to be not solvable in radicals. There may be no stable solution to the problem of human governance or economics. Instead, the best that can be provided are unstable solutions that always fail eventually.
#15 LOTM -
Your post sounds like the “inevitable progress of humanity” yarn I used to read of. But then came WWI, then WWII. And now, as Wretchard says, “we’re at the edge of a shadowy plain.”
You say, “Intelligence or Wisdom or Sentience give us reason, including a reason for Hope”???
Pray tell, what is this Hope you speak of? No offense, but you sound like the very thing you condemn in your post #7!
#12 Rosinante “I read that the Democratic party victor in the special election was a pro-life, pro-gun, small government Democrat.
Now that the Republicans are purging their RINO’s, it seems that the Democrats are acquiring DINO’s.”
We ran that experiment back in 2006 — of many Democrats getting elected by “running to the right” of their Republican election opponent. I think we kind of see how that worked out. Yeah, yeah, all politics is local, but if you have “D” after your name, you are beholden to the Leadership for committee assignments and chairmanships and all manner of things, and you have automatic buy-in to a national agenda. How often will you be “allowed” to vote against your Caucus?
Blaine- “300 million people have a lot of momentum and anyone trying to make a change have to deal with that momentum.”
These are more like hot molecules bouncing around faster and faster. Look for an event that brings people to a single point issue like the one that organized 10k Thai to show up at one point in the city center. When you have an event that attracts 10 million Americans to the town square, tow things are going to happen; 1) it will get the attention of the rulers. 2) They will barricade themselves and declare martial law. The sad truth is, true or not, a majority believes they’d like that outcome, the music stops and they are firmly in power.
#28. Eggplant
“More to the point, not all well defined problems are solvable.”
I certainly agree with you, but somebody needs to tell the politicians that. The idea that any problem can be solved by passing laws is a common form of insanity that afflicts us today.
I forget what state it was (and this might not even be a true story–I don’t know for sure) that once passed a law to make the value of Pi equal to 3, the idea being that it would make it easier for the school children.
Reality and politics seem to mix like oil and water.
test,test,test
But here’s the thing, we are NOT running out of – anything that I can see. Not food. Not people. Not money. Not oil. It’s my perception that there is more loose money sloshing around the world today, by FAR, than at any previous age of the world. Technology makes it so. We are RICH!
But nobody is so rich, that a few blockheads won’t try to kill the golden goose. It’s like Microsoft and PC hardware, the processors are just ungodly powerful these days, but Microsoft is great at producing software that uses the processor’s power in wait loops and poor coordination so that the more power it has, the faster it wastes it! A power saw is a wonderful tool – but it can be misused. So with our economic and technological worlds today.
OK I just can’t help it, I suggest that what the problem is, is that our political system does not choose technocrats, and for the very good reason that most technocrats are abysmal politicians. Yet, we need BOTH to keep our modern world on the rails and moving forward. Problem.
This whole crisis could have been quickly resolved by applying Andrew Mellon’s solution – “Liquidate! Liquidate! Liquidate!”
By using repeated Keynesian patches, we’ve prolonged and worsened the underlying problems of readjustment by markets. One could suspect the Cloward-Pivens methodology at work here, and some of the players may well intend to destroy our Western system. Others just fear the pain involved and avoid the truth involved in readjustments.
Look at the housing markets. One in seven of those with mortgages are no longer making payments. Liquidate via foreclosure and the house would be bought by someone at a lower price who would make the new payments.
In the long run, INDIVIDUALS are in fact dead. Cultures, not necessarily so. We do see a diminishing of cultural energies with the aging populations of the West. Plus, our great engines of technical and economic growth have run their course. What good, really, does the iPad do for the economy? It is a baroque advancement, just as 12-tone music signified that classical music had exhausted its ideas. We’ll have to await both a real technical advance that could increase economic productivity AND the venture capital to fund it’s institutionalization.
Yes, intelligence is the ability to predict the future. Right now, most of us are feeling pretty dumb OR pretty depressed. Or both.
“Trying to tell what is going on from the news is like watching a clock that only has a second hand” – to quote somebody, anybody.
There’s no “payload”, only fragments of a trend. You have to zoom out in time like you zoom out in Google Earth to determine the trend. Since we are bound by the laws of this universe, we can only look backwards – hence the importance of paying attention in History class. I’m not saying that driving the truck of life by only looking at the rear view mirror is easy, but it’s the only way.
Having said that, there are some trend emerging. (1) Europe is becoming steadily weaker – but that is pretty obvious from an American viewpoint. (2) America is becoming weaker and Americans are waking up to it. (3) The rumblings from middle America (the real America) are just the 1st steps in a gradual political change – and change fueled by the realization that America is getting weaker.
Weaker? Yep. Pretty much everyone realizes that teacher’s unions are not good for our educational system and are an obstacle to positive change. Pretty much everyone realizes that “Made in the USA” is not superior to “Made in China”. Pretty much everyone realizes that you can’t have an effective Government that perpetually runs a huge deficit. That is only part of the “weaker” feeling.
If I zoom out, I would say the US peaked in the late 80′s, early 90′s, and plateaued until Obama turned the corner downward. But then nobody pays me for my opinion.
Let’s see, if China’s total economy is still about 1/4 of the US, then if they are growing at twice our rate, it will (a) take how many years before their economy is in total larger than ours, and (b) take how many years before their economy is larger than ours per-capita?
No calculators are allowed, but you can take off your shoes and count on your toes.
It seems to me that if you have enough independent minds trying to compete on OODA, the emergent aggregate mind will be faster and stranger than anyone can comprehend.
Something is happening, yes.
Where the elites had once been able to have some vague grasp on the aggregate mind, the number of participants and connections has vastly increased, pushing it beyond anyone’s comprehension.
Whitehall wrote:
Yes, intelligence is the ability to predict the future. Right now, most of us are feeling pretty dumb OR pretty depressed. Or both.
… I have glimpsed an intelligence that is vast and wise beyond my comprehension, and seen that it is still a moron.
“And so we plod along..”
#38. Dishman
Where the elites had once been able to have some vague grasp on the aggregate mind, the number of participants and connections has vastly increased, pushing it beyond anyone’s comprehension.
With no disrespect intended, I think that understanding the aggregate mind beyond a small village of twenty people (to chose an arbitrary number) is simply beyond what humans are capable of doing.
Its like me trying to teach my dog calculus. She may pay attention and try to learn but it is beyond her power to understand no matter how hard she tries. The great sin of modern times is believing that anyone has the intellectual capacity to understand everything and how it all fits together.
We don’t, we can’t, and we never will.
15/LOTM:
“The countervailing force is called variously Intelligence or Wisdom or Sentience. It is what gives us Reason, including a reason for Hope.”
I’m with you through Reason. I depart company with the notion of Hope. In the words of Henry Rollins: “Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.” I eschew hope in favor of Consideration, Action, and Diligence derived from Reason.
“We can get the universe off the dime. Our mind and will combine to make Archimedes’ Lever. With them we can achieve amazing things.”
My Ivy League Engineering School often pointed us toward Archimedes as a figurative model for our potential. The lever teaches us that with the right tools, we can approach any problem – no matter how enormous it first appears. The bathtub teaches us that in all cases, measure and observe the real world to ensure that your thinking on a subject actually applies beyond your own skull.
We really need more problem solving types in government and fewer lawyers. Their “solutions” always seem to create bigger problems. They just push the air around in the balloon as they twist and squeeze it…until it pops.
Tcobb wrote:
With no disrespect intended, I think that understanding the aggregate mind beyond a small village of twenty people (to chose an arbitrary number) is simply beyond what humans are capable of doing.
I agree. I believe that 20 is the actual typical number for understanding, though I don’t have a cite for it.
The words I used were “vague grasp”. Perhaps a better phrasing would be “a sense of vague understanding”, which is different from “an actual vague understanding”.
My point was more along the lines of the difficulty of maintaining the delusion of understanding.
You’ve really got to watch out for Deja Vu. Deja Vu usually means that the Matrix has been reset.
Wow, always impressed by the quality here.
My 2 cents: Barring an utter, incontrovertible miracle, the U.S. is toast–for all the reasons that have been noted above: We’re bankrupt, Obama and the Dem congress keep spending money we don’t have ($23 Billion to keep poor school districts from having to lay off teachers, anyone?), the Dems just passed socialized medicine (works so well in the UK, eh?); Obie has effectively banned further leases offshore U.S.; Leftists have blocked new nuclear generating plants; and no Dem wants to even *mention* the phrase “Islamic terrorists.”
Yep, toast. But the good news is that most conservatives are far better prepared for the coming storm than most Leftists/Socialists/Democrats. So when it hits the fan, more of the former will survive to rebuild.
Lord willing.
WRT the Pi=3 story, it seems to have been true–sort of. It was also Pi=4 and 3.2 and other things, all in the same bill. In Indiana the bill passed the House but not the Senate, visiting the Committee on Swamplands and Committee on Temperance along the way.
As for emergent aggregate minds, Einstein said “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Committee IQ =max(IQ)/#members
One could view the “crisis” as a protective response from threatened elites. If challenged for power, the elites just screw the general pooch with the intent on making a crisis that their challengers have to divert their attention to and away from the power struggle.
It’s a proactive version of that “never let a crisis go to waste” tactic.
As I’ve long held forth about on this site, I contend that we are in the process of elite turnover. Elites don’t exit quietly or easily.
Re the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the Second Law: All of them refer only to an isolated system, and there is only one known example of that. To a first approximation Earth is a closed system – no mass flows in or out but energy flows in and out – and hence none of the Laws apply to Earth as a whole; hence, order can accumulate here. And it has – for evidence, look in the mirror.
I have a hypothesis, possibly untestable. Which is that the Rapture is the same as the Rapture of the Nerds, or to put it another way that the Numenon will be reachable only through the forces that lead to the Singularity. Maybe the world-mind will know God. Or at least know Him better than we can.
All religions are based on the idea of something present, yet invisible, that is beyond comprehension by mere mortal minds. What happens to organised religion, when such an entity is unambiguously present and immanent? How does the Catholic Church deal with the Neuromancer?
#43 sf
We are only toast so long as we keep playing the games that made us so to begin with. It is a false choice to say that we must keep playing the same game of Three Card Monte and that there can be no other game.
There are other ways. One thought that occurs to me with regard to government workers is to make their actual salary dependent upon what the median income of the people who actually have and do pay taxes have
after its taken away from them.
Yes, oh bureaucrats, by the same power that you have robbed the productive, you shall be robbed yourselves. If the after tax income of the productive goes down by say, 20%, so shall the pay that is given to you.
Economic incentives work. We should try applying it to the government.
Eggplant #23:
You don’t want that stage to explode and create space debris. A Centaur – or a Delta II 2nd stage – or a Delta IV 2nd stage – is never going into deep space but rather, into either a highly elliptical Earth orbit or a high altitude Earth Orbit. There usually is not enough propellant on board to restart the engine and drive the stage down into re-entry (although this is sometimes is done for the Delta II upper stages) and you don’t want it to blow up due to the propellant that is left on board and scatter that junk all over the place.
Upper stages on some early Ariane missions did just that. The French did not even know about it until they were curious about an anomaly on one and asked the USAF to give them tracking data on one stage. The reply was that the stage could no longer be seen but there were many many little objects in that same orbit. And it turned out the previous flights of stages of that type had also blown up, resulting in an increase in space debris in the Geosynch Transfer Orbit of around 4000%, creating problems for everyone.
novanglus,
By Hope I do not mean an expectation of an outcome but a recognition of variability arising from the dimension of time. If you believe that the future can only be more of the present then you are in Flatland and there is no reason to use your reason as you cannot expect change to happen. If you believe that change can happen then you have a motivation to act and since actions have consequences there will be at least the possibility of a more desirable future. This quality uses reason and sentience but it is not dependent on logic, it is a condition that emanates from the variability of our existence. Truly, where there is life there is hope.
Regarding Archimedes and the lawyers, that sounds like a dirty joke or at least an invitation to speculate on how a Sicilian would resolve impositions by the arrogant and elitist, but I do have thoughts on restoring a more practical education to our future professional leadership. My first suggestion is to put everyone through 6 months of universal military training after their 17th birthday would expose people to certain practical problem solving situations that would benefit in many ways. It would ensure that most future academics and lawyers would, as their predecessors did, have a sympathy for just those engineering principles that you espouse. This would provide an anchor to their legal and theoretical deliberations that should on the margin prove helpful.
The secondary school curriculum should be revised to include basic accounting for all, now it is offered if at all only to the slower vocational track students, as well as Junior Achievement style entrepreneurship studies, Series 7 training, and basic shop skills classes. The inclusion or restoration of these will leave little room I fear for classes on gender identification for those aged 15 and campaigns to support the political interests of the Teacher’s Union.
RWE,
Space shrapnel or Cosmic buckshot.
Committee IQ =max(IQ)/#members
s/b= min(IQ)/#members
“no mass flows in or out “ Save meteors, comets, and asteroids.
What survives the economic cataclysm is culture. The greatest threat to the wisdom of the Belmont Club is the takeover of the internet by the government.
Socialism and Fascism are striving to take over the levers of power. The effort to damage Capitalism seems to be working.
I apologize for being overly cryptic.
I love the Belmont Club, especially the comments.
Capitalism is important because it provides the wherewithal of culture.
The Belmont Club is the highest level of culture I know.
I urge any of us capable to oppose the FCC’s attempt to regulate the Internet.
Capitalism is a fragile artifact of culture. It requires the rule of law, the right to own the fruits of ones labor and the freedom to trade.
The US is no longer a country where capitalism may flourish.
Yes Lucy, People want to be free. Problem is they don’t want the responsibility that comes with freedom. So, like my Dad always told me. “If you want something. Siht in one hand and want in the other and see which one gets full first”.
aardvark @ 14
Although I have always loved the poem, I too remember wondering, even as a child, why he had to pluck the flower out of the cranny in order to contemplate its ‘all in all’.
Best wishes,
Jim
#46 Fletcher Christian
“All religions are based on the idea of something present, yet invisible, that is beyond comprehension by mere mortal minds. What happens to organised religion, when such an entity is unambiguously present and immanent? How does the Catholic Church deal with the Neuromancer?”
Or, perhaps more appropriately, how does the Catholic Church deal with the return of the Son of God? Well what is written is that the response of the kings and rulers is “mourning”. Imagine that: the singularity personified and even after the obliterations described in prophecy the elites mourn the passing of the old.
Another response is denial. When faced with the presence of God (god) made flesh, as Christ or Neuromancer or Mahdi or whatnot, many will swallow their pride for a little while, while secretly arguing that “this is not the REAL singularity… a great change, but something else is coming!” Again, to point at Scripture, Revelation does not end with the Second Coming, but with the aftermath of the earthly kingdom established by that kingdom, in which people are given a shot at what they must think is the “real singularity”, and then are wiped out for believing a lie and rebelling against the true ruler.
But we’re not there yet, not on the other side of any singularity, real or imagined. Man, much like he needs religion, also needs to see patterns–it’s what we do. I don’t know that there is any pattern, or message, in the events today, except “break everything, as fast as possible”. The engine revved beyond tolerance, operating on the wrong fuel and lubricants. Why? Well the spiritual default is still to assume someone or something wants to bulldoze the current order aside for their new “shining city on the hill”. The alternative view would be pure chaos without reason, but it sure looks to me like people have, under a powerful delusion, “believed a lie”.
–JC
RWE @ 48 said:
“There usually is not enough propellant on board to restart the engine and drive the stage down into re-entry (although this is sometimes is done for the Delta II upper stages) and you don’t want it to blow up due to the propellant that is left on board and scatter that junk all over the place.”
What you say makes sense. However I know they were doing propellant blow-down with jettisoned Centaur and S-IVb stages on translunar trajectories that ended up in heliocentric orbit. I’m glad they did because those old stages were important historical artifacts.
On the subject of reentering stages: A few years ago I was working with some guys from the Aerospace Corp. who wanted to put “black boxes” on transfer stages for data recovery after the stages burned up. The objective was to better understand the reentry physics of old transfer stages. The idea was to have the “black box” inside a 45 deg. sphere-cone RV with a heavy duty thermal protection system. The RV would contain a data recording system and an Iridium telephone. After the RV separated from the reentering junk, it would “phone home” to an Iridium satellite and report its life story before augering-in. Seemed like a good idea at the time but probably never got past the proposal phase.
I have had a career as a peace officer. From that, I learned to key in on anomalies as the keys to the truth, which I have mentioned before here in looking at a number of the things we have discussed. The key for me has been the totally uncharacteristic reactions of our political class, both parties. The old order is gone. They are operating under very different rules, as Wretchard says. And not only government, but also economics, and pretty much every institution of this world that Americans depend upon. It is there. We are just too wrapped up in our own world views to see and accept the changes. And they are coming faster.
In my life outside work: I have been a writer, a political scientist of sorts, and a historian by avocation. There are moments in history when it becomes clear that the old order, the old solutions, are not capable of coping with the current reality. We are not privy to exactly what is to come. All that we can see is that the transition is going to be painful, and that there is no guarantee that any individual or group will survive. This is a time of testing, and individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures will pass or fail. There is no grading on a curve.
May it be those of us who love this country who pass. May the Long Night not fall. And perhaps …. Next Year in Jerusalem ….
Subotai Bahadur
Whitehall@35,
Over 30 years and 75 fund-raising presentations to potential investors on 4 separate propositions, all eventually funded, I never once met a VC who didn’t adamently subscribe to the rule that the fewer the employees, the better. Outsource. Offshore. Core competency.
That divine stewardship hollowed US out, and got US where we are. Perhaps 20 million jobs short, probably getting much worse, with no solution in anyone’s fundable business plan.
On occasions too numerous to remember, the concept of US-made was dismissed with statements like “We don’t do nationalism.” Many times our propositions were dismissed because they didn’t project 100X return in 5 years. We were attempting to be realistic at 10X in 7. So 90% of last decade’s VCs were wastrals, now defunct or “living on the carry.” The survivors bring US less than ten IPOs/year. Not good.
As noted, the iPad is luxury goods, made elsewhere. Fabulous new products that require no increase in company headcounts doom US. Efficiency without effectiveness means we get ever better at doing the wrong things ever faster.
One thing sure to invalidate Moore’s Law is lack-of-funding.
Eggplant #55:
We had a somewhat similar idea. We wanted to do a detailed analysis of the Shuttle Columbia debris to enable us to refine our breakup models. We held a series of telecons and meetings at the debris “Museum” to figure out what kind of data to record. After it became obvious that it would be a big effort, I came up with a method to streamline the process, using methods employed in modern warehousing. But the costs came back from the people who launch the Shuttle in the millions of dollars with years of effort. This was like having Boeing design your shoes and clothes because you might want to wear them on an airplane. It never got funded.
Based on these and many other experiences in the aerospace industry, I must admit that I shudder when I see an ad for warships designed by Lockheed Martin or Boeing. We should be using Toyota or someone like that.
Tcobb@47
Yes, oh bureaucrats, by the same power that you have robbed the productive, you shall be robbed yourselves.
Regaining that which was robbed from you is not robbery. For you, it’s break-even.
# 49 Lotm I agree on the 6 months service and would add that everyone files a tax return regardless of income with some minimum payment to the both state and fed government.
#54 JC in KZ – I see your point. But my point was that the incomprehensibly titanic minds on the other side of the Singularity will have nothing supernatural about them – and in fact we will have been responsible for at least the early stages of their creation. Which makes such an entity qualitatively different from Christ, or Lord Shiva, or any other supernatural being.
Christians believe that the Trinity is present and immanent, but there is no proof at the moment. Maybe there will be at some point. The AIs will have a demonstrable physical reality and effect on the material world.
So the point remains; how does any established Church deal with a completely natural entity that is nevertheless beyond comprehension and has powers comparable with the God of the Old Testament?
We may have to answer that question rather soon. Human-brain-equivalent processing power is predicted for about 2030 or so, in large installations, and in the PC on your desk about ten years later. And then it begins…
richard,
everyone files a tax return regardless of income with some minimum payment
Thank you. A call for a “Shareholder’s Democracy?” It is corporatist and there would be issues regarding retained earnings and dividends from foreign owned entities but it has some promise. Combined with strict controls on lobbying from unions and businesses it would encourage investment, employment and dividend distribution domestically, in order to create a bloc of voters supportive of business interests. The slogan could be “No Representation Without Taxation.” It would be interesting to see a state attempt it, if the SCOTUS wasn’t reading the XIVth Amendment as grounds for destroying federalism.
To be blogged under the title “Pay to Play.”
Eggplant @ 23:
I didn’t see an answer for you off-topic question, so I’ll come out of lurk mode. I’ll use Centaur
as an example, just ’cause I’m somewhat familiar with the hardware and where it ends up, which is –
several places.
LEO missions, it re-enters and burns up. Centaur is mostly a big aluminum pop-can. It has to be
either pressure stabilized or placed in mechanical stretch here in the gravity field, so reentry
burns it up fairly completely, even the more solid components like engine(s) and avionics. But an
explosion in LEO would leave those more solid items as a lot of shrapnel in the region of space that
people still go to pretty regularly.
GEO missions, it gets placed in a parking orbit. If it’s going to stay up there, better it be in one
big chunk that can be mapped, tracked, SEEN, and avoided. The Chinese/Indians will thank us for that when they
start sending manned missions to the moon and beyond.
Deep space, same thing. Keep it so it can be seen.
One of the biggest problems we have in space is space junk – dead satellites, lost tools and
fasteners, inert transfer stages. But the bigger it is, the easier it is to locate and evade. One
of the reasons we raised such a fuss with the Chinese when they demo’d their satellite kill capability
was the amount of shrapnel it generated.
vgregory647 @ 63:
Thank you for the explanation. Nice to see another aerospace engineer at Belmont Club.
SuboB,
Assuming I understand you right: I’ll toast to …next year in Jerusalem.
Where is Ben Casey’s Hospital Chief when we need him?
man.woman,birth,death,infinity
@37 Josh “Let’s see, if China’s total economy is still about 1/4 of the US, then if they are growing at twice our rate, it will (a) take how many years before their economy is in total larger than ours, and (b) take how many years before their economy is larger than ours per-capita?
“No calculators are allowed, but you can take off your shoes and count on your toes.”
There’s no answer to that. It depends on the growth rates, not just their ratio. If the bit about toes means that that the answer to (a) is 20 years or less, that’s wrong; China only catches us in so little as 20 years if the rates are absurdly high.
YR US CHINA
20 7.73 15.46
25 6.05 12.09
30 4.96 9.93
35 4.21 8.42
40 3.66 7.31
45 3.23 6.46
50 2.89 5.79
55 2.62 5.24
60 2.39 4.79
65 2.20 4.41
70 2.04 4.08
As to (b), it would take several centuries. You seem to be doing something that many liberals do, which is to think of the possible drastic decline of the United States as if it would happen without any disaster, such as a major war. That way, they avoid scaring themselves.