Sorry for the long pause, folks. I negotiated the end of my career, and Mrs riggerjack and I used up the spring and summer on each other. Doing whatever I wanted, and almost nothing else, as an exercise in exploring what I want, and don't.
It turns out, thoughts about this thread were nearly constant. The desire to try again to communicate those thoughts, simply wasn't.
But the weather has changed, and I thought I would try again to clarify my thoughts.
…..................
I think by the title people were expecting RJTP I-III (nearly 10000 words or about 40 minutes of standard reading time) to be setting the stage for a discussion about the deeper human issues and perspectives that prevent change in complex systems. Even after the title was revealed as a joke, I still didn't expect this was literally but a technical proposal for waste management solutions.
Jacob, reading this thread over, it's clear to me that we have never been on the same page. If I were trying to sum up what I am trying to talk about, it might be something like:
What we build, limits how we think.
How we think, limits what we build.
And most importantly, which of these limits are still valid in 2023, and how to explore in search of limits that no longer apply.
But I am insane. On Big 5, I score 7 (of 100) on Conscientiousness, and 0 on Agreeableness. I am easily distracted, and even while I agree with 99% of a statement, I tend to focus on that last 1% exclusively.
So reading over this thread, it's hard to discern that pattern for all of my sidetracks.
….............
@7:
“the map is not the territory.”
I have no doubt that you feel this is well mapped territory. I don't dispute this. I do dispute that it is mapped accurately.
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
Yogi Berra
I was trying to point to practices, to show the differences from theory. One cannot discern these differences by simply referring to one's maps.
I have been sloppy in my use of terms. Sometimes I used “my culture” to refer to Western Culture in general, but mostly, the culture I am thinking about would be the “G-ladder” culture from the MOC model. The knowledge set of the Professional class. The native knowledge set for most of this forum. The knowledge set used to frame the metacrisis.
What I thought I was making clear, was that the sum the “G ladder knowledge set” applied to the problem of waste, came up with a solution that costs a billion dollars for Bellingham to upgrade from burning their poo to composting their poo. But, either way, they're still going to use the Puget Sound as their drain field.
A billion dollars, in a city that has a total real estate value of 18 billion dollars.
The City of New York poos directly into the waters around it. As rich as it is, my culture is not capable of coming up with a plan to stop that, ever, for any amount of money.
The rules and the regulations are pushing for an environment where we're moving to more of these systems, not less of these systems. We aren't pushing in the direction of big tanks and septic fields. We're pushing in the direction of installing more central water treatment facilities regardless of how that actually works out in water quality.
It seems that more “professional expertise” in waste management is a higher priority for my culture than the quality of waste management. I'm sure this is entirely coincidence.
But if you look at the problem from Adam's perspective, and you have enough biology knowledge to understand how to brew beer, and enough plumbing knowledge to know that poo flows downhill, and enough landscaping knowledge to know what to do with a bunch of fertilized water; then you can pretty much come up with a better system on your own.
Look at the modifications of a standard septic system I proposed. Look at the components I used: valves, pipe, and precast tanks.
We've had aquaducts for how long? Fermenting and irrigation predate the written word. The Chinese were piping natural gas 7,000 years ago.
Recently, I looked up the works of the New Alchemy Institute, because they were mentioned in a journal, here. It reminded me of the old Mother Earth News issues from my childhood. Places where systems like the one I suggested in RJTPIII were laid out in detail, many times over.
Nothing, but nothing, I am pointing out is new. This has been within our noosphere forever. It has been in the archetechtural noosphere for nearly a century.
If there is anything efficient about my culture, it's the way we have
efficiently avoided developing this technology.
...
Let's look at a timeline:
In 1974, NAI completed the Ark,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_( ... rd_Island) on PEI. Bellingham's new poo burner was bright, shiny and new.
All of the knowledge in NAI, Mother Earth News, and all their ilk have been with us all my life. This knowledge has been in the hands of engineers, and Schools of Engineering; lawyers and judges, regulators and legislators; activists, politicians, protestors; writers, artists, and influencers; even charities have been created. My culture is all over this. They know exactly what they want.
And today, nearly 50 years later: the Ark has been torn down for nearly three decades, and somehow, Bellingham can't afford an upgrade to a poo composter, even at the end of the current system's duty cycle. Let alone any other system in the Ark. Bellingham is going to fire up a new poo burner, instead. LA sewage processing is now back up to 1950's standards. NYC just stews in its own poo, and seems totally OK with it.
That's about the sum of our progress over my lifetime, using our existing maps.
It's clear that we know what we want, and we know how to do it. Very much as Aztec priests knew what they wanted, and how to do it. We are repeating the rituals of success, long after success stopped being the result of our rituals...
“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure, that just ain't so.”
anonymous
I wrote RJTP I-III to outline what kind of obstacle waste processing is. It's not an insurmountable Mt. Everest; it's the kind one could trip over, if one wasn't looking.
Doesn't it seem odd to you that such a simple task is so
utterly beyond our means?
It's hard to progress on complex problems. Harder still, when we choose not to acknowledge our failures.
If you haven't sat with the metacrisis long enough to understand that we are at a cultural dead end, nothing I'm saying will make much sense. (Though judging by this thread, that may not be the real reason nothing I'm saying seems to make sense...)
“Or alternately we could consider a model that is maybe more efficient because it focuses on the needs of Adam2023 and Eve2023 who are already living on the planet with us, and could likely benefit from being adopted out of the foster care system in Detroit, provided with an education even though poor female in rural India, or basic medical care in African slum?"
I don't want to directly attack the specific examples you gave. So let me add a similar example from my own background before ERE, when I was trying to think of what I would do with my early retirement. I thought about getting an old drilling rig, and going into rural India, and helping with the lack of clean drinking water I've heard about. I understand that helping others is a deeply satisfying experience. That I can use some form of cultural arbitrage, and stretch my 1st world resources in a third world setting. I understand that I could have a deep impact on an Eve2023, or many. I understand that she would have richer options because of my efforts, and the personal satisfaction available to me on this path.
Thank you for your suggestion.
But I am flawed in such a way that the satisfaction available on that path would never overcome my knowledge that there was no shortage of English speaking Eve2023's before I began. There was no shortage of uninjured Adam2023's, either. That the wells I drilled would just start pumping saltwater as sea levels rise. While I can improve the situation directly in front of me, it is a Sisyphean task.
Using your methods, I have no chance of improving the situation, as a whole. I would be surrounded on all sides as far as I could see, by the futility of my efforts.
If that were all I wanted, I would still have a career.
So, why a thousand years?
Because people can process that in a thousand years we won't have fossil fuels, without triggering defense mechanisms. Everyone understands that life was different 1000 years ago, so if I am focused a thousand years out, people are less concerned by how my efforts will affect them. They are less concerned by things that appear odd to them.
Because people can understand that when the future without fossil fuels arrives, those who practiced for this environment are likely to do better. And that those practices, weird as they are, could be useful to their grandbabies.
Because when people on opposite sides of any Overton window focus on a near target, their perspectives are nearly completely oppositional. (This could be graphed as a very short isosceles triangle with the Overton window as a base, and the legs as perspective.) If they focus far enough into the distance, their perspectives become nearly parallel. (Picture a very tall isosceles triangle.)
People on the opposite sides of an Overton window are concerned by different aspects of issues. I doubt they will be much interested in working on the same problems, in the same ways. But someone from the far right trying to demonstrate their own vision of Adam's perspective is going to “raise awareness” in the right, in ways nobody else could. Same for the left. Their efforts aren't likely to look the same at all. But they would compete. And competition is good.
Because a thousand years is far enough away to make the full resource loops clearer. So short term patches that kinda address the problems we create, are more clearly just patches. This addresses this problem:
“The key problem with the metacrisis is that we have a bunch of different perspectives that cause different problems but we lack a universal interface that will fix them all at the same time. Instead each perspective tries to fix it in their own way without realizing that their solution inadvertently becomes someone else's problem.”
Because a long enough timeline allows one to be strategic in how to stage efforts. Fix X, and use the recovered resources to address Y, use the environment where X and Y are nonproblems to deal with Z. This gives entirely different solution sets for Z, than trying to address Z directly.
Because I believe the immediacy bias of my culture has left lands that could be orchards of low hanging fruit, virtually untouched.
And finally, I know of no way to change the future without making changes in the present. Adam's perspective is just a tool to help make the choice of which action to take.
“Putting on own oxygen mask first makes a good deal of common sense, but how does it then make common sense to focus on unborn posterity rather than "the evils of the day" that are certainly sufficient if circle of care is to be expanded?”
If the future doesn't fit within one's circle of care, how exactly could one expect the the future to be better than today? Serendipity is not a substitute for strategy.
From
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu (many thanks to AH)
“Humans are similarly “local” by nature, most concerned with events in the very short term: eating today; rent this month; quarterly profits; annual yield; few-year political terms. Some thought goes into decade-level planning, but seldom extends beyond one’s own lifetime. All this is very understandable and is the way it is for good reason. It’s a sensible reaction to dealing with uncertainty and limited control over a complex life, and is highly adaptive in an evolutionary sense.
Economists formalize this natural tendency as a discount rate: devaluing the future relative to the present. Where money counts—that is, in nearly all current human decisions—the distant future may as well not exist, having essentially zero value. [Late addition: putting zero value on the future is one way to assure a worthless future.]
Maybe this dismal framing simply captures human nature accurately. But maybe it also amplifies a destructive tendency—conditioning us to think in these myopic terms.”
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I started this thread in the ERE2 subforum for good reason. I was trying to address ERE2 concerns. But J&G's posts recently in other ERE2 threads made me aware of how much confusion there is with ERE2.
In my mind, ERE is a fantastic guide to becoming a PC in a world of NPCs. How to free ourselves.
It works. But it's not the only guide. It is a guide that works if one's path is close enough to Jacob's to make the leap.
ERE is the grimoire for a class of economic surfers/wizards. Where we learn the balance and flow of the interface between the personal, and the economy.
And ERE2 is about the things that PCs can accomplish together. Not merely EREmites, PCs.
If we seperate the ERE2 possibilities, we could choose categories like “The quests EREmites could coordinate together” and “the quests that Jacob could lead us on”. But this thread, and my obsession is more like “building a quest generator (or many generators).”
Using the trope of a game within a game, imagine a huge, complex MMORPG. After one had played the game long enough, the standard rules and rewards get old. But it is possible to create a different game, with different goals; and operate that game within the world running the original rules.
Contrast this with lobbying Admin to nerf or buff aspects of the game for a preferred game balance (political solutions).
I tried to look up an example of games within games, but Google defeated me. If anyone could provide examples, I would appreciate them.
In “fight club” there was a “homework assignment” that was such a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWNrPCakd2I
“Start a fight with a total stranger, you're going to start a fight, and you are going to lose.”
Such a simple, voluntary, reversible change to the internal ruleset, allowed the near PC's of the movie to crack open the lives of random NPCs. Not to break the NPCs, but to empower them.
The world at large did not have to change. The internal ruleset of bored PCs only needed to change slightly. And the game within the game is born.
No Admin was needed. No unavailable resources were needed. All that was needed were players looking for a new game, and someone willing to generate a quest. Tyler Durden created some great, though destructive, games that work without changing the larger ruleset.
I'm not interested in adding violence to this world. It has more than it needs.
But I am deeply interested in game design, in ways of generating quests that show us new ways of playing the same old game, in new ways.