Accelerating Change & Increasing Complexity

[Ego]

Accelerating Change & Increasing Complexity

Change is happening at an accelerating rate. Politics, culture, climate, beliefs, morals, the nature of work, genetic engineering, health, relationships, the physical characteristics of human beings... - it is all changing fast and the rate of change is accelerating.

Increasing complexity allows fewer people to understand the changes. When one area of change overlaps another, the ability to measure the change, scan the future and prepare an adaptation becomes more challenging.

Add the fact that we have several cognitive biases (confirmation, framing & attitude polarization to name a few) that blur our ability to see change and a culture that is increasingly denying change because the consequences of admitting it is somehow unthinkable.

The first step is to know what changes are happening and to acknowledge them.

Here is a thread for doing just that.

[Ego]

Almost 30% decline in young men's testosterone levels in less than one generation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9519315292

[J_]

Or....let the changes be...
And do live simple, be content, be active, give love..

[Scott 2]

I've been thinking lately about how I keep up with the change. I can't parse everything myself and many sources have unacceptable lag time. My general pattern is to get a couple trusted experts in each area of interest, then let them tell what to know. I also try to engage in a real life community.


Tech (career) - 1-2 weekly podcasts, 1-2 yearly conferences and roughly a book every other month. Book selections emerge from expert recommendations. I debate on a monthly in person meetup, but have not pulled the trigger. Work is the community.

Yoga / Spirituality - 1-2 weekly podcasts, now an online class. My wife's yoga class most weeks is the community, plus she attends training that we talk about. I'm very well read here and it doesn't change fast, so no other education.

Lifting / Fitness - 1-2 weekly podcasts. Local gym 1-2x a week. No deep community here, but no strong desire to advance it either. I'm better read than the work I'll put in to improve, so no other education either. In FIRE, I'm likely to pursue a deeper community.

Money - I participate here for community and expertise, dip into MMM once in awhile. No real life community, limited further education. Again, already well read. I couldn't find a compelling podcast. They are all either too basic, or targeted at professional investors, with far more detail than I care to consume.


I ignore everything else, unless it amuses me or appears on Google News. Keeping up is impossible.

[classical_Liberal]

CRISPR Gene Editing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing
As this technology improves it has vast implications to the human race.

The ethical implications alone are staggering from a Gattaca perspective.

However, it also has the potential to solve many long term problems for our species. I find it interesting culturally, that this has not been grabbed onto by the techno-optimist cults. It's a human technical breakthrough that can literally save us from ourselves and is possibly within a decade of some serious implementation. Yet most of the ethical connotations remain negative in popular culture.

[ertyu]

Here's what gives me the creeps: neuralink and whatever tf boston dynamics are up to

[Scott 2]

The cool robots are much scarier once you realize where the funding comes from.

[ertyu]

yep.

[George the original one]

Social evolution is the scary one to me. Trump's presidential campaign and subsequent election to the office was the embodiment of upending societal norms that, frankly, are disturbing to me for their broad acceptance. The level of name-calling, lying, and distortion of reality ("Alternative Facts") has been like living through Big Brother's newspeak.

[enigmaT120]

I first noticed it with George W. Bush's "WMD's" repetition. Repeat the lie long enough and people will believe it. As if I didn't have enough reason to dislike other people.

[ertyu]

Like frogs in a pot, we each start to live more and more in our very own Truman show. And not just when it comes to politics and disinformation - that there is AI that can sense when bipolar people are in a manic phase and push tickets to Las Vegas at them, or that the AI knows a teen mom is pregnant before her parents do and starts sending her ads for mommy products at Target is horrific.

[IlliniDave]

Social evolution is the scary one to me. Trump's presidential campaign and subsequent election to the office was the embodiment of upending societal norms that, frankly, are disturbing to me for their broad acceptance. The level of name-calling, lying, and distortion of reality ("Alternative Facts") has been like living through Big Brother's newspeak.

I read 1984 in 1979 or 1980 (assignment in high school Lit class). At the time it at least seemed like Orwell's vision was either something that was way, way off in the future or just plain wrong. But in the last 20 years it seems like we've embraced it and distilled it to new levels. Multiple competing "truths" that are laced with falsity. Easy to find a story but virtually impossible to find the story. I honestly don't know if there is any person or entity out there that is trustworthy. Ignorance is bliss. Love is hate. War is peace. We have it all.

Back in my school days we also learned that change in acceleration is jerk. Seems like an apt term.

What's increasingly my belief is that humans are largely driven by emotion that we've tried to temper with reason. So as the pursuits of reason become increasingly fractured and disjoint, either though increasing specialization or deceit/propagandizing, emotion steps in to fill the "holes".

[7Wannabe5]

I recently viewed a documentary about the advent of radio broadcast early in the 20th century. Since for the first time, broadcasts/news was going out to everyone, the early announcers/newsmen had to learn to project a neutral unbiased stance because the advertisers sponsoring the broadcasts didn't want to offend any of their potential customers. Irony, therefore, being that 20th century era of mass-marketing was positive influence on moderation of tone. Newspapers prior to radio tended to be more niche-oriented and biased.

I also learned on a year end wrap-up that Cokie Roberts died this year. I always thought of her as an ideal moderate journalist. Kids these days have no idea what it was like to grow up in an era where almost everybody watched similar news broadcasts on TV and how that influence centered the conversation. Scary thought is that large corporations or similar entities that are not in the business of selling the news to niche markets actually might be the best sources of unbiased information these days. For instance, Jacob has pointed to large insurance companies producing their own in-house reports on likely costs related to climate change. The magazine published by Costco is also an interesting read. I also believe that reports generated by government agencies that are too boring to be under scrutiny, like the IRS or USDA, are good sources of facts and current trends. There still are competent,clear-eyed people out there steering the ships, but they are no longer "making the news" in either sense of the phrase.

[Ego]

Hypersonic Missiles are a Game Changer

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/opin ... siles.html

Missiles whose accuracy minimizes the risk of collateral damage, that pose no risk to aircrews, are unstoppable and phenomenally accurate, can yield an impact equal to five to ten tons of high explosive with no warhead at all yet be capable of delivering a nuclear bomb, and can reach nearly every coordinate on the surface of the earth within 30 minutes. Death from the air, guaranteed on-time delivery.

and

Moreover, hypersonics are a weaponized moral hazard for states with a taste for intervention, because they erase barriers to picking fights. Is an adversary building something that might be a weapons factory? Is there an individual in an unfriendly country who cannot be apprehended?

and

The biggest threat from hypersonics is that they come at a time when the world’s arm control treaties are falling apart. We need a multilateral agreement to limit hypersonic arsenals and their use, but unfortunately, the United States, which would have to take the lead in orchestrating the negotiation of such an agreement, is uninterested in any deals that might tie its hands.

[George the original one]

What's increasingly my belief is that humans are largely driven by emotion that we've tried to temper with reason. So as the pursuits of reason become increasingly fractured and disjoint, either though increasing specialization or deceit/propagandizing, emotion steps in to fill the "holes".

"Trust your feelings" and "Use the Force".

[IlliniDave]

"Trust your feelings" and "Use the Force".

If only we had more Jedis! As it is, we wind up with elevated outrage, name-calling (and general divisiveness), and a culture of "by any means necessary".

[Jason]

IBM was founded at the beginning of the 20th century. Dell and Cisco were each founded in 1984 and yet are already fighting against becoming "the next IBM" as the the cloud and SAS are replacing hardware. (For what's it worth, I am personally betting that Cisco will transition successfully.) Microsoft was founded in 1975 yet escaped finding itself as being classified in terms of IBM because it pivoted successfully. The key is trying to identify the next Microsoft as corporate antiquation is accelerating.

In 1987 the FCC lifted The Fairness Doctrine ushering in conservative talk radio i.e. Rush Limbaugh as well and planting the seeds for partisan cable news as well as the cluster that is now Fakebook. So long Walter Cronkite. Its interesting, from an Orwellian perspective, of how rewriting the past is essential to both sides i.e. those who control the past control the future. On the right we have "Make America Great Again" on the left we have social justice warriors tearing down statues of people who do not comport perfectly to their present day values. Its not only the rapidity of a de-historicized fractualization, its the extent of fractualization. Thank you Derrida. That being said I think its more a techno-corporate Brave New World of entertaining ourselves to death than 1984 government control of information. Freud's concept of the narcissism of small differences in a materialistic society where news and information has become just another consumer product from which you can pick and choose according to your personal tastes like its something you wear.

[HalfCent]

Brilliant, @Jason!

[intellectualpersuit]

My fear is that this massive system with accelerating change and increasing complexity has too much momentum, and is too complicated to understand and predict for the purpose of course correction, placing us on a ride going off the rails that can't be changed. Unless anyone has ideas.

[7Wannabe5]

Seedless mango currently being grown in test fields in India.