4th, 5th, 6th Person Perspective

[chenda]

Ha! trickle down is back in style? Are any of Regan's economists still alive?

Ideas tend to trickle down whereas money tends to trickle up.

[classical_Liberal]

@Chenda
How does one define the top vs the bottom in the trickle of ideas? Wealth is relatively easily defined, so is height, etc.

If ideas trickle down, then how can the "top" be determined in advance of the trickle? (was Galileo or the Church on top for the trickle down?) or is it the trickle itself that which defines the top? IOW, in two dimensions like a square, pentagon, hexagon,(ha!) which point or line represents the top in which the trickle will occur?

If this is the top of a social structure, how do you define such structure? Every social structure has countless interactions with other social structures, some larger ones encompassing smaller ones in totality.

Isn't it important to understand and define "top" when discussing anything tricking down from it? Results only point to trickle down after the fact (ie when "top" is established), which means nothing if predictability is impossible.

Thanks for you time!

[chenda]

@classical_liberal - that's a good question which I'll need to think more about. I'm thinking it's more like the trickle down defines the top but I can't help feeling that might be a bit of an intellectual cop out on my part

[Riggerjack]

WRC,

That was an odd link. Why did you include it?

I looked around, but the closest thing to showing what they are doing is a .PDF of their fair in India, back in 2014.

There were lots of ideas looking for grant $$$. Janiki sent a display, pimping the same tech that Bellingham can't afford. Sesemee Street was there proposing an education campaign. And then we get into the “creative” solutions. A standard outhouse built from a wooden frame and billboard vinyl. Lots of designs that involved seperating solids from liquids, and moving solids by auger for further processing.

Methinks if a poo auger is part of the design, the designer does not envision doing the maintance himself. When (not if) that auger jams, it will need to be disassembled, cleaned and reassembled. None of the auger designs seemed to take this into consideration.

Whereas my design is operated by manually turning a valve or many valves, then a year or 5 later, turning it/them back.

There were lots of systems that will dry out poo. This seems useful in places where there isn't water to flush. But I think I would solve the water problem before addressing the poo problem. Using water allows for methane gathering. A place low on water could probably put methane to good use.

There were some new ideas I hadn't thought of, or run across elsewhere. One system was set up to raise macroorganisms (flies, snails, etc) on poo. I admire the simple loop, but adding more flies/snails to my environment doesn't appeal to me much.

By comparison, my system isn't very creative. All I did was take a standard American septic system, and intercept the waste products (gas, liquid, and solid) and reroute to make them useful byproducts, rather than waste. My system outputs biogas, biosolids to composting, and a water/fertilizer combination for irrigation.

Nothing like the pizazz of a poo-fired pressure cooker that turns poo into poo fired pressure cooker fuel...




@Chenda

A public sewer system was once a very controversial idea, many reputable people like the editor of The Economist thought it the start of a slippery slope towards communism. In my town their were literally riots over the idea, not 200 years ago.

Yeah. It's always controversial when everyone* needs to sacrifice for everyone's** benefit. I suggest that if there was rioting, the benefits were concentrated in ways the sacrifices weren't.


* & ** political systems are adroit at separating the everyone who pays from the everyone who benefits. It turns out, "everyone" can be a very small minority, according to the practices of my culture.

Nobody forced anyone to go electric. Nobody forced Ford to electrify the F-150. People recognized "better effects" and chose them, at their own pace. No herding necessary.

I think there is a LOT of herding and coercion involved with this

I would like to hear more about your thoughts here. What forms of coercion were used on Ford to cause them to electrify the F-150?




@zbigi

If you google “history of sanitation” there are lots of Wikipedia pages, most telling stories originating in 17th century London.

If you google “world history of sanitation”, you will find different results, from far earlier, that surpass the European model of “poo in the street, and clean up from there.”


@jacob

This is why these "extreme efforts at the personal level" serve as the spear-point of the movement.

I recognize the parallels between ERE and endurance running. And agree with your math.

But I would point out that endurance running is still a fringe activity, in a world of growing obesity. Nowhere in your example did I see any way of addressing the confounding factors those exponential curves are experiencing.

In other words, you seem to have a firm grasp on the ways a fringe movement can propagate itself.

Is ERE2 supposed to break out of the fringe?


@classical liberal,

Google “Thomas Sowell trickle down” for a better understanding of who said what about trickle down economics. It's worth the time. And probably not what you think.

For myself, I use a model more like diffusion.

Information disperses from highly concentrated to less concentrated. So if one embraces a hexagonal model of society, information could flow from anywhere, to anywhere. From edges, or corners, or random points within, toward edges, corners, or other random points.

Of course this wouldn't help identify one group as “dominant/victims/good/rich/blah, blah” in the way most models of social structures are meant to be used...

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.

I showed you that methane at point of use is available in small quantities (no distribution costs). That methane can be captured easily/cheaply at point of emission.

How does that fit with your peak oil/CC models? My guess is it doesn't. We aren't talking about quantities of energy/methane on the same scale. In the assumptions of those models, I'm talking about rounding errors.

But how would those models be different, if they had this factiod available when designing the model?

I'm not asking you to defend your models.

I'm asking you how the information I am giving you fits within your worldview. If you find that it wasn't considered, what does that tell you?

You have models of food shortages, farmland depletion, fertilizer shortfalls.

I just showed you a system that recovers human/yard waste as fertilized water. Probably again, too small to be on those models.

You have built models. You understand the models you use to understand wicked problems.

If you add in the information that I have given you, would you design those models in the same way?

If not, what does that tell you?

[7Wannabe5]

@RJ:

All sorts of loop-closing possibilities such as the one you outlined are considered in the models. Human manure is recycled to a much greater extent in many parts of the world. For instance, it is used as feedstock for some varieties of pond raised fish in places where that is legal/acceptable.

The energy available from human waste is by necessity less than the energy available in the food consumed by those humans. In the U.S. currently, the energy wasted due to food being discarded directly from refrigerators is greater than the energy available from human manure. The trucks that transport our food from field to retail outlets burn far more energy than is available from human waste.

That said, it is true of course that ingenious humans such as yourself will come up with all sorts of workarounds and substitutions as/if the price of petroleum increases due to decrease in supply. However, if the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested ) of these solutions is lower than the current EROEI of petroleum then to the extent that our quality of life is dependent on energy-input intensive goods and services, our quality of life will decline. And there is some evidence that this decline might be soon and fast or already occurring , but, as always, not equally distributed everywhere.

As of now, the conventional fossil fuel industry and big fossil fuel intensive agriculture in the U.S. are still supported by the government for reasons, quite possibly valid, related to national security. Somebody has to be the asshole, and the asshole usually needs/demands an extra pork chop on his plate.

Anyways, just the babblings of a semi-jaded permaculturalist. Carry on.

[jacob]

@RJ - To add a bit to 7wb5. Denmark has carried out some experiments along the lines you're suggesting using its resident pig population of ~12M, which is about 2x the human population, to extract methane. Pigs weigh about the same as humans and presumably produce about the same amount of shit on a daily basis? Even better, (ab)using pigs bypasses the whole rights/opinion/ick issue, allowing people to experiment with generating methane at scale. And so the humans have done so already.

While I have not spent that much time looking into the specifics, it's my understanding that most of these attempts have failed because they're not financially viable under the current metrics. That is, conventional alternatives are cheaper whether measured by $$$ or EROEI. OTOH, collecting "night soil" and "pissing in a pot" has historically been of great significance, so it's not like the idea is DOA. It's just a hard sell, especially at scale, where financing matters.

[chenda]

I would like to hear more about your thoughts here. What forms of coercion were used on Ford to cause them to electrify the F-150?

EV have enjoyed a lot of government promotion. Subsidies/tax breaks, mass procurement, threats of ICE sale bans. As noted on the other thread no manufacturer wants to end up the Kodak of cars.

[Riggerjack]

All sorts of loop-closing possibilities such as the one you outlined are considered in the models.

I respectfully disagree. Look much closer at the assumptions of your models.

Human manure is recycled to a much greater extent in many parts of the world. For instance, it is used as feedstock for some varieties of pond raised fish in places where that is legal/acceptable.

Yes, that's poo, and a concentrating loop. sigh.

The energy available from human waste is by necessity less than the energy available in the food consumed by those humans. In the U.S. currently, the energy wasted due to food being discarded directly from refrigerators is greater than the energy available from human manure. The trucks that transport our food from field to retail outlets burn far more energy than is available from human waste.

Yup.

That said, it is true of course that ingenious humans such as yourself will come up with all sorts of workarounds and substitutions as/if the price of petroleum increases due to decrease in supply.

If I described anything ingenious, the ingenuity is not mine. The science I described was worked out generations ago. If there is any intellectual property, I expect it was patented before I was born.

However, if the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested ) of these solutions is lower than the current EROEI of petroleum then to the extent that our quality of life is dependent on energy-input intensive goods and services, our quality of life will decline.

Well, as I said above, I don't think EROEI is the right metric. But if we have to use it, I would remind you EROEI is a ratio, not a quantity. The numerator is the same in both cases, methane.

But the denominator is different. Compare the energy to drill a few Km into the earth, embed a few km of steel pipe, fracking agents, and the network to distribute that energy. Add in maintenance on well and distribution network. Divide that number by the years until the well is played out and the network to depreciate. Divide by number of users.

Mine generates methane passively from waste as long as it is used and maintained. (How much energy does it take to flush a toilet? Is it more if one has an integrated system?) And most of the effort to create this system is currently practiced in building a septic system. The energy is produced at point of use, no transportation costs.

You teach math. What happens as a denominator approaches zero?

... And so the humans have done so already.

While I have not spent that much time looking into the specifics, it's my understanding that most of these attempts have failed because they're not financially viable under the current metrics. That is, conventional alternatives are cheaper whether measured by $$$ or EROEI. OTOH, collecting "night soil" and "pissing in a pot" has historically been of great significance, so it's not like the idea is DOA.

As I said above, everything I have talked about in I-III was old technology. It has been tried many times, in many places. I'm not surprised by the pigs in Denmark. Hell, this was the power source for Bartertown in "Mad Max, beyond the Thunderdome."

It's just a hard sell, especially at scale, where financing matters.

Absolutely. It doesn't work very well that way. I strongly recommend you stop trying to use that model. It's been tried. Mainly, it fails.

But I would point out that everything you know about what is financially viable, is based on people like you, doing math they have been perfecting, in an environment different from the environment which you currently live in.

Since the world is different, how accurately do you think those equations are, in describing the limits of your world?

It's a bit of a trick question, because unless you are looking at the periphery, the equations all seem to still work. So for the equation minded, the world has changed very little. But if one plays in the periphery, the space outside the financialized math is distorting in ways that open up new possibilities, not visible from the range where the math still works.

I would point out that we manage to build septic systems and WWTPs. Disposing of methane to atmosphere, and biosolids to the seafloor, and still it is "financially viable".

Doubling the cost of a septic system install ($6400 for me back in 2009) to capture waste and gain useful products (fertilized irrigation water, methane, and compost) by itself, may be a hard sell.

Or not.

I don't know. That wasn't my plan.

[Riggerjack]

The "informational core dump"-style of writing (or podcasting) doesn't work very well for me because internally I mostly think in diagrams of relations. In order to think about some input, I must first translate words and factoids and match them to the relevant relations, then think about those relations, which generally happens without using words (no inner voice), and then ultimately translate these thoughts into words as output if I want to communicate back.

With that kind of internal wiring, the thinking is easy, but the translation is hard and consumes most of the mental energy.

As such I prefer the input to have some structure explaining where it is going and why including a particular factoid is relevant. Metaphorically, it's a lot easier for me to figure out what kind of building someone is talking about if the framing is described upfront as well as some idea of how the final building is going to be used. Listening to 10000 word description of the various types of construction material on the site tells me nothing about the building.

In short, a long list of factoids or "conceptoids" is pretty much wasted on me. They cost energy. I don't enjoy them for their own sake. To put it in other words. You know how some people enjoy long-form articles like slatestarcodex, listening to podcast interviews, spending 4 hours getting lost in wikipedia, and reading all the footnotes in all the books. I'm the opposite of that

I have been sitting with this for a few months.

I'll be honest, I'm stumped. Apparently, our thinking processes are far more divergent than I hoped.

So I tried to build a relatable framework for you. Try this:



Try to picture the world from Adam's point of view. Adam lives 50 generations in the future, give or take. That puts him around the year 3000. Time enough that we can say with some degree of certainty that fossil fuels are not being used. Either because we became civilized, and figured out how to stop using them, or we just ran out of them; but either way, nobody's really using fossil fuels anymore.

Part of the Prime Directive, so to speak, is to leave the world a better place. This is the driver of most of our philosophies.

But how does one leave the world a better place for Adam? What can I do today, while I have the positive effects of the American Empire bringing the world's goods to me cheaply? While I have cheap energy available to me at my whim, what can I do to make the world a better place for Adam?

Now, there's some that may think that this is kind of a silly question. If you're used to looking at the world from the perspective of wicked problems, the idea that anything's going to get better soon, is ridiculous.

But if one is looking to remove that immediacy bias, the cultural bias, and look from a long way off, Adam's viewpoint seems to work pretty well.

I've spent some time thinking about exactly how things could be better for a hypothetical Adam. I can't save him fossil fuels. I can't gather resources and stash them away so that they're still available for him. I might be able to change a small amount of land use in ways that might still be providing value to him; but you know, it's really difficult to try to secure land use over the course of 1000 years.

But what does move the needle for Adam is if now, while we have this glut of energy available to us, we go to the effort of figuring out how to make the world that he lives in (A world without fossil fuels), a pleasant place to be; by his definition and our own.

Our culture defines Adam’s life as post apocalyptic. I call this Adam’s Default Life. If we do nothing, this seems the default path.

But if Adam has a good life, it’s because someone worked out how to live well, without fossil fuels. To me, it seems clear this is easier to do with the benefits of plentiful resources, such as we have, now.

The world that Adam lives in doesn't have fossil fuels, but it does have the aftereffects of our use of fossil fuels. So interestingly, if we figure out how to live Adam’s Good Life, the sooner we do it, the better the world that Adam lives in. Simply because he has fewer after-effects to be dealing with.

If Adam's good life is appealing, compared to consumer capitalism, well maybe it's possible for people to leapfrog to this lifestyle; skipping the energy intensive consumerism stage that we're currently in, and go directly to Adams good lifestyle.

Adam has a lot of resources available to him. He has whatever he needs, if we provided him with those.

Or Adam is scrambling through a world built by survivors after the fumes ran out.

The way I see it, it's simply a question of which we choose to do. A toggle switch for the future. Either we create the means to live Adam’s Good Life on local resources using energy at the rate it can be gathered, or we don’t.

So if I were insane, bored, and had years to work on it, I might look at how such a thing could be created...

…..



First, go back to the basics, review the wicked problems. All of those wicked problems show processes that self-terminate long before Adam ever hears about them.

But the reasons for why they are self-terminating and why they're important to us, don't matter to Adam, at all. They make about as much sense to Adam, as sacrificing people on Aztec temples does to me.

I'm sure that within their own internal logic, and by the rules of their culture, a visual display of gruesomeness was the right move to make while under threat, for Mesoamericans. This is why it had been taken to such extreme levels. But I can't really understand what it is that they were thinking was going to happen to solve their problem this way.

And in the same way, I don't think Adam can really understand how it is that we don't have the resource tokens to solve problems, when money is internally generated within our culture.

In short, all of those wicked problems are completely irrelevant to Adam. Roughly equivalent to calculating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin...





Let’s take a minute with that.

All the ways we currently track the metacrisis, as a collection of wicked problems, are irrelevant to the solution set.

Self-terminating processes will simply self-terminate.

All those wicked problems are self-terminating processes. All of them. That’s what makes them wicked. The internal forces and guidance mechanisms have no potential steadying state. Failure is inevitable without resetting the control mechanisms, and we have no useful influence on those controls. Thus, the wicked problem.

Alternatively, one could compare the general trends of what we're doing, to see which trends are moving toward self-termination. That seems to be the work that Game B and Daniel Schmachtenburger are doing. They are running a “from here to there simulation”. Where they think they know where “here” is, and they're trying to define where “there” could be.







My approach is to define a destination.

“There” is Adam’s good life.

This gives me a point of comparison for mapping “here”.

…





Unfortunately, nobody has ever been there. It seems to be beyond most peoples’ conceptual limitations to even try to imagine such a place. Or if they can imagine it, they think of Elves and magic.

But Adam has made clear to me, I don’t have to ever get there. The journey from here to there will take generations, time I don’t have. We just need to start some processes, and securely fund them. Those who come later will perfect that which we start.

The things we do, we get better at. The rest, we don’t develop at all.

…



Perhaps in that light, look at what I've been trying to describe in RJTP I-III.

[7Wannabe5]

You teach math. What happens as a denominator approaches zero?

If I'm imagining the benefits of planting some fruit trees vs. the benefits of planting corn every year, there is a portion of the graph that plots yield over effort that might look like it is heading towards infinity, and now I am living in my very own self-created freakin' permaculture Garden of Eden, but then, uh damn, thump, even fruit trees don't live forever.

That said, you are pretty much preaching to the choir if you are noting that there is almost an infinite regress of value niches in the discard market that aren't viewed as worthwhile from the perspective of big finance, etc. For instance, the "trash" Ego's affluent tenants create which is only accessible/worthwhile for him to process, or the food rotting in the inaccessible niches of refrigerators across the U.S., or the information about your unique personal preferences that is inaccessible to anybody (or intelligence without body) who does not have access to your quiet mind.

OTOOH, bearing in my mind that I'm not even sure if we're talking about the same models, there remains embedded in the models with which I am familiar, an essential disagreement about the time value of money. Will the future be Post-Growth or Post-Scarcity or BAU or none or all of the above? Should I buy my yet-to-be-conceived granddaughter a 30 Year Treasury or AI ETF or FITB???? This disagreement is too core to be resolved through compromise. Complex systems don't provide the easy morals of an instructive fable; they produce tortoises, hares, and humans.

[Riggerjack]

If I'm imagining the benefits of planting some fruit trees vs. the benefits of planting corn every year, there is a portion of the graph that plots yield over effort that might look like it is heading towards infinity, and now I am living in my very own self-created freakin' permaculture Garden of Eden, but then, uh damn, thump, even fruit trees don't live forever.

Exactly. In your example, there is a qualitative difference (corn vs fruit trees) not represented in a quantitative model (bushels or calories). And neither addresses the rest of the confounding factors (pests and blights, soil, light, etc).

My point wasn't "Look, I got High Score!". It was that EROEI is an inappropriate model. There is a qualitative difference.

A qualitative difference that pushes some variable towards infinity or zero crashes models.

I am not asking you to check to see if your models have a category for regenerative practices. I am asking you to recognize the difference in quality.

I propose that if the modelers were aware of a possibility of one (or more than one... ) of their variables being pushed to zero or infinity, they would have built their models differently, or not at all.

I am asking you to look for the ways it doesn't fit your models. In the same way jacob's quality of life doesn't fit income/quality of life models. Qualitative difference.

This disagreement is too core to be resolved through compromise.

This disagreement is irrelevant, for the same reasons wicked problems are irrelevant. This set of assumptions does not contain a solution set. New assumptions are needed.

I'm trying to get you to build new assumptions, so you can build new mental models. Because you live in a new world.

Try to imagine trying to explain (Tristan Harris's take on social media/our response to covid, other complex effects of changes in communication costs) to your yourself in the year 2000.

The idea that all that change happened/is happening, and old models (or new models using old data categorization) still apply? That we have picked the efficient path? That we even recognize the low hanging fruit, in a world changing so fast, is ludicrous.

Adam's perspective makes this clearer.

Try this.

there is a trope starting with Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" to go back in time, and use one's knowledge from the future to fix some primitive behaviors. Introduce sanitation practices, perhaps.

So what if Adam came back to today?

Knowing what we know, and what he needs to live a good life in the future, what does he introduce today?

As I demonstrated up thread, there is a big delta between what we do, and what we know how to do.

Because we already know what we know; and we can guess at Adam's needs; it turns out, we don't actually need Adam to make this work.

...

While I have not spent that much time looking into the specifics, it's my understanding that most of these attempts have failed because they're not financially viable under the current metrics. That is, conventional alternatives are cheaper whether measured by $$$ or EROEI.

What if there were a plan to make new practices "extremely financially viable" compared to current practices, using existing metrics?

How fast does "extremely financially viable" push change through our culture?

Could that change, result in different relevant metrics?

What are your metrics for ERE2?

What does Adam know about ERE2?

[7Wannabe5]

My point wasn't "Look, I got High Score!". It was that EROEI is an inappropriate model. There is a qualitative difference.

Okay, gotcha now. Yes, it is true that whenever you attempt to make a quantitative model of the real world a lot of information goes missing; the map is not the territory. OTOH, quantification also frequently reveals information not readily available to the human senses; math and science are helpful.

I propose that if the modelers were aware of a possibility of one (or more than one... ) of their variables being pushed to zero or infinity, they would have built their models differently, or not at all.

I'm not entirely sure where you are going with this, but, for instance, the fact that any form of growth will be limited or constrained in a real system, does not mean that a given growth model is inaccurate within those constraints. A linear model accurately predicts the amount of water in the tub at time t if it is being filled at rate r, even if it's real world ridiculous to consider the situation when you take t to infinity. Similarly, population growth is accurately modeled as exponential even though there will obviously never be a planet Earth inhabited by a trillion humans, and even though the fertility rate itself is influenced by complex factors such as the education of females.

Different models do imagine and apply different constraints and different feedback mechanisms, both positive and negative, within systems. For instance, the Rational Optimists tend towards imagining human ingenuity towards substitution of material or technology as being pretty much unlimited. In fact, they imagine AI as a near-term accelerant of this potential. So, their prediction would be that my yet-to-be-conceived grandchild will quite likely live to see a world of virtually unlimited cheap energy, global climate change largely averted, and universal basic income for all. OTOH, the doomiest pessimists construct a model in which end of the world as we know it/extinction of the human species will occur near term when disastrous positive feedback loops are triggered as average global temperature/CO2 concentrations reach new highs. However, there is no essential disagreement between the optimists and the pessimists in terms of the basic "tub filling" model of global climate change, and the fact that it can't/won't be extended to infinity for multiple reasons comprising wide variety of constraints.

So what if Adam came back to today?

Knowing what we know, and what he needs to live a good life in the future, what does he introduce today?

As I demonstrated up thread, there is a big delta between what we do, and what we know how to do.

Because we already know what we know; and we can guess at Adam's needs; it turns out, we don't actually need Adam to make this work.

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? 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?

[Riggerjack]

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.”


…...........

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.

[daylen]

The new game within the game is deploying mass intelligence with the help of giant tensor processors to map every decision within our light cone till the end of time. We are like the seeds of this potentially unstable process extending out tens, thousands, or even millions of years. If humanity succeeds in solving the alignment problem internally, they will have also solved it externally into a massively parallelized world of ambient calculation. Seems to be the case from my perception but curious how your view meshes with the possibility of a future where AI is general, cheap, well-aligned enough, and robust to energy disruption.

[daylen]

What we build, limits how we think.

How we think, limits what we build.

Can't help but bring turing completeness into this jam. What computer science / finite math would have us believe is that so long as thinking is turing complete(*) it can be used to build anything and anything can be imbued with thought(+). Though, what thinking cannot do alone is describe all that can be built or not built. Basically, this perspective implies there are no short cuts or free lunches and to know for sure if something is buildable you must build it.

A possible counter swing to this line of thought might be that infinite math works but only if all the uncountables align, and to be aligned they must all be represented.. or something. The map becomes the territory if and only if it completes itself kinda thing, and perhaps the only way to self-complete without contradiction is through the "proper" disclosure of an infinite error-correction process.

(*) Which is perhaps a surprisingly low bar. Hence why perhaps something as "dumb" as a neural net can do anything really with enough scale and training.

(+) So long as it can take the form of a turing machine which can point to, change, and remember states.

[chenda]

I suggest that if there was rioting, the benefits were concentrated in ways the sacrifices weren't.

I suspect more importantly it was just a widespread lack of understanding of germ theory.

[7Wannabe5]

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.

I've understood that we are at a cultural dead end since at least 1978/79 when I first read "Breakfast of Champions" etc. This likely contributed to my own first attempt at becoming a PC which was dropping out of high school at age 14 with a rough plan to educate myself by reading my way through the library in alphabetical order. I must have skipped over some less interesting titles, because I remember I was reading Bradbury when I finally got busted.

One of my more recent attempts at becoming a PC was based on asking myself "How would I behave if I lived in a future world in which having approximately 3 life/romantic/sexual partners was socially promoted?" Attempting to live in a camper on a vacant lot in the city was another such experiment.

However, now that I have semi-integrated the strong version of lack of belief in free will, I understand that my behavior, although not super commmonplace, was pretty predictable given my innate somewhat rare-for-a-female neurobiology (especially in terms of risk-aversion) and early exposure to a wide variety of reading materials.

That said, I think your take on the 1000 years perspective and quest generators was quite interesting. I agree that most humans are mostly "local" by nature, but I think even in the subset of those who think less "locally", there may be neurobiologically different tendencies in terms of expanding strategically into the future vs. opportunistically over an expanding range. IOW, there are rational investors and there are rational traders. And they thrive in different environments. So, the question one might ask would be whether the next 50 years is likely to be the sort of environment in which a rational investor will thrive or a rational trader? IOW, pick the individual or institution you trust most to give you back 64 marshmallows 50 years from now if you lend them one today. The more 50 year bets locked into place, the more rigid the structure becomes, and the more little birds who land, thump, on the ground, when the unforeseen storm knocks the big old trees down, freeing up the sunlight for opportunistic species. Etc. etc. etc.

[Slevin]

I tried to look up an example of games within games, but Google defeated me. If anyone could provide examples, I would appreciate them.

Warcraft 3 is the main poster child, where I think 6 or 7 whole different genres of games were spawned out of the map building tools and scripting languages inside the game. This might be breaking the rules of your intentions a little bit, as it was changing the whole logic of how everything could be done.

Other examples off the top of my head: I would maybe pose Settled and the new generation of Runescape Youtubers, who play an extremely old game, but by developing intense and impractical rules for themselves that make "playing the game" something drastically different than the intended mechanisms.
, Skyrim as an NPC, Minecraft literally lets you build minecraft / whatever the heck you want inside of it (people have made functioning PCs), Nuzlocke's for Pokemon, Speedrunning, Randomizer races (see Pokemon, any of the Zelda games, etc), Kaizo Ironmon (again pokemon), basically all of modding that messes with game rules, EDH for magic the gathering (new game with new rules with more players), Dandân / Forgetful Fish Format in Magic the gathering. Very easy to find people building whole new games to play within the systems / infrastructure of existing games.

I would hazard to say it is a basic human feature to play games in unintended ways for novelty value.

[jacob]

Games within games ...

A simple example would be tax planning. Most people just fill out the forms and pay the result at the bottom line. This would be the NPC equivalent. Once the PC understands the rules, it becomes possible to achieve a goal (achieving a goal is one of the core definitions of what constitutes a game) such as paying the least amount of taxes ... or deferring paying to other years.

A bigger example would be the FIRE game. Instead of optimizing for consumption over a lifetime, it becomes possible to use the same rules to gain time-freedom and control.

Minimalism is another example. Instead of buying "more, bigger, better", another aesthetic is found where "convenience, ease, and fit" is pursued as a goal. Same rules, but playing the consumer game in a very different way.

These two can be combined in a bigger game called leanFIRE. This was the original core of ERE1. It was novel at the time because the minimalist and investor Venn diagrams normally don't overlap much at all.

Permaculture is an example of taking the standard rules of growing grass, flowers, and a few tomato plants ... and converting that land into "free food that comes right out of the ground".

These are all single-player games. What about multiplayer games?

Multiplayer games require some kind of "protocol" that is "rules that govern the transmission of some value". For example, "family structure" is one such protocol. There's no reason why one should be close with people who share a fraction of one's DNA. Marriage (an extension of this protocol) is a contract protocol. Because of this protocol, we socialize with certain people and not with others. It's almost arbitrary.

Religion is another such protocol. It makes people do certain things together that they would not otherwise do. Another protocol is the nation-state. People interact mainly with people from the same nation because of the nation-protocol. A hugely influential protocol is the market-protocol which transmits money. People will do all kinds of things for pieces of paper called money. Specialization follows from mass-organization (corporatism) because being a specialist pays the most money. (The FIRE game is grafted onto this corporate game as is "the welfare state".)

The newest protocol is the internet. Specifically the protocols for sending emails and displaying web pages. (Compare to ftp'ing files.) An emergent game within this protocol is/was social media. Instead of everybody individually broadcasting a homepage and sending an email to the author, social media first made it possible to comment on other people's homepages (myspace) and subsequently (facebook, twitter, ...) dispense with homepages all together. This protocol basically made it possible to connect with people over conversation that wasn't possible before.

Where's ERE2 in this?

Recall how the market+money+corporatism fostered the idea of the specialist. The problem with a corporate structure of specialists is that it has a certain kind of blindness for the gaps. (Blind men and the elephant.) This makes it unpossible to solve complex problems [such as your sewerage example]. However, ERE1 creates generalists. People who (at WL6+) become transdisciplinary.

This should make it possible to solve problems in novel ways. So far this is only getting started. This is likely due to lack of density. There weren't all that many who had broken through the WL5-6 wall five years ago. Now there are more.

It's easy to dismiss ERE1s coming together on a regular basis (MMGs) and repeat meetups as just "another party". I tend to do that myself. However, note how quickly people develop and learn in those groups compared to the old-fashioned way of "doing everything on their own" and only communicating asynchronously. I believe this is because they're in the direct company of multi-skilled people. If I have one critique of the Skillathon, it is that I think people will discover that "figuring stuff out" will take much much longer on one's own than it does when "teachers" are is present. (Note that unlike SD:Green who makes the---in my opinion wrong assumptions---that all humans have the inherent wisdom to understand complicated problems, for these groups, there will actually be someone in the group who is competently informed. Presumably the "protocol" will recognize this. Cf. Green protocols which tend to squash individual competence.)

For example, I started my "controller"-project almost 1.5 years ago. It took me that long to figure things out. Working alone, every snag is a new problem to be worked out. E.g. my soldering iron is borked, so in order to progress, I must now learn to thread a rod. And so on ...

The router project is an attempt to get around that. I figure if we're all building the same thing && we're all somewhat multi-skilled && we're able to exchange supplies (like in the flatrate swapping thread, it will be possible to move much much faster. I expect speed to go something like the SQRT(N), where N is the number of people in the group. This would be an example of ERE2.

I have personally lost some interest in trying to define it intellectually (been there done that) and organize it socially (not for me). I've gone back (or forward) to throwing mud on the wall. I'm not sure "emergence" can be forced. Rather, it will probably come when people are ready && some external event forces it. (Like the COVID lockdowns forced people to reconsider their dependence on money and consumerism and consequently crashing the WL5-6 barrier.)

[7Wannabe5]

Multiplayer games require some kind of "protocol" that is "rules that govern the transmission of some value". For example, "family structure" is one such protocol. There's no reason why one should be close with people who share a fraction of one's DNA. Marriage (an extension of this protocol) is a contract protocol. Because of this protocol, we socialize with certain people and not with others. It's almost arbitrary.

Very true. I've sometimes wondered if I would be as inclined to socialize with members of my own family if they weren't also interesting people who enjoy talking about books and ideas. What if I had given birth to a dull child? I believe I would still love. However, a dull and unkind child would be difficult to love. OTOH, one thing I enjoy about polyamory (which also differentiates it from promiscuity*) is that it extends my social "family" and/or tribal "territory" in novel ways, and it also provides the benefit that you don't have to stake out your share of social territory post-divorce or break-up. Although, of course, with mature individuals this also applies in monogamous situations. For instance, I still have a warm social relationship with my ex-MIL.

Specialization follows from mass-organization (corporatism) because being a specialist pays the most money. (The FIRE game is grafted onto this corporate game as it "the welfare state".)...

... the market+money+corporatism fostered the idea of the specialist. The problem with a corporate structure of specialists is that it has a certain kind of blindness for the gaps. (Blind men and the elephant.) This makes it unpossible to solve complex problems. However, ERE1 creates generalists. People who (at WL6+) become transdisciplinary.

I think you just outlined the difference between the INTJ and ENTP paths. ERE1 doesn't make ENTPs into generalists, because we are already inherently generalists, and we are also inherently inclined towards self-employment, so prefer to graft our function at the market + money level rather than the market+money+ corporatism level. Although, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to not be associated with corporate entities at some junctures in your functioning in the modern world. So, for the ENTP, the ERE path would be more concerned with achieving more focused mastery and/or striving towards maximizing Ti functioning, which is kind of difficult because on neurobiology level pretty much pushes us towards more file-cabinet-gray depression or cold anger, as opposed to the Happy Hugs Adventure!! which is life on maximum Ne/Fe.

*Promiscuity pretty much assumes that you don't meet each others "people" or you routinely show up at the same small town bar so you already know each other's people.