He has been demonstrating a need for vitamin D since around 2000 (before Holick).
Bottom line: * Humans are adapted overall for an outdoor lifestyle partially clothed in the sunshine without regular bathing. * Humans in industrialized countries now spend most of their time indoors -- or travelling in enclosed vehicles where glass is designed to prevent UV transmission to prevent faded carpets but not faded people. * When humans in industrialized countries go outdoors they tend to wear a lot of clothes. * Bathing (especially with soap) disrupts the formation of vitamin D by removing natural oils from the skin which are needed to make vitamin D.
Three other factors have made vitamin D deficiency worse: * Dermatologists claiming time in the sun gives you cancer -- which is a half-truth because while sunlight can increase melanoma risk (a relatively easily treatable cancer), vitamin D reduces cancer risk for many cancers including melanoma -- which is why more office workers get melanomas than outdoor workers and why many office workers get melanomas in places they wear clothes. * The USA RDA for vitamin D was set to prevent the worst cases of rickets not to ensure optimal health and so for decades has been ten times or more too low. Only recently has it been raised to perhaps adequate for infants but the RDA is still too low for adults * Historically, a patent was granted for Vitamin D2, a synthetic and less effective form of vitamin D, and that was what doctors pushed instead of the better vitamin D3. * In order to use vitamin D optimally, you also need a health diet like with vitamin K2 and other cofactors like magnesium, zinc, and boron -- and the standard American diet tends to be lacking in these.
Another complication: if a pregnant or nursing mother has low vitamin D her child will also have low vitamin D -- which may be a contributor to autism and other health problems for young children.
And yet another (politically charged) complication: people with darker skin moving far north or south from the equator are going to be even more impacted by vitamin D deficiency (e.g. especially Somalis moving to Minnesota who also wear burkas and have a high autism rate). Just like people with lighter skin who move to the equator are at elevated risk from melanoma. Skin color is adaptive for latitude (some exceptions being people who get vitamin D in their diet from fish or other animal products). However, this is made more complicated by uncertainty about whether vitamin D needs may differ in connection with other metabolic genes varying along with skin color genes.
Also, while vitamin D is the biggest immediate problem form lack of adequate sunlight, it is not the only substance our skin makes when exposed to sunlight -- so taking the right amount of vitamin D3 is beneficial but maybe not the entire answer.
Yes, there are now conflicts of interest by multiple advocates of adequate Vitamin D3 like with Holick or even now Cannell. But there still is a health crisis going on!
... resulting from monolithic design problems: https://linux.slashdot.org/com... https://www.mail-archive.com/f... https://slashdot.org/comments.... "Some companies have long considered Smalltalk their "secret weapon" because they could upgrade their systems at least at the application level while the applications continued to run. I guess I've been in computing so long and seen much better innovations like QNX and Smalltalk get passed by in favor stuff like Linux and Java that I guess I don't expect good innovations to be adopted except perhaps decades later. Anyway, I still have a lot of respect for Linus and his accomplishments in bringing a community of people together to do FOSS software. A free Linux is better than an unfree QNX in that sense. Nobody is perfect. And obviously a lot of people here are defending Linus' choice of strong language. Yet, I can't help but feel that the reason Linus is angry, and fearful, and shouting when people try to help maintain the kernel and fix it and change it and grow it is ultimately because Alan Kay is right. As Alan Kay said, you never have to take a baby down for maintenance -- so why do you have to take a Linux system down for maintenance?"
Anyway, nice to see this discussion come up again years later related to a more detailed analysis.
The reason I did not want to use Linux in the first place in the 1990s was because Unix was obviously an out-dated design compared to microkernel-based QNX etc.. But in the end the large community adopted it and so I did too. But I did not have to like the unfortunate core technical choices that traded off things like security, upgradability, understandability, and consistency for a claim to be a bit speedier on certain hardware.
Sort of like Intel's hardware design choices to emphasize speed over security are also now coming home to roost.
@elonmusk resources to reach a higher level of your potential: * Bullies to Buddies: How to Stop Being Teased and Bullied Without Really Trying * Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew P. Walker * William C. Norris: Portrait of a Maverick
Hope he finds time to at least skim those resources -- especially #2 if he is working so much! A lot of his current missteps with "mistweets" could easily be explained by lack of enough good sleep.
Surprisingly, the statistics is suggestive: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/0... "They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so...."
Alternatives: "The Ethical Engineer: An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light" by Eugene Schlossberger https://www.amazon.com/Ethical... "On occasion, professionals need to use moral reasoning as well as engineering skills to function effectively in their occupation. Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry. The Ethical Engineer sets out the tools and materials essential to dealing with whistle-blowing, environmental and safety concerns, bidding, confidentiality, conflict of interest, sales ethics, advertising, employer-employee relations, when to fight a battle, and when to break the rules. The author offers recommendations and techniques as well as rules, principles, and values that can guide the reader. Lively examples, engaging anecdotes, witty comments, and well-reasoned analysis prove his conviction that "ethics is good business.""
And also: "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
I put together a reading list of related ideas here: "High Performance Organizations Reading List" https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, appropriate compensation is important in a society like the USA that has so many exchange transactions (as opposed to subsistence, gift, and planned transactions). Like Dan Pink says, people need to be paid enough to "take money off the table" as an issue. And for some people who like to work independently, saving up money is a way to buy their own time to work on things they care about.
But once money is off the table, these sorts of non-monetary issues affect productivity: * Purpose (Finding meaning in what you do in how it affects people and the rest of the world) * Autonomy (being able to make decisions about what you do and how you do it) * Mastery (personal growth in technical skills and other areas) * Community * Infrastructure
Dan Pink talks about the first three in the video above.
Community is related to shared purpose, but I feel is a different thing in itself about how people relate to each other and have fun together. While I feel it problematical to ask employees to travel long distances for special events or to give up evenings or weekends for "team building exercises", a company that uses some of the work day to build community is likely making a good investment. Those can be relatively simple things like lunch-and-learns, holiday parties in the late afternoon, special lunches with invited guests, and so on. Even something like a regular "all hands" meeting to discuss what is going on in the company can help build community. Enjoyable training sessions like using appropriate humor in communications could also help. Even just starting voice or video chats ten minutes before the appointed time so people who show up early can chat briefly about stuff they are doing outside of work can make a difference. But community is not any one thing -- it is about the whole as a culture and also strengthening many individual one-to-one relationships.
Infrastructure overlaps with "Autonomy" to an extent -- but larger organizational choices can make a big difference for software developers; for example:
* The process choices -- e.g. see David Thomas on moving beyond "Agile" to "Agility"
* The tool/language/library choices -- e.g. in the web space there are so many poorly thought out overly-complex systems being adopted like Angular from big-name herd effects. Contrast such overly-complex systems with the idea of simplicity like in "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (developer of Clojure) or ideas by Chuck Moore (developer of Forth) or by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (with Smalltalk) or Leo Horie (with Mithril.js/HyperScript) and Adam Morse (with Tachyons.css). You don't have to use these specific languages or libraries to learn to appreciate things from the perspective of appropriate simplicity as the ultimate elegance, which can then be applied to whatever you are stuck with for legacy reasons.
* Having the appropriate tools you need to do your job (e.g. adequate computing, adequate displays, an appropriate workspace, good audio/visual communications, etc.)
And of course the specific relation an employee has with a manager makes a huge difference, given it is often said people
I agree on the value of uMatrix. Right now, for example, it is blocking 14 items from Slashdot. I can't imagine browsing the web without it or something similar.
When I sometimes see people browse the web without it I am a bit shocked at what most web pages look like. Also, once I posted a link to a reasonable site without knowing that there was advertising-supplied "your computer has been infected" junk there -- because I usually just don't see junk like that.
For personal web surfing, I mostly use a not-too-fast Chromebook (running GalliumOS) with only 4GB RAM -- but I can have dozens or sometimes even hundreds of tabs open without much slow down (usually) -- because most of the JavaScript is selectively blocked. Contrast that with comments by people who say their Chromebook (or other machine) slows down when only a few tabs are open.
The risk though is that uMatrix can in theory mess with any site or with your computer. This is the sort of thing that should be baked into every browser -- and continually undergo stringent review. But it is not built-in because -- even with Firefox -- there are conflicts of interests with how browser vendors make their money via either advertising or deals with advertisers.
A plus for me is that -- as a JavaScript/TypeScript UI developer mostly right now -- looking at what JavaScript sites load can be educational. But I can see how for the average web user that is mostly going to be more of a potentially confusing chore -- although a chore still worth it for everyone IMHO.
I don't use uBlock origin -- maybe I should? But I have found a hosts file that blocks questionable sites helps a lot (see my previous post here e.g. https://someonewhocares.org/ho... ).
Tangentially, here is a shout out for using Mithril.js/HyperScript plus Tachyons.css for web UI developers who want to make low-footprint quick-to-load-and-run sites that are also easy to refactor.
The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
As a political example of the appropriate need for balance between meshworks and hierarchies, here is an excerpt from and essay where conservatives call (propertarian) libertarianism the "Marxism of the RIght": https://www.theamericanconserv... "The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoonâ(TM)s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family [as well as health and community, I'd add] are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."
Something I wrote about a decade ago: https://pdfernhout.net/basic-i... "One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
From the article: "Space doesn't belong to the military industrial complex," Smith told me. "It belongs to humanity, it belongs to anyone who wants to go there. There's an extreme frustration in me that there's an entire universe out there to explore and the only way to get there is through these existing systems, these highly formalized systems that don't have a whole lot of incentive to make it easy to get there right now. I think that's a good enough reason to try this."
Nice to see some steps towards what we encouraged in 2001: https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com... "The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
Kind of difficult sometimes to see how much design culture has changed since then one day at a time -- but it has (e.g. see also the other slashdot story from today on the move to open RISC-V cores...)
My essay: https://www.pdfernhout.net/rec... "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious....
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all....
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altruistic people around; they just unfortunately are often misled for reasons of profit and power that Major General Butler outlined very clearly in "War is a Racket" decades ago. We need to build a better world where our trusting young people (and the people who give them orders) have more options for helping build a world that works for everyone than "war play". We need to build a better world where some of our most hopeful and trusting citizens are not coming home with PTSD as shattered people (or worse, coming home in body bags) because they were asked to kill and die for an unrecognized irony of using the tools of abundance to create artificial scarcity."
Waxman: Well where do you think you made a mistake then?
Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations specifically banks and others were such is that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.
You might be interest int his essay I put together around 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Like you, I am glad that more and more people are paying attention to these concerns and, as you say, at least the conversation has started.
You might also enjoy some of James P. Hogan's sci-fi on this topic -- like Voyage From Yesteryear and Mission to Minerva.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-... "Walker explains "how a good night's shut-eye can make us cleverer, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier, and ward off cancer.""
I'm about a third of the way through the book so far and it is just amazing. I will never take sleep for granted again.
Essentially, our brains are overclocked for high performance of a certain kind during the day and almost everyone absolutely need eight or so hours of good sleep each and every night for the brain to recover and stay healthy. (There is a very tiny number -- much less than 1% -- of people with a genetic mutation that lets them get by on less sleep.)
As one example, during the day, new factual information is stored in the hippocampus and then when you go to sleep NREM sleep moves the data to other part of the brain for long term storage. So, if you don't sleep enough that night, you lose much of those memories. Sleeping more a day or two later will never bring those memories back.
As another example, I just read today about how glial cells shrink during sleep so fluid can bathe the adjacent neurons and then the glial cells can remove toxic waste products that can lead to Alzheimer's.
He explains how drowsy driving causes more accidents and worse ones than drunk driving.
He also talks about how caffeine blocks receptors in the brain for adenosine (which causes "sleep pressure"). While caffeine may make it possible for people to get by with less sleep for a time, such users will still miss out on all the other health-giving parts of sleep as above -- and more, including greater creativity like from dreams.
That said, I'd add, for some people, coffee beans are the only beans they consume and in general eating beans and the phytonutrients they contain is health promoting. So, for some people, the health benefits of drinking coffee bean juice may outweigh issues of caffeine. But, there are lots of other beans people can eat that don't have caffeine in them. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com...
So, bravo for making a great choice and sticking with it through caffeine withdrawal and into a healthier life.
See also in general: http://web.archive.org/web/201... "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health."
And see also Vernor Vinge's various writings on a "Singularity".
That said, hedging our bets by making the world a happier and healthier and more resilient place for everyone right now before a singularity is probably not a bad idea given our trajectory out of any singularity may have a lot to do with out path into one.
I was responding to this blog post -- especially the conclusion and Marx quote at the end (quoted here): "Return of the Slave Society" https://thesphinxblog.com/2017... "... There's a substantial tradition, especially in the nineteenth century, of contrasting ancient slave society with modern capitalism. I always recall the Aristotle quote with which I started from Marx's evocation of it in Das Kapital: foolish Greek, thinking that machinery would lead to a life of leisure, rather than being the surest method of lengthening the working day! Likewise, "the Roman slave was bound with chains... the modern wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads". Manifestly, Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited, and that we might be better off thinking of analogies between Juvenal's "bread and circuses" snark and the joys of social media...
> "On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, Speech at the anniversary of the People's Paper)""
Hi Neville, Thanks for the insightful post on what can we learn about our possible future from studying a past society where "autonomous tools" were ubiquitous [Ancient Rome with slaves].
I've been wondering myself what we could learn about the future of robotic economics from the pre-Civil War US South and its slave-based economy. Given robots and AIs might have feelings in the future, that includes the previous moral justifications for what we now find abhorrent to do to people such as outlined in "Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents" by Paul Finkelman.
Thanks for expanding the picture for me to include reflections from Roman society. You might find of interest some of Marshall Brain's speculative writings on the future of robotics and economics (and the resulting concentration of wealth) like in his "Robotic Nation" essays.
I especially like your tangential point that "Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited".
To go off further on that tangent (reflecting your Marx quote, including "At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy"), one of the saddest things about modern times is that all these advanced technologies -- technologies that could be used to liberate people's time in a post-scarcity way -- these technologies are instead being used mainly to regulate people's time via Orwellian 24X7 surveillance both at work and at home. People are even voluntary inviting Alexa, Siri, and so on into their homes to potentially eavesdrop on everything they or their children say -- like with the human slaves of old. But there is a twist now of potentially recording everything said in a home and c
Somewhere (likely one of the original two Smalltalk books) there is a cartoon from the development of Smalltalk where the transcript on the screen shows something like "2 + 2" resulting in "3" with the programmer exclaiming something like "It works!". And the implicit notion is that the entire development environment and parser/compiler and Bitblit graphics and class hierarchy and so on is up and running, so what is a little minor (likely easily fixable) math error between friends?
We could have a Basic Income for all so that anyone who wanted to create FOSS could without having to take a paying job. The basic income would also recognize all the contributions to society many people make which they are not compensated for (e.g. caring for sick relatives instead of sending them to nursing homes).
Or we could have better 3D printers, gardening robots, materials extractors, portable recycling equipment, and printable solar panels so that programmers making FOSS would not need to engage with the exchange economy much.
Or we could expand the gift economy (which FOSS is part of) to more of the material world (e.g. Freecycle).
Or the US government could repeal most drug laws and convert freed-up prisons into places where FOSS programmers or others who wanted to make free public digital works could hang out and get free room and board and so on (or maybe build nicer accommodations to the same goals).
Or the filing or holding of non-freely-licensed copyrights by non-profits (e.g. most universities who already employ a lot of people to do programming) could be determined to be "self-dealing" by Congress or maybe just the IRS: https://pdfernhout.net/open-le... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Or in the absence of such a legal ruling, foundations and other donors could require grantees to sign a pledge to only create free and open source works: "Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content" https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-...
Or programmers could keep creating FOSS in their spare time both for its own sake and in the hopes the growing quantitative mass of FOSS eventually leads to a qualitative shift towards a post-scarcity society.
=====
Or something I posted around 2004:
"How to Find the Financing for Achieving the Star Trek Society" https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com... "This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA
https://www.counterpunch.org/2... "David Noble:... And again, going back to your first question, the purpose of peer review is prior censorship and I believe very strongly that if people want to criticize something that you write or I write, they have every right to do that AFTER itâ(TM)s published not before itâ(TM)s published. To me thatâ(TM)s the critical issue."
Search on "peer review is censorship" for similar opinion pieces.
This is not to defend any journals being misleading though...
To follow up on your diet modification suggestion and also probiotics, see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's writing; example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Another way to deal with biofilms in theory is with phages (viruses that attack bacteria): "Dr. Tim Lu - Biofilms and Phage Therapy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mentioned here: http://www.phagetherapycenter.... "This 11 minute film is excerpted from an interview with Dr. Tim Lu, who is an expert in characterizing & eliminating biofilms with phage therapy. He offers some insightful ways to describe complex biofilms and their connection to antibiotic resistance."
Makes me wonder if people might get more intestinal biofilms (and related allergies etc.) if they are not drinking dirty water with more phages?
An AI with a survival instinct experiencing intermittent power failures can start doing unexpected things: https://www.goodreads.com/book... "Survival test. Civilization had grown so complex that only a world-wide computer network could control everything. But the computer was only logical - it lacked common sense. And its all-too-logical decisions were beginning to cause too many near-fatal accidents. The solution was on the drawing-boards - a universal, self-aware and self-programming computer, equipped with judgement. But...could it be controlled? Or would it attempt to take over, disregarding its creators? if so, could it be turned off? Raymond Dyer and his team of computer specialists knew they had to find answers to these questions, but the project was too dangerous to test on Earth. So they installed the super computer on an orbiting [space habitat] and programmed it to survive at all costs. Then they sent a group of men to attack the computer...to goad it into trying to kill them. Then they would turn it off. Obviously if things went wrong, they might lose a few men - but the [habitat] and the computer could always be destroyed. Obviously... But the computer didn't quite see it that way!"
After outlining the history of the creation of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas outlines some basic problems with the Agile industry (including selling fear and also pushing complex IT systems to organize work that they can charge lots of money for). He says "the values have been totally lost behind the implementation". He says we need to distinguish between the implementation (Agile/Scrum/Lean/Kanban/etc) and the specification (Agility). He says "No rules are universal (except for this one)" and that "all rules are contextual". He espouses holding close to the value of "Agility" involving figuring out where you are, taking a small step towards your goal, re-evaluating and adjusting your understanding based on what you learned, and then iterating. He suggests choosing between alternatives delivering similar short-term value based on which keeps more options open to make future change easier -- outlining Dave's Rule of Design: "A good design is easier to change than a bad design." He calls for courage at the individual, team, and company levels to know you are going to make mistakes in order to find out what needs to be done -- and to work hard to make sure those mistakes small and correctable.
A shorter summary text version: "Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)" https://web.archive.org/web/20... "The word "agile" has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products. So I think it is time to retire the word "Agile."
Again, I agree with what you are saying overall -- but I feel you are missing my main point about social momentum and proof-of-concept.
There is a *huge* difference socially between having essentially nothing but an idea (what we have now, e.g. James P. Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow novel, Gerry O'Neill's non-fiction writings, or some paper idea studies like NASA's 1980 Advanced Automation for Space Missions http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/... ) versus having a detailed collaboratively-developed simulation model based on the best science you have which brings together thousands of knowledgeable engineers and scientists (like Linux brought together thousands of knowledgeable programmers). We're going to need a lot of design thinking for something extremely complex like self-replicating space habitat that can duplicate itself from sunlight and asteroidal/lunar/martian ore which includes all the chemical pathways and mechanical designs.
Think of it this way -- if you were a multi-billionaire, who would you give some funding to for people to go further for a space habitat (like by building prototype hardware)? Some group with a hand-wavy idea? Or some group with detailed (but maybe inaccurate for the reasons you outlined) simulation models that have been worked on for knowledgeable engineers for a decade in their spare time as a labor of love to get as close as they can without having the money for hardware tests which they know are important?
Or if you hired your own people to build space habitats, who would you be more likely to hire (at least for part of the design team)? Engineers who had no knowledge of such simulations or the core engineers who had developed such systems or used aspects of them to design and build other smaller projects?
Also, don't get too hung up on the mechanical/physical limits of current simulations. There is also a lot of design work to do related to operations research, logistics, and chemical pathways related to knowing what materials and tools you need to make other materials and tools.
Consider the issue of how to make an airlock seal. There can be a lot of work done today on logistics like all the prerequisites of how for materials to make a flexible deal for an airlock door -- even if some of the mechanical design is still questionable (like whether that specific seal actually works as well as you hoped for a specific work pod's door). NASA already has made airlocks that work OK -- so presumably there is a way to find out what materials they used and then work backwards from there -- perhaps documenting a range of possible seals and then figuring out what each needs as prerequisites (and so on, recursively).
Sure, "Space Engineers" may not be realistic -- especially as it tries to be a game and not a CAD/CAM program. But something like it could be a lot more realistic. And that is a step forward -- even if it is not the final product.
We also can look forward twenty years to what might be possible for testing any detailed designs we make by then. 3D printing is bringing down the cost of testing mechanical prototypes -- and in twenty years is likely to be even better. Also, simulations continue to get better as hardware becomes cheaper and more available. How good might general simulations be in twenty year for testing designs? For example, maybe someday we will actually be able to simulate water molecules and solutions much better than we can now and so atomic-level chemistry simulations for completely new chemical processes may be much more useful. But until then, there are handbooks for chemical engineering with many cookbook recipes if you are willing to work withing the limits of what we know well (even if space may pose extra challenges for earth-derived recipes)
Another aspect is that commercial designs (like you mention developing) tend to be optimized and push the envelope of what
That may all be true but one aspect of the idea is that simulations will improve (as they have) and a lot of hardware can be designed and tested virtually (e.g. Besiege or Kerbal Space Program). Is only simulated testing ideal? No. But it is next-to-free and so can move us forward. Eventually, sure, we need to build and test real hardware. But that can come later after we have a lot of social momentum going from the simulations.
From a paper I co-write in 2001: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems" https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com... "The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.vitamindcouncil.or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He has been demonstrating a need for vitamin D since around 2000 (before Holick).
Bottom line:
* Humans are adapted overall for an outdoor lifestyle partially clothed in the sunshine without regular bathing.
* Humans in industrialized countries now spend most of their time indoors -- or travelling in enclosed vehicles where glass is designed to prevent UV transmission to prevent faded carpets but not faded people.
* When humans in industrialized countries go outdoors they tend to wear a lot of clothes.
* Bathing (especially with soap) disrupts the formation of vitamin D by removing natural oils from the skin which are needed to make vitamin D.
Three other factors have made vitamin D deficiency worse:
* Dermatologists claiming time in the sun gives you cancer -- which is a half-truth because while sunlight can increase melanoma risk (a relatively easily treatable cancer), vitamin D reduces cancer risk for many cancers including melanoma -- which is why more office workers get melanomas than outdoor workers and why many office workers get melanomas in places they wear clothes.
* The USA RDA for vitamin D was set to prevent the worst cases of rickets not to ensure optimal health and so for decades has been ten times or more too low. Only recently has it been raised to perhaps adequate for infants but the RDA is still too low for adults
* Historically, a patent was granted for Vitamin D2, a synthetic and less effective form of vitamin D, and that was what doctors pushed instead of the better vitamin D3.
* In order to use vitamin D optimally, you also need a health diet like with vitamin K2 and other cofactors like magnesium, zinc, and boron -- and the standard American diet tends to be lacking in these.
Another complication: if a pregnant or nursing mother has low vitamin D her child will also have low vitamin D -- which may be a contributor to autism and other health problems for young children.
And yet another (politically charged) complication: people with darker skin moving far north or south from the equator are going to be even more impacted by vitamin D deficiency (e.g. especially Somalis moving to Minnesota who also wear burkas and have a high autism rate). Just like people with lighter skin who move to the equator are at elevated risk from melanoma. Skin color is adaptive for latitude (some exceptions being people who get vitamin D in their diet from fish or other animal products). However, this is made more complicated by uncertainty about whether vitamin D needs may differ in connection with other metabolic genes varying along with skin color genes.
Also, while vitamin D is the biggest immediate problem form lack of adequate sunlight, it is not the only substance our skin makes when exposed to sunlight -- so taking the right amount of vitamin D3 is beneficial but maybe not the entire answer.
Yes, there are now conflicts of interest by multiple advocates of adequate Vitamin D3 like with Holick or even now Cannell. But there still is a health crisis going on!
... resulting from monolithic design problems:
https://linux.slashdot.org/com...
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
https://slashdot.org/comments....
"Some companies have long considered Smalltalk their "secret weapon" because they could upgrade their systems at least at the application level while the applications continued to run. I guess I've been in computing so long and seen much better innovations like QNX and Smalltalk get passed by in favor stuff like Linux and Java that I guess I don't expect good innovations to be adopted except perhaps decades later. Anyway, I still have a lot of respect for Linus and his accomplishments in bringing a community of people together to do FOSS software. A free Linux is better than an unfree QNX in that sense. Nobody is perfect. And obviously a lot of people here are defending Linus' choice of strong language. Yet, I can't help but feel that the reason Linus is angry, and fearful, and shouting when people try to help maintain the kernel and fix it and change it and grow it is ultimately because Alan Kay is right. As Alan Kay said, you never have to take a baby down for maintenance -- so why do you have to take a Linux system down for maintenance?"
Anyway, nice to see this discussion come up again years later related to a more detailed analysis.
The reason I did not want to use Linux in the first place in the 1990s was because Unix was obviously an out-dated design compared to microkernel-based QNX etc.. But in the end the large community adopted it and so I did too. But I did not have to like the unfortunate core technical choices that traded off things like security, upgradability, understandability, and consistency for a claim to be a bit speedier on certain hardware.
Sort of like Intel's hardware design choices to emphasize speed over security are also now coming home to roost.
@elonmusk resources to reach a higher level of your potential:
* Bullies to Buddies: How to Stop Being Teased and Bullied Without Really Trying
* Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew P. Walker
* William C. Norris: Portrait of a Maverick
Link: https://twitter.com/pdfernhout...
Hope he finds time to at least skim those resources -- especially #2 if he is working so much! A lot of his current missteps with "mistweets" could easily be explained by lack of enough good sleep.
Surprisingly, the statistics is suggestive: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/0... ..."
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
They are engineers.
Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so.
And also: http://www.slate.com/articles/... ..."
"It's true that eight of the 25 hijackers on 9/11 were engineers
Alternatives: "The Ethical Engineer: An "Ethics Construction Kit" Places Engineering in a New Light" by Eugene Schlossberger
https://www.amazon.com/Ethical...
"On occasion, professionals need to use moral reasoning as well as engineering skills to function effectively in their occupation. Eugene Schlossberger has created a practical guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, students, and workers in business and industry. The Ethical Engineer sets out the tools and materials essential to dealing with whistle-blowing, environmental and safety concerns, bidding, confidentiality, conflict of interest, sales ethics, advertising, employer-employee relations, when to fight a battle, and when to break the rules. The author offers recommendations and techniques as well as rules, principles, and values that can guide the reader. Lively examples, engaging anecdotes, witty comments, and well-reasoned analysis prove his conviction that "ethics is good business.""
And also: "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More on Dan Pink and his writings: https://www.danpink.com/about/
Alfie Kohn also writes on the topic of intrinsic motivation
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/puni...
I put together a reading list of related ideas here:
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, appropriate compensation is important in a society like the USA that has so many exchange transactions (as opposed to subsistence, gift, and planned transactions). Like Dan Pink says, people need to be paid enough to "take money off the table" as an issue. And for some people who like to work independently, saving up money is a way to buy their own time to work on things they care about.
But once money is off the table, these sorts of non-monetary issues affect productivity:
* Purpose (Finding meaning in what you do in how it affects people and the rest of the world)
* Autonomy (being able to make decisions about what you do and how you do it)
* Mastery (personal growth in technical skills and other areas)
* Community
* Infrastructure
Dan Pink talks about the first three in the video above.
Community is related to shared purpose, but I feel is a different thing in itself about how people relate to each other and have fun together. While I feel it problematical to ask employees to travel long distances for special events or to give up evenings or weekends for "team building exercises", a company that uses some of the work day to build community is likely making a good investment. Those can be relatively simple things like lunch-and-learns, holiday parties in the late afternoon, special lunches with invited guests, and so on. Even something like a regular "all hands" meeting to discuss what is going on in the company can help build community. Enjoyable training sessions like using appropriate humor in communications could also help. Even just starting voice or video chats ten minutes before the appointed time so people who show up early can chat briefly about stuff they are doing outside of work can make a difference. But community is not any one thing -- it is about the whole as a culture and also strengthening many individual one-to-one relationships.
Infrastructure overlaps with "Autonomy" to an extent -- but larger organizational choices can make a big difference for software developers; for example:
* The process choices -- e.g. see David Thomas on moving beyond "Agile" to "Agility"
* The tool/language/library choices -- e.g. in the web space there are so many poorly thought out overly-complex systems being adopted like Angular from big-name herd effects. Contrast such overly-complex systems with the idea of simplicity like in "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (developer of Clojure) or ideas by Chuck Moore (developer of Forth) or by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (with Smalltalk) or Leo Horie (with Mithril.js/HyperScript) and Adam Morse (with Tachyons.css). You don't have to use these specific languages or libraries to learn to appreciate things from the perspective of appropriate simplicity as the ultimate elegance, which can then be applied to whatever you are stuck with for legacy reasons.
* Having the appropriate tools you need to do your job (e.g. adequate computing, adequate displays, an appropriate workspace, good audio/visual communications, etc.)
And of course the specific relation an employee has with a manager makes a huge difference, given it is often said people
I agree on the value of uMatrix. Right now, for example, it is blocking 14 items from Slashdot. I can't imagine browsing the web without it or something similar.
When I sometimes see people browse the web without it I am a bit shocked at what most web pages look like. Also, once I posted a link to a reasonable site without knowing that there was advertising-supplied "your computer has been infected" junk there -- because I usually just don't see junk like that.
For personal web surfing, I mostly use a not-too-fast Chromebook (running GalliumOS) with only 4GB RAM -- but I can have dozens or sometimes even hundreds of tabs open without much slow down (usually) -- because most of the JavaScript is selectively blocked. Contrast that with comments by people who say their Chromebook (or other machine) slows down when only a few tabs are open.
The risk though is that uMatrix can in theory mess with any site or with your computer. This is the sort of thing that should be baked into every browser -- and continually undergo stringent review. But it is not built-in because -- even with Firefox -- there are conflicts of interests with how browser vendors make their money via either advertising or deals with advertisers.
A plus for me is that -- as a JavaScript/TypeScript UI developer mostly right now -- looking at what JavaScript sites load can be educational. But I can see how for the average web user that is mostly going to be more of a potentially confusing chore -- although a chore still worth it for everyone IMHO.
I don't use uBlock origin -- maybe I should? But I have found a hosts file that blocks questionable sites helps a lot (see my previous post here e.g. https://someonewhocares.org/ho... ).
Tangentially, here is a shout out for using Mithril.js/HyperScript plus Tachyons.css for web UI developers who want to make low-footprint quick-to-load-and-run sites that are also easy to refactor.
This is a hosts file I use to avoid some bad stuff: https://someonewhocares.org/ho...
Much thanks to Dan Pollock and others for creating and maintaining it!
by Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
The conclusion: "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
As a political example of the appropriate need for balance between meshworks and hierarchies, here is an excerpt from and essay where conservatives call (propertarian) libertarianism the "Marxism of the RIght": https://www.theamericanconserv...
"The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoonâ(TM)s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family [as well as health and community, I'd add] are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments."
Something I wrote about a decade ago: https://pdfernhout.net/basic-i...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?"
From the article: "Space doesn't belong to the military industrial complex," Smith told me. "It belongs to humanity, it belongs to anyone who wants to go there. There's an extreme frustration in me that there's an entire universe out there to explore and the only way to get there is through these existing systems, these highly formalized systems that don't have a whole lot of incentive to make it easy to get there right now. I think that's a good enough reason to try this."
Nice to see some steps towards what we encouraged in 2001:
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
Kind of difficult sometimes to see how much design culture has changed since then one day at a time -- but it has (e.g. see also the other slashdot story from today on the move to open RISC-V cores...)
My essay: https://www.pdfernhout.net/rec... ... ... ...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altruistic people around; they just unfortunately are often misled for reasons of profit and power that Major General Butler outlined very clearly in "War is a Racket" decades ago. We need to build a better world where our trusting young people (and the people who give them orders) have more options for helping build a world that works for everyone than "war play". We need to build a better world where some of our most hopeful and trusting citizens are not coming home with PTSD as shattered people (or worse, coming home in body bags) because they were asked to kill and die for an unrecognized irony of using the tools of abundance to create artificial scarcity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Waxman: Well where do you think you made a mistake then?
Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations specifically banks and others were such is that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.
You might be interest int his essay I put together around 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Like you, I am glad that more and more people are paying attention to these concerns and, as you say, at least the conversation has started.
You might also enjoy some of James P. Hogan's sci-fi on this topic -- like Voyage From Yesteryear and Mission to Minerva.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-...
"Walker explains "how a good night's shut-eye can make us cleverer, more attractive, slimmer, happier, healthier, and ward off cancer.""
I'm about a third of the way through the book so far and it is just amazing. I will never take sleep for granted again.
Essentially, our brains are overclocked for high performance of a certain kind during the day and almost everyone absolutely need eight or so hours of good sleep each and every night for the brain to recover and stay healthy. (There is a very tiny number -- much less than 1% -- of people with a genetic mutation that lets them get by on less sleep.)
As one example, during the day, new factual information is stored in the hippocampus and then when you go to sleep NREM sleep moves the data to other part of the brain for long term storage. So, if you don't sleep enough that night, you lose much of those memories. Sleeping more a day or two later will never bring those memories back.
As another example, I just read today about how glial cells shrink during sleep so fluid can bathe the adjacent neurons and then the glial cells can remove toxic waste products that can lead to Alzheimer's.
He explains how drowsy driving causes more accidents and worse ones than drunk driving.
He also talks about how caffeine blocks receptors in the brain for adenosine (which causes "sleep pressure"). While caffeine may make it possible for people to get by with less sleep for a time, such users will still miss out on all the other health-giving parts of sleep as above -- and more, including greater creativity like from dreams.
That said, I'd add, for some people, coffee beans are the only beans they consume and in general eating beans and the phytonutrients they contain is health promoting. So, for some people, the health benefits of drinking coffee bean juice may outweigh issues of caffeine. But, there are lots of other beans people can eat that don't have caffeine in them.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com...
So, bravo for making a great choice and sticking with it through caffeine withdrawal and into a healthier life.
See also in general:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health."
See Hans Moravec's informed speculations like his book "Mind Children": https://www.goodreads.com/book...
Or going beyond that to the nature of consciousness and reality:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm...
And see also Vernor Vinge's various writings on a "Singularity".
That said, hedging our bets by making the world a happier and healthier and more resilient place for everyone right now before a singularity is probably not a bad idea given our trajectory out of any singularity may have a lot to do with out path into one.
I was responding to this blog post -- especially the conclusion and Marx quote at the end (quoted here):
"Return of the Slave Society"
https://thesphinxblog.com/2017...
"... There's a substantial tradition, especially in the nineteenth century, of contrasting ancient slave society with modern capitalism. I always recall the Aristotle quote with which I started from Marx's evocation of it in Das Kapital: foolish Greek, thinking that machinery would lead to a life of leisure, rather than being the surest method of lengthening the working day! Likewise, "the Roman slave was bound with chains... the modern wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads". Manifestly, Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited, and that we might be better off thinking of analogies between Juvenal's "bread and circuses" snark and the joys of social media...
> "On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. (Marx, Speech at the anniversary of the People's Paper)""
==== My own comment there: https://thesphinxblog.com/2017...
Hi Neville, Thanks for the insightful post on what can we learn about our possible future from studying a past society where "autonomous tools" were ubiquitous [Ancient Rome with slaves].
I've been wondering myself what we could learn about the future of robotic economics from the pre-Civil War US South and its slave-based economy. Given robots and AIs might have feelings in the future, that includes the previous moral justifications for what we now find abhorrent to do to people such as outlined in "Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents" by Paul Finkelman.
Thanks for expanding the picture for me to include reflections from Roman society. You might find of interest some of Marshall Brain's speculative writings on the future of robotics and economics (and the resulting concentration of wealth) like in his "Robotic Nation" essays.
I especially like your tangential point that "Marx failed to imagine that the remorseless logic of capitalism might lead workers to be displaced rather than exploited".
To go off further on that tangent (reflecting your Marx quote, including "At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy"), one of the saddest things about modern times is that all these advanced technologies -- technologies that could be used to liberate people's time in a post-scarcity way -- these technologies are instead being used mainly to regulate people's time via Orwellian 24X7 surveillance both at work and at home. People are even voluntary inviting Alexa, Siri, and so on into their homes to potentially eavesdrop on everything they or their children say -- like with the human slaves of old. But there is a twist now of potentially recording everything said in a home and c
Somewhere (likely one of the original two Smalltalk books) there is a cartoon from the development of Smalltalk where the transcript on the screen shows something like "2 + 2" resulting in "3" with the programmer exclaiming something like "It works!". And the implicit notion is that the entire development environment and parser/compiler and Bitblit graphics and class hierarchy and so on is up and running, so what is a little minor (likely easily fixable) math error between friends?
Coincidentally I posted some ideas just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
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We could have a Basic Income for all so that anyone who wanted to create FOSS could without having to take a paying job. The basic income would also recognize all the contributions to society many people make which they are not compensated for (e.g. caring for sick relatives instead of sending them to nursing homes).
Or we could have better 3D printers, gardening robots, materials extractors, portable recycling equipment, and printable solar panels so that programmers making FOSS would not need to engage with the exchange economy much.
Or we could expand the gift economy (which FOSS is part of) to more of the material world (e.g. Freecycle).
Or the US government could repeal most drug laws and convert freed-up prisons into places where FOSS programmers or others who wanted to make free public digital works could hang out and get free room and board and so on (or maybe build nicer accommodations to the same goals).
Or the filing or holding of non-freely-licensed copyrights by non-profits (e.g. most universities who already employ a lot of people to do programming) could be determined to be "self-dealing" by Congress or maybe just the IRS:
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Or in the absence of such a legal ruling, foundations and other donors could require grantees to sign a pledge to only create free and open source works:
"Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content"
https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-...
Or programmers could keep creating FOSS in their spare time both for its own sake and in the hopes the growing quantitative mass of FOSS eventually leads to a qualitative shift towards a post-scarcity society.
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Or something I posted around 2004:
"How to Find the Financing for Achieving the Star Trek Society"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA
https://www.counterpunch.org/2... ... And again, going back to your first question, the purpose of peer review is prior censorship and I believe very strongly that if people want to criticize something that you write or I write, they have every right to do that AFTER itâ(TM)s published not before itâ(TM)s published. To me thatâ(TM)s the critical issue."
"David Noble:
Search on "peer review is censorship" for similar opinion pieces.
This is not to defend any journals being misleading though...
To follow up on your diet modification suggestion and also probiotics, see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's writing; example: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Another way to deal with biofilms in theory is with phages (viruses that attack bacteria):
"Dr. Tim Lu - Biofilms and Phage Therapy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Mentioned here: http://www.phagetherapycenter....
"This 11 minute film is excerpted from an interview with Dr. Tim Lu, who is an expert in characterizing & eliminating biofilms with phage therapy. He offers some insightful ways to describe complex biofilms and their connection to antibiotic resistance."
Makes me wonder if people might get more intestinal biofilms (and related allergies etc.) if they are not drinking dirty water with more phages?
In general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
An AI with a survival instinct experiencing intermittent power failures can start doing unexpected things: https://www.goodreads.com/book...
"Survival test. Civilization had grown so complex that only a world-wide computer network could control everything. But the computer was only logical - it lacked common sense. And its all-too-logical decisions were beginning to cause too many near-fatal accidents. The solution was on the drawing-boards - a universal, self-aware and self-programming computer, equipped with judgement. But...could it be controlled? Or would it attempt to take over, disregarding its creators? if so, could it be turned off? Raymond Dyer and his team of computer specialists knew they had to find answers to these questions, but the project was too dangerous to test on Earth. So they installed the super computer on an orbiting [space habitat] and programmed it to survive at all costs. Then they sent a group of men to attack the computer...to goad it into trying to kill them. Then they would turn it off. Obviously if things went wrong, they might lose a few men - but the [habitat] and the computer could always be destroyed. Obviously... But the computer didn't quite see it that way!"
For his current thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
After outlining the history of the creation of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas outlines some basic problems with the Agile industry (including selling fear and also pushing complex IT systems to organize work that they can charge lots of money for). He says "the values have been totally lost behind the implementation". He says we need to distinguish between the implementation (Agile/Scrum/Lean/Kanban/etc) and the specification (Agility). He says "No rules are universal (except for this one)" and that "all rules are contextual". He espouses holding close to the value of "Agility" involving figuring out where you are, taking a small step towards your goal, re-evaluating and adjusting your understanding based on what you learned, and then iterating. He suggests choosing between alternatives delivering similar short-term value based on which keeps more options open to make future change easier -- outlining Dave's Rule of Design: "A good design is easier to change than a bad design." He calls for courage at the individual, team, and company levels to know you are going to make mistakes in order to find out what needs to be done -- and to work hard to make sure those mistakes small and correctable.
A shorter summary text version:
"Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"The word "agile" has been subverted to the point where it is effectively meaningless, and what passes for an agile community seems to be largely an arena for consultants and vendors to hawk services and products. So I think it is time to retire the word "Agile."
I've collected more related ideas on this High Performance Organizations Reading List:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Obligatory XKCD on Kerbal Space Program: https://xkcd.com/1356/
Again, I agree with what you are saying overall -- but I feel you are missing my main point about social momentum and proof-of-concept.
There is a *huge* difference socially between having essentially nothing but an idea (what we have now, e.g. James P. Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow novel, Gerry O'Neill's non-fiction writings, or some paper idea studies like NASA's 1980 Advanced Automation for Space Missions http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/... ) versus having a detailed collaboratively-developed simulation model based on the best science you have which brings together thousands of knowledgeable engineers and scientists (like Linux brought together thousands of knowledgeable programmers). We're going to need a lot of design thinking for something extremely complex like self-replicating space habitat that can duplicate itself from sunlight and asteroidal/lunar/martian ore which includes all the chemical pathways and mechanical designs.
Think of it this way -- if you were a multi-billionaire, who would you give some funding to for people to go further for a space habitat (like by building prototype hardware)? Some group with a hand-wavy idea? Or some group with detailed (but maybe inaccurate for the reasons you outlined) simulation models that have been worked on for knowledgeable engineers for a decade in their spare time as a labor of love to get as close as they can without having the money for hardware tests which they know are important?
Or if you hired your own people to build space habitats, who would you be more likely to hire (at least for part of the design team)? Engineers who had no knowledge of such simulations or the core engineers who had developed such systems or used aspects of them to design and build other smaller projects?
Also, don't get too hung up on the mechanical/physical limits of current simulations. There is also a lot of design work to do related to operations research, logistics, and chemical pathways related to knowing what materials and tools you need to make other materials and tools.
Consider the issue of how to make an airlock seal. There can be a lot of work done today on logistics like all the prerequisites of how for materials to make a flexible deal for an airlock door -- even if some of the mechanical design is still questionable (like whether that specific seal actually works as well as you hoped for a specific work pod's door). NASA already has made airlocks that work OK -- so presumably there is a way to find out what materials they used and then work backwards from there -- perhaps documenting a range of possible seals and then figuring out what each needs as prerequisites (and so on, recursively).
Sure, "Space Engineers" may not be realistic -- especially as it tries to be a game and not a CAD/CAM program. But something like it could be a lot more realistic. And that is a step forward -- even if it is not the final product.
We also can look forward twenty years to what might be possible for testing any detailed designs we make by then. 3D printing is bringing down the cost of testing mechanical prototypes -- and in twenty years is likely to be even better. Also, simulations continue to get better as hardware becomes cheaper and more available. How good might general simulations be in twenty year for testing designs? For example, maybe someday we will actually be able to simulate water molecules and solutions much better than we can now and so atomic-level chemistry simulations for completely new chemical processes may be much more useful. But until then, there are handbooks for chemical engineering with many cookbook recipes if you are willing to work withing the limits of what we know well (even if space may pose extra challenges for earth-derived recipes)
Another aspect is that commercial designs (like you mention developing) tend to be optimized and push the envelope of what
That may all be true but one aspect of the idea is that simulations will improve (as they have) and a lot of hardware can be designed and tested virtually (e.g. Besiege or Kerbal Space Program). Is only simulated testing ideal? No. But it is next-to-free and so can move us forward. Eventually, sure, we need to build and test real hardware. But that can come later after we have a lot of social momentum going from the simulations.
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
From a paper I co-write in 2001: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."