While you make a good point, nutrition works right now (along with exercise, good sleep, a less stressful lifestyle, avoiding hazards like smoking, community connectedness, and so on like in "Blue Zones"). The rest of life extension is just a hope that maybe we can create new technologies. Also, for most people, if they can make it in good health to 100+ years old via such well-proved things, they will then be around for more breakthroughs in the next 50+ years.
Also, probably most invasive life extension technologies for extreme longevity could also be turned into biological weapons (like rewriting DNA or reorganizing the brain). So, we may end up with technologies that could allow people to live in good health for 1000s of years, have any skin color or nose shape they want, and people will use them to kill off everyone else that has a different skin color or nose shape then they currently have (which would be very sadly ironic). Improved nutrition does not have that existential risk associated with it for the most part.
Fines or imprisoning CEOs do little to change the pattern of relationships and values and policies that make an organization what it is, any more than a human body loosing some skill cells or even brain cells usually changes how a person behaves very much.
Seriously, why should any corporate communications have any expectation of privacy? Corporations with "limited liability" are chartered for the public interest. 150 years ago, US Americans put such creatures on very short leashes because they had seen what trouble resulted from big British corporations in the American colonies. Individuals have now lost pretty much all informational privacy due to large corporations and the current internet. Why should bigger more powerful creatures than humans like corporation have more privacy in practice than humans? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society". Any argument that corporations need privacy (like for salaries or payments for services) for some sort of commercial advantage is trumped by the public interest in understanding what corporations are doing and also that if all corporations were transparent there would be a level playing field. Granted, it would require new ways of doing business, but books like "Honest Business" also extol the value of "open books". Or perhaps corporations should be forced to choose -- if they want limited liability for shareholders then they need to be transparent; if every shareholder accepts full responsibility for all actions of the organization, then they can have privacy?
And see also my comments from 2000, the relevant section copied below (sadly a lot of links there have rotted): http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
========= machine intelligence is already here =========
I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces can destroy it. [Well, I now in 2014 think there are also other options, like symbiosis, maybe friendly AI, and in general trying to be nicer to each other like with a basic income in hopes that leads to a happier singularity...]
Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component -- in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought". http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/ You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt" their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.
These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the political/social process of its own ends). http://www.adbusters.org/magaz... Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist.
But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it will get harder when corporations don't ne
And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012: "Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?" https://groups.google.com/foru...
... How the Power of Diversity Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/Differen... "In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
Of course, then to keep a group of such people motivated, they need autonomy, challenge/mastery, and purpose, like Dan Pink outlines here: "RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And until we get a basic income for all, at least enough money to live a decent life in our society so money is essentially off the table as it has reached the point of diminishing returns for people who like their work: http://science.slashdot.org/st...
I don't seem to have "Rogue Bolo" in my sci-fi book collection, but the cover on Amazon looks familiar. I think I might have given it away one Halloween decades ago living in Princeton, NJ when I gave the option of getting books instead of candy to some trick-or-treaters (several teens there seemed to prefer the books).
Your point on a Bolo singularity makes me think about the Asimov universe, and how his robots there eventually interpreted the three laws in a way "The Zeroth Law" that gave them lots of independence, and that saw themselves as in a way more "human" than humans, and also caused them to start intervening in history behind the scenes. There is no set of laws or constitution that ultimately does not need some intelligent judge to interpret the meaning or spirit of the words in a present day context, and once some intelligent entity (including an AI) starts creatively interpreting "rules" including "metarules" about how rules can be changed, who knows where it will end? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Inspired by your post, I've been looking through my Bolo books. I started rereading "Ploughshare" by Todd Johnson in "Bolos: Book 1: Honor of the Regiment" where "Das Afrika Corps" and other Mark XVI C Bolos act a bit odd due to a spilled milkshake by the "Director's son" in the "White Room" psychotronics lab and the use of "DK-41" cleaning fluid to fix that mess up. Another case of the unexpected...
I liked "Bolo Rising" novel which has a Bolo Mark XXXIII series HCT called Hector. That is an interesting novel of a Bolo regaining its operational capacity after being infiltrated and locked down by alien technology. There is another XXXIII in "Bolo Strike". But while those mega-Bolo stories are interesting in their own sort of over-the-top way (maybe your point about "the other guy"), I like the diversity in the short stories in "Honor of the Regiment" by a variety of authors covering the whole history of different Bolos of various capabilities and their unfolding increasing sentience and self-directedness. What does "Honor" or "Service" means over time and shading into a meta-level? For example, are whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, or Kiriakou honorable and engaged in service and fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution? Or are they traitors? Complex questions... Perhaps "Rogue Bolo" goes deeper into such issues? As a lesser example, "Bolo Brigade" explores the issue of a conflict between "rules of engagement" and a Bolo's desire to get its job done. Conflicts between priorities are not something that only humans will face...
It is not clear where the singularity of emerging AI and technologically-expanded-or-narrowed humans and so on will all lead in reality -- especially with Bolo vs. Beserker as an option. I forget the plot of "Bolo Strike" as I look at my Bolo books, but the blurb on the back says "as Bolo faces human-Bolo hybrid in a cataclysmic showdown". So there are other ways automated systems can cause change, either their own independence or by empowering some few independent humans. As I essentially say near the end of the 2000 post to the Unrev-II Engelbart Bootstrap mailing list, corporations are like vast machine intelligence at his point. And like the present day, what is the real difference to most people if the Earth is laid waste, the seas polluted, the mountains leveled, the oceans strip-mined, and most of the people kept down in their aspirations for a decent life by "aliens from outer space" or by some 1% of vampire-like human-machine-hybrid-organizational "aliens" who have become specialized in "extracting wealth" by privatizing gains and socializing costs (including the cost to the worker of unpleasant work environments)? Even without human-Bolo hybrids, there can be vast technological/bureaucratic enterprises that make use of humans as parts much the same as the "!*!*!" of "Bolo Rising" tried to do in their quest of "efficiency" -- "efficiency" to what end and to whose benefit? So much
Yeah, I've seen surveys that say humanity in the West can more easily imagine nuclear war or other destruction of everything we care about instead of significant social change... None-the-less, as Howard Zinn wrote: http://www.commondreams.org/vi... "In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
BTW, to fix a typo, one sentence should be: "While I like Iain Bank's Culture Novels, I wonder why the [AIs] there, both human-level and way-beyond-human-level take so much effort to take care of humans and cater to them."
... simulated cannibalistic robot killers in the 1980s on a Symbolics running ZetaLisp. I gave a couple conference talks about it, plus one at NC State (where I wrote the simulation) that I think even may have influenced Marshall Brain. I had created a simulation of self-replicating robots that reconstructed themselves to an ideal from spare parts in their simulated environment (something proposed first by von Neumann, but I may have been the first to make such a simulation). The idea was that a robot that was essentially half of an "ideal" robot would make its other half by adding parts to itself, then split in two by cutting some links, and then do it again. The very first one assembled its other half, cut the links to divide itself, and then proceeded (unexpectedly to me) to then start cutting apart its offspring for parts to do it again. I had to add a sense of "smell" so robots would set the smell of parts they used and then not try to take parts that smelled the same. I also mention that simulation here: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Decades later, I still got a bit freaked out when our chickens would sometimes eat their own eggs...
My point though is that completely unintentionally, these devices I designed to create ended up destroying things -- even their own offspring. It was a big lesson for me, and has informed my work and learning in various directions ever since. Things you build can act in totally unexpected ways. And since creation involves changing the universe, any change also involves to some extent destroying something that is already there.
James P. Hogan in his 1982 book "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" which I had read earlier should have been a warning. In it he makes clear how any AI could gain a survival instinct and then could perceive things like power fluctuations as threats -- even if there was not intent on the part of the original programmers for that to happen. http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought" assigned as reading in college also should have been another warning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's been sad to watch the progression of real killer autonomous robots since the 1980s... Here is just one example, and the exciting, upbeat music in the video shows the political and social problem more than anything: "Samsung robotic sentry (South Korea, live ammo)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just because we can do something does not mean we should...
I was impressed that this recent Indian Bollywood film about an AI-powered robot took such a nuanced view of the problems. A bit violent for me, but otherwise an excellent and thought provoking film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... "Enthiran is a 2010 Indian Tamil science fiction techno thriller, co-written and directed by Shankar.The film features Rajinikanth in dual roles, as a scientist and an andro humanoid robot, alongside Aishwarya Rai while Danny Denzongpa, Santhanam, Karunas, Kalabhavan Mani, Devadarshini, and Cochin Haneefa play supporting roles. The film's story revolves around the scientist's struggle to control his creation, the android robot whose software was upgraded to give it the ability to comprehend and generate human emotions. The plan backfires as the robot falls in love with the scientist's fiancee and is further manipulated to bring destruction to the world when it lands in the hands of a rival scientist."
But yes, the Beserker Series is another signpost in that direction -- perhaps countered a bit by the Bolo series by Keith Laumer?:-) ht
More by me from 2009: "[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")" http://p2pfoundation.net/backu... "[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow" http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
We can and should do better than this as a society.
My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring. http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on: "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income " https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply. http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Around 2001 or 2002, while working at at IBM Research I went to a talk by Ted Nelson there, and I asked him about the story given the similar name. He said that the story had inspired him (at least partially) to do his work, and thanked me for telling him the name of the story, saying he had been looking for that story for a long time. While I did not say so, his reply about looking for the story surprised me given that there are probably not many stories with Xanadu in the title so a library search would have found it I would think.. Ted Nelson records everything around him on a tape recorder (or at least did then), so that interaction should be on one of his tapes...
The 1956 story by Theodore Sturgeon is am amazing work that features a world networked by wireless mobile wearable computing supporting freely shared knowledge and skills through a sort of global internet-like concept. Some of that knowledge was about advanced nanotech-based manufacturing. The system powered an economy reflecting ideas like Bob Black writes about in "The Abolition of Work", where much work had become play coordinated through this global network. The story has inspired other people as well, both me from when I read it (and forgot it mostly for a long time, except for the surprise ending), and also a Master Inventor at IBM I worked with who got inspired by the nanotech aspects of that story when he was young. Even almost sixty years later, that story still has things we can learn from about a vision of a new type of society (including with enhanced intrinsic&mutual security) made possible through advanced computing.
A core theme is an interplay between meshwork and hierarchy, reminiscent of Manuel De Landa's writings: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/man... "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."
See also, for other "old" ideas we could still benefit from thinking about: "The Web That Wasn't" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007
For most of us who work on the
If everyone stuck all their cash and other non-cash funds into their mattresses, it is basic mainstream economics that we would have a huge financial depression from lack of currency for exchange. So, why do mainstream economists have trouble understanding that the same thing happens if take all that money and instead stuff it into computers in the digital equivalent of a casino frequented mostly by the wealthiest (the stock market, derivatives, currency speculation, etc.), where the money spends all its time in transactions have little relation to the real goods and services that most people spend all their money on?
My take on that was from an idea I first saw a glimmering of in "Money As Debt II": http://paulgrignon.netfirms.co... "Today the largest volume of money by far is changing hands in what is best described as the gambling economy... the foreign exchange market, the derivatives market and the rest of the financial instruments being played by banks and investment funds for as much profit as possible. For example, the volume of trade on the world's foreign exchange markets, in just one week, exceeds the total volume of world trade in real goods and services during an entire year. This money is in continuous play by speculators looking to make windfall profits on currency fluctuations. It exists... but only in the gambling economy."
Your tax on transactions could help with reducing the FIRE-sector casino economy by discouraging so much trading, but it does not get at the root of things like wealth concentration, since wealthy people could still just park money in cash or gold or real estate. A progressive income tax going up to 90%+ like we had in the USA decades ago, with the revenue redistributed as a basic income might help with wealth concentration. So might a wealth tax (but that is harder). Modest inflation also discourages hording money by forcing wealthy people to spend money, invest it, or lose it.
Other alternatives to keep things going despite an absence of cash for the real economy due to it being stuffed into computers include more LETS systems (alternative currency that promotes community), making what little currency there is in the real economy move faster, expanding the gift economy, improved subsistence production, and better government planning using current tax dollars.
So much of our wealth today is the product of generations of hard work by so many people including those creating inventions and other new ideas building on previous ideas, and in that sense is effectively a common inheritance. C.H. Douglas talked about with "Social Credit": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Or previously, slugs: http://science.slashdot.org/st... ""SlugBot is no ordinary robot. SlugBot hunts down slugs, and is powered by fermenting the slugs' corpses, producing biogas fuel. "
Life seems livvd between fire and ice, between order and chaos.
Computers and software have been through several generations over the last 70 years (and more). The failures we still see IMHO have more to do with our social systems (including legal frameworks) than with the possibilities of hardware or software. The same is perhaps true of nuclear power -- Fukushima happened more for social reasons than technical ones..
Well said! Now if we could only get people also to apply the same ideas to fixing up programming languages and libraries (e..g Swift vs. C/D/Java/JavaScript/Smalltalk/etc.) instead of inventing new ones that just have different gaps and different bugs...
Overheard at lunch there around 2000 (paraphrase): "We hire the most competitive candidates from the most competitive top three schools and then we wonder why they have trouble cooperating and getting along..."
I hope the policy has changed since... It also seemed like they were passing over a lot of interesting people and thus limiting their cognitive diversity.
See also Scott E. Page book "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co... "The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."
And: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co... "An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."
And: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com... http://www.naturalchild.org/gu... http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1... "Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""
Thanks for pointing this out (article submitter here). People make points in other comments about MetaFilter's business strategy, varied content, or grousing about the moderation. Your comment instead emphasizes the positive about how how MetaFIlter is one of the longest running online communities and it is trying to sustain itself. One comment I saw on MetaFilter compared these donations to the end of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life". http://metatalk.metafilter.com...
I've never been a MetaFilter member. Nor have I paid much attention to it anytime recently other than seeing stories on it now and then found by whatever random process. But a couple months ago I added it to my list of interesting news sites. Every day it has some interesting and generally pleasant (non-trollish) discussions linked to on the main page as the best of the discussions. I can see the value in that and the work that goes into it. As I wrote to someone just before hearing this news, Slashdot is like the discussions I had in college around the computer center and the engineering buildings; MetaFilter is like the more randomly varied discussions I had in the dorm hallways, dining halls, and maybe the social science buildings.
Having recently "discovered" this jewel that reminds me of the better part of what the internet was in the late 1990s, it is sad to see it struggling. Slashdot is a community I have long enjoyed and participated in, and itself may itself be facing some of the same general issues. It's a bit surprising to me to see in some of the comment here a lack of acknowledgement of the parallels. Why do they think "Beta" is being pushed? People may say MetaFilter is not "original" content like a news articles. Nonetheless, I feel discussions about new articles are themselves important content. I read Slashdot not so much for the articles but for the discussions which often point out how the articles are wrong or misleading, or add lots of details to the articles, or put the articles into a broader context. Discussion has its own value, both for participants and for lurkers. I don't know if it is true, but I did find interesting the speculative comment by someone that the fall in traffic could reflect that maybe Google does not want competition with its own Google+?
Matt sounds like someone who really cares about his community, sort of like a town mayor (and a founder who never "sold off" from the early internet days, unlike Slashdot getting sold off to various new owners). Guestimating from their staff size and their revenue loss and member base (on the order of 10,000 active members), it must be take at least US$20K - US$40K a month to keep that community humming along for staffing costs (mostly for moderation I would think)? Or guessing on the order of about US$2 to US$5 per active member per month? Computers and bandwidth for hosting used to cost something significant, but nowadays for a text-mostly site I would not think those matter much?
It seems to me that the financing of all this has been for the past few years mostly that people not in the community (non-posters) drive by via Google and generate ad revenue, and that revenue then supports the community. The people who actively participate in the community must be a much smaller percentage of views. It looks like with MetaFilter, the people who funded the community were not the people who actually inhabited the social process of it.
That reminds me a bit of where I live in the Adirondack Park. Much of the money coming into the community is from summer tourists or summer residents when the population swells
Show me some citations for your accusations? Fuhrman's main book "Eat to Live" is one of the most scientifically-grounded books on nutrition, with thousands of references to substantiate his points with evidence. That said, I don't agree 100% with everything he recommends (see below) in part because of the nature of the limits of what you can find in the scientific literature, as well as the difficulty of making sense of conflicting studies. There is also the fact that most nutritional studies start with a fundamentally sick and detoxified Western population (however good their basic vitals are) and so it may be hard to draw broad conclusions about what would be best for people eating very diferently to begin with. The future is individualized medicine based on genetics and the intestinal microbiome and also lifestyle and history, but we are not there yet. So, it is possible to question some broad recommendations he makes -- which is also shows the limit of writing books on a complex topic like human health for a general audience.
For examples of where I disagree some with Furhman, for many people (although not those at strong risk of hemorrhagic stroke), Fuhrman's advice on severely limiting salt intake may be questionable IMHO (versus just mainly avoiding processed foods and their salt load which makes them palatable). We need salt for brain function and stomach acid. While too much salt will create problems especially for some specific people, it is hard to know what the acceptable limit is in individual people, which also depends on how much potassium they eat and other aspects of their health. Most people probably should eat less salt, but how much less is an area of contention and there are some conflicting studies.
Furhman may also be a bit low on his vitamin D recommendations. He did base his recommendation on a scientific study related to vitamin D and mortality, but I feel there are other aspects to that beyond what he cited.
Maybe my biggest concern is that Furhman may not clearly enough state the importance of iodine and his recommendations are based on the US RDA for that which may be 10X too low (see Brownstein). The problem is that if you follow Fuhrman's advice to eliminate dairy (a good source of iodine since cows concentrate it from grass) without also adding sea vegetables or an iodine supplement to your diet (or iodized salt, see above), it seems to me you may become iodine deficient. This is especially true if you eat foods from one part of the world given many agricultural lands especially in Europe are iodine deficient. It is also true because we are exposed to so much bromine in Western countries which is an iodine antagonist, suggesting we need more iodine to compensate for that. The issue of iodine is one of emphasis about getting enough iodine given his other advice would reduce it and he suggests a low target to begin with. For example, here he does suggest iodine supplements, but not to emphasizing it to the degree he should IMHO given all the other aspects of his approach: http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
In general, Fuhrman's advice to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables is also difficult to follow for most people living in a Western culture including due to cost of vegetables and fruits given US agricultural subsidies for grains and animal products. Also, eating such things out-of-season poses environmental and social costs for transport and supporting big farms in foreign countries which may not be well-regulated or engage in fair-trade.
Less-demanding (but less rewarding) whole-grain-heavy advice by John McDougall or Andrew Weil may be easier to follow and in the end thus achieve better overall results in our society for many who have trouble following Fuhrman's approach. Fuhrman originally trained as a world-class athlete (figure skating), so he seems to expect a lot of self-motivation and self-control in others -- as well as perhaps the financial resources to afford the best heal
Looks like a fascinating movie too, assuming this is the one: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt12... ""Spiritual Revolution" is a look at Eastern Spirituality in the Western world, with particular emphasis on its points of convergence with Western science and psychotherapy."
Your point of playing media is a reminder it might be good to play her favorite music if she wants. And cuddling with her infant son and hearing his voice might also contribute to her healing and her desire to communicate and move and get well.
Yes, good points about the importance of good nutrition for recovery (although now might not be the best time to focus on cleaning out sequestered toxins, although a good long-term goal). Most mainstream medicine pays at best lip service to nutrition. Omega 3 fatty acids might help rebuild the brain, given the brain is mostly fat. Eggs have some as you say, but there are probably better choices. This is worthy of lot of further research to learn all that is needed. Don't count on a typical MD including even a brain specialist to know much about this.
Bear in mind there are different kinds of strokes which might need somewhat different nutrition depending on the causes and other complications. Specifically, clogged arteries causing one kind of stroke probably need a somewhat different approach than rebuilding damaged arteries that caused a different kind of bleeding stroke, since there is a balance of processes going on to strengthen or tear down the walls of arteries. But in either case, the body can't do the right thing without the needed building blocks and the control of inflammation caused by poor nutrition.
Check her vitamin D level regularly as that is involved with inflammation management. Here is a good standard to work towards: http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
I've posted lots of other general nutrition links in the past, especially by Dr. Fuhrman. But again do your own research on what is best since a lot of his general diet advice is more for people with clogged arteries and at risk of ischemic stroke than for those with weakened arteries as he focuses on salt-restriction instead to minimize the risk of hemorrhagic stroke. There are processes in the body that both tear down and build up arteries, and they probably must be kept in balance to avoid both kinds of strokes, even though most US Americans are far more at risk of strokes from clogged arteries of the building up process going too far (from both inflammation and bad fats). Links about stroke from him though: http://www.drfuhrman.com/disea... http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar... http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
I see a whole bunch of books on Amazon on "Stroke Recovery". Probably all sorts of good stuff there.
I agree with Richo's comment here that it is too soon to focus on fancy communications gear and you need to focus on just the basics (like yes. no, pain, thirsty, etc.): http://ask.slashdot.org/commen...
See also my related comment about how to us the free market to deal with Global Warming (GW) issues and also Fracking: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Amazing so many slashdotters ignore it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... "Deutsche Bank says, that in January 2014 already more than 19 countries are under grid parity for solar power and sees starting a second gold rush for solar power..."
Of course, had we been paying the true cost of fossil fuels up front (pollution costs, health costs, defense costs, democratic costs of centralized wealth, other risks) as well as for nuclear (no insurance company will touch it), then renewables and energy efficiency (including passive solar) would have crowded out everything else in the market in the 1980s. Instead we got the Reagan years.
President Carter was wrong about a lot of things regarding energy policy. He should have focused more on appropriately pricing fossil fuel and nuclear externalities into the market, with any related taxes distributed generally as a basic income. Hard for him to do that with nukes as a previous nuclear engineer perhaps. But he was right when he said: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ... "We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
We took the wrong path to fragmentation and self-interest under Reagan and have gone down that road in the USA for about thirty years. So many have suffered, including in the most recent financial crisis. It is a long hard walk back to community and public interest but we have to do it.
Pope Francis has been writing about this like in his book "The Joy of the Gospel: Evangelii Gaudium" which I just got to see what he had to say on the topic of economics and social justice as informed by ethics.
Fortunately, many people have worked at solutions anyway despite this thirty years of widespread pervasive market failure to account for externalities or distribute purchasing power equitably. Thanks to the hard work of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs along with consumers who purchased expensive products anyway for environmental and practical reasons, now renewables and efficiency are cheaper than fossil fuels in many situation despite the unaccounted for externalities. This is a huge tremendous success but you would not know it reading most of the slashdot comments on this story. Part of the issue is that until grid parity is reached, people still deny it will happen and most do nothing. After grid parity is reached and surpassed, then it is foolish economically to use anything but renewables. Just like humanity did not leave the stone age because we ran out of rocks (but we still use rock for building sometimes), and humanity did not stop using whale oil because we ran out of it, so too we will not stop using fossil fuels because we run out of them (not will we likely stop using liquid chemical carriers for energy, but they may be made by renewables and likely someday fusion).
Granted, we in theory know how to make much safer nuclear plants too. In theory, somehtign like Thorium-based power run by respo
Slashdot Mirror
While you make a good point, nutrition works right now (along with exercise, good sleep, a less stressful lifestyle, avoiding hazards like smoking, community connectedness, and so on like in "Blue Zones"). The rest of life extension is just a hope that maybe we can create new technologies. Also, for most people, if they can make it in good health to 100+ years old via such well-proved things, they will then be around for more breakthroughs in the next 50+ years.
Also, probably most invasive life extension technologies for extreme longevity could also be turned into biological weapons (like rewriting DNA or reorganizing the brain). So, we may end up with technologies that could allow people to live in good health for 1000s of years, have any skin color or nose shape they want, and people will use them to kill off everyone else that has a different skin color or nose shape then they currently have (which would be very sadly ironic). Improved nutrition does not have that existential risk associated with it for the most part.
http://www.corporatecrimerepor...
Fines or imprisoning CEOs do little to change the pattern of relationships and values and policies that make an organization what it is, any more than a human body loosing some skill cells or even brain cells usually changes how a person behaves very much.
Seriously, why should any corporate communications have any expectation of privacy? Corporations with "limited liability" are chartered for the public interest. 150 years ago, US Americans put such creatures on very short leashes because they had seen what trouble resulted from big British corporations in the American colonies. Individuals have now lost pretty much all informational privacy due to large corporations and the current internet. Why should bigger more powerful creatures than humans like corporation have more privacy in practice than humans? See also David Brin's "The Transparent Society". Any argument that corporations need privacy (like for salaries or payments for services) for some sort of commercial advantage is trumped by the public interest in understanding what corporations are doing and also that if all corporations were transparent there would be a level playing field. Granted, it would require new ways of doing business, but books like "Honest Business" also extol the value of "open books". Or perhaps corporations should be forced to choose -- if they want limited liability for shareholders then they need to be transparent; if every shareholder accepts full responsibility for all actions of the organization, then they can have privacy?
And see also my comments from 2000, the relevant section copied below (sadly a lot of links there have rotted):
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
========= machine intelligence is already here =========
I personally think machine evolution is unstoppable, and the best hope
for humanity is the noble cowardice of creating refugia and trying, like
the duckweed, to create human (and other) life faster than other forces
can destroy it. [Well, I now in 2014 think there are also other options, like symbiosis, maybe friendly AI, and in general trying to be nicer to each other like with a basic income in hopes that leads to a happier singularity...]
Note, I'm not saying machine evolution won't have a human component --
in that sense, a corporation or any bureaucracy is already a separate
machine intelligence, just not a very smart or resilient one. This sense
of the corporation comes out of Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous
Technology: Technics out of control as a theme in political thought".
http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/
You may have a tough time believing this, but Winner makes a convincing
case. He suggests that all successful organizations "reverse-adapt"
their goals and their environment to ensure their continued survival.
These corporate machine intelligences are already driving for better
machine intelligences -- faster, more efficient, cheaper, and more
resilient. People forget that corporate charters used to be routinely
revoked for behavior outside the immediate public good, and that
corporations were not considered persons until around 1886 (that
decision perhaps being the first major example of a machine using the
political/social process of its own ends).
http://www.adbusters.org/magaz...
Corporate charters are granted supposedly because society believe it is
in the best interest of *society* for corporations to exist.
But, when was the last time people were able to pull the "charter" plug
on a corporation not acting in the public interest? It's hard, and it
will get harder when corporations don't ne
More fundamental CS though: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galle...
My proposals: https://www.changemakers.com/m...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And also advice to Larry from that my own individual sensemaking from 2012:
"Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"
https://groups.google.com/foru...
... How the Power of Diversity Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."
An aspect of that is also that humans are adapted to argue together in small groups and find creative solutions together:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
http://lifehacker.com/can-rati...
Of course, then to keep a group of such people motivated, they need autonomy, challenge/mastery, and purpose, like Dan Pink outlines here:
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And until we get a basic income for all, at least enough money to live a decent life in our society so money is essentially off the table as it has reached the point of diminishing returns for people who like their work:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
I don't seem to have "Rogue Bolo" in my sci-fi book collection, but the cover on Amazon looks familiar. I think I might have given it away one Halloween decades ago living in Princeton, NJ when I gave the option of getting books instead of candy to some trick-or-treaters (several teens there seemed to prefer the books).
Your point on a Bolo singularity makes me think about the Asimov universe, and how his robots there eventually interpreted the three laws in a way "The Zeroth Law" that gave them lots of independence, and that saw themselves as in a way more "human" than humans, and also caused them to start intervening in history behind the scenes. There is no set of laws or constitution that ultimately does not need some intelligent judge to interpret the meaning or spirit of the words in a present day context, and once some intelligent entity (including an AI) starts creatively interpreting "rules" including "metarules" about how rules can be changed, who knows where it will end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Inspired by your post, I've been looking through my Bolo books. I started rereading "Ploughshare" by Todd Johnson in "Bolos: Book 1: Honor of the Regiment" where "Das Afrika Corps" and other Mark XVI C Bolos act a bit odd due to a spilled milkshake by the "Director's son" in the "White Room" psychotronics lab and the use of "DK-41" cleaning fluid to fix that mess up. Another case of the unexpected...
I liked "Bolo Rising" novel which has a Bolo Mark XXXIII series HCT called Hector. That is an interesting novel of a Bolo regaining its operational capacity after being infiltrated and locked down by alien technology. There is another XXXIII in "Bolo Strike". But while those mega-Bolo stories are interesting in their own sort of over-the-top way (maybe your point about "the other guy"), I like the diversity in the short stories in "Honor of the Regiment" by a variety of authors covering the whole history of different Bolos of various capabilities and their unfolding increasing sentience and self-directedness. What does "Honor" or "Service" means over time and shading into a meta-level? For example, are whistleblowers like Manning, Snowden, or Kiriakou honorable and engaged in service and fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution? Or are they traitors? Complex questions... Perhaps "Rogue Bolo" goes deeper into such issues? As a lesser example, "Bolo Brigade" explores the issue of a conflict between "rules of engagement" and a Bolo's desire to get its job done. Conflicts between priorities are not something that only humans will face...
It is not clear where the singularity of emerging AI and technologically-expanded-or-narrowed humans and so on will all lead in reality -- especially with Bolo vs. Beserker as an option. I forget the plot of "Bolo Strike" as I look at my Bolo books, but the blurb on the back says "as Bolo faces human-Bolo hybrid in a cataclysmic showdown". So there are other ways automated systems can cause change, either their own independence or by empowering some few independent humans. As I essentially say near the end of the 2000 post to the Unrev-II Engelbart Bootstrap mailing list, corporations are like vast machine intelligence at his point. And like the present day, what is the real difference to most people if the Earth is laid waste, the seas polluted, the mountains leveled, the oceans strip-mined, and most of the people kept down in their aspirations for a decent life by "aliens from outer space" or by some 1% of vampire-like human-machine-hybrid-organizational "aliens" who have become specialized in "extracting wealth" by privatizing gains and socializing costs (including the cost to the worker of unpleasant work environments)? Even without human-Bolo hybrids, there can be vast technological/bureaucratic enterprises that make use of humans as parts much the same as the "!*!*!" of "Bolo Rising" tried to do in their quest of "efficiency" -- "efficiency" to what end and to whose benefit? So much
Well, 3D printing is a lot like magic cauldrons, so we may both be right in the end. :-)
Of course, magic cauldrons are not without their downsides: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Yeah, I've seen surveys that say humanity in the West can more easily imagine nuclear war or other destruction of everything we care about instead of significant social change... None-the-less, as Howard Zinn wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
BTW, to fix a typo, one sentence should be: "While I like Iain Bank's Culture Novels, I wonder why the [AIs] there, both human-level and way-beyond-human-level take so much effort to take care of humans and cater to them."
... simulated cannibalistic robot killers in the 1980s on a Symbolics running ZetaLisp. I gave a couple conference talks about it, plus one at NC State (where I wrote the simulation) that I think even may have influenced Marshall Brain. I had created a simulation of self-replicating robots that reconstructed themselves to an ideal from spare parts in their simulated environment (something proposed first by von Neumann, but I may have been the first to make such a simulation). The idea was that a robot that was essentially half of an "ideal" robot would make its other half by adding parts to itself, then split in two by cutting some links, and then do it again. The very first one assembled its other half, cut the links to divide itself, and then proceeded (unexpectedly to me) to then start cutting apart its offspring for parts to do it again. I had to add a sense of "smell" so robots would set the smell of parts they used and then not try to take parts that smelled the same. I also mention that simulation here:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
Decades later, I still got a bit freaked out when our chickens would sometimes eat their own eggs...
My point though is that completely unintentionally, these devices I designed to create ended up destroying things -- even their own offspring. It was a big lesson for me, and has informed my work and learning in various directions ever since. Things you build can act in totally unexpected ways. And since creation involves changing the universe, any change also involves to some extent destroying something that is already there.
James P. Hogan in his 1982 book "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" which I had read earlier should have been a warning. In it he makes clear how any AI could gain a survival instinct and then could perceive things like power fluctuations as threats -- even if there was not intent on the part of the original programmers for that to happen.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...
Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought" assigned as reading in college also should have been another warning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
It's been sad to watch the progression of real killer autonomous robots since the 1980s... Here is just one example, and the exciting, upbeat music in the video shows the political and social problem more than anything:
"Samsung robotic sentry (South Korea, live ammo)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Just because we can do something does not mean we should...
I was impressed that this recent Indian Bollywood film about an AI-powered robot took such a nuanced view of the problems. A bit violent for me, but otherwise an excellent and thought provoking film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Enthiran is a 2010 Indian Tamil science fiction techno thriller, co-written and directed by Shankar.The film features Rajinikanth in dual roles, as a scientist and an andro humanoid robot, alongside Aishwarya Rai while Danny Denzongpa, Santhanam, Karunas, Kalabhavan Mani, Devadarshini, and Cochin Haneefa play supporting roles. The film's story revolves around the scientist's struggle to control his creation, the android robot whose software was upgraded to give it the ability to comprehend and generate human emotions. The plan backfires as the robot falls in love with the scientist's fiancee and is further manipulated to bring destruction to the world when it lands in the hands of a rival scientist."
But yes, the Beserker Series is another signpost in that direction -- perhaps countered a bit by the Bolo series by Keith Laumer? :-)
ht
Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...
Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
We can and should do better than this as a society.
My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
See "The Skills of Xanadu", as text: http://books.google.com/books?...
and as audio: https://archive.org/details/pr...
Around 2001 or 2002, while working at at IBM Research I went to a talk by Ted Nelson there, and I asked him about the story given the similar name. He said that the story had inspired him (at least partially) to do his work, and thanked me for telling him the name of the story, saying he had been looking for that story for a long time. While I did not say so, his reply about looking for the story surprised me given that there are probably not many stories with Xanadu in the title so a library search would have found it I would think.. Ted Nelson records everything around him on a tape recorder (or at least did then), so that interaction should be on one of his tapes...
The 1956 story by Theodore Sturgeon is am amazing work that features a world networked by wireless mobile wearable computing supporting freely shared knowledge and skills through a sort of global internet-like concept. Some of that knowledge was about advanced nanotech-based manufacturing. The system powered an economy reflecting ideas like Bob Black writes about in "The Abolition of Work", where much work had become play coordinated through this global network. The story has inspired other people as well, both me from when I read it (and forgot it mostly for a long time, except for the surprise ending), and also a Master Inventor at IBM I worked with who got inspired by the nanotech aspects of that story when he was young. Even almost sixty years later, that story still has things we can learn from about a vision of a new type of society (including with enhanced intrinsic&mutual security) made possible through advanced computing.
A core theme is an interplay between meshwork and hierarchy, reminiscent of Manuel De Landa's writings:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/man...
"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."
See also, for other "old" ideas we could still benefit from thinking about:
"The Web That Wasn't"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Google Tech Talks October, 23 2007
For most of us who work on the
If everyone stuck all their cash and other non-cash funds into their mattresses, it is basic mainstream economics that we would have a huge financial depression from lack of currency for exchange. So, why do mainstream economists have trouble understanding that the same thing happens if take all that money and instead stuff it into computers in the digital equivalent of a casino frequented mostly by the wealthiest (the stock market, derivatives, currency speculation, etc.), where the money spends all its time in transactions have little relation to the real goods and services that most people spend all their money on?
My take on that was from an idea I first saw a glimmering of in "Money As Debt II":
http://paulgrignon.netfirms.co...
"Today the largest volume of money by far is changing hands in what is best described as the gambling economy... the foreign exchange market, the derivatives market and the rest of the financial instruments being played by banks and investment funds for as much profit as possible. For example, the volume of trade on the world's foreign exchange markets, in just one week, exceeds the total volume of world trade in real goods and services during an entire year. This money is in continuous play by speculators looking to make windfall profits on currency fluctuations. It exists... but only in the gambling economy."
Your tax on transactions could help with reducing the FIRE-sector casino economy by discouraging so much trading, but it does not get at the root of things like wealth concentration, since wealthy people could still just park money in cash or gold or real estate. A progressive income tax going up to 90%+ like we had in the USA decades ago, with the revenue redistributed as a basic income might help with wealth concentration. So might a wealth tax (but that is harder). Modest inflation also discourages hording money by forcing wealthy people to spend money, invest it, or lose it.
Other alternatives to keep things going despite an absence of cash for the real economy due to it being stuffed into computers include more LETS systems (alternative currency that promotes community), making what little currency there is in the real economy move faster, expanding the gift economy, improved subsistence production, and better government planning using current tax dollars.
So much of our wealth today is the product of generations of hard work by so many people including those creating inventions and other new ideas building on previous ideas, and in that sense is effectively a common inheritance. C.H. Douglas talked about with "Social Credit":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Computers don't have a long history of serving humans yet."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Or the recent Slashdot article on robots being used to rip apart mosquitoes...
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Or previously, slugs:
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
""SlugBot is no ordinary robot. SlugBot hunts down slugs, and is powered by fermenting the slugs' corpses, producing biogas fuel. "
See also, for a different robotic dystopia from helping too much and "protecting" too much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
Life seems livvd between fire and ice, between order and chaos.
Computers and software have been through several generations over the last 70 years (and more). The failures we still see IMHO have more to do with our social systems (including legal frameworks) than with the possibilities of hardware or software. The same is perhaps true of nuclear power -- Fukushima happened more for social reasons than technical ones..
Well said! Now if we could only get people also to apply the same ideas to fixing up programming languages and libraries (e..g Swift vs. C/D/Java/JavaScript/Smalltalk/etc.) instead of inventing new ones that just have different gaps and different bugs...
Overheard at lunch there around 2000 (paraphrase): "We hire the most competitive candidates from the most competitive top three schools and then we wonder why they have trouble cooperating and getting along..."
I hope the policy has changed since... It also seemed like they were passing over a lot of interesting people and thus limiting their cognitive diversity.
See also Scott E. Page book "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/Differen...
Google probably suffers to a lesser extent from a similar problem as I suggest here:
http://developers.slashdot.org...
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"The official use of common schooling was invented by Plato; after him the idea languished, its single torchbearer the Church. Educational offerings from the Church were intended for, though not completely limited to, those young whose parentage qualified them as a potential Guardian class. You would hardly know this from reading any standard histories of Western schooling intended for the clientele of teacher colleges."
And:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"An important part of the virulent, sustained attack launched against family life in the United States, starting about 150 years ago, arose from the impulse to escape fleshly reality. Interestingly enough, the overwhelming number of prominent social reformers since Plato have been childless, usually childless men, in a dramatic illustration of escape-discipline employed in a living tableau.
Beginning about 1840, a group calling itself the Massachusetts School Committee held a series of secret discussions involving many segments of New England political and business leadership.1 Stimulus for these discussions, often led by the politician Horace Mann, was the deterioration of family life that the decline of agriculture was leaving in its wake.2
A peculiar sort of dependency and weakness caused by mass urbanization was acknowledged by all with alarm. The once idyllic American family situation was giving way to widespread industrial serfdom. Novel forms of degradation and vice were appearing.
And yet at the same time, a great opportunity was presented. Plato, Augustine, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and a host of other insightful thinkers, sometimes referred to at the Boston Athenaeum as "The Order of the Quest," all taught that without compulsory universal schooling the idiosyncratic family would never surrender its central hold on society to allow utopia to become reality. Family had to be discouraged from its function as a sentimental haven, pressed into the service of loftier ideals--those of the perfected State."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1...
"Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are . . . factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.. . . And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.""
Also:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org
Thanks for pointing this out (article submitter here). People make points in other comments about MetaFilter's business strategy, varied content, or grousing about the moderation. Your comment instead emphasizes the positive about how how MetaFIlter is one of the longest running online communities and it is trying to sustain itself. One comment I saw on MetaFilter compared these donations to the end of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
http://metatalk.metafilter.com...
I've never been a MetaFilter member. Nor have I paid much attention to it anytime recently other than seeing stories on it now and then found by whatever random process. But a couple months ago I added it to my list of interesting news sites. Every day it has some interesting and generally pleasant (non-trollish) discussions linked to on the main page as the best of the discussions. I can see the value in that and the work that goes into it. As I wrote to someone just before hearing this news, Slashdot is like the discussions I had in college around the computer center and the engineering buildings; MetaFilter is like the more randomly varied discussions I had in the dorm hallways, dining halls, and maybe the social science buildings.
Having recently "discovered" this jewel that reminds me of the better part of what the internet was in the late 1990s, it is sad to see it struggling. Slashdot is a community I have long enjoyed and participated in, and itself may itself be facing some of the same general issues. It's a bit surprising to me to see in some of the comment here a lack of acknowledgement of the parallels. Why do they think "Beta" is being pushed? People may say MetaFilter is not "original" content like a news articles. Nonetheless, I feel discussions about new articles are themselves important content. I read Slashdot not so much for the articles but for the discussions which often point out how the articles are wrong or misleading, or add lots of details to the articles, or put the articles into a broader context. Discussion has its own value, both for participants and for lurkers. I don't know if it is true, but I did find interesting the speculative comment by someone that the fall in traffic could reflect that maybe Google does not want competition with its own Google+?
Another story has a link to a video where Matt Haughey, the founder of Metafilter, explains the size of the site and the moderation infrastructure and its history:
http://newstorystudio.com/why-...
http://vimeo.com/21043675
Matt sounds like someone who really cares about his community, sort of like a town mayor (and a founder who never "sold off" from the early internet days, unlike Slashdot getting sold off to various new owners). Guestimating from their staff size and their revenue loss and member base (on the order of 10,000 active members), it must be take at least US$20K - US$40K a month to keep that community humming along for staffing costs (mostly for moderation I would think)? Or guessing on the order of about US$2 to US$5 per active member per month? Computers and bandwidth for hosting used to cost something significant, but nowadays for a text-mostly site I would not think those matter much?
It seems to me that the financing of all this has been for the past few years mostly that people not in the community (non-posters) drive by via Google and generate ad revenue, and that revenue then supports the community. The people who actively participate in the community must be a much smaller percentage of views. It looks like with MetaFilter, the people who funded the community were not the people who actually inhabited the social process of it.
That reminds me a bit of where I live in the Adirondack Park. Much of the money coming into the community is from summer tourists or summer residents when the population swells
Show me some citations for your accusations? Fuhrman's main book "Eat to Live" is one of the most scientifically-grounded books on nutrition, with thousands of references to substantiate his points with evidence. That said, I don't agree 100% with everything he recommends (see below) in part because of the nature of the limits of what you can find in the scientific literature, as well as the difficulty of making sense of conflicting studies. There is also the fact that most nutritional studies start with a fundamentally sick and detoxified Western population (however good their basic vitals are) and so it may be hard to draw broad conclusions about what would be best for people eating very diferently to begin with. The future is individualized medicine based on genetics and the intestinal microbiome and also lifestyle and history, but we are not there yet. So, it is possible to question some broad recommendations he makes -- which is also shows the limit of writing books on a complex topic like human health for a general audience.
For examples of where I disagree some with Furhman, for many people (although not those at strong risk of hemorrhagic stroke), Fuhrman's advice on severely limiting salt intake may be questionable IMHO (versus just mainly avoiding processed foods and their salt load which makes them palatable). We need salt for brain function and stomach acid. While too much salt will create problems especially for some specific people, it is hard to know what the acceptable limit is in individual people, which also depends on how much potassium they eat and other aspects of their health. Most people probably should eat less salt, but how much less is an area of contention and there are some conflicting studies.
Furhman may also be a bit low on his vitamin D recommendations. He did base his recommendation on a scientific study related to vitamin D and mortality, but I feel there are other aspects to that beyond what he cited.
Maybe my biggest concern is that Furhman may not clearly enough state the importance of iodine and his recommendations are based on the US RDA for that which may be 10X too low (see Brownstein). The problem is that if you follow Fuhrman's advice to eliminate dairy (a good source of iodine since cows concentrate it from grass) without also adding sea vegetables or an iodine supplement to your diet (or iodized salt, see above), it seems to me you may become iodine deficient. This is especially true if you eat foods from one part of the world given many agricultural lands especially in Europe are iodine deficient. It is also true because we are exposed to so much bromine in Western countries which is an iodine antagonist, suggesting we need more iodine to compensate for that. The issue of iodine is one of emphasis about getting enough iodine given his other advice would reduce it and he suggests a low target to begin with. For example, here he does suggest iodine supplements, but not to emphasizing it to the degree he should IMHO given all the other aspects of his approach:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
In general, Fuhrman's advice to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables is also difficult to follow for most people living in a Western culture including due to cost of vegetables and fruits given US agricultural subsidies for grains and animal products. Also, eating such things out-of-season poses environmental and social costs for transport and supporting big farms in foreign countries which may not be well-regulated or engage in fair-trade.
Less-demanding (but less rewarding) whole-grain-heavy advice by John McDougall or Andrew Weil may be easier to follow and in the end thus achieve better overall results in our society for many who have trouble following Fuhrman's approach. Fuhrman originally trained as a world-class athlete (figure skating), so he seems to expect a lot of self-motivation and self-control in others -- as well as perhaps the financial resources to afford the best heal
So, they probably don't see snakes often except on TV watching Crocodile Dundee: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Wow, what an inspirational story about your MiL!
Looks like a fascinating movie too, assuming this is the one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt12...
""Spiritual Revolution" is a look at Eastern Spirituality in the Western world, with particular emphasis on its points of convergence with Western science and psychotherapy."
Your point of playing media is a reminder it might be good to play her favorite music if she wants. And cuddling with her infant son and hearing his voice might also contribute to her healing and her desire to communicate and move and get well.
Yes, good points about the importance of good nutrition for recovery (although now might not be the best time to focus on cleaning out sequestered toxins, although a good long-term goal). Most mainstream medicine pays at best lip service to nutrition. Omega 3 fatty acids might help rebuild the brain, given the brain is mostly fat. Eggs have some as you say, but there are probably better choices. This is worthy of lot of further research to learn all that is needed. Don't count on a typical MD including even a brain specialist to know much about this.
Bear in mind there are different kinds of strokes which might need somewhat different nutrition depending on the causes and other complications. Specifically, clogged arteries causing one kind of stroke probably need a somewhat different approach than rebuilding damaged arteries that caused a different kind of bleeding stroke, since there is a balance of processes going on to strengthen or tear down the walls of arteries. But in either case, the body can't do the right thing without the needed building blocks and the control of inflammation caused by poor nutrition.
Places to start from my searching just now, but do a lot of research yourself (a long path for most US Americans to learn about eating healthy despite all the misinformaiton out there...):
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/...
(Different stroke type, but maybe some overlap:) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.stroke.org/site/Doc...
http://www.strokeassociation.o...
Other things can help too to reduce inflammation and then physical therapy: http://healyourbrain.wordpress...
Check her vitamin D level regularly as that is involved with inflammation management. Here is a good standard to work towards:
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
I've posted lots of other general nutrition links in the past, especially by Dr. Fuhrman. But again do your own research on what is best since a lot of his general diet advice is more for people with clogged arteries and at risk of ischemic stroke than for those with weakened arteries as he focuses on salt-restriction instead to minimize the risk of hemorrhagic stroke. There are processes in the body that both tear down and build up arteries, and they probably must be kept in balance to avoid both kinds of strokes, even though most US Americans are far more at risk of strokes from clogged arteries of the building up process going too far (from both inflammation and bad fats). Links about stroke from him though:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disea...
http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
I see a whole bunch of books on Amazon on "Stroke Recovery". Probably all sorts of good stuff there.
I agree with Richo's comment here that it is too soon to focus on fancy communications gear and you need to focus on just the basics (like yes. no, pain, thirsty, etc.):
http://ask.slashdot.org/commen...
That said, here is what Hawking uses:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-...
Also other tools discussed previously on Slashdot may be helpful in the long term:
.. if I had known MakerBot would start doing questionable patent stuff like this instead of the openness they seemed to promise back then.
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Well done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
See also my related comment about how to us the free market to deal with Global Warming (GW) issues and also Fracking:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Amazing so many slashdotters ignore it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
"Deutsche Bank says, that in January 2014 already more than 19 countries are under grid parity for solar power and sees starting a second gold rush for solar power..."
Of course, had we been paying the true cost of fossil fuels up front (pollution costs, health costs, defense costs, democratic costs of centralized wealth, other risks) as well as for nuclear (no insurance company will touch it), then renewables and energy efficiency (including passive solar) would have crowded out everything else in the market in the 1980s. Instead we got the Reagan years.
President Carter was wrong about a lot of things regarding energy policy. He should have focused more on appropriately pricing fossil fuel and nuclear externalities into the market, with any related taxes distributed generally as a basic income. Hard for him to do that with nukes as a previous nuclear engineer perhaps. But he was right when he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."
We took the wrong path to fragmentation and self-interest under Reagan and have gone down that road in the USA for about thirty years. So many have suffered, including in the most recent financial crisis. It is a long hard walk back to community and public interest but we have to do it.
Pope Francis has been writing about this like in his book "The Joy of the Gospel: Evangelii Gaudium" which I just got to see what he had to say on the topic of economics and social justice as informed by ethics.
Fortunately, many people have worked at solutions anyway despite this thirty years of widespread pervasive market failure to account for externalities or distribute purchasing power equitably. Thanks to the hard work of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs along with consumers who purchased expensive products anyway for environmental and practical reasons, now renewables and efficiency are cheaper than fossil fuels in many situation despite the unaccounted for externalities. This is a huge tremendous success but you would not know it reading most of the slashdot comments on this story. Part of the issue is that until grid parity is reached, people still deny it will happen and most do nothing. After grid parity is reached and surpassed, then it is foolish economically to use anything but renewables. Just like humanity did not leave the stone age because we ran out of rocks (but we still use rock for building sometimes), and humanity did not stop using whale oil because we ran out of it, so too we will not stop using fossil fuels because we run out of them (not will we likely stop using liquid chemical carriers for energy, but they may be made by renewables and likely someday fusion).
Granted, we in theory know how to make much safer nuclear plants too. In theory, somehtign like Thorium-based power run by respo