"Or you keep throwing things at it until it gets better by itself and the psychiatrist takes credit for it."
Yeah, it is ironic how homeopaths are villified but psychiatrists are celebrated, when the placebo effect is strong in both... Must have a better PR firm? http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science Quoting Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/ "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)
Also: "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why." http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all "Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol."
The mind/brain/body/spirit/etc. indeed is amazing...
"Society has been pretty much unbearable since more than one person has been in a group. Before that, loneliness was unbearable. And yet, most people aren't clinically depressed."
While this is true, and a good point, there can be positive forms of stress, too, called "eustress": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress "Eustress was originally explored in a stress model by Richard Lazarus, it is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings."
Stresses can be distress or eustress depending on how we are prepared to deal with them. The average person may smartly run from a house fire, whereas a trained and experienced fire fighter is expected to approach one calmly and deliberately (and may even feel some excitement and camaraderie putting his or her extensive training into use). There is also the notion of "flow" when the challenge matches our current level of skill. Game designers understand this -- so levels start off easy and get harder as your skills increase. And you would not expect someone who is an expert at playing a video game like, say, Halo, to be able to immediately win at face-to-face poker games, because they require different skill sets and interests (or vice versa).
Humans are adapted to a certain type of environment, which includes certain types of average stressors. Historically, * humans lived in tribal groups that included extended families, * they walked several miles a day, * they got plenty of sunlight, * they had regular exposure to the sights and sounds of nature, * they ate organic food with lots of phytonutrients and fiber, * they did a variety of hands-on tasks involving both the mind and body working together, and * the stories and songs of every-day life were told by relatives for the purposes of education.
There may have been downsides to that life (high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics or trauma surgery for accidents, etc.) but there were many good things about it too in the sense that we were adapted to that mix (even if we have also partially adapted some to changes since). Humans need sunlight for health. We need exercise. We need a certain level of dirt to challenge the immune system. We need phytonutrients to build a healthy body. We need daily mental stimulation to some degree. And so on. The same sunlight might kill certain bacteria, and the same phytonutrients may poison certain insects, the same physical exercise might not be possible for a slug, and the same social challenges might drive a bear crazy, but for humans, we have adapted to make the best of those challenges -- and to be stronger as individuals and groups because of them.
Nowadays, humans in developed societies live a very differnt life in many ways: * humans tend to live in isolated houses or apartments as singles or couples (and when they leave that home physically or virtually have experiences around a lot of strangers in cities or on the internet), * they usually drive or take mass transit instead of walk, * they spend much of their time indoors with no direct sunlight, * they mainly hear synthetic sounds and see synthetic ("supernormal") images, * they eat processed foods low in phytonutrients and fiber and high in chemical additives, * they do tasks that are either very abstract or very physically repetitive but rarely use the mind and body together (see "The Case For Working with Your Hands" by Crawford), and * the stories and songs of every day life are told by strangers who often want to convince someone to do something so the stranger can profit from it (often something unhealthy for the person or the planet in the long term, though it may feel good in the short term, like drinking sugar water).
My suggestion a couple years ago to a public call for ideas by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319 "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
My wife and I have worked on some software used by the intelligence community in different countries. But our focus had been to try to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. Note the Snowden here is a different Snowden from the leaker: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/4318/un-wired/ "There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not the philosophy of TIA."
We tried to get the related company to open source the software, but not much luck. My wife does have some rights to some of the work, plus the core ideas are available in the public literature (which is what my wife based her research on).
We all may well benefit from an expectation of privacy, and a healthy government may well have an obligation to defend privacy the same way it might defend our physical infrastructure. I don't want to argue against those things (even if in practice in the communal extended-family villages that hunter/gatherer humans had historically, privacy may have been rare). But in practice right now, I doubt we can stop the spying, because it is too seductive, an
It's true that a stressful environment can indeed contribute to the risk of depression, and also that for most people, modern life is indeed stressful in a lot of new ways. To support your point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park ""Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.""
I'd agree there are many factors involved in depression, including all the factors that may stand in the way of eating better (including lack of money for healthier food, misinformation, initial lack of motivation, peers, time, negative self-talk, misinformed professionals, chemical dependencies, bad relationships, difficult working or living conditions, no access to nature, social status, etc.). So, yes, even when you know you should eat better, there can still be a lot of hurdles in the way. A related film including a truck driver trying to get out of a downward spiral: http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/
You could think of nutrition as like your car's tires, which are the interface between the car and the reality of the road. If your tires are bald, you are most likely going to have an accident on slippery roads, no matter how good the rest of the car is. But if your tires are bald, maybe you spend so much time paying for car repairs that you don't have money or time to go to the tire shop for new ones? And it is hard to think about investing in new tires when all the mechanics at car repair places that you go to (which don't sell tires for some reason) are telling you (based on years of their own training) that the reason you are having so many accidents is because you need an oil change, or a new transmission, or need to install all wheel drive, or remove the roof to make the car into a convertible. Still, it is true you'd probably have less accidents even with bald tires if, say, the roads were not so windy or made of slippery glass due to bad public policy... So, yes, depression is multi-factored in that sort of way (and more, since, following the analogy, how grippy your bald tires are might still be some function of exactly how you turn the steering wheel perhaps to make the most of some remaining patches of tread near the edges perhaps).
From the first result: http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/food-to-balance-your-mood "In a study of 200 people done in England for the mental health group known as Mind, participants were told to cut down on mood "stressors" they ate, while increasing the amount of mood "supporters." Stressors included sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and chocolate (more of that coming up). Supporters were water, vegetables, fruit, and oil-rich fish. Eighty-eight percent of the people who tried this reported improved mental health. Specifically, 26% said they had fewer mood swings, 26% had fewer panic attacks and anxiety, and 24% said they experienced less depression."
I know, one can quibble about whether they had a control group, whether that was "double blind" experiment, and so on.
Consider, if someone cruel were to take a rat and feed it nothing but sugar water, the poor abused rat is going to sicken and die, and probably be pretty cranky throughout the process of dying. Rats need a variety of nutrients. Why expect anything different
So, people may not be getting as much happiness in the long term out of drugs or junk food as they think they might. It's just the way the brain seems to be wired.
That said, you are mixing in some other interesting ideas like: * "sexual selection" (a technical term in evolutionary biology) like for the otherwise disadvantageous and wasteful peacock's tail (or profligate showy spending) because it appeals for whatever reason to the opposite sex,, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection * the potential problems of following other people's rules written to their own benefit, and * time sense -- see Phillip Zimbardo's "The Time Paradox" RSA Animate video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
BTW, if you feel you normally have a consistent low level of mood otherwise, look hard at what you eat (artificial colors, sugar, refined starch, caffeine?) and what you don't eat (vegetables, omega 3s and other healthy fats, B complex, vitamin D, etc.). See Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman as places to start with that.
See also my other comments here on "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction".
But ultimately, as you suggest, we all make choices based on our preferences, ability, history, situation, and priorities etc..So, from a metaphysical point of view, it can be hard to argue with assumptions about the meaning of life to different people -- even if some approaches to life may seem to some to be less adaptive. And certainly those who are too abstentious, and leave no progeny as a result, are evolutionary problems on the other side of (excessive) moderation. Thus "Moderation in all things, including moderation".
But there are probably other stories, as this technology has been used in various ways for decades. Although this is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center "More recent research has shown that the so-called pleasure electrodes lead only a form of wanting or motivation to obtain the stimulation, rather than pleasure."
There are so many situations human need to navigate where you could start down a slippery slope... Part of the problem is that it takes time for society to adjust as people learn about each new one technology is making possible...
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html " Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) "In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels)."
Also related about "Supernormal Stimuli": http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X "Our instincts -- for food, sex, or territorial protection -- evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons -- that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term "supernormal stimuli" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization."
Like moths to the flame... Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. That said, people will do this. Not sure what the outcome will ultimately be, but the "natural selection" point above, to select for people who do not do this, may well come into play. And that may also be part of the adaptive evolutionary value of religion, to scare us away from some unhealthy things and attract us to some healthy things (whatever else one can say about specific dogmas): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
So, maybe the only people who will survive being overstimulated by electrical thunderbolts will be those with a deep abiding religious feeling that such a life is wrongly lived?
As I note there, obviously, writing stuff like that must not be the way to get a high paying (>$200K annual) job programming in the financial industry.:-) But this may be of interest to others looking at Ray Dalio's "Principles" or in Bridgewater Associates (the world's biggest hedge fund in 2011) as a place of employment. Or perhaps it may be of interest in trying to understand, from a psychological perspective, some of the potential limits of Bridgewater's financial models if they reflect only that version of "Principles"?
From what I sent: ---- I guess one might say that from the outside, with this cover letter I'm trying to upgrade Bridgewater in my own way, even as Bridgewater would probably upgrade me in some sense if I worked there.:-) I'm supplying some of the results of my having read widely for many years on a variety of topics related to evolution, technology, psychology, and social change. Maybe someone at Bridgewater will read this, maybe not, but it was also interesting to write it and try to get a message through the filters all organizations have. It's a first draft, and it could be a lot better, a lot shorter, and so on were I to spend a lot more time on it, or were I to have better tools with which to communicate it (which I can aspire to create someday, like supplying a semantic web to your inbox).
The key points here are that: * "Evolution" does not mean "progress" as humans normally think of it (this from someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time), * All reasoning depends on emotions (which give us reason to reason), * Bridgewater has reached the size where it has a significant effect on the exchange economy that supports it and needs to consider the broader issues in its modeling and responsibilities to stakeholders; * There can be many overlapping senses of "self" (body, family, philosophy, company, state, etc.) and models (including financial models) may need to take that in account, but that is not reflected in "Principles"; * There is a pressing need for sensemaking tools and I feel I can help create them (and have helped create some in the past); * such tools might, through the FOSS gift economy, even be a way to take aspects of Bridgewater's self-improvement culture (like through structured arguments) and make that available to the general public, as if things like openness and rationality are true for Bridgewater, they must be true for the rest of the world, and maybe Bridgewater try to help the rest of the world achieve those things too (while also increasing its potential employee pool of people learning such tools); * Bridgewater can probably better promote health among its community in terms of vitamin D, eating more vegetables, understanding the "Pleasure Trap", and having treadmill workstations;...
---
Realistically, I'd have probably been a better match for the Dalio Family Foundation perhaps, directing time and money to open source sensemaking software efforts?:-)
Anyway, thankfully I found some other way to earn ration units (fiat dollars) that I can exchange for food and shelter, in the absence of a "basic income" and given pretty much all the land is enclosed and privatized, and even if it was not, it takes a village and lots of specific skills to live well in the wilderness... http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout
All philosophy is anthropology;
All anthropology is psychology;
All psychology is biology;
All biology is chemistry;
All chemistry is physics;
All physics is math;
All math is philosophy.:-)
See my website for lots about the future of economics. I passed on my change to work on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan Chase doing Smalltalk around 2000. Back then I didn't think it worth the commute there (which my wife had hated earlier), as well as the risk for a Japanese-style subway gassing. Little did I imagine someone attacking the WTC, but I guess otherwise it is possible I might have been at a meeting in the WTC as the group met over there sometimes.
Still, as imaginary as fiat dollars are, if enough people believe in the idea, that gives it a sort of reality. And, like most US Americans, I have to deal with that collective fantasy as a way to ration the fruits of production. But it is hard also to look past how the abstractions related to the fantasy of money often hurt so many people. "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips is great down-to-Earth book on money by a creator of MasterCard, and reading it around age 15 was a formative experience in my life -- helping me avoid an early pursuit of fiat dollars and instead working towards ideals I cared about (with what limited success I've had).
But really, almost all financial engineering is pointless zero-sum gambling work, as interesting as it may still be as an abstract game. As it was explained to me by a friendly mathematician at IBM Research over lunch when I was in the speech group there (which was a group constantly being poached by Wall Street), it rally is picking up nickels before a streamroller (Buffet's analogy). You bet other people's money in such a way as you have a high chance at getting a small percentage increase on a big sum, and you (legally) skim some money off the top as a fee (or reward), while cleverly "managing" the risks, including those black swan events that most everyone ignores and you probably will too. If you are lucky, you do this for a bunch of years and then retire. If you are unlucky, you have a bad year (either badly managed risk or a black swan?) and maybe even lose your job as the company folds, but you don't generally have to give back previous years profits -- plus you get to learn "How to Speak Hedgie"::-) http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/08/how_to_speak_hedgie.html "In these days of market volatility, hedge-fund managers and executives at all types of money management firms have been forced to explain why their funds are shutting down, losing money hand over fist, and freezing investors' funds. When they do so, however, they frequently lapse into a strange euphemistic dialect. And so we thought it would be helpful to provide a handy Hedgie-English glossary.... Hedge-Fund Phrase: Unprecedented, unique circumstances Translation: Stuff happens. But we had no clue...."
But, and I only realized this much later, by indirectly raising issues about systemic risk in the 1980s around the Princeton University Operations Research group, I pretty much ensured I would not get a PhD, at least there.:-) http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
But, like hedge fund managers, do those professors have to give back decades of salary because they were in some sense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox "FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote[1] personal servers running free software for distributed social networking, email and audio/video communications.[2] "
I'm not convinced that by itself is enough though. Encryption can be broken and the metadata remains short of anonymizing systems. And laws can just be passed to require registration etc..
Ultimately, the answer to one way surveillance may be more like David Brin's "Transparent Society" where anyone can surveil anything -- so, for example, all cameras in public spaces would be accessible by anyone, everyone would be able to access the NSA's database of phone metadata logs (and anyone could check who had checked someone's phone logs etc.), and so on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society "The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."
A step towards that would be to have laws passed that say corporations with limited liability have no right to privacy in any of their communications or records.
Thanks for the great post. As a disclaimer, I've been working as a contractor for the last 18 months or so supporting a major TV/Cable company's broadcast operations' embedded software for digital video, and years earlier I did work for IBM with digital video and cable set-top boxes, so the below may be biased in that sense.
One thing I might point out is that in Europe, even with TV, the sort of community life you describe is somewhat more intact. So, there is some sort of difference in the USA. TV is no doubt part of the change in our society. But there are other factors. One is the spread of the socially isolating automobile. Another is the movement of women into the paid exchange economy and away from the home-based gift economy (including less in-home child care), away from the subsistence economy of home production, and away from voluntary participating in local community-planned economy. Another is increasing material aspirations, including how larger homes with larger yards physically separate people more; see "Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" by Suniya S. Luthar. The rising professionalization of so many activities has discouraged individuals helping each other (you are more likely now to see a psychologist instead of talk to your neighbor over the fence while putting up laundry, with the solution being prescription drugs instead of social change). Lengthening school days (and years with grad school) means less people are around regular communities. The rise of big box stores displacing locally-owned neighborhood stores is another factor. So is the loss of the family farm and the culture that produces. The reduction of unions in the USA and loss of long vacations and shorter working hours is probably another big factor making for less time to be neighborly. No doubt there are more factors as well due to technological and political changes.
Your post reminds me of a Simpson's episode where for some reason all the TVs stop working and the community immediately renews itself, families interact more, kids play outside, everyone is happier and healthier, and everyone acknowledges that, but as soon as the TVs start working again, people go right back to sitting in front of them. That too has a ring of truth to it. Why would that be? There is a book by Dierdre Barrett called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose". It suggests that humans, like all creatures, a wired to respond to certain things. In prehistoric times, these behaviors like responding to quick movements (might be a snake about to strike), or seeking out sweet things (like ripe berries), were adaptive and helped us survive. With modern technology, where quickly changing scenes on a video screen or piles of processed sugar are both easy to conjur up, these tendencies may be maladaptive. Paul Graham wrote an essay on "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", about many addictive things including drugs like cheap alcohol becoming bigger and bigger challenges. The book "The Pleasure Trap" makes a similar point, focusing mostly just on junk food. For food, it used to be that to get sweetness, you had to eat a lot of fruit which had fiber and phytonutrients which were essential to human health. Now you can just get obese on sugar, and get sick too, because you won't be eating the fiber or phytonutrients. The same is true now for interesting experiences. In the past, when TV did not exist, or when it had only a few channels with less programming (like when I was a child), then it was hard to overindulge in it. When you wanted to see people, you generally had to interact with real people in real families and real communities, which generally had other health benefits (maintaining healthy social connections). Or you might read a book.:-) Now you can be part of a TV "family" and get lots of excitement and laughs very easily, but you do not gain the real social connections from that time investment that could help you in other ways. That is an aspect of Neil Postman's book o
Or as I wrote elsewhere in my own words:... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness".:-)
So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees.:-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings): http://www.ursulakleguin.com/ or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion, as *ethical* and *spiritual* beings, we humans can choose a different way, and at least approximate world peace among ourselves as best we can. Something I learned from an old and wise biologist (Larry Slobodkin) who studied both philosophy and nature.
Yes, this is plausible now that you raise it. Now that this social network surveillance is acknowledged, and the public is not protesting much, it become acceptable and part of US society. This prepares the ground to move to the next level of surveillance which probably may be already happening. This could be the automated analysis of all phone calls using speech recognition, when calls are then only listened to by a human analyst after being flagged by a machine due to using some key word or phrase. A system could be put in place to rubber stamp warrants for these flagged calls. Thus, the government can plausibly say it does not listen in on hone calls without valid suspicion. Then in five years, this can be leaked. Then the public begins prepared for the next phase, etc.. Recall that immediately after 9/11/01 it was discussed that all cell phone calls were recorded and the recordings kept for some length of time. Haven't heard much about that lately.
However, it is also possible this leak was the plan and Snowden is not aware of it, but just he was the first systems admin to take the bait (probably expected based on his psych profile and internal monitoring). We will probably never know, because it is hard to see what is real and what is illusion when living in a maze of mirrors.
But, if we are living in a computer simulation, the last laugh is that everything the NSA or any other government agency anywhere does is recorded down to the level of thoughts and farts.:-) http://www.simulation-argument.com/
See also my: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "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."
Another Mirror Maze, btw: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=18 "When a new political party espousing traditional, constitutional values sweeps into power, institutions of the current Establishment close ranks in an attempt to destroy it."
The Proteus operation is not one of Hogan's better works. If you are willing to give him another try, try Voyage from Yesteryear, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, or Code of the Lifemaker, which are all about post-scarcity technologies in various ways as hard sci-fi. It is the post-scarcity aspects that are similar, even if Hogan's are much more near-term.
The thing about writers is, it may take decades for people to learn about the prose that stands the test of time. So, I guess most authors may be old by the time that happens.
I read somewhere that modern sci-fi is so hard to write because it gets boring because things are so safe (or just crazy -- e.g. anything goes nanotech). Larry Niven faced that and supposedly threw away a lot of his stories about the "Teela" gene time of lucky people who won a birth lottery, because they were too boring. Space exploration to other planets like Star Trek linked to what people knew of exploring new continents and islands on Earth. What can really connect to what people know when talking about deeply different virtual reality and nanotech and robotics? It's probably pretty hard to write a story interesting to humans.
Even Iain Banks struggled with that, having to write stories in ages when the human form was popular in the Culture (he says sometimes it was not popular) and writing about "Special Circumstances" having adventures on non-Culture worlds.
I've pretty much stopped buying sci-fi novel though (compared to buying one or two dozen a year a couple decades ago). The current ongoing changes are pretty much too exciting as they are.:-) Hard to recall the last new novel I've bought, although I've reread some old ones...
Sarah Zettel is an interesting author (blending Islamic ideas with science fiction themes, example, a woman starship captain who wears a burka and goes through all sorts of hoops to keep correct by the law -- the core theme of the book is about AI though): http://www.amazon.com/Fools-War-Sarah-Zettel/dp/0446602930
His writings help inspire the OSCOMAK idea by me starting about twenty five years ago, but it hasn't gone much anywhere: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, I know what you mean by these sorts of inspirations. A good sci-fi author helps us make a leap of imagination.
I'd recommend Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and his "Voyage From Yesteryear" especially for post-scarcity themes. But he touches on them in his other works too. Also check out his "Code of the Lifemaker" if you like the idea of seed factories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker
So, if you like Iain Banks, you may like Hogan's writing. Sadly, James P Hogan died about three years ago of heart disease (which is generally reversible through great nutrition, see Dr. Joel Fuhrman).
Also google on cancer and a ketogenic diet (starves cancer cells of the sugar they need).
The sad thing is we could have a post-scarcity society right now, but our ideology gets in the way. Maybe it would not be "The Culture" level, but it would still be pretty neat. But we have not done that, and so many areas of our society, including medicine. remain backward for lack of appropriate investment.
Good luck on your career. Maybe there will be some magic bullets out there to fight cancer someday, maybe you will invent them, but until then, there is still a lot a person can do to prevent and in some cases reverse cancer, even if nothing is 100% guaranteed.
A book James P. Hogan told me about: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/ "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."
You're welcome. On a basic income, one reason for a basic income versus increasing the minimum wage is that it ensures purchasing power is distributed somewhat evenly across a society. The market only hears the needs of people with money. But the value of most human labor is declining relative to capital used for automation (especially AI and robotics), as has been long predicted (like in "The Triple Revolution" memorandum from 1964).
It's true that an increased minimum wage (similar to say Denmark) would help ensure more of productivity gains go to workers -- except that it also increases the financial pressure to automate to get rid of workers. So, higher wages becomes an economic death spiral for most workers when robotics is rapidly improving. As work that can't be easily automated becomes more abstract, more precise, or more demanding, fewer people have the skills and talent to do it well, contributing to a growing rich/poor divide.
Automation also does no have to completely replace workers to have this effect -- if automation enables one person do the work of two, then there is one worker who can be fired. There will only be a job for that fired worker if the economy expands -- but expanding the economy has probably (in the USA) long passed the point of diminishing returns, as people sicken from supersized meals, lose human community by spending time interacting with more stuff, and so on. And in any case, the exponential potential of automation seems to be increasing faster than economic growth, so even as the economy expands, it is not clear humans are needed to do much more work. The US GDP has grown by about 33% over the past decade while the work force has stayed essentially the same,
Also, a basic income, which goes to every citizen without conditions, is somewhat different from a guaranteed minimum income which is an income supplement to ensure someone has a certain amount of income as a minimum. With a basic income, there is no disincentive to work, contrasted with the way there is a disincentive with a guaranteed minimum income (where you lose some of the subsidy for every dollar you earn). With a basic income, there is no need to monitor how money much everyone makes in order to decide how to supplement -- so there is less bureaucracy and no possibility for cheating by hiding income since income does not matter in deciding who gets it, A basic income acknowledges that as "property" rights enclose the land, the average citizen should still get some right to the fruits of the land even if they don't own it, because the original conversion of land to individual ownership is in some sense a theft from the commons.
A basic income (as a "social credit") also acknowledges that most of what makes possible some people to be so productive is the ideas in the common cultural heritage of all humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
But these issues all are interlinked. If people had better representation in Congress, as basic income would be more likely to get passed (contrast with Germany which is moving more towards one). Something like it (more like a guaranteed minimum income) did pass the House under President Nixon, but did not pass the Senate. If people had better communications systems, then maybe they would be able to work out the details of the transition better. If people had a basic income, they would have more time for lobbying Congress (whether about human rights at home or preventing US foolishness abroad) and writing free communications software.
For example, my own effort towards a FOSS social semantic desktop and public intelligence tools has mostly stalled with the
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/ http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2013/01/26/mit-cold-fusion-101-videos/ http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml "In 2005, Dr. Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern. University, and Lewis Larsen, president and CEO of Lattice Energy LLC, began publishing papers that presented a new theory to explain the experimental anomalies observed in LENR experiments. Their theory claims these anomalies are due not to a fusion reaction, which would involve the strong force, but to other low energy nuclear reactions that involve weak interactions, namely neutron formation from electrons and protons/deuterons, followed by local neutron absorption and subsequent beta-decay processes. The following published papers and news items provide more details on the Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Theory of LENRs."
Although there are also similar reports going back decades before Pons & Fleischmann...
I guess the same forces that keep us on Windows instead of Linux keep us on coal and oil instead of solar and LENR?:-)
Good point. I already knew of cases where companies based in other countries did not want to host with US web hosting firms out of privacy concerns. This may tend to accelerate that trend...
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/472433-oh-the-jobs-people-work-at-out-west-near-hawtch-hawtch "Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!"
By the way, while this can lead to "full employment", that does not make it a great thing: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "There are a large number of possible cures that can be tried either to create jobs or to deal with the problems posed by widespread chronic unemployment, each with various different long term societal consequences (both good and bad)."
Canada never (successfully) revolted against the British. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellions_of_1837 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada "In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the British Empire, which became official with the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and completed in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament."
Yet, Canada got rid of slavery decades before the USA. Canada now ranks higher on scales of health and happiness than the USA. So, there are other ways forward than violence.
Even the American Revolution probably would not have succeeded except for help from the French who were at odds with the British.
Slashdot Mirror
"Or you keep throwing things at it until it gets better by itself and the psychiatrist takes credit for it."
Yeah, it is ironic how homeopaths are villified but psychiatrists are celebrated, when the placebo effect is strong in both... Must have a better PR firm?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Quoting Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)
Bruce Levine's book goes into detail on this:
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Also:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
"Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol."
The mind/brain/body/spirit/etc. indeed is amazing...
"Society has been pretty much unbearable since more than one person has been in a group. Before that, loneliness was unbearable. And yet, most people aren't clinically depressed."
While this is true, and a good point, there can be positive forms of stress, too, called "eustress": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress
"Eustress was originally explored in a stress model by Richard Lazarus, it is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings."
Stresses can be distress or eustress depending on how we are prepared to deal with them. The average person may smartly run from a house fire, whereas a trained and experienced fire fighter is expected to approach one calmly and deliberately (and may even feel some excitement and camaraderie putting his or her extensive training into use). There is also the notion of "flow" when the challenge matches our current level of skill. Game designers understand this -- so levels start off easy and get harder as your skills increase. And you would not expect someone who is an expert at playing a video game like, say, Halo, to be able to immediately win at face-to-face poker games, because they require different skill sets and interests (or vice versa).
Humans are adapted to a certain type of environment, which includes certain types of average stressors. Historically,
* humans lived in tribal groups that included extended families,
* they walked several miles a day,
* they got plenty of sunlight,
* they had regular exposure to the sights and sounds of nature,
* they ate organic food with lots of phytonutrients and fiber,
* they did a variety of hands-on tasks involving both the mind and body working together, and
* the stories and songs of every-day life were told by relatives for the purposes of education.
There may have been downsides to that life (high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics or trauma surgery for accidents, etc.) but there were many good things about it too in the sense that we were adapted to that mix (even if we have also partially adapted some to changes since). Humans need sunlight for health. We need exercise. We need a certain level of dirt to challenge the immune system. We need phytonutrients to build a healthy body. We need daily mental stimulation to some degree. And so on. The same sunlight might kill certain bacteria, and the same phytonutrients may poison certain insects, the same physical exercise might not be possible for a slug, and the same social challenges might drive a bear crazy, but for humans, we have adapted to make the best of those challenges -- and to be stronger as individuals and groups because of them.
Nowadays, humans in developed societies live a very differnt life in many ways:
* humans tend to live in isolated houses or apartments as singles or couples (and when they leave that home physically or virtually have experiences around a lot of strangers in cities or on the internet),
* they usually drive or take mass transit instead of walk,
* they spend much of their time indoors with no direct sunlight,
* they mainly hear synthetic sounds and see synthetic ("supernormal") images,
* they eat processed foods low in phytonutrients and fiber and high in chemical additives,
* they do tasks that are either very abstract or very physically repetitive but rarely use the mind and body together (see "The Case For Working with Your Hands" by Crawford), and
* the stories and songs of every day life are told by strangers who often want to convince someone to do something so the stranger can profit from it (often something unhealthy for the person or the planet in the long term, though it may feel good in the short term, like drinking sugar water).
A movie like "The Emerald Forest" explores a bit of this contrast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emerald_Forest
Nonetheless, very
Like your idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
And for related ironic humor in the news: :-)
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/14/rep-stockman-requests-nsa-logs-for-phone-traffic-between-white-house-irs/
An example in fiction of a Transparent Society is in Marshall Brain's "Manna" at the end:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
My suggestion a couple years ago to a public call for ideas by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."
And I also wrote:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"So, with all the billions of dollars a years spent on âoeintelligenceâ, why not at least try to produce some freely-available âoedual useâ intelligence tools to help civilian American citizens make sense of the real things that are killing most real Americans by the hundreds of thousands every year?"
My wife and I have worked on some software used by the intelligence community in different countries. But our focus had been to try to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. Note the Snowden here is a different Snowden from the leaker:
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/4318/un-wired/
"There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not the philosophy of TIA."
We tried to get the related company to open source the software, but not much luck. My wife does have some rights to some of the work, plus the core ideas are available in the public literature (which is what my wife based her research on).
We all may well benefit from an expectation of privacy, and a healthy government may well have an obligation to defend privacy the same way it might defend our physical infrastructure. I don't want to argue against those things (even if in practice in the communal extended-family villages that hunter/gatherer humans had historically, privacy may have been rare). But in practice right now, I doubt we can stop the spying, because it is too seductive, an
You're welcome. Yes, "for self-defined values of reasonable and interesting" is part of some deep deep question...
By the way, on DVT and nutrition and lifestyle from Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Weil:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-pregnancy-coumadin-vitamin-k-and-a-plantbased-diet.html
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03146/Phlebitis.html
See also my other posts on this article, like:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&cid=44008655
I started using a treadmill workstation in part to try to reduce the risk of things like DVT and similar issues from working a lot with computers (and a treadmill is better than a standing desk in that sense).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2011216/How-sitting-desk-long-deadly-blood-clot.html
But once there are clots, dealing with them is more problematical.
It's true that a stressful environment can indeed contribute to the risk of depression, and also that for most people, modern life is indeed stressful in a lot of new ways. To support your point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
""Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.""
I'd agree there are many factors involved in depression, including all the factors that may stand in the way of eating better (including lack of money for healthier food, misinformation, initial lack of motivation, peers, time, negative self-talk, misinformed professionals, chemical dependencies, bad relationships, difficult working or living conditions, no access to nature, social status, etc.). So, yes, even when you know you should eat better, there can still be a lot of hurdles in the way. A related film including a truck driver trying to get out of a downward spiral:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/
You could think of nutrition as like your car's tires, which are the interface between the car and the reality of the road. If your tires are bald, you are most likely going to have an accident on slippery roads, no matter how good the rest of the car is. But if your tires are bald, maybe you spend so much time paying for car repairs that you don't have money or time to go to the tire shop for new ones? And it is hard to think about investing in new tires when all the mechanics at car repair places that you go to (which don't sell tires for some reason) are telling you (based on years of their own training) that the reason you are having so many accidents is because you need an oil change, or a new transmission, or need to install all wheel drive, or remove the roof to make the car into a convertible. Still, it is true you'd probably have less accidents even with bald tires if, say, the roads were not so windy or made of slippery glass due to bad public policy... So, yes, depression is multi-factored in that sort of way (and more, since, following the analogy, how grippy your bald tires are might still be some function of exactly how you turn the steering wheel perhaps to make the most of some remaining patches of tread near the edges perhaps).
Still, please do your own research on diet and mood and you may be surprised. A starting point: https://www.google.com/search?q=diet+and+mood
From the first result:
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/food-to-balance-your-mood
"In a study of 200 people done in England for the mental health group known as Mind, participants were told to cut down on mood "stressors" they ate, while increasing the amount of mood "supporters." Stressors included sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and chocolate (more of that coming up). Supporters were water, vegetables, fruit, and oil-rich fish. Eighty-eight percent of the people who tried this reported improved mental health. Specifically, 26% said they had fewer mood swings, 26% had fewer panic attacks and anxiety, and 24% said they experienced less depression."
I know, one can quibble about whether they had a control group, whether that was "double blind" experiment, and so on.
Or another:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01/28/healthy-diet-can-improve-mood/50908.html
"The results showed a strong day-to-day relationship between more positive mood and higher fruit and vegetable consumption, but not other foods."
Consider, if someone cruel were to take a rat and feed it nothing but sugar water, the poor abused rat is going to sicken and die, and probably be pretty cranky throughout the process of dying. Rats need a variety of nutrients. Why expect anything different
Basically, our brains readjust to higher levels of stimulation and then we feel about the same, except we may be ruining our health; see: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
So, people may not be getting as much happiness in the long term out of drugs or junk food as they think they might. It's just the way the brain seems to be wired.
That said, you are mixing in some other interesting ideas like:
* "sexual selection" (a technical term in evolutionary biology) like for the otherwise disadvantageous and wasteful peacock's tail (or profligate showy spending) because it appeals for whatever reason to the opposite sex,,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
* the potential problems of following other people's rules written to their own benefit, and
* time sense -- see Phillip Zimbardo's "The Time Paradox" RSA Animate video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg
BTW, if you feel you normally have a consistent low level of mood otherwise, look hard at what you eat (artificial colors, sugar, refined starch, caffeine?) and what you don't eat (vegetables, omega 3s and other healthy fats, B complex, vitamin D, etc.). See Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman as places to start with that.
See also my other comments here on "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction".
But ultimately, as you suggest, we all make choices based on our preferences, ability, history, situation, and priorities etc..So, from a metaphysical point of view, it can be hard to argue with assumptions about the meaning of life to different people -- even if some approaches to life may seem to some to be less adaptive. And certainly those who are too abstentious, and leave no progeny as a result, are evolutionary problems on the other side of (excessive) moderation. Thus "Moderation in all things, including moderation".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TekWar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droud
But there are probably other stories, as this technology has been used in various ways for decades. Although this is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center
"More recent research has shown that the so-called pleasure electrodes lead only a form of wanting or motivation to obtain the stimulation, rather than pleasure."
See also my comment below:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&cid=44004193
In a book reference there, "The Pleasure Trap", the authors talk about multiple brain systems for pleasure that work in different ways to different ends (dopamine vs. serotonin).
http://www.livestrong.com/article/175158-dopamine-vs-serotonin/
There are so many situations human need to navigate where you could start down a slippery slope... Part of the problem is that it takes time for society to adjust as people learn about each new one technology is making possible...
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
" Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
"In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels)."
Also related about "Supernormal Stimuli":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
"Our instincts -- for food, sex, or territorial protection -- evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons -- that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term "supernormal stimuli" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization."
And on overcoming "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Like moths to the flame... Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. That said, people will do this. Not sure what the outcome will ultimately be, but the "natural selection" point above, to select for people who do not do this, may well come into play. And that may also be part of the adaptive evolutionary value of religion, to scare us away from some unhealthy things and attract us to some healthy things (whatever else one can say about specific dogmas):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
So, maybe the only people who will survive being overstimulated by electrical thunderbolts will be those with a deep abiding religious feeling that such a life is wrongly lived?
Thanks!
I've been meaning to put up the comments I had on Ray Dalio's principles somewhere for a long time. I finally just put them up here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sent-to-Bridgewater-on-Ray-Dalio-Principles.html
As I note there, obviously, writing stuff like that must not be the way to get a high paying (>$200K annual) job programming in the financial industry. :-) But this may be of interest to others looking at Ray Dalio's "Principles" or in Bridgewater Associates (the world's biggest hedge fund in 2011) as a place of employment. Or perhaps it may be of interest in trying to understand, from a psychological perspective, some of the potential limits of Bridgewater's financial models if they reflect only that version of "Principles"?
From what I sent: :-) I'm supplying some of the results of my having read widely for many years on a variety of topics related to evolution, technology, psychology, and social change. Maybe someone at Bridgewater will read this, maybe not, but it was also interesting to write it and try to get a message through the filters all organizations have. It's a first draft, and it could be a lot better, a lot shorter, and so on were I to spend a lot more time on it, or were I to have better tools with which to communicate it (which I can aspire to create someday, like supplying a semantic web to your inbox).
----
I guess one might say that from the outside, with this cover letter I'm trying to upgrade Bridgewater in my own way, even as Bridgewater would probably upgrade me in some sense if I worked there.
The key points here are that: ...
* "Evolution" does not mean "progress" as humans normally think of it (this from someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time),
* All reasoning depends on emotions (which give us reason to reason),
* Bridgewater has reached the size where it has a significant effect on the exchange economy that supports it and needs to consider the broader issues in its modeling and responsibilities to stakeholders;
* There can be many overlapping senses of "self" (body, family, philosophy, company, state, etc.) and models (including financial models) may need to take that in account, but that is not reflected in "Principles";
* There is a pressing need for sensemaking tools and I feel I can help create them (and have helped create some in the past);
* such tools might, through the FOSS gift economy, even be a way to take aspects of Bridgewater's self-improvement culture (like through structured arguments) and make that available to the general public, as if things like openness and rationality are true for Bridgewater, they must be true for the rest of the world, and maybe Bridgewater try to help the rest of the world achieve those things too (while also increasing its potential employee pool of people learning such tools);
* Bridgewater can probably better promote health among its community in terms of vitamin D, eating more vegetables, understanding the "Pleasure Trap", and having treadmill workstations;
---
Realistically, I'd have probably been a better match for the Dalio Family Foundation perhaps, directing time and money to open source sensemaking software efforts? :-)
Anyway, thankfully I found some other way to earn ration units (fiat dollars) that I can exchange for food and shelter, in the absence of a "basic income" and given pretty much all the land is enclosed and privatized, and even if it was not, it takes a village and lots of specific skills to live well in the wilderness...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
As I've written before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34100224
The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout
All philosophy is anthropology; :-)
All anthropology is psychology;
All psychology is biology;
All biology is chemistry;
All chemistry is physics;
All physics is math;
All math is philosophy.
See my website for lots about the future of economics. I passed on my change to work on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan Chase doing Smalltalk around 2000. Back then I didn't think it worth the commute there (which my wife had hated earlier), as well as the risk for a Japanese-style subway gassing. Little did I imagine someone attacking the WTC, but I guess otherwise it is possible I might have been at a meeting in the WTC as the group met over there sometimes.
Still, as imaginary as fiat dollars are, if enough people believe in the idea, that gives it a sort of reality. And, like most US Americans, I have to deal with that collective fantasy as a way to ration the fruits of production. But it is hard also to look past how the abstractions related to the fantasy of money often hurt so many people. "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips is great down-to-Earth book on money by a creator of MasterCard, and reading it around age 15 was a formative experience in my life -- helping me avoid an early pursuit of fiat dollars and instead working towards ideals I cared about (with what limited success I've had).
But really, almost all financial engineering is pointless zero-sum gambling work, as interesting as it may still be as an abstract game. As it was explained to me by a friendly mathematician at IBM Research over lunch when I was in the speech group there (which was a group constantly being poached by Wall Street), it rally is picking up nickels before a streamroller (Buffet's analogy). You bet other people's money in such a way as you have a high chance at getting a small percentage increase on a big sum, and you (legally) skim some money off the top as a fee (or reward), while cleverly "managing" the risks, including those black swan events that most everyone ignores and you probably will too. If you are lucky, you do this for a bunch of years and then retire. If you are unlucky, you have a bad year (either badly managed risk or a black swan?) and maybe even lose your job as the company folds, but you don't generally have to give back previous years profits -- plus you get to learn "How to Speak Hedgie": :-) ... ..."
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/08/how_to_speak_hedgie.html
"In these days of market volatility, hedge-fund managers and executives at all types of money management firms have been forced to explain why their funds are shutting down, losing money hand over fist, and freezing investors' funds. When they do so, however, they frequently lapse into a strange euphemistic dialect. And so we thought it would be helpful to provide a handy Hedgie-English glossary.
Hedge-Fund Phrase: Unprecedented, unique circumstances
Translation: Stuff happens. But we had no clue.
But, and I only realized this much later, by indirectly raising issues about systemic risk in the 1980s around the Princeton University Operations Research group, I pretty much ensured I would not get a PhD, at least there. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
But, like hedge fund managers, do those professors have to give back decades of salary because they were in some sense
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox
"FreedomBox is a community project to develop, design and promote[1] personal servers running free software for distributed social networking, email and audio/video communications.[2] "
I'm not convinced that by itself is enough though. Encryption can be broken and the metadata remains short of anonymizing systems. And laws can just be passed to require registration etc..
Ultimately, the answer to one way surveillance may be more like David Brin's "Transparent Society" where anyone can surveil anything -- so, for example, all cameras in public spaces would be accessible by anyone, everyone would be able to access the NSA's database of phone metadata logs (and anyone could check who had checked someone's phone logs etc.), and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society
"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."
A step towards that would be to have laws passed that say corporations with limited liability have no right to privacy in any of their communications or records.
Thanks for the great post. As a disclaimer, I've been working as a contractor for the last 18 months or so supporting a major TV/Cable company's broadcast operations' embedded software for digital video, and years earlier I did work for IBM with digital video and cable set-top boxes, so the below may be biased in that sense.
One thing I might point out is that in Europe, even with TV, the sort of community life you describe is somewhat more intact. So, there is some sort of difference in the USA. TV is no doubt part of the change in our society. But there are other factors. One is the spread of the socially isolating automobile. Another is the movement of women into the paid exchange economy and away from the home-based gift economy (including less in-home child care), away from the subsistence economy of home production, and away from voluntary participating in local community-planned economy. Another is increasing material aspirations, including how larger homes with larger yards physically separate people more; see "Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" by Suniya S. Luthar. The rising professionalization of so many activities has discouraged individuals helping each other (you are more likely now to see a psychologist instead of talk to your neighbor over the fence while putting up laundry, with the solution being prescription drugs instead of social change). Lengthening school days (and years with grad school) means less people are around regular communities. The rise of big box stores displacing locally-owned neighborhood stores is another factor. So is the loss of the family farm and the culture that produces. The reduction of unions in the USA and loss of long vacations and shorter working hours is probably another big factor making for less time to be neighborly. No doubt there are more factors as well due to technological and political changes.
Your post reminds me of a Simpson's episode where for some reason all the TVs stop working and the community immediately renews itself, families interact more, kids play outside, everyone is happier and healthier, and everyone acknowledges that, but as soon as the TVs start working again, people go right back to sitting in front of them. That too has a ring of truth to it. Why would that be? There is a book by Dierdre Barrett called "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose". It suggests that humans, like all creatures, a wired to respond to certain things. In prehistoric times, these behaviors like responding to quick movements (might be a snake about to strike), or seeking out sweet things (like ripe berries), were adaptive and helped us survive. With modern technology, where quickly changing scenes on a video screen or piles of processed sugar are both easy to conjur up, these tendencies may be maladaptive. Paul Graham wrote an essay on "The Acceleration of Addictiveness", about many addictive things including drugs like cheap alcohol becoming bigger and bigger challenges. The book "The Pleasure Trap" makes a similar point, focusing mostly just on junk food. For food, it used to be that to get sweetness, you had to eat a lot of fruit which had fiber and phytonutrients which were essential to human health. Now you can just get obese on sugar, and get sick too, because you won't be eating the fiber or phytonutrients. The same is true now for interesting experiences. In the past, when TV did not exist, or when it had only a few channels with less programming (like when I was a child), then it was hard to overindulge in it. When you wanted to see people, you generally had to interact with real people in real families and real communities, which generally had other health benefits (maintaining healthy social connections). Or you might read a book. :-) Now you can be part of a TV "family" and get lots of excitement and laughs very easily, but you do not gain the real social connections from that time investment that could help you in other ways. That is an aspect of Neil Postman's book o
... to this plane of existence. As I wrote:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
----
Or as I wrote elsewhere in my own words: ... I agree with the sentiment of the Einstein quote [That we should approach the universe with compassion], but that sentiment itself is only part of a larger difficult-to-easily-resolve situation. It become more the Yin/Yang or Meshwork/Hierarchy situation I see when I look out my home office window into a forest. On the surface it is a lovely scene of trees as part of a forest. Still, I try to see *both* the peaceful majesty of the trees and how these large trees are brutally shading out of existence saplings which are would-be competitors (even shading out their own children). Yet, even as big trees shade out some of their own children, they also put massive resources into creating a next generation, one of which will indeed likely someday replace them when they fall. I try to remember there is both an unseen silent chemical war going on out there where plants produce defense compounds they secrete in the soil to inhibit the growth of other plant species (or insects or fungi) as a vile act of territoriality and often expansionism, and yet also the result is a good spacing of biomass to near optimally convert sunlight to living matter and resist and recover from wind and ice damage. I try to recall that there is the most brutal of competition between species of plants and animals and fungi and so on over water, nutrients (including from eating other creatures), sunlight, and space, while at the same time each bacterial colony or multicellular organism (like a large Pine tree) is a marvel of cooperation towards some implicitly shared purpose. I see the awesome result of both simplicity and complexity in the organizational structure of all these organisms and their DNA, RNA, and so on, adapted so well in most cases to the current state of such a complex web of being. Yet I can only guess the tiniest fraction of what suffering that selective shaping through variation and selection must have entailed for untold numbers of creatures over billions of years. To be truthful, I can actually *really* see none of that right now as it is dark outside this early near Winter Solstice time (and an icy rain is falling) beyond perhaps a silhouette outline, so I must remember and imagine it, perhaps as Einstein suggests as an "optical delusion of [my] consciousness". :-)
So much for "world peace" when even the tranquil seeming forests have so much Yin-Yang complexity going on within and around the trees. :-) The best I feel we can hope for is balance (like Ursula K. Le Guin's writings):
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/
or maybe, transcendence to some form of universe certainly way beyond our present understanding; example, with its own flaws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
But still, no matter what examples the universes sets before us, or in what proportion, as *ethical* and *spiritual* beings, we humans can choose a different way, and at least approximate world peace among ourselves as best we can. Something I learned from an old and wise biologist (Larry Slobodkin) who studied both philosophy and nature.
What a dangerous game life is, especially living in "interesting times". :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
The good news is, no one will get out of this infinite game alive anyway, so we might as well have some fun with it 'till then. :-)
Yes, this is plausible now that you raise it. Now that this social network surveillance is acknowledged, and the public is not protesting much, it become acceptable and part of US society. This prepares the ground to move to the next level of surveillance which probably may be already happening. This could be the automated analysis of all phone calls using speech recognition, when calls are then only listened to by a human analyst after being flagged by a machine due to using some key word or phrase. A system could be put in place to rubber stamp warrants for these flagged calls. Thus, the government can plausibly say it does not listen in on hone calls without valid suspicion. Then in five years, this can be leaked. Then the public begins prepared for the next phase, etc.. Recall that immediately after 9/11/01 it was discussed that all cell phone calls were recorded and the recordings kept for some length of time. Haven't heard much about that lately.
However, it is also possible this leak was the plan and Snowden is not aware of it, but just he was the first systems admin to take the bait (probably expected based on his psych profile and internal monitoring). We will probably never know, because it is hard to see what is real and what is illusion when living in a maze of mirrors.
But, if we are living in a computer simulation, the last laugh is that everything the NSA or any other government agency anywhere does is recorded down to the level of thoughts and farts. :-)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
See also my: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"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."
Another Mirror Maze, btw:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=18
"When a new political party espousing traditional, constitutional values sweeps into power, institutions of the current Establishment close ranks in an attempt to destroy it."
The Proteus operation is not one of Hogan's better works. If you are willing to give him another try, try Voyage from Yesteryear, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, or Code of the Lifemaker, which are all about post-scarcity technologies in various ways as hard sci-fi. It is the post-scarcity aspects that are similar, even if Hogan's are much more near-term.
The thing about writers is, it may take decades for people to learn about the prose that stands the test of time. So, I guess most authors may be old by the time that happens.
An on-line page turner for me by Roger Williams, even if too graphically violent:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
Bound to be other great voices out there.
I like some of Peter F. Hamilton's stuff, although again it is too graphically violent for my tastes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reality_Dysfunction
I really like Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix
I read somewhere that modern sci-fi is so hard to write because it gets boring because things are so safe (or just crazy -- e.g. anything goes nanotech). Larry Niven faced that and supposedly threw away a lot of his stories about the "Teela" gene time of lucky people who won a birth lottery, because they were too boring. Space exploration to other planets like Star Trek linked to what people knew of exploring new continents and islands on Earth. What can really connect to what people know when talking about deeply different virtual reality and nanotech and robotics? It's probably pretty hard to write a story interesting to humans.
Even Iain Banks struggled with that, having to write stories in ages when the human form was popular in the Culture (he says sometimes it was not popular) and writing about "Special Circumstances" having adventures on non-Culture worlds.
I've pretty much stopped buying sci-fi novel though (compared to buying one or two dozen a year a couple decades ago). The current ongoing changes are pretty much too exciting as they are. :-) Hard to recall the last new novel I've bought, although I've reread some old ones...
Sarah Zettel is an interesting author (blending Islamic ideas with science fiction themes, example, a woman starship captain who wears a burka and goes through all sorts of hoops to keep correct by the law -- the core theme of the book is about AI though):
http://www.amazon.com/Fools-War-Sarah-Zettel/dp/0446602930
Baen might have younger novelists somewhere?
http://www.baen.com/
His writings help inspire the OSCOMAK idea by me starting about twenty five years ago, but it hasn't gone much anywhere: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
So, I know what you mean by these sorts of inspirations. A good sci-fi author helps us make a leap of imagination.
I'd recommend Hogan's "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and his "Voyage From Yesteryear" especially for post-scarcity themes. But he touches on them in his other works too. Also check out his "Code of the Lifemaker" if you like the idea of seed factories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker
So, if you like Iain Banks, you may like Hogan's writing. Sadly, James P Hogan died about three years ago of heart disease (which is generally reversible through great nutrition, see Dr. Joel Fuhrman).
Cool stuff that on Seed Factories. Check out the "Open Manufacturing" mailing list though for other people with related interests.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/openmanufacturing
A key point I've discovered on post-scarcity perceptions and social choices (summarized in my sig):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Too late for Iain though, sadly (vitamin d, iodine, phytonutrients, etc.): http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43349347
Also google on cancer and a ketogenic diet (starves cancer cells of the sugar they need).
The sad thing is we could have a post-scarcity society right now, but our ideology gets in the way. Maybe it would not be "The Culture" level, but it would still be pretty neat. But we have not done that, and so many areas of our society, including medicine. remain backward for lack of appropriate investment.
Good luck on your career. Maybe there will be some magic bullets out there to fight cancer someday, maybe you will invent them, but until then, there is still a lot a person can do to prevent and in some cases reverse cancer, even if nothing is 100% guaranteed.
Sadly, we also lost another post-scarcity sci-fi writer, James P. Hogan, a couple years ago to heart disease (a disease generally reversible with excellent nutrition).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
A book James P. Hogan told me about:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
"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."
You're welcome. On a basic income, one reason for a basic income versus increasing the minimum wage is that it ensures purchasing power is distributed somewhat evenly across a society. The market only hears the needs of people with money. But the value of most human labor is declining relative to capital used for automation (especially AI and robotics), as has been long predicted (like in "The Triple Revolution" memorandum from 1964).
It's true that an increased minimum wage (similar to say Denmark) would help ensure more of productivity gains go to workers -- except that it also increases the financial pressure to automate to get rid of workers. So, higher wages becomes an economic death spiral for most workers when robotics is rapidly improving. As work that can't be easily automated becomes more abstract, more precise, or more demanding, fewer people have the skills and talent to do it well, contributing to a growing rich/poor divide.
Automation also does no have to completely replace workers to have this effect -- if automation enables one person do the work of two, then there is one worker who can be fired. There will only be a job for that fired worker if the economy expands -- but expanding the economy has probably (in the USA) long passed the point of diminishing returns, as people sicken from supersized meals, lose human community by spending time interacting with more stuff, and so on. And in any case, the exponential potential of automation seems to be increasing faster than economic growth, so even as the economy expands, it is not clear humans are needed to do much more work. The US GDP has grown by about 33% over the past decade while the work force has stayed essentially the same,
Supporting evidence for all that here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Also, a basic income, which goes to every citizen without conditions, is somewhat different from a guaranteed minimum income which is an income supplement to ensure someone has a certain amount of income as a minimum. With a basic income, there is no disincentive to work, contrasted with the way there is a disincentive with a guaranteed minimum income (where you lose some of the subsidy for every dollar you earn). With a basic income, there is no need to monitor how money much everyone makes in order to decide how to supplement -- so there is less bureaucracy and no possibility for cheating by hiding income since income does not matter in deciding who gets it, A basic income acknowledges that as "property" rights enclose the land, the average citizen should still get some right to the fruits of the land even if they don't own it, because the original conversion of land to individual ownership is in some sense a theft from the commons.
A basic income (as a "social credit") also acknowledges that most of what makes possible some people to be so productive is the ideas in the common cultural heritage of all humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit
More on a basic income:
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
But these issues all are interlinked. If people had better representation in Congress, as basic income would be more likely to get passed (contrast with Germany which is moving more towards one). Something like it (more like a guaranteed minimum income) did pass the House under President Nixon, but did not pass the Senate. If people had better communications systems, then maybe they would be able to work out the details of the transition better. If people had a basic income, they would have more time for lobbying Congress (whether about human rights at home or preventing US foolishness abroad) and writing free communications software.
For example, my own effort towards a FOSS social semantic desktop and public intelligence tools has mostly stalled with the
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
http://www.lenr-coldfusion.com/2013/01/26/mit-cold-fusion-101-videos/
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/WL/WLTheory.shtml
"In 2005, Dr. Allan Widom, a condensed matter physicist with Northeastern. University, and Lewis Larsen, president and CEO of Lattice Energy LLC, began publishing papers that presented a new theory to explain the experimental anomalies observed in LENR experiments. Their theory claims these anomalies are due not to a fusion reaction, which would involve the strong force, but to other low energy nuclear reactions that involve weak interactions, namely neutron formation from electrons and protons/deuterons, followed by local neutron absorption and subsequent beta-decay processes. The following published papers and news items provide more details on the Widom-Larsen Ultra-Low-Momentum Neutron Catalyzed Theory of LENRs."
Although there are also similar reports going back decades before Pons & Fleischmann...
I guess the same forces that keep us on Windows instead of Linux keep us on coal and oil instead of solar and LENR? :-)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/31/2027225/samsung-says-their-tvs-arent-really-spying-on-you
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/09/20/1942248/smart-meters-reveal-what-youre-watching
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/07/18/224208/consumers-may-find-smart-appliances-a-dumb-idea
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/04/14/1227215/new-bird-shaped-drone-shown-at-security-and-defense-trade-show
http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/green500-inventor-asked-to-improve-robo-bugs/
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17830076-secret-weapon-how-thermal-imaging-helped-catch-bomb-suspect?lite
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/10/0143240/drones-dogs-and-the-future-of-privacy
Good point. I already knew of cases where companies based in other countries did not want to host with US web hosting firms out of privacy concerns. This may tend to accelerate that trend...
"A conspiracy theorist would say that most likely the actual truth is more damming."
On conspiracy theories, maybe there is already a computer record of our every thought and fart? :-) http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/472433-oh-the-jobs-people-work-at-out-west-near-hawtch-hawtch
"Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!"
By the way, while this can lead to "full employment", that does not make it a great thing:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"There are a large number of possible cures that can be tried either to create jobs or to deal with the problems posed by widespread chronic unemployment, each with various different long term societal consequences (both good and bad)."
Canada never (successfully) revolted against the British.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellions_of_1837
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canada
"In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the British Empire, which became official with the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and completed in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament."
Yet, Canada got rid of slavery decades before the USA. Canada now ranks higher on scales of health and happiness than the USA. So, there are other ways forward than violence.
Even the American Revolution probably would not have succeeded except for help from the French who were at odds with the British.
A related post I made today: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3833389&cid=43945791