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Replying to
Idiots on the left want free money rain. Idiots on the right want to sermonize about "personal responsibility." Idiots on the top want to gleefully hand money to each other imagining cronyism is sustainable in a vacuum. Idiots on the bottom want to burn everything down.
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Every one of these responses fails through human-centricity. The machine/set of machines must first be in working order creating a surplus in parameter space to allow you to center human concerns.
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This is one reason I detest the techlash, despite some justice in their criticisms of tech. The techlash is a bad-faith worldview rooted in a willful ignorance of how the world works, and an arrogant presumption that of course it should work in a human-centric way.
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Sometimes I think we need a proper new religion based on unironically and genuinely sacralizing "tech." It is insane that we think people who uncritically worship rocket launches are somehow lesser humans than ones who worship mythical memories of long-ago fake news pseudoevents.
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Even if you understand nothing about a thing, worship is a way of centering it and ridding yourself of the assumption that you are at the center when you are not. That's epistemic progress. Even if your mental model of the thing you're centering is completely wrong and childish.
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Even if you think rockets work on the principle of dragons hidden in the fuselage breathing fire out the bottom, that's better, tbh, than thinking the world was created in 7 days in 6000 BC by some dude with a white beard who still interferes with "miracles" to guide events.
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Yet, which belief gets ridiculed, and which ones gets deeply centered in everything from the social calendar to tax policy to social-distancing exemption policy? Merry covid-spreading Christmas.
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I'm not saying ignore human concerns and save the system. I'm saying don't forget that the option of paying attention to human concerns only exists if you pay adequate attention to the workings of world machinery first.
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The world today is in a financially bombed out state. If balance sheets and budgets were buildings, it would look like Dresden or Tokyo after the firebombing attacks. Utter gutting and devastation of large sections of the financial built environment.
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We don't see this because we never admitted to ourselves that the way the world works, the financial software is in fact the center. We tagged it the preserve of sociopaths, and guess what, system adversely selected precisely the people who had no problems being viewed as such.
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Replying to
The only way to be human at this scale and complexity of civilization is to realize that humans are not the center. Merely the privileged beneficiary of the system being somewhere close to working order.
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We are all Eloi living on the surface of the leviathan pretending that what we care about in our little lives is what matters for the whole to work -- family, music, jokes, twitter, etc. The small minority who center a search for the actual soul of the beast get tagged villains.
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Yes, there are venal elites, corrupt patterns, oppression, and all that, but all that is STILL human centric. It is peripheral to the way the machine works the way first class vs. coach and legroom issues are peripheral to how an airplane flies at all.
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I think trying to make things human-centric and focusing on ideological blame games is the Original Sin of systems thinking. It's as silly as trying to make the solar system geocentric by force. The center is where the center is.
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Replying to @vgr
Seems like you bristle at the bad-faith arguments on all sides, do you resent the search for alternatives to ‘greed is good’ & obvious lies of the global capitalist bourgeoise? More Foucault than Marx, aren’t we supposed to make things more human-centric? question our systems?
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The human imperative is to always be seeking new ways to decenter ourselves, shed more layers of our anthropocentric conceits, and try harder to discover the true centers of things that concern us.
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It is *easy* to diagnose and act on systems in human-centric ways because human brains are wired to work exceptionally well around questions of fairness and cheating. That does NOT mean questions of fairness and cheating are the most important questions.
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To return to my plane example: Is it unfair that some assholes occupy too much overhead bin space? Yes. Is it unfair that tall people have to be cramped in their seats? Yes. That doesn't mean any of it is central to how planes fly.
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To return to my original point of departure for this rant -- why DON'T we have maps of financial fallout damage the way we do wildfires or bomb damage? Why is our situation awareness of what is actually happening so shockingly bad?
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Why are we unable to place debate about economic damage vs. fatalities on a firmer empirical footing by actually mapping patterns of economic damage on balance sheets even though buildings are still standing? Because we are "human centric" egotists who think we are the center.
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It's not all bad -- some of the data IS available, and mapping it all IS far harder than mapping geography. My beef is with the attitude that it is immoral to take it seriously and try because of course everybody already knows the "right" answer.
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Replying to @theartlav
Partial views are visible -- the budgets of city governments, the balance sheets/quarterly reports of publicly traded companies, the budgets of many government departments... rates of foreclosure on loans etc etc. It's just very hard to pull a composite picture together.
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Like this recent stimulus bill. 90% of the commentary is on a) the inadequacy of the $600 checks, b) the fact that they shoved in the 3-martini-lunch tax break to get the deal done.
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The fact that they mostly stiffed city/state governments is a footnote. Actual financial bomb damage -- like small airports getting big windfalls and critical infrastructure big airports in the financial ICU, is being ignored because we don't have maps/situation awareness.
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Yes I understand this is still a triage-style bill. Yes I understand there is a lot of need for band-aids before people can even think beyond their next meal. But there is a deep reluctance to even think about the nature of the damage and what long-term recovery might entail.
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We do not want the development and deployment of the vaccine to be the last heroic thing the crippled global system does for what are essentially its human intestinal biota.
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There should be a name for this syndrome of believing "if we built it, we must be the center of it." "Built" does a lot of work in the conceited relationship of humans to the "built" environment they merely had a small role in catalyzing the emergence of.
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"Technology is just a tool," and "markets should serve humans" are propositions that emerge from unexamined, uncritical, self-important anthropocentricity. The artificial world is vastly more emergent than we think. It needs to be studied, understood, and related to like nature.
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Herbert Simon/Sciences of the Artificial vector of thing is unacceptably primitive still. That shit hasn't moved since 1970 and vague noises about "weakly coupled systems" and other chart-porn bs from the first pass 50 years ago.
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I'm gonna call my new religion Stackocentrism. Things revolve around the stack, not around the humans. Whatever your mental model of the stack, stackocentrism is still a better mental model than human-centrism.
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If we had a proper map of the leviathan, every balance sheet in the world would show up as safe/burning, and the topology would reveal systemic risk. A financial fire department would descend and put out the fire, do control burns etc.
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The public balance sheet would add an equity stake in the rescued org in proportion to the disproportionate benefit to the “owner.” The less you matter to system survival, the lower your priority, and the higher the stake taken in exchange for rescue if you do get rescued.
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Bailouts are not a bad thing. We live with imperfect knowledge in an uncertain world, with complex patterns of risk coupling. We just need a science of bailouts. A financial equivalent of disaster preparedness and response capability. Instead of processing through a moral lens.
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A stupid thing about human-centric thinking is that every failure becomes a moral failure and the calculus of blame, reward, punishment, and justice becomes the theology of system repair. One reason is we use money allocation (both market and planned) as primary fix mechanism.
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It’s not a bad mechanism, but it has the unfortunate property of also being the primary enabler if individual human quality of life. It’s almost like we need different monetary systems for humans vs the system.
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Otherwise it leads to thinking Bill Gates lives 120 billion times better than average burger-flipper simply because he has a 120 billion times the net worth of the median person with no assets. Most of that money is Stack fuel. He probably only is 10-1000x happier than you and me
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Enterprise money vs consumer money? Not a bad idea actually. Things like food stamps get at that. As do things like earmarked capital equipment grants to industries. Separate power money from survival-and-hedonism money. Bread-and-circus bucks vs. infrastructure bucks.
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Financialization would actually be a good thing if it included almost everybody in its logic, and encoded what everybody knows about the system. It’s currently terrible because it reflects a tiny minority view of how the world works. A bunch of 0.1% idiots trading green lumber.
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