Conversation

When/how/why does marshaling of useful potential turn into hoarding? Examples I’m thinking of: charged battery, dam, stocked pantry, survivalist/emergency supplies, full factory inventory, “full-stack” engineer, decathlete, polymathery, polyglottery, multiple masters degrees…
10
35
In principle “potential” is eternal, abstract and undifferentiated, but in practice it is always transient, embodied and differentiated. One sign it is hoarding is increase in entropy without actualization of potential. Eg expired items.
1
13
Another sign is organizational disorder. Organization is easiest when you have some sense of general purpose I’d not specific goals. The less clear the purpose, the harder it is to organize the potential. In the limit of true purposelessness you can’t organize at all.
Replying to
I recall in Oscar and Lucinda, the boy Oscar collects stones as a hobby and tries various schemes like by color or size. If there’s no purpose, there’s no good reason to choose one scheme over another. For many collection hobbies this is a source of pleasure.
1
4
Alternately, absent a telos, the most natural scheme is one that efficiently embodies the history of the potential. Kinda begs the question since your sense of history is a dual of your sense of future potential (eg “dead end” vs “frontier”). You grok both or neither 🤔
1
4
Related: the kinetic equivalent of potential. Some generalization of momentum. A flow rate times a “mass.” Free cash flow. Calories/day. Stable demand. They’re a kind of potential. Predictably renewable flow.
2
2
You can covert back and forth via npv/dcf and eps equivalents. “Margin” is the rate of natural transfer from kinetic to static potential. 🤔
1
1
General idea I’m tacking towards is modeling identity as purely a function of potential and hoarding. External+internal. Static+kinetic embodiment. Gods as pure kinetic potential, demons as pure static hoarding. Free cash flow versus trash pile.
1
4
“Stranded potential” is when potential rots because there’s no usable way to convert it. All you can do is discharge it as exhaust. (“exhausted” is not the same as “depleted”). The Great Weirding was a Great Exhaust Stroke of stranded industrial capital potential.
5