Yeah. Stephen Hawkins had a similar mind-set https://apnews.com/article/be53fc24c4ff476f929237d042125621 While I agree that we have degraded the environment, and can't expect unlimited growth with limited natural resources ... I question the degree to which we can effect climate (though those black-ops planes are trying awfully hard with their chem-trails). And a maltusian solution is morally repugnant, playing right into the hands of the sociopaths among us.
I really don't know the way out. But the unnaccounable who strike the pose of knowing, just for the sake of personal power ... have got to go. If not soon, future generations will find homo sapiens, only another layer of fossils upon the dinosaurs.
Steve, Limits to Growth based on Limited resources is the trap set by Malthus, and refined by the grifter Neumann’s “Game Theory”. Propose that you consider that the Universe is neither bounded nor limited. Imago Viva Dei!
I agree with you about Malthus's solution, provided one big assumption ... that we will be able to expand our swarms with offworld resources before we destroy ourselves over the lowest hanging fruit. I have heard talk about harvesting resources from beyond earth since growing up, that is one reason I gravitated towards the sciences as an undergrad. But I saw so little indication the predators among us would not stop harvesting us first. That is why I gravitated towards education and the social sciences. Here is an example of a society that had a whole world of resources waiting for them, and what did they do?
''Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America. Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve.''
As for Cynthia's substack, I gave it a brief read, and agree with her on many points ... but took my points from other thinkers and experiences. For example, I had a couple of experiences climbing 'Wittgenstein's Ladder' as an undergrad back in the states, and eventually was able to find the best articulation of the limits of logic in the mystic traditions at the origins and edges of later, institutionalized religion ... at the limits of logic in math and science, most clearly articulated by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (STEM fields grounded in assumptions which cannot be proven within their resulting systematic models .... but perhaps sustainable as a heuristics), and my experiences later articulated in linguistics by the 'hard form' of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity (or Joseph Campbell's Jungian take on anything that can be articulated is necessarily an incomplete model and therefore a 'metaphor' of reality mediated by language or the arts. The predictability and progress of some models ... such as in physics, engineering, and the medical fields ... are both provisional and parochial, serving specific problem-solving tasks. Fundamental human nature has not 'progressed' since the first pre-stone-age man competed over resources or mates, or cooperated over hunting and gathering.
As a classroom educator, and to some extent by my temperament ... I was repulsed by the limits of zero-sum games of brute memorization for standardized tests designed to produce compliant but disposable workers. That is what the gist of public education has been all along ... from the Victorian-era Prussian model, similar in organization and heuristics to two other institutions ... the military and the penal system ... to the modern public education system. I am closer to a Platonic idealist who prefers to see differences in academic domains as merely provisional social constructs to keep that publish-or-perish model going (also a damned zero-sum game). As a Platonic idealist, my goals and methods have been to use non-zero sum games in the classroom (co-operative learning, humanistics and values clarification, flipped classes, community outreach, etc.) consciously aimed towards what I consider the highest ideal of education. If we are social primates (not logical thinking machines), the process of social maturity is long and arduous. The process of education is continual, life-long, and makes no distinction between 'teacher' and 'student' ... every moment an opportunity for personal growth for each member of a community ... as individuals ... to reach their full potential to be morally autonomous. Enough moral autonomy to choose, rather than be coerced or forced (as a self-appointed ruling class is now trying to do), into empowering the marginalized and holding authority accountable. By personal choice.
I will end for now, because having resigned in protest from a tenured position in order to stay with my ideals, I am now forced to supplement a modest pension with contract work in the public schools system. As I have limited time, 67 and with non-metasaszied throat cancer, spending my mornings writing self justifications may not be my best use of limited resources. In that respect, I would be playing into a zero-sum game and one not of my own choosing.
(sigh)
Hi Whisk.
Yeah. Stephen Hawkins had a similar mind-set https://apnews.com/article/be53fc24c4ff476f929237d042125621 While I agree that we have degraded the environment, and can't expect unlimited growth with limited natural resources ... I question the degree to which we can effect climate (though those black-ops planes are trying awfully hard with their chem-trails). And a maltusian solution is morally repugnant, playing right into the hands of the sociopaths among us.
I really don't know the way out. But the unnaccounable who strike the pose of knowing, just for the sake of personal power ... have got to go. If not soon, future generations will find homo sapiens, only another layer of fossils upon the dinosaurs.
Cheers Whisk, and keep up the good fight.
steve
Steve, Limits to Growth based on Limited resources is the trap set by Malthus, and refined by the grifter Neumann’s “Game Theory”. Propose that you consider that the Universe is neither bounded nor limited. Imago Viva Dei!
https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-curse-of-game-theory-why-its?r=9h8kf&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post&fbclid=IwAR11TYRKHQ5XAnwY_PnZ0joH8joEZlH_Aot2_P5cJVBjYeBR8RxHqyqJNok
Hi Warren,
I agree with you about Malthus's solution, provided one big assumption ... that we will be able to expand our swarms with offworld resources before we destroy ourselves over the lowest hanging fruit. I have heard talk about harvesting resources from beyond earth since growing up, that is one reason I gravitated towards the sciences as an undergrad. But I saw so little indication the predators among us would not stop harvesting us first. That is why I gravitated towards education and the social sciences. Here is an example of a society that had a whole world of resources waiting for them, and what did they do?
''Thus, Norse society’s structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society’s values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe’s most remote outpost. We modern Americans should not be too quick to brand them as failures, when their society survived in Greenland for longer than our English-speaking society has survived so far in North America. Ultimately, though, the chiefs found themselves without followers. The last right that they obtained for themselves was the privilege of being the last to starve.''
Diamond, Jared. Collapse (p. 276). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
As for Cynthia's substack, I gave it a brief read, and agree with her on many points ... but took my points from other thinkers and experiences. For example, I had a couple of experiences climbing 'Wittgenstein's Ladder' as an undergrad back in the states, and eventually was able to find the best articulation of the limits of logic in the mystic traditions at the origins and edges of later, institutionalized religion ... at the limits of logic in math and science, most clearly articulated by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (STEM fields grounded in assumptions which cannot be proven within their resulting systematic models .... but perhaps sustainable as a heuristics), and my experiences later articulated in linguistics by the 'hard form' of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity (or Joseph Campbell's Jungian take on anything that can be articulated is necessarily an incomplete model and therefore a 'metaphor' of reality mediated by language or the arts. The predictability and progress of some models ... such as in physics, engineering, and the medical fields ... are both provisional and parochial, serving specific problem-solving tasks. Fundamental human nature has not 'progressed' since the first pre-stone-age man competed over resources or mates, or cooperated over hunting and gathering.
As a classroom educator, and to some extent by my temperament ... I was repulsed by the limits of zero-sum games of brute memorization for standardized tests designed to produce compliant but disposable workers. That is what the gist of public education has been all along ... from the Victorian-era Prussian model, similar in organization and heuristics to two other institutions ... the military and the penal system ... to the modern public education system. I am closer to a Platonic idealist who prefers to see differences in academic domains as merely provisional social constructs to keep that publish-or-perish model going (also a damned zero-sum game). As a Platonic idealist, my goals and methods have been to use non-zero sum games in the classroom (co-operative learning, humanistics and values clarification, flipped classes, community outreach, etc.) consciously aimed towards what I consider the highest ideal of education. If we are social primates (not logical thinking machines), the process of social maturity is long and arduous. The process of education is continual, life-long, and makes no distinction between 'teacher' and 'student' ... every moment an opportunity for personal growth for each member of a community ... as individuals ... to reach their full potential to be morally autonomous. Enough moral autonomy to choose, rather than be coerced or forced (as a self-appointed ruling class is now trying to do), into empowering the marginalized and holding authority accountable. By personal choice.
I will end for now, because having resigned in protest from a tenured position in order to stay with my ideals, I am now forced to supplement a modest pension with contract work in the public schools system. As I have limited time, 67 and with non-metasaszied throat cancer, spending my mornings writing self justifications may not be my best use of limited resources. In that respect, I would be playing into a zero-sum game and one not of my own choosing.
Cheers Warren,
and keep up the good fight.