A friend of mine once asked me to try and describe to him how I thought the universe/reality/whatever you want to call it works... after I recovered from laughing my ass off I said something like this... but words are actually insufficient to the task:
Imagine, if you will a vast (basically infinite) space. This space is filled with stuff. This stuff is both point-like and thread-like. All this stuff interacts with ALL of the other stuff in largely unperceivable (to us) ways and regardless of the "distance" between them.
There is (again, for lack of a better term) a plane of "now" that is moving through this space (it is in this plane of now that we see the point-like aspect of the stuff).
If you could know and track ALL of the stuff and ALL of the influences you would (truly) understand what is happening--BUT, you can't. It is simply not possible. You would also (I think but I am not sure) see that the whole thing is deterministic, arising from the initial conditions.
In order to function, we have to limit even the things that we can see and connect. Things have to be simplified. REALLY REALLY simplified. So we exist in a ghost of reality--not simply what we can see or know or understand, but an even more limited subset of that.
This is why I always talk about things like narrative and identity, because those are the things that we use to both understand and act.
It only looks like chaos from the inside (because of our limitations) and we try and conquer that chaos through narrative, even though the narrative is very very far from the actual thing.
The closest academic school that expresses what I think about this is Process Philosophy (A. N. Whitehead).
Simple. Greenwald, like all Trump converts such as Ben Shapiro and Bill O'Reilly, sold out their integrity for the bucks provided by stirring the pot of conflict and hate
I full subscribed to Linker, just based on the Greenwald and Bannon pieces. Thanks for another great tip. Only issue now is having enough time to read JVL and not just the newsletters he recommends.
A number of data science algorithm’s are modeled on biological systems. In the context of my comment, I mean that as more data is fed in(connection’s, text to be analyzed, etc) the predicted results improve the ability to amplify the resultant emotional responses. In a sense it lives and grows as more people in the network get sucked into the subject.
The gray flannel dwarves aka attorneys will save the day for pirate Bannon, and send the bill to Mercer. Or perhaps they’ll all be housed in the same federal pen. One can hope!
I see a connection between Greenwald and quantum politics. Our social systems are increasingly difficult to predict because of their complexity, making them more chaotic (to steal from the article). And sometimes those trying to make sense of it blow a gasket and that would be Glenn Greenwald (and Tulsi Gabbard for that matter). Selective skepticism implies that Grenwald has a (big) blind spot, not being able to recognize his cognitive dissonance of crapping on center left politicians and media folks while ignoring the literal crimes on the right. But that's not having a blind spot, that is dysfunctional (for someone of his caliber). Nope, my sophisticated analysis concludes that he's broken somehow. And the quantum politics of today, would explain how so many people--mostly in the Right, but Greenwald and a few others on the left--broke in the last few years. Sarkissian is correct that we are beginning to experience what politics will be like in the digital century. Buckle up.
I have a quibble with Anton S. Canzano, or Canzo, or Cabano's "quantum politics" metaphor. Yes, quantum mechanics focuses on the "very small". But that doesn't translate to individual people/particles. Quantum mechanics is statistical, describing probabilities of whole populations.
More interestingly, quantum mechanics describes such individuals within a population as being in a "superposition of states." Meaning there's a certain probability it could go this way, and another probability it could go that way. The mathematics to describe this superposition existence uses imaginary numbers -- you may recall this as i = square root of -1.
(Humorous aside: When the concept of imaginary numbers was introduced to me in high school, I asked "What the heck is this used for?" My teacher mumbled that it's sometimes used in architecture. And I said the quiet part out loud: "Well, I'm never going into a building again!" Since then, having learned a lot more about physics and math, I understand the connection.)
Anyway, even MORE interesting is that the individuals/particles don't settle on one side or the other UNTIL THEY ARE OBSERVED. Schrodinger's cat is supposed to be meaningful to your average Joe? Please. I give the average Joe a bit more credit, and think that experiments on light's wave/particle duality are understandable AND enlightening. In a nutshell: photoelectric effect is evidence for particle. Diffraction is evidence for wave. It all depends on HOW you make the observation. Google away.
Mathematically, observation collapses the superposition probabilities by squaring them. Such that the imaginary i (square root of minus 1) becomes the real number minus 1. Back in the real world. Could go wave. Could go particle. Either way, ya made yer choice. Or rather, a choice has been made for you.
So I would propose a more apt metaphor. Any individual person starts out as a superposition of states -- could go either way. And the "observation", which solidifies them on one side or the other, depends on their environment -- media (social, TV), local community, etc. Not to be too cute about it -- how that environment "squares" with them. Nah, that IS too cute about it. Eh, WTF.
Not to get too far in the weeds, but chaos theory asserts that a small difference at an early stage will amplify into a huge difference in later stages.
Which leads me to a vital question. To paraphrase a recent movie title "Are the kids REALLY ok?"
Carol
p.s. Subscribed to Damon right away, because I already liked him from "Beg To Differ"
You wouldn't happen to know of a popularized treatment of chaos that
a) isn't *quite* as middle school level as Gleick (maybe something around the level of Weinberg or Hawking's popsci books?); and yet
b) treats incompletely deterministic chaos in a physical large dispersive medium like an non-uniform ordinary fluid (not Bose-Einstein condensates which are cool but rare at ordinary temperatures) sort of quantitatively rather than butterfly wing silliness (but without expecting the reader to understand too much math; Lagrangians would be Right Out). Like the chaotic fluid dynamics version of Chua's circuit. I keep looking and crickets.
(please reread your textbooks if you want to play with analogies to QM in public :) - real probability is the square root of the product of the complex amplitude and its complex conjugate, duh :) )
To your last, quoting The Offspring rather than a movie, "The Kids Aren't Alright".
OK, I subscribed to Linker too - hopefully the longer form will work better for him than The Week. He's not just apologized for his theocon ways, but actually done a fair amount of reflection on *why* he had those ways in the first place (AFAIK his old First Things content is still online - it makes, err, interesting reading), which I guess makes him kind of a theocon Whittaker Chambers? Except that, so far at least, Linker has stopped in the political middle. The closest American analogy I can think of from far left to approximate middle would be Max Shachtman.
Well, I guess I'm not that literate. I don't understand Sarkissian at all, I ignore Greenwald because he has nothing to say, other than being a self appointed pundit, Republicans are showing us how to tear the Country apart, Bannon can't get a movie made so he's BSng on media, and he has nothing to say, just another juvenile extremist. And I went to college. And maybe I'm a hopeless optimist. I'm trying to elect people to serve the people, not the perks. And don't get me started on Trump and his monkeys. I've run a few businesses in my time and I'd love to interview Trump for a job. He'd be out of the building in under 4 minutes. I served my Country in War. I wonder how we got all this garbage in Congress elected.
In part because we've leaned into the notion that government is an inherently corrupt and tainted institution. Then we're surprised when so many corrupt people are drawn to it.
Government by its nature is prone to corruption, but we've essentially surrendered to the notion of innate corruption rather than accepting that any functional form of government will require ongoing maintenance and upkeep.
The goals we should aspire to involve justice, honor, and competence.
(What those terms specifically encompass then forms part of the public debate we should have in selecting our representation, along with discrete policy matters.)
Our system was formulated with the concept that there would be substantial, knowledgeable engagement with the issues and character of those representing the republic from those with franchise. It's a good ideal, but among the challenges is that the complexity of society has made it very difficult for the average voter to be informed, even without an active disinformation environment. Add to that we're exhausted and overworked as a society, with a severe lack of the mental/emotional bandwidth that it takes to be engaged.
"Those of us who devoted ourselves to making sense of the Trump administration frequently struggled to nail down precisely what was so unnerving about his presidency...
"But far worse and more dangerous was the bullshit.
"...The ultimate consequence of spreading BS far and wide is a gradually rising tide of chaos—epistemic, moral, and political... preparing the way for totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular."
A while back, I read "Chris Rufo: Professional Bullshit Artist":
"Whether CRT is actually present wherever Rufo says it is does not matter to him in the slightest. It’s not about integrity; telling the truth is for suckers. What matters, fundamentally, is winning... Truth is no end in itself; the only aim is political power.
"One of Frankfurt’s poignant insights: 'Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.' ...Rufo is a black belt in bullshit artistry, whereas [James] Lindsay tends to play the role of the liar more often. Rufo may therefore represent a more pernicious threat."
Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" notes,
"What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say: It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it."
Bull sessions are often silly, toying with ideas noncommittally. Still, they serve a purpose: play is part of learning. "The statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that there is no pretense that [the connection between what people say and what they believe] is being sustained." Bull-session "candor" isn't truthfulness, just unfiltered, even irresponsible in other contexts.
People were attracted to Trump's "candor". The public bull sessions advocating Trumpism sure style themselves as "adventuresome". But governing is no mere bull session. Bull sessions are normal in political commentary, though, creating cover for the real bullshit artists. Enough cover to hide the likes of Trump and Rufo? I had hoped not, but I've gotten used to that hope being disappointed.
This quote from Jean Paul Sartre about anti-semites perfect overlays the American right. Just replace “anti-Semites” with “anti-CRT.”
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Re governing, the political strategists say their candidates campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Trump campaigned in bullshit and continued it as he governed. He continued his rallies and was was president of his base, only, not the US.
There is, interestingly, a line in #2 today that ties in quite nicely as an explanation for something in #1, I believe. Unless I am totally misreading and misinterpreting everything I know about Steve Bannon and his ilk, which I'm sure is entirely possible...
"These individuals seldom know what their end point is. Their main drive seems to be motivated by dissatisfaction in most cases."
Bannon, a political player of both note and notoriety, has always struck me as quite the same as a number of ordinary everyday folks I've known who are of no note or notoriety beyond how many of them there apparently are within our society. He's someone who knows what he hates and doesn't want, but has no real idea that can be expressed in concrete and specific terms of what it is he really does want, (beyond perhaps power, money and recognition). No 'vision' of a future that can be expressed in terms that don't include some form of nihilism.
In this he is completely like a fair number of people I've known personally. They can only define themselves by what (and who) they're against. Ask them to explain in specific terms what they are actually for, and it's the sound of choking crickets that you will usually hear.
WRT Quantum Politics:
A friend of mine once asked me to try and describe to him how I thought the universe/reality/whatever you want to call it works... after I recovered from laughing my ass off I said something like this... but words are actually insufficient to the task:
Imagine, if you will a vast (basically infinite) space. This space is filled with stuff. This stuff is both point-like and thread-like. All this stuff interacts with ALL of the other stuff in largely unperceivable (to us) ways and regardless of the "distance" between them.
There is (again, for lack of a better term) a plane of "now" that is moving through this space (it is in this plane of now that we see the point-like aspect of the stuff).
If you could know and track ALL of the stuff and ALL of the influences you would (truly) understand what is happening--BUT, you can't. It is simply not possible. You would also (I think but I am not sure) see that the whole thing is deterministic, arising from the initial conditions.
In order to function, we have to limit even the things that we can see and connect. Things have to be simplified. REALLY REALLY simplified. So we exist in a ghost of reality--not simply what we can see or know or understand, but an even more limited subset of that.
This is why I always talk about things like narrative and identity, because those are the things that we use to both understand and act.
It only looks like chaos from the inside (because of our limitations) and we try and conquer that chaos through narrative, even though the narrative is very very far from the actual thing.
The closest academic school that expresses what I think about this is Process Philosophy (A. N. Whitehead).
YOU GUYS I AM NOT CRYING...Latest post from Canzano: https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-legacy-of-shoe-lives-on?s=r
Simple. Greenwald, like all Trump converts such as Ben Shapiro and Bill O'Reilly, sold out their integrity for the bucks provided by stirring the pot of conflict and hate
I full subscribed to Linker, just based on the Greenwald and Bannon pieces. Thanks for another great tip. Only issue now is having enough time to read JVL and not just the newsletters he recommends.
One wants one's JVL.
Thank you for this, Josh, you said it a hell of a lot better than I did.
I just can't subscribe to any more JVL...dang you...lol....I like Damon on Beg to Differ, I assume he left The Week then?
When/if thing get better financially for me I will be able to subscribe to some of your recommendations.
Until then, I still like reading the excerpts.
Sign up for Damon's free list!
I did....
A number of data science algorithm’s are modeled on biological systems. In the context of my comment, I mean that as more data is fed in(connection’s, text to be analyzed, etc) the predicted results improve the ability to amplify the resultant emotional responses. In a sense it lives and grows as more people in the network get sucked into the subject.
Greenwald should be ignored; Bannon should be jailed.
The gray flannel dwarves aka attorneys will save the day for pirate Bannon, and send the bill to Mercer. Or perhaps they’ll all be housed in the same federal pen. One can hope!
I see a connection between Greenwald and quantum politics. Our social systems are increasingly difficult to predict because of their complexity, making them more chaotic (to steal from the article). And sometimes those trying to make sense of it blow a gasket and that would be Glenn Greenwald (and Tulsi Gabbard for that matter). Selective skepticism implies that Grenwald has a (big) blind spot, not being able to recognize his cognitive dissonance of crapping on center left politicians and media folks while ignoring the literal crimes on the right. But that's not having a blind spot, that is dysfunctional (for someone of his caliber). Nope, my sophisticated analysis concludes that he's broken somehow. And the quantum politics of today, would explain how so many people--mostly in the Right, but Greenwald and a few others on the left--broke in the last few years. Sarkissian is correct that we are beginning to experience what politics will be like in the digital century. Buckle up.
I have a quibble with Anton S. Canzano, or Canzo, or Cabano's "quantum politics" metaphor. Yes, quantum mechanics focuses on the "very small". But that doesn't translate to individual people/particles. Quantum mechanics is statistical, describing probabilities of whole populations.
More interestingly, quantum mechanics describes such individuals within a population as being in a "superposition of states." Meaning there's a certain probability it could go this way, and another probability it could go that way. The mathematics to describe this superposition existence uses imaginary numbers -- you may recall this as i = square root of -1.
(Humorous aside: When the concept of imaginary numbers was introduced to me in high school, I asked "What the heck is this used for?" My teacher mumbled that it's sometimes used in architecture. And I said the quiet part out loud: "Well, I'm never going into a building again!" Since then, having learned a lot more about physics and math, I understand the connection.)
Anyway, even MORE interesting is that the individuals/particles don't settle on one side or the other UNTIL THEY ARE OBSERVED. Schrodinger's cat is supposed to be meaningful to your average Joe? Please. I give the average Joe a bit more credit, and think that experiments on light's wave/particle duality are understandable AND enlightening. In a nutshell: photoelectric effect is evidence for particle. Diffraction is evidence for wave. It all depends on HOW you make the observation. Google away.
Mathematically, observation collapses the superposition probabilities by squaring them. Such that the imaginary i (square root of minus 1) becomes the real number minus 1. Back in the real world. Could go wave. Could go particle. Either way, ya made yer choice. Or rather, a choice has been made for you.
So I would propose a more apt metaphor. Any individual person starts out as a superposition of states -- could go either way. And the "observation", which solidifies them on one side or the other, depends on their environment -- media (social, TV), local community, etc. Not to be too cute about it -- how that environment "squares" with them. Nah, that IS too cute about it. Eh, WTF.
Not to get too far in the weeds, but chaos theory asserts that a small difference at an early stage will amplify into a huge difference in later stages.
Which leads me to a vital question. To paraphrase a recent movie title "Are the kids REALLY ok?"
Carol
p.s. Subscribed to Damon right away, because I already liked him from "Beg To Differ"
Hi Carol -
You wouldn't happen to know of a popularized treatment of chaos that
a) isn't *quite* as middle school level as Gleick (maybe something around the level of Weinberg or Hawking's popsci books?); and yet
b) treats incompletely deterministic chaos in a physical large dispersive medium like an non-uniform ordinary fluid (not Bose-Einstein condensates which are cool but rare at ordinary temperatures) sort of quantitatively rather than butterfly wing silliness (but without expecting the reader to understand too much math; Lagrangians would be Right Out). Like the chaotic fluid dynamics version of Chua's circuit. I keep looking and crickets.
(please reread your textbooks if you want to play with analogies to QM in public :) - real probability is the square root of the product of the complex amplitude and its complex conjugate, duh :) )
To your last, quoting The Offspring rather than a movie, "The Kids Aren't Alright".
OK, I subscribed to Linker too - hopefully the longer form will work better for him than The Week. He's not just apologized for his theocon ways, but actually done a fair amount of reflection on *why* he had those ways in the first place (AFAIK his old First Things content is still online - it makes, err, interesting reading), which I guess makes him kind of a theocon Whittaker Chambers? Except that, so far at least, Linker has stopped in the political middle. The closest American analogy I can think of from far left to approximate middle would be Max Shachtman.
Thx for the tip to Linker. I subscribed!
Well, I guess I'm not that literate. I don't understand Sarkissian at all, I ignore Greenwald because he has nothing to say, other than being a self appointed pundit, Republicans are showing us how to tear the Country apart, Bannon can't get a movie made so he's BSng on media, and he has nothing to say, just another juvenile extremist. And I went to college. And maybe I'm a hopeless optimist. I'm trying to elect people to serve the people, not the perks. And don't get me started on Trump and his monkeys. I've run a few businesses in my time and I'd love to interview Trump for a job. He'd be out of the building in under 4 minutes. I served my Country in War. I wonder how we got all this garbage in Congress elected.
In part because we've leaned into the notion that government is an inherently corrupt and tainted institution. Then we're surprised when so many corrupt people are drawn to it.
Government by its nature is prone to corruption, but we've essentially surrendered to the notion of innate corruption rather than accepting that any functional form of government will require ongoing maintenance and upkeep.
The goals we should aspire to involve justice, honor, and competence.
(What those terms specifically encompass then forms part of the public debate we should have in selecting our representation, along with discrete policy matters.)
Our system was formulated with the concept that there would be substantial, knowledgeable engagement with the issues and character of those representing the republic from those with franchise. It's a good ideal, but among the challenges is that the complexity of society has made it very difficult for the average voter to be informed, even without an active disinformation environment. Add to that we're exhausted and overworked as a society, with a severe lack of the mental/emotional bandwidth that it takes to be engaged.
Quoting Linker,
"Those of us who devoted ourselves to making sense of the Trump administration frequently struggled to nail down precisely what was so unnerving about his presidency...
"But far worse and more dangerous was the bullshit.
"...The ultimate consequence of spreading BS far and wide is a gradually rising tide of chaos—epistemic, moral, and political... preparing the way for totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular."
A while back, I read "Chris Rufo: Professional Bullshit Artist":
https://conceptualdisinformation.substack.com/p/chris-rufo-professional-bullshit?s=r
"Whether CRT is actually present wherever Rufo says it is does not matter to him in the slightest. It’s not about integrity; telling the truth is for suckers. What matters, fundamentally, is winning... Truth is no end in itself; the only aim is political power.
"One of Frankfurt’s poignant insights: 'Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.' ...Rufo is a black belt in bullshit artistry, whereas [James] Lindsay tends to play the role of the liar more often. Rufo may therefore represent a more pernicious threat."
Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" notes,
"What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say: It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it."
Bull sessions are often silly, toying with ideas noncommittally. Still, they serve a purpose: play is part of learning. "The statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that there is no pretense that [the connection between what people say and what they believe] is being sustained." Bull-session "candor" isn't truthfulness, just unfiltered, even irresponsible in other contexts.
People were attracted to Trump's "candor". The public bull sessions advocating Trumpism sure style themselves as "adventuresome". But governing is no mere bull session. Bull sessions are normal in political commentary, though, creating cover for the real bullshit artists. Enough cover to hide the likes of Trump and Rufo? I had hoped not, but I've gotten used to that hope being disappointed.
Good points. I have often thought about Frankfurt's little book these past seven years. (Can it really be *seven* years now? Lord, have mercy!)
Thanks for the link to ConceptualDisinformation. One more bit of reading.
This quote from Jean Paul Sartre about anti-semites perfect overlays the American right. Just replace “anti-Semites” with “anti-CRT.”
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Excellent!
Good point about Trump's so-called candor.
Re governing, the political strategists say their candidates campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Trump campaigned in bullshit and continued it as he governed. He continued his rallies and was was president of his base, only, not the US.
There is, interestingly, a line in #2 today that ties in quite nicely as an explanation for something in #1, I believe. Unless I am totally misreading and misinterpreting everything I know about Steve Bannon and his ilk, which I'm sure is entirely possible...
"These individuals seldom know what their end point is. Their main drive seems to be motivated by dissatisfaction in most cases."
Bannon, a political player of both note and notoriety, has always struck me as quite the same as a number of ordinary everyday folks I've known who are of no note or notoriety beyond how many of them there apparently are within our society. He's someone who knows what he hates and doesn't want, but has no real idea that can be expressed in concrete and specific terms of what it is he really does want, (beyond perhaps power, money and recognition). No 'vision' of a future that can be expressed in terms that don't include some form of nihilism.
In this he is completely like a fair number of people I've known personally. They can only define themselves by what (and who) they're against. Ask them to explain in specific terms what they are actually for, and it's the sound of choking crickets that you will usually hear.