The Abundances of Ages

October 4, 2012 By
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

High culture organizes its world views using overarching frames: intellectual superstructures that serve as extrinsic conceptual coordinate systems.  “Globalization” and “Industrialization” are examples of such frames.

Popular culture on the other hand, tends to be driven by the most visible and drama in the immediate environment.  From the chaos of turbulent change, popular culture tends to pick out specific motifs around which to grow a world view. These motifs mostly arise from the economic abundances that drive that particular age.

In trying to compare and contrast the motifs of different ages, something interesting struck me: the motifs tend to cycle between material, object and cognitive motifs. The objects aren’t random objects, but ones created by the operation of technology. So iron is a material motif for the Iron Age, the steam engine is an object motif for the Industrial Age, and writing is a cognitive motif for the Bronze Age.  Here’s an approximate and speculative table of the motif-cycling I made up.

(I have endnotes for the less obvious table entries, which may need some explanation; and obviously the model is more speculative for ages for which contemporary written records are not available to us).

Why is this cycling important? Well, for all you futurists out there who are stuck in a mental rut asking yourself, what’s the next big thing? the next big thing is almost certainly not going to be a thing at all (object motif).  It’s going to be a material motif. So the right question is what’s the next new material? 

So answers like “3D printing” are wrong in a specific and interesting way. Let me explain.

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Annealing the Tactical Pattern Stack

October 2, 2012 By

Human behaviors are complicated things. They are easy to describe, as fragments of narratives, but hard to unpack in useful and fundamental ways. In Tempo, I offered a model of behavior where universal tactics (universal in the sense of arising from universally shared conceptual metaphors, and being enacted in domain-specific ways) form a basic vocabulary, and are enacted through basic decision patterns, which are like basic sentence structures in language.

I suggested that there are four basic kinds of tactical pattern: reactive, deliberative, procedural and opportunistic, that could be conceptualized via this 2×2, where the x-axis represents the locus of the information driving the action (inside/outside your head) and the y-axis represents whether the information has high or low visibility (i.e. whether it is explicit and in awareness, or whether it is part of the frame/background, and below awareness).

 While writing the book, I tried to figure out whether these behaviors also form a natural hierarchy of sorts. I was unable to make up my mind, so I did not include the idea in the book. Now I think I have a good model. The stack looks like this (the simplicity is deceptive):

 

Why? And how should you understand this diagram?

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Cloud Mouse, Metro Mouse

September 27, 2012 By

The fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is probably the oldest exploration of the tensions involved in urbanization, but it seems curiously dated today.  The tensions explored in the fable — the simple, rustic pleasures and securities of country life versus the varied, refined pleasures and fears of town life  — seem irrelevant today. In America at least, the “country” such as it is, has turned into a geography occupied by industrial forces.  The countryside is a sparsely populated, mechanized food-and-resource cloud. A system of national parks, and a scattering of “charming” small towns and villages pickled in nostalgia, are all that liven up a landscape otherwise swallowed up by automated modernity.

In America, larger provincial towns and cities that are just a little too large and unwieldy to be nostalgically pickled, but not large enough to be grown into metropolitan regions, appear to be mostly degenerating into meth-lab economies or ossifying into enclaves of a retreating rich.

So the entire canvas of the town mouse/country mouse fable is being gradually emptied out. If there is a divide today, it is between two new species of mice: metro mice and cloud mice.

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Money as Pain Relief

September 20, 2012 By

I’ve been thinking about four ideas related to money lately, and about why I am generally uncomfortable framing life goals in financial terms.

  1. The classic idea in sales that people buy only two things: happiness and solutions to problems
  2. The idea that “money is a problem to be solved” (I don’t know the source of this idea)
  3. The idea that only central banks can make money, and that everybody else should think in terms of taking money from someone else (this one is due to Dorian Taylor)
  4. The piece of folk wisdom that says (contrary to the first idea) that money cannot buy happiness

When you put the four together, you get quite a nice little theory about why most people find it hard to make take enough money for their needs. And you end up with the interesting conclusion that all money is pain relief.

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Demystification versus Understanding

September 17, 2012 By

I am getting really interested in distinctions between types of knowledge these days. I think these distinctions are very important to the invisible structure of mental models.

One distinction whose importance I have come to increasingly appreciate, is the one between demystification and understanding. Both are types of appreciative knowledge. I define them as follows:

  • To demystify something is to understand it to a level where you no longer feel anxious about your ignorance.
  • To understand something is to have the same priorities as experts regarding that something.

The latter is in fact an implicit chicken-egg definition of expertise.

There is a shallow sense in which I can come across as very “knowledgeable.” Very few important things utterly mystify me that do not also mystify everybody else. When I encounter a new idea, I usually have some way to parse it. I am rarely at a loss over what to make of it. But this knowledge is only slightly deeper than the knowledge of a librarian who knows how to classify a book on any subject in a catalog.

So what is real understanding? Why is having the same priorities as experts a good test?

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Romanticism and Classicism (Assembly Required)

September 11, 2012 By

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of an aesthetic recently. In particular, aesthetics applied to things other than art and design. I’ve come to believe that your aesthetic posture is one of the most important determinants of how you think.

This post was threatening to snowball into a 10,000 essay (here’s why) so I decided to spare you the pain and provide three sampler pieces of the dozen or so I am trying to assemble into…something. Instead I’ll leave you to try and assemble something out of these pieces yourself.

Hint: you may want to try viewing a variety of distinct examples that are not formally pieces of art using these three constructs. Like say, coffee, the Republican/Democrat parties (in America), popcorn, a slum, a forest, a language, a mathematical result, a piece of code, an approach to planning a vacation, a way of organizing a desk…. So here you go, your first DIY ribbonfarm post.

First, always a good idea to start with a 2×2. Here, the challenge was to come up with a useful y-axis.

Next, an attempt to link aesthetics with attitudes about time. Paired-term lists are always good for exploring a dichotomy, and time is a reliably fertile variable to attempt to link to just about anything else.

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The Varieties of Scientific Experience

August 30, 2012 By

Note: this post has nothing to do with the book by Carl Sagan of the same name, which I just learned about from a comment. Damn Carl Sagan for using up a great title.

I recently realized that certain uses of words like science and scientific really annoy me. The train of thought started with this video of a TED talk by Jane McGonigal. Now, I don’t agree with a lot of what she says in the talk, but that isn’t really what bothered me about it. A lot gets written or said about scientific ideas that I don’t agree with. Disagreement and contention are a normal part of science. Nor was it the fact that it was a TED talk, with everything that signifies. I’ve made my peace with the existence of TED in our world. No, what bothered me was the specific rhetorical approach she adopted, in deploying the idea of “science” in a broader discourse. In other words, I disagreed with her way of talking about science and its place in society more than I disagreed with the science she was talking about.

Thinking more about it, it struck me that people who deal with science experience it in different ways. These varied experiences of science show up primarily when scientific ideas are situated within broader secondary discourses (I’ll leave primary scientific discourses for another post).  When people disagree about science at meta-levels, these different experiences are often the reason.

So something like what William James said about religious experience holds true of scientific experience as well: It comes in some distinct varieties. What are these varieties, and what light do they shed on incidents like my reaction to the TED talk?

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Waste, Creativity and Godwin’s Corollary for Technology

August 23, 2012 By

For the last six months, the scarcity/abundance dichotomy has been annoying me.  All dichotomies are false of course, but some are more of a bitch to transcend than others. On a 10-point scale where good vs. evil is a 4 in terms of transcendence difficulty, I’d rate scarcity versus abundance at 8.5.

And it is more than a harmless intellectual distraction. The scarcity versus abundance dichotomy is central to all technological thinking. The two sides of the dichotomy also have the two most powerful ideas in science — the second law of thermodynamics and evolution — as their respective intellectual motifs (I once called these two ideas the only sexy ideas in science; I think they appeal to humans because they both involve irreversibility, but that’s a story for another day).

So anytime you talk scarcity versus abundance, you are holding a sort of sumo wrestling match between two heavyweight ideas. This is why the respective poles of technological visioning, the ideas of the Singularity and Collapse, exercise such a powerful grip on our imagination.

I can’t say I’ve managed to rise above the dichotomy yet, but I am beginning to see a glimmer of a way out of this particular cognitive trap.

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Realtechnik, Nausea and Technological Longing

August 16, 2012 By
This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Psychohistory

The story of barbed wire is one of the most instructive ones in the history of technology.  The short version is this: barbed wire (developed between 1860 to 1873) helped close the American frontier, carved out the killing fields of World War I, and by spurring the development of the tank as a counter-weapon, created industrial-era land warfare. It also ended the age-old global conflict between pastoral nomads and settled agriculturalists (of animals, vegetables and minerals) and handed a decisive victory to the latter. Cowboys and Indians alike were on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence. Quite a record for a technology that had little deep science or engineering behind it.

Barbed wire is an example of a proximal-cause technology that eventually disturbed multiple human balances of powers, starting with the much-mythologized cowboys-versus-ranchers balance. When things finally stabilized, a new technological world order had emerged, organizing everything from butter to guns differently.  Barbed wire was not a disruptive innovation in the Clayton Christensen sense. It was something far bigger. Its introduction marked what Marshall McLuhan called a break boundary in technological evolution: a rapid, irreversible and wholesale undermining of a prevailing planet-wide technological equilibrium. So ironically, the ultimate boundary-maker of physical geography was a boundary breaker in technology history.

The story of barbed wire illustrates the core principle that I want to propose: an equilibrium in technological affairs is necessary for an equilibrium in political affairs. There is no possibility of a realpolitik equilibrium without a corresponding realtechnik equilibrium: a prevailing, delicately balanced configuration of technological forces across an entire connected political-economic-cultural space (which today is always the entire planet).

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Breakout Moves and Exponential Outcomes

August 13, 2012 By

Humans differ in abilities by at most an order of magnitude along dimensions that can be meaningfully measured, such as speed or height. When humans compete on the basis of such “Olympics” variables, you tend to get a linear relationship between effort and outcome. If you can run twice as fast as me, you will cover twice as much distance over any given period of time.

It takes civilized tools and social constructs to create greater differences. Written language and mathematics are civilized conceptual tools. Guns and computers are civilized physical tools (because it takes civilizations to manufacture them).  Money is a social construct.

A race that depends strongly on tools, and with outcomes measured in terms of social constructs, can lead to exponential relationships between efforts and outcomes (due to compound-interest style accumulation dynamics), as well as orders of magnitude differences in relative outcomes.  How does this work?

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