Free energy principle

Friston   and his free energy ideas might help unify theories of human behavior.

what, exactly, is free energy? Why might all living things minimise it?

Start with a simpler idea: every organism is trying to minimise how surprising its experiences are. By “surprising”, we mean experiences that have not been encountered previously by the organism or its ancestors.

Your ancestors were successful enough to produce a lineage that eventually produced you, so what they experienced must have promoted survival. And your own experiences so far have resulted in you still being alive.

A comprehensive survey paper

Stupidity

Cipolla’s 5 laws of stupidity

Attempting to explain why everything is going so poorly…

I disagree with the core thesis.  I don’t think it’s so much stupidity, though I’ll grant that there is a lot of it, rather, I believed it is self interested actors who exploit the work of others.  Game theory shows how this can lead to strong forces towards making the overall “good” worse, in favor of the gains for the few powerful exploiters.

I need to write an essay on this…

Michael Hudson explains history

Neoliberalism   is unsustainable 

Therefore it will eventually end

How?  And what might follow?

There is an economic alternative, of course. Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of ancient rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from reducing the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom. If the non-U.S. Eurasian world now follows this basic aim, it would be restoring the course of history to its pre-Western course. That would not be the end of history, but it would return to the non-Western world’s basic ideals of economic balance, justice and equity.

…

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall.

…

The West, in its U.S. neoliberal iteration, seems to be repeating the pattern of Rome’s decline and fall. Concentrating wealth in the hands of the One Percent has always been the trajectory of Western civilization. It is a result of classical antiquity having taken a wrong track when Greece and Rome allowed the inexorable growth of debt, leading to the expropriation of much of the citizenry and reducing it to bondage to a land-owning creditor oligarchy.

Dollar as the reserve currency

Galbraith  discusses history and some possibilities for the future in this time of flux.

the dollar has by now been de facto the primary world reserve asset for over a hundred years

On August 15, 1971, the curtain came down on the gold-exchange standard, and it rose – though we did not know it yet and thought otherwise at the time – on the neoliberal era. Devaluation, export controls, the wage-price freeze, and fiscal stimulus à outrance – these were Keynesian and even wartime measures that seemed to signal a mass conversion of Richard Nixon’s coterie to full employment, price stability, and managed trade.

it fell apart in 1973 when the stimulus ended, controls were weakened or lapsed, oil prices spiked, and the resulting general inflation was met by high interest rates, spurring a new slump in 1974. At that point pre-Keynesian dogmas re-emerged in an updated toga.

up to now the dollar-based order has been supported mainly by instability elsewhere and the lack of a credible alternative or compelling reason to create one, or where such reasons are felt, the ability to do so. With a large and liquid market for debt, the US Treasury bond remains the refuge of first resort even when a financial upheaval originates within the United States, as was the case with the sub-prime debacles of the 2000s and even today.

Enter China 

The China that one sees with trained but unfiltered eyes does not so easily fit into … simple boxes. It has the following key characteristics:

• it is a very large, administratively decentralized, internally-integrated economy, regaining in these respects attributes that were already familiar to Adam Smith;
• it has a plethora of organizational forms – public, private, joint venture, state, provincial, municipal, township and village.
• These are financed by a state-owned banking system that provides elastic support to activity in the interest of maintaining social stability, a paramount goal, and that has a large portfolio of non-performing loans to show for it.
• The state at various levels enjoys substantial control of the land, hence has the capacity to earn land rent, and is capable of spurring and directing major investment projects, in urban construction, water management, electrical power and mass transportation, including roads, air travel and most recently high-speed rail.
• The larger economy is capable of absorbing technologies from the West as well as of creating its own, and of meeting the standards of Western markets, thus having solved the consumer goods quality-control problem of historical socialism, and, finally,
• China remains somewhat insulated from the predations of international finance by a large foreign currency reserve and the continued application of capital controls.

The Chinese model has succeeded, by trial and error, over a bit less than 50 years, in eliminating mass poverty, in creating an urban world that is largely secure, with an educated, healthy population. In 2020 it succeeded in mobilizing that population to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic – so far, anyway – as no Western society, except New Zealand, was able to do.

Conclusion: A Dual System Has Arrived

A tentative conclusion is that the dollar-based financial system, with the euro acting as a junior partner, is likely to survive for now. But there will be a significant non-dollar, non-eurozone carved out for those countries considered adversaries by the United States and the European Union, of which Russia is by far the present leading example – and for their trading partners. China will act as a bridge between the two systems – the fixed-point of multi-polarity.

Is everything falling apart?

Sure seems like the (maybe just “a”) apocalypse is looming 

Nonzero discusses Haidt

Jonathan Haidt has bad news for us. In a much discussed Atlantic piece called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” he lays out a view of our situation that’s grimmer than that grim title suggests—even if you throw in the grim subtitle: “It’s not just a phase.” 

From ~2000

“While I’m basically optimistic, an extremely bleak outcome is obviously possible.” And even if we avoid a truly apocalyptic fate, I added, “several moderately bleak outcomes are possible.”

I don’t see quite as much bleakness as Haidt seems to see. And one reason, I think, is that I don’t see the causes of our current troubles as being quite as novel as he does. We’ve been here before, and humankind survived.

By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.

Some of these thresholds look more like the current era than you might think. Though my book is often depicted (accurately but incompletely) as Haidt depicts it—as emphasizing the tendency of information technology to unite people—it also emphasizes the tendency of information technology to divide people, to deepen the bounds between tribes of various kinds, and to facilitate the creation of new, narrower tribes.

Robert Wright

The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.

Social media

And the fragmentation of modern society

Some strong criticism

The internet is not what you think

internet history and philosophy and the source of crapification

everything seems to be geared toward harnessing attention and exploiting attention on the designers’ parts, rather than in cultivating attention on the user’s part.

Internet search has become crapified

But it’s still possible to use 

Old Google

Alternatively 

Yandex or  DuckDuckGo

Consciousness

A conversation  between Damasio and Anil Seth

while we may all be intimately familiar with what consciousness feels like, explaining why it exists or how it arises from physical and biological processes is another matter. These questions are as old as Aristotle, and yet millennia on, we still don’t have any definitive answers. For much of history, the nature of consciousness was the purview almost exclusively of philosophers and poets. It was not taken seriously as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry because it was difficult, if not impossible, to do experiments. But over the past three decades, that has changed, as neuroscientists began to make some real headway in understanding the neural bases of consciousness-related phenomena.

Roundup of vaccines at two years on

Part 1

Of a series

close to 30 vaccines have been rolled out, and there are more than 140 in clinical trials. Many more are in the pipeline, too… 

overview of clinical trials and other studies on boosting and mixing vaccines.

a combination of waning immunity and variants has focused a lot of recent attention on boosters. Mixed vaccine schedules, on the other hand, have been critical ever since we’ve had a range of vaccines with uneven supply. Mixing vaccines isn’t only considered for logistical reasons, though. It can be done in hopes of improving immunity. The theory is that this could widen immune responses more than same-same vaccination, as vaccines are targeted at stimulating the immune system in different ways.

There are 3 major issues this post doesn’t address: vaccine outcomes specifically in people who have also been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, outcomes in the under-18s, and adverse events after boosters and mixed schedules.

Major safety concerns in rollouts of boosters haven’t been reported

The system that drives the world

The nutmegs curse

The Nutmeg’s Curse asserts that the modern world order, what I call the System, is built on four principles that guided the Dutch takeover of the Banda Islands in Indonesia in 1621: white supremacy, genocide, war and trade.