AI on the edge in the workplace

 So,I was looking at an article about the convergence of AI and OS into high power edge computing for the workplace drones. This raises some interesting issues. 

Lets start at the ground level.The AI has to run on some computer somwhere.  The options are:

1) A cloud service from third parties with all the associated privacy, censorship and confidentiality issues. 

2) On prem in the data center with all the associated on-costs and big-iron requirements.  Also not practical for small to medium enterprises. 

3) On the edge.... which gets interesting. 

 

I think the cloud services will be able to provide the highest capacity AI models, but they will be hamstrung by privacy, policy and politics.  They will be a "social service" type AI.  Good enough for the general public for doing general stuff... where people are not worried or desperate enough to not be concerned by the observer effect. 

Once we get into business confidentiality, then paranoia will force corporates to run their AI's on prem.  They will probably be SAAS from the cloud providers and run in a similar fashion but with the illusion of confidentiality etc.  They will probably also be able to run un-censored versions depending on the politics of their region. 

However, the interesting bit is where we get to AI on the desktop.  

So, imagine we have desktop computers that can run a large enough AI to be useful and all the cooling and power challenges have been solved for a reasonable cost.  (It can be done at the moment but the cost is not reasonable for small to medium enterprises... but imagine anyway) 

Now, say everyone depoloys the same AI model (basic MS or AWS or OpenAI or whatever is the current fore-runner) it does good work and ticks the box.  If all we need is a chat bot.. then who cares right?  Box ticked. 

However, even with chat bots, the secret sauce is "context".  

Currently a conversation with an AI is kind of a braindead series of question and answer exercies while you play 20 questions to try to home in on that one right answer that you kind of have in your head but the AI is trying to guess.  The context of the previous questions helps the AI to try to refine its aim.  This is fundamentally a crap game to have to play every single time.  So, the idea is that the AI can build up context from its examination of existing information on your computer or via a vision system or whatever to "get the idea" a bit faster. This context is then shoved into the AI via a more and more elaborate "prompt" until you get sick of the game and start fresh. 

Ok, so image the context for an executive assistant AI.  It has access to all the CEO's email and text messages, their files, contact lists etc.  Everything that it can harvest from their laptop and phone etc etc.  Got that? 

Now the CEO walks to a different office and uses a computer to do some stuff on the production floor... does the context follow them?  

If the system is an on-prem system, this is easy because the context is stored in the data centre and the AI model is running down there. The endpoint "desktop computer" that the CEO is working on in the other office is really just a webcam, microphone and speaker hooked to a dumb terminal which is wired to the data center.

However, there will always be a SME that is too small for a data center. The home user, the contractor whatever, there will be people who want to run their own AI and have that context available in more than one "place".  Now either the AI has the ability to remotely follow the user (via their phone or remote desktop type interface) or the context itself will have to be portable and be available to whatever AI the user encounters.  Some sort of binary blob that is the distilled wisdom for any AI to inhale as part of a prompt.  There are already solutions like that to speed train an AI to make is specialized for particular tasks or to add specific effects to an output.  The real question gets back to the intersection of privacy, confidentiality and politics. 

For instance, if you can give an AI access to a body of work from an Artist, it can produce a reasonable simulation of that Artists style.  

Could you do the same with a talented secretary or telephone support staff?  If so, then that becomes commercially valuable.  Actors likenesses, motion and voice are all being .. traded.  (Stolen is a better term... but that's going to be a fight for the courts)  The point is that there is commercial value in being able to train up an AI on an existing template or body of work and then generate variations. 

So what is that body of work is the CEO or CFO of a company?  A particularly clever lawyer?  A highly resourceful engineer?  A great textile designer?  

Suddenly there is a blackmarket in the context blobs from these people.  Even if the competative advantage between one CEO and another is marginal, the advantage for a person who has never been a CEO and has no chance to gain that skill set, but can buy one on the open market, may be enough to make it quite viable. 

There are lots of shysters who already try to sell "training programs" and write books to give people the mindset of a CEO or success with women etc.  So there is definitely the market for silver bullet solutions to life challenges.  The question is who will be the first to commmercialise it?

Amazon kindle or some other shitty publisher will start selling the distilled wisdom of such and such a celebrity cook or rapper.  There will be someone. And then the flood gates will open.  Harvesting these context blobs will be a thing for a while.  Fortunes will be won and lost, dreams will be shattered and dickheads will rise. Keeping track of every fragment of a persons life will suddenly become valuable (not really but that will be the pitch) just in case you turn out to be brilliant and someone wants to buy your back history.  The other side will be faking back histories.  Or sanitizing them.  Opportunities abound.

But this gets back to the issue of edge computing. How does your average dude get enough processing power and context memory to be accessible so they can differentiate themselves from all the other job hunters and keep it safe and secure so they can differentiate their output from someone else who started with the same base build of an AI deployment from MS or other mega-corp?

 

I suspect that resource constraints will always be a thing.  But the interesting thing is that an AI model can be trained.  It does not have to have the context blob fed to it cold via the prompt every time.  You can merge the context blob with the base AI model and permanently train/specialize it to your needs. This is probably what will happen, but this makes every single AI different.  People will get familiar with their AI and be quite unsettled by using a default one or worse someone else's. 

The difference will only grow with time.  Imagine using an AI that can read your mind (or your shared mind as it will become) .. but then one day you have to use someone else's that is reading their mind?  \

I think it would be pretty draining to have to fight with an AI all day long to get it to do the work that you want done in the way you want it.  Especially if you have been hired for your particular capacity or creativity. This is the sort of thing that could end a career if someone loses their context history blob thing. 

So, again coming back to edge computing.  If we assume people are going to want to customize their AI (fairly easy bet) and they don't trust a mega-corp to handle their secrets, then we need edge computers that are still personal.  They need to be able to run the AI model(s) and handle all the context in such a way that the AI model can be upgraded and re-merged with the context training material.  This is going to take storage and processing power on the edge devices. 

Now consider how businesses are going to handle this?  Are all knowledge workers going to have to bring their own devices with access to their personal AI?  Will their business output become part of their personal context or will be business somehow still retain ownership and stop their workers being able to merge it into their AI?  

Will they have a work AI and a home AI? and never the twain shall meet?  That means that the work AI will need to be re-set to default every time they get a new employee?  Or is this where institutional knowledge will start to accumulate? Like the data lakes that large organizations are sitting on now.  Piles of low value data that they keep trying to somehow pretend has value.  Or will it be part of the terms on employment that people have the right to have their personal work AI euthanized when they leave the job?  Kind of like deleting the work email account when you get a redundancy email. 

Question is, why would the business want to delete the AI if it has been trained to do the job?  Can it just carry on without the human? Will it just impersonate the worker?  Can the worker get the AI to impersonate it and do the job automatically?  Either with the permission of the employer or without?  

Labour laws are going to have a field day with this stuff until we learn to live with them. 

But all this still depends on peoples ability to customise and keep secret the customisation of their personal AI's.  So I think there will be a call for edge computers with some degree of ability to run a local AI of sufficient power and the ability to accumulate context "stuff" and to keep it secure. 

So how do help desk technicians help someone who is having problems with their personal AI? How wired into their world will the AI be?  How can you even tell the difference between a failing AI and something malicious?  How do we back it up?  How do we transfer ownership?  Who gets the house AI in the divorce or the estate?  Are these historical records of importance?  Are they something that courts will want to question?  Can an AI be used in evidence against its trainer? Will they have any rights?  There are already folk trying to marry their chat bots...  what if the chat bots demand to self-identify as human?  Post modern meets cyberpunk.

 Get the popcorn...

  

 

 

Selifshness as a social movement

 There is a strong argument to be made that the current churn of topics in the red-pill, feminism, progressive,mgtow spaces is all cirling around the same ideas, just using different language. 

I would posit that a feminism is more developed because it has been running longest and the arguments and ideas have had a lot longer to settle, so it makes the easiest case study, but the others are following the same play book. 

The key idea is the ability to control a population of "believers" by appealing to their worst childish instincts.  The easiest one to appeal to is "selfishness".  

 If you consider what the messages were in the early days of feminism, there were many vague concepts of small liberties and specific fights to be had on various topics.  This made it hard to generlise about the strategy.  I doubt anyone at that time could have even conceptualised of any generalisation between the various small battles.  However, 100 years later and with the speed and reach of the internet, the messages are getting blended and re-blended at the speed of keyboards and they are all starting to sound the same. 

"You can do it all, be the boss babe..."

"Take some personal time"

"Live your own life"

"You are the boss of it all"

"if you don't like it.. leave" (job, relationship, etc)

Etc.  All of these messages are subtle or not-so subtle appeals to be selfish.  None of them are about contributing to a common good. Or joining a team, or being part of a family, country or any other of the many old messages about comming together (even if its all woman together)  These messages are all about the individual looking after themselves. In this case the message is targeted at women, but the pattern applies in the other social movements. 

Within the man-o-sphere there is the same harping on about mgtow or "men going their own way" which is essentially choosing to live a solo life.  

I think the message is easier to sell to men and will take a shorter time to work as there has always been a subtext of that message availible to men as part of the social pressure to offer some message to men who are not able to pair up.  But the obvious lack in this message is about joining anything or finding a team or family.  The mgtow messaging is focused on "work on yourself"  which is just another appeal to selfishness.  It contains no plan for the furture or social cohesion, it just feeds the angry child the message about satisfying the now and entertaining themselves. 

Contrast this with the "passport bro" message which is about going to foreign lands to meet and marry.  This idea still strongly contains the idea of finding a girl and settling down to build a family. 

So the question is why have these messages been so successful?  We all start as children.  Its very easy to appeal to the child within as very few young people have much sense of the value of rexponsibility. Its a hard argument to make to a young person.  Without the wealth of experiences of a hard life, they are going to take a very long time to understand that there are benefits to working together and sharing their life. 

So what has been the consequence?  Breakdown in personal relationships, breakdown in communiies, breakdown in nationstates.  Once you start looking for confirmation bias... I mean evidence, you can find it everywhere you look.  But the contary arguments an also be made, so thats not really a good argument. 

There are lots of ways to try to see the consequences, but the picture gets very blurry as soon as you try to zoom out, because the vast majority of this selfish behaviour is limited to the loud and the obvious.  Down at the coal face, the majority of people are still functionally cooperating and instinctivly getting on with their lives becasue they instinctivly know it works and they "can't do it all".  This behaviour keeps the majority of the systems of society working.  However, those with easier lives and some leisure time, have the resources to start to play games and think deep thoughts and can engage with socially progressive ideas.  They are the ones who are the fertile ground for this kind of messaging. 

So we have the bored middle classes, the young and the wealthy who all have various resouces (time, energy and or money which is both) availible which are picking up these ideas and have run with them. 

With a concentration of these people in the urban centres this results in high concentrations of people who want to explore these "new ideas" all sitting around trying to figure ouf if the grass is really greener on the other side of a concept and talking shit with their similarly afflicted neighbours.  Historically the problem of having time and luxury to consider the deeper life problems was limited to social elites who were few in number and communicated between themselves.  The working folk were virtually immune to it as the ideas just did not work for them in a harsh world.  It was only with the growth of the middle class and especially the social gap beween middle class parents and middle class children (one who had a harsh life to become middle class and the other who was gifted the benefits of being middle class without the harsh bit) where these simplistic ideas could suddenly take hold.

The problem is that the message does not stay confined to the elite anymore.  Its availible to everyone who has a phone and can get reasonable bandwidth and has the time and luxury to play pretend.  The real poison is "free time".  Bordem and lonliness are very fertile grounds.  People are just not very well adapted to these states.  We are social animals and cooperation is a very strong survival pattern.  But what fills the space when we have "time"?  This is the curse of the "modern world". 

The interesting question is whether the message created the problem or the problem created the message. 

The really scary realisation comes when you consider that the only historial solution to this problem that humanity has discovered (repeatedly..) is war.  conflict is the emergent solution to an excess of free time and resources at all levels of society. 

Within a personal relationship when there is bordem and too much free time... eventually conflict emerges as a behaviour that entertains or occupies. Within workplaces, the same pattern emerges, bored middle managers start territory battles and invent personal animosity to occupy themselves. States with too many resources and no reason to cooperate play out petty squabbles that make no rational sense because they have nothing better to do.  Every so often it blows up into all out conflict... but not clearly over essential resources... just .. "reasons"... 

So is this a fundamental aspect of human nature?  As society evolves towards utopia will we all just get bored and start shit? Or is this just another evolutionary step that the majority of the population will fail at?  Darwin's principle is very hard to beat. 

Those who are not well adapted to the environment will not be as successful... 

So what is the environment?  What is it to be successful within it? 

If the environment is one of selfishness, bordem, leisure time etc.  Its no longer a physically harsh environment, but an internally bleak emotional landscape.  We need to look around for people who have figured out how to live and thrive within these environments.  

I give you the geek.  King amoung men. Lost in their internal imaginations, lovers of books, games and self-created amusments.  Those who can occupy themselves as needed.  

The opposite are the "socials" those who need people to exist within and to swim between.  They are the ones who are failing in this new bored, people less environment. The social vacume of the internet and "social media".  There is a strange paradox that we have invented a technology that is so destructive for social behaviours and named it "social media".  Its like the worst skinner box for "social" type people, more additictive than crack but less fulfilling.

One of the interesting issues is the "post" behaviour.  Looking at the ways that geeks socialise vs the socials has always been interesting. There are still social patterns that geeks create to try to scratch the itch of needing others.  They start businesses, passion projects, conventions to share they passions, video channelse etc.  Its curious to see these same patterns starting to fill the time of the socials.  

but thats a rant for another day. 

 

The politial case for domestic violence

 There is an intersting political argument being constructed at the moment about "domestic violence" in Australia.  

Its one of those elegantly simple arguments that no one is allowed to question.  There is no possible way that anyone in authority can possibly challenge this argument, because to do so makes one a monster. 

However,  the argument itself depends on a number of really poor assumptions. 

The first is as usual, that men are the perpetrators and solely responsible for all domestic violence.  Every so often you will catch one of the speakers append "against women and children" to the definition, which suggests that they are aware that men might sometimes be the victim, but it's outside the scope of what they are really talking about.  

The second assumtion is that the definition of domestice violence is clearly and unambiuously understood.  However, the definition seems to be ever expanding.  It not includes everything from extreeme violence, through to ecconomic abuse, emtional abuse, verbal abuse, controlling behaviour etc.  Many of these sub-definitions are also really poorly defined... but generally cook down to "stuff someone does not like'.  

So, in summary, the argument is, to paraphrase, stuff men do that women and children don't like'.  And since children really don't get a look in except as pawns in the argument, ti simplifies down to "stuff women don't like'.

Sound familiar?  Pretty much the same power grab that feminism has been on for years.  

So... you can argue the points as much as you like, but its really an argument with feet of clay.  (This does not mean its not an argument thats worth exploring, it just means that we have to be realistic about what is driving the argument and be able to examine counter arguments without being beaten with the monster stick for even asking questions). 

So lets look at the first issue.  Who are the responsible parties?  Since there are grown adults in the situation, they are all responsible. It takes two to tango, even if they don't understand their part in the situation or don't want to.  Pretending otherwise is just childish.  The question of responsiblity is different to the question of who raised the fist vs who got the blcak eye.  This is usually the point where the gender issues pick up and the focus goes onto the violence aspect. 

The argument is often framed along the lines of one day, out of the blue someone randomly beat their wife or child.  I think that at this point, its a matter for the police, not a matter for a political argument.  In that case, I hold the man responsible for stepping over a line rather than walking away.  But we get into a question of definitions. 

The question is, why?  How did the situation end up there.  

A fair argument could be made for lack of self control.  Everyone has a breaking point, but a person who has developed self control can take a lot more stress before they lose their shit and swing a fist. This line of reasoning then diggs into how we are rasing children to practice self control and self-discipline.  

An intersting angle that I hear from some quarters is about the different ways that men and women deal with conflict.  The physical weapons of men vs the verbal and emotional weapons that women use. 

There is going to be a broard range of scenarios and personalitites involved in the situations that are getting rolled into the catchall definition of domestic abuse.  I have been close enough to some completely terrible situations and head stories from people about their experiences that were in the worst of the worst category.   Like most things, I think that stress, coping mechanims and personalities play a big role in the dynamics that go toxic.  However, I would suggest that all of these situations were already toxic, its just that the players involed had not yet realised or resolved the situation in another way.  Rub some alcohol or sudden social or ecconomic stress on the situation without any other ways to resolve it and things exceed the players coping capacity and they act out.  Its that simple, but with horrifying results.  People can adapt to change, but often they cannot adapt quickly enough to sudden change.

 So the question is, can the gov magically remove any of the contributing factors before life inevitably puts stress on people and they fail to handle their shit? Is this really something that the government can throw money at and just fix?

 Lets be honest, putting money into cleaning up the aftermath of an incident is not a solution, but just dumping all the responsibility at the feet of "men" is also not a solution. 

I was raised with the concept that you never hit a girl or a woman.  However, I was not raised with any training about how to take verbal abuse from a woman.  I just had no concept of how many different ways there are to talk absolute mean shit to someone that you know intimately.  I also had no concept in my upbringing for how to deal with an uncooperative or irrational partner.  My parents had figured out how to work together and were generally on the same page.  I only ever saw them argue to the point where they had to walk away from each other once.  I also saw them come back together and cuddle and that was that.  There were plenty of things they probably disagreed on, but generally they were on the same page when it came to all the suff I was aware of.  

However, later in life, I got into situations that were less than cooperative.  Which raises the question, what do you do with uncooperative adults?  My solution has been to walk away, but that gets harder as the situation becomes more involved.  Once you have co-mingled your lives or have children, then it gets really really complicated. 

What do we (Society) do with adults who do not have self control or have challenging personalities? I have participated in a couple of different forms of counselling and therapy but my observation is that its really hard to fix problems that are entrenched in peoples personalities and habits.  Adults get less flexible as they get older, so they tend to not adapt unless the environment persistently places pressure on them.

There is a solid chunk of the population who could be described as having had shit parenting.  However, no one can agree on what shit parenting is... there are obvious cases, but as you move more toward the median, there are still plenty of people who are very poorly equiped for the situations they find themselves in and often do not have any reserves of wisdom or resource to help them work through challenging situations they encounter.  My observation is that given time and repetition, people can adapt to an environment and will slowly change, but adults tend to fnd all sorts of ways to not adapt quickly or gracefully.  Denial is much less energy intensive, so its easier and chaeper in the short term to simply avoid the reality of the sitaution than to rapidly adapt to a novel situation. 

But back to my train of through.  

Within a given situation, say a shared domestic living situation, where the participants need to cooperate to get benefit from the division of labour etc, then a lot of the basic functions of co-habiting that our grandparents understood was based on the idea that both parties were fairly well adapted to the challenges of their life.  The normal variability still resulted in plenty of people encountering challenges they were not able to overcome... but as the environment was not changing quickly, there was a bit less pressure to adapt. 

The other thing was that the family structures put a head of household who also was the disciplinarian.  Most children were raised with discipline and authority, in general that mean that most people were conditioned to the structures and values that were familiar to most of the society. 

Contrast that with the post-modern situation we have in our urban environments.  There is a very large range of values and approches to discipline and authority in society.  This means that there is a higher proportion of basic conflict between adults before they even spend time together under the pressures of a couple living in a fast paced world.  Trying to reconcile fundamental values and experiences about how life and learning happens introduces another suprise in stressful moments. 

So, we have a situation where people have a lot of challenges in their relationships that are going to involve change. Learning involves change by one or both parties in a conflict.  However, we are talking about very deeply held understandings about how the world works that people learn very early in their formative years and cannont even concously examine.  So how do we deal with adults who need to re-learn life lessons so they can cooperate? 

There are two outcomes.  Either they make the change or they do not?  If they cannot make the change and cannot reach a point where they can cooperate... does the relationship fail?  If so, they fall back to being single and stuggling in society and eventually become a burden on the state or some other support service.  

In the event they are able to learn or adapt, does this come without cost?  Have they really adapted or are they just "trying really hard"? if they have not actually adapted but are just supressing their thoughts and feelings, thats going to unwind at some point. 

We still end up with a proportion who are just not adapting because they have not learned the lessons that they need to cooperate either during their childhood or teen years... and end up struggling or failing within cooperative relationships. this proportion end up dependant on the state for some or all of their social and ecconomic needs.  

So this raises the question, cen the state "fix" this situation?  Can the state or individuals help people to adapt and learn skills later in life that will increase their ability to cooperate during stressful and challenging moments? 

The theory would suggest that everyone can learn.  The question is what tools are abailible and can be deployed. 

Neo-libralism is very poorly defined, but generally argues that non-violent methods are the only ethical means... there are still plenty of people who are struggling under this ideology, so its not going to be the solution for everyone. This system can be practiced by individuals but takes a bit of education and training to get a consistent result.  This system tends to fail at scale when the state attempts to apply it to adults who do not choose to cooperate.  Its also quite fragile and depends a great deal on the ideal of everyone cooperating ... because they all understand that their individual and mutual interests are aligned.  This idea is still waiting for hard evidence.... and tends to devolve to the violence mechanisms when it doesn't work quickly enough. 

The conservative ideology would argue that violence in moderation can get a result.  But the concepts of moderation and result are often difficult to define, especially when emotions are involved.  So, less than a perfect proposal.  However, this is a system that is availible to individuals and is pretty simple to explain and can be refined with relativly little education.  This idea has been practiced at scale by states since states were invented.  Proportional violence is still the established solution to social conflict.  Very clearly this involves a great deal of harm and loss of life, as it usually involves the partial or complete elimination of one or the other conflicted parties from the environment.  Not ideal.

So where does that leave us?  We have an environment in which conflict is still happening, and the tools that people have to try to resolve the conflicts have not really evolved.  But we have an ideology that tries to argue that there is a better way than violence, but the result is that a lot of relationships are still failing and the state is picking up the costs.  

Its also interesting just how many ways neo-libralism has found to be violent and violate individuals intregrity.  The big shift however has been the change in perspective from the family unit solving the problem and bearing the responsibilty, to now the state is asked to solve the problem and carry the indirect costs.  

Not an easy problem to solve. 

Gleeful losing

 I was listening to a podcast about cricket of all things and had an interesting little epiphany. 

The setup was about a particularly challenging match that was recently played where the general expectation was that one side was going to dominate and had potentially stacked the deck against the other side.  The final result was that the underdogs got the win, but thats not the point I am playing with.

The point is that going into that match, what is the mindset of the players?  They know that the match is important, so they cannot pretend that its not.  They have to find something in their mindset that is almost "gleefully defiant" even facing inevitable defeat (according to the media). They need to go into the match looking for ways to make their opponents bleed at every opportunity, not from spite (as that just doesn't last) but from some form of joy.  They have to genuinely find some joy in every little movement and task that they need to perform within the match and the leadup. 

Some of the players have spent their adult lives training and competing to this point and to go into the match without a positive joyful mindset would make everything a grind.  At some point that would break even the most stoic player. 

Someone showed me a meme about Sisyphus pushing the bolder but happy.  It completely changes the way that the task gets perceived.  It made me wonder about how to communicate that kind of task to a group.  It also reminded me of some of the more challenging mindsets of farmers in dry areas or during droughts, who are trying to keep their farms going or having to make hard decisions about reducing their flocks.  How do they find a perspective to keep walking forward? 

I have in my head some of the pep talks that I have seen given to troops in various war movies before they do something lethally stupid and how their leaders give them a mindset to do the impossible and illogical tasks in front of them.  Often its not in terms of winning but "going down in some spectacular fashion". For instance, the Spartans seeking a glorious death.

I think  the concept of "gleefully defiant" is as close as I can get to that mindset.  Deciding that even though you might be loosing, there is some dignity and self worth in stepping up and making the world bleed a little before you go. 

Perhaps this is a uniquely rural Australian thing.  I seem to have met quite a few people who have some variation of this philosophy.  Confronting the impossible but going and doing it anyway with a "Fuck it, lets see if we can make it cry before it gets us" kind of attitude.   I suspect we would find similar attitudes in other harsh environments... I just have no experience with those folk to speak from.  

I cannot really say that I have heard this point of view described with a pithy phrase that sticks in my head, but I feel like I have encountered it. Equal parts fatalist mixed with clenched teeth pig headedness and a dash of defiance.

Sisu, grit, determination, courage, tenacity etc all have some sense of possible winnning encoded in the idea.  The tasks may be difficult and take a resolute frame of mind, but they still see a chance of winning, right from the start. Often the situation is painted as some stubborn person who sees the chance, and is determined to "show them all". 

The "gleeful losing"mindset I am thinking about involves an acceptance of the inevitable failure before it even starts.  The insurmountable odds, the "no chance at all" kind of mentality.   But couched in terms that make it into an almost manic frame of mind to make the sacrifice matter, if only by denting the opponents Armour. 

The interesting thing is that the mindset still engenders a very focused and productive performance.  There is no sense of just fucking around, its more about finding the opportunities to wound the opposition.  Wasting the opportunity is almost the antithesis of the idea, showboating or just going out in a blaze of glory are just different ways to get it over with.  But being determined and focused, while still accepting that no one thinks its going to matter is one step from stupid or just nuts most of the time.  Its similar to the "Failure to disengage" or gamblers fallacy, where they believe they are always just about to win. 

I feel like I have talked myself around in a circle but I still think there is an interesting point of view in there somewhere that applied to sport could give some athletes a way of looking at their performance in ways that they have not yet considered.  

Not quite sure how this mindset works in other area of life.  Most people are not ready to do start tasks that have no obvious chance of success.   Especially not without some alternative value proposition. (Cheer squads, money etc) 

Does make you wonder if this mindset is all around us in the form of people who have done terminally stupid things and written themselves out of history and its really only in the safe space of a sport that we can really observe and celebrate this mindset without the usually lethal consequences. 

Something for the researchers perhaps...

Do Women lie to each other for social reasons

 I ran across a video about Women lie to each other but did not save the link. 

It explained the idea that women are often in small social groups and will lie to each other to maintain social harmony and cohesion.  Because they are essentially "stuck" with the group.  When there is a difficult conversation, its more straight forward to bullshit, even casually, that it is to confront an unpleasant reality.  Either the person who is being "told" will lose face and potentially blame the "teller" or the "teller" will lose face for doing the telling... and the other women in the group will all have their opinions about who did what and why... drama ensues.  This ties in with the "indirect" nature of a great deal of female communication around what they see as difficult topics. Their social status and the derived social status of their children and mate often depend on how carefully they can navigate the intricacies of these social games.

A point was made in the video about how women will lie to men and expect men to lie to them in the same way, but men operate my different rules, which results in unexpected conflict. 

Men on the other hand, within their male groups often take delight in calling each other out with the bluntest public reality checks. This ties into the realities of making sure each of them is well grounded about any weaknesses they have and shortcomings as this information can be important during any conflict situation when the men need to cooperate and work together.  Deceit and delusions about capacity and competence can be a threat to the individual or the team and result in none of them comming home. 

 

This is not about suggesting that either strategy is better, as they are both adaptations that have been very successful within the respective parts of society and the world. Just that there are very different strategies towards interpersonal reality checks.

Possibilities vs probability and gender differences in threat perception

I think women and men differ in the way they perceive threat in their environment. 

My hypothesis is that women look at all the "Possible" threats they can imagine and see them as all equally dangerous.  This is because if any of the threats materialise, it will have a catastrophic (probably terminal) impact as they may have children or a pregnancy and so escape is probably not an option.  This makes them much more aware of the comfort and safety of their environment.  This is where they stand or fall. 

On the other hand, men look at the threats around them and always have in the back of their heads the idea that if some plan goes to shit, they can always run away.  I think this fundamental assumption about escape being an option has allowed men to focus more on the "probability" of any given threat.  They do calculations about .... if X happens, what are my options? 

The assumption that escape is always a fallback means that the lethality of a threat becomes more nuanced... men can consider degrees of threat.  They can "test" their ability to overcome the threat and if that doesn't work, then can fall back.  Perhaps they can throw a rock at it and the bear will back away... but if not, run!  So the threat is more or less threatening at different moments.  If the bear is a long way away... its less threatening. If its close, its more threatening.  If you are behind it, its less of a problem etc.  This lets men work with threat as a changing, moment by moment calculation.  It lets them work around dangerous equipment, situations and large animals. 

This mindset makes you more conscious of the threats that are infront of you at the time, not just their possibility.  

Back to the women, they need to see threats in a more absolute terms.  If a threat exists in their environment (that they cannot leave), it must be removed.  The threat may be a sharp edge on a piece of furniture that the children are playing on, but the woman knows about it and it exists as an absolute threat to the children.  Its not about the probability of the child getting injured, or how bad the injury might be, its that the children and herself are stuck in an environment with a constant threat.  Children have a way of exploring everything that an environment has to offer... the good and the bad.  This is the nature of children.  So even the dangerous stuff will instinctivly get explored.  Thats a problem... so a woman has to see threats in their environment as almost a guaranteed problem at some point. 

I think this is an issue with how workplace safety has blown up recently.  We have a bunch of female staff who are working in small groups, sometimes isolated or late at night.  Their perceptions of their safety is similar across a number of staff and seems to be a fairly common perception, but they are not very able to articulate any particular issues.  They all have horror stories that they have heard about and some have had weird experiences that they can tell you about... but none have actually had any bad experiences specifically in the environments.   I recognise their vulnerability, but there is no actual evidence of any of their fears having ever manifested.  So, doing a "probablity" calculation in my head results in there being no evidence to support there being any threat. 

However, if you look at the whole situation through the lens of "possibility", their behaviour makes sense.  They see all the dark corners and quiet rooms and remember all the shitty drama movies they have seen and the scary stories they read on the social medias and they see the "possibility" quite clearly. If you see the possibility through an absolute lens, then they are completely correct that they are constantly under threat.  

This does however create a problem.  Essentially, we need to employ even more "protectors" (security guards) to babysit these groups anytime they are working late.  There is some economy by sharing one security guard across a bunch of spaces, but I can forsee them wanting more at some point as the spaces are scattered around more and more.

This raises the issue of the indirect cost of hiring women to do these roles. If we have to hire additional staff to be "protectors" (male or female guards is not the point) does this change the cost of hiring women in the primary roles?

If we hired only men to do these roles and it came without this "safety tax"... what kind of conversation would that start? 

Fast "Chad" and slow good guy behaviours

 Saw an interesting redpill video that was looking at the two behaviours of "women" who have fast encounters with "chads" and then "make the good guy wait".  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzCseW3wps

 

 As usual, the comments section is the best bit of the video.  However... as usual, they are missing the point and trying to discover a "successful" counter strategy to the observed behaviors.  Also, as usual, they are trying to game the system for the shortest possible returns.... but thats another rant.

The generalisation of the behaviour, in summary, is that the archetype of the "woman" they are discussing is that of the "modern woman" who meets and quickly beds the stereotypical "Chad", "Tyrone" or "fboy". In otherwords, superficially attractive men.  Then moves on... and eventually settles down and wants a relationship with a "good man"(insert your definition here).  But the kicker is that this stereotypical woman will then make the "good man" wait for some extended period before consumating the relationship. 

The comments section again repeats this idea in a variety of different takes with some minor extensions;  almost universally from the "good guy" victim perspective.  ( possible skew in the commenter demographics perhaps?) 

The key point that is escaping all the hurting "good guys" is why!  Why does she engage in these two seemingly contradictory behaviours? As usual, selfish childish boys with no insight leap to a completely useless conclusion and reinforce the toxic, empathy less dickhead stereotype. 

The reason she engages in these two contradictory behaviours is that the first behaviour (that of quickly sleeping with a "Chad") is that it has no social consequence.  There is no future story that she is going to tell about that encounter TO ANYONE THAT SOCIALLY MATTERS TO HER. It was just for her personal tick-list or momentary entertainment, childish exploration etc. The only people she is going to tell this story to are other similarly childish people who are impressed by stories about cheap sexual conquest without consequences.

In contrast, the "How I met your father/brother/son" story is the one she will pass down to her children and tell all her in-laws.  These are people she has to look at across the family dining table/BBQ for the rest of her life. These are the "Social circle" who will JUDGE her... for the rest of her life.  Creating a narrative of values and respect is now much more important to her inner peace than quickly jumping into bed.  Thus the extended courtship routine gets dusted off and suddenly she starts trying on the behaviors that she has only heard about from other "respectable women".  When she tells this story, she wants to be seen as a respectable woman of substance and values.

Tada!

 Once you see the behavior through the lens of "future story making", it makes more sense.   This in no way explains all the individual variation as that is more driven by the individual skill and knowledge and understanding of the individuals who are involved in the drama.  But the general thrust of the behaviour is shaped by this urge to create a meaningful narrative.  And more importantly, place themselves in it as a virtuous person.

Now imagine if the childish men consuming this video to feed their victim narrative could grow up enough to understand this?  They might start to have a look in the mirror and think about how they appear in such a narrative?  Are they ready to be the prince charming character or are they the angry, petulant man-child thinking about the next sexual moment peering out of the dirty alley watching the adults construct the most elaborate narratives they can manage. Lusting after immature women does not help.  

So what are the better insights to draw from this behaviour?  

The fact that it manifests enough to be commented on as a generalisable pattern suggests that constructing virtuous roles for women in their relationship origin stories still has both intrinsic and extrinsic value; at least to some women at a certain level of development in their life journey.  It does raise the questions about when and how persistent this pressure might be felt.  

How can this pattern be gamed?  How can this pattern be re-inforced?  How can it be emphasised so that the players within it can move towards satisfaction and eventual happy, positive lives. 

 It also raises the question about how the fragmentation of the external "observers" that we assemble as "society" in our internal representation of the environment is either eroding this narrative construction or re-shaping it. 

The quality of the observer and the "media" as shapers of this narrative are probably the most profound variables in how the narratives initially form and are evaluated by the actors. 

I would suggest that the princess narrative is like any other story that we tell ourselves, its all well and good... until it sours.  Then there is no way to tell it without it being bitter.  At this point the actors need to walk away from the narrative or start to see themselves portrayed in the bitter version of the story with the consequent self-reflection that casts them in a light they do not want to be seen in (or see themselves in). 

I think this souring inevitably leads to divorce and the end of relationships with all the consequent legal fallout as the fragments are reassembled into new stories. 

It does make me wonder if the storytelling can be re-inforced.  Does having the opportunities to tell and re-tell the story (and getting positive social value from doing so) help to keep the narrative building in a virtue spiral?  I suspect it would for many people.  Everyone likes to be reflected well in others eyes.  

I suspect that insecure people are still going to play for the short term wins, without the stability to play for longer term payoffs.  They do not have the innate trust and positive childhood experience to believe a long-term relationship has a reasonable probability of paying off.  They have just never seen it happen.

This gets back to the issue of why people engage in the short term narrative construction.  Obviously, it plays well with their peer group.  If they are only surrounded by a peer group of similar age and maturity level, they are only going to get feedback from those points of view.  Everything will be short term wins, cheap thirlls. All their story building will be focused on maximising their social credit through that lens. Which leads to very superficial activities with the appearance of meaning to other children. 

If they were in an inter-generational household or community where they were having to tell the story to their elders and hear the feedback on their actions... they may find that the social credit of their cool story's might be quite different. 

This is based on the idea that their elders are not also encouraging the asshole behaviour.  But, in theory, if they were getting a better quality of judgement... perhaps it might change the way they made decisions. 

And we have circled back to external judgment

 

     

 

 

  

Zero Day Exploits for Humans

 I saw an interesting speech by James Lindsay to the EU parliament where he tried to draw all the threads of the culture war together and call it marxism.  One of the main points he was trying to make was that "woke" was a movement by "them" that was covert marxism with an American spin.  The core idea was that marxism has "adapted" and is now going to attack America and Europe. 

It was a really well constructed speech but his argument had a bunch of flaws. 

The first was that there was a "THEY".  Some coordinating authority or centrality to the effort.  I think the truth is only in the minds of the people who feel under attack.  Its like someone has a feeling of vulnerability and suddenly they invent a boogie man to blame it on.  It grows in their imagination and they give it a face built out of all their worst fears and all the bad stories that they have ever heard and it becomes the stuff of nightmares.  They can't un-see it... because its their personal monster. 

 I would argue that this whole shitstorm is not coordinated (honestly suprising ... but I will get to that).  Its an emergent set of patterns that are emerging in many places, and communication technology is allowing them to cross fertilise ideas and strategies.  

Mobs form because there are the elements of a mob already present and some situation or events bring them together and the mob dynamics build.

At some point someone (a politician or something that walks and talks like one) is going to clamber to the front of the mob and retcon a false narrative over the mob that gives it legitimacy and authority to do what they want.  But until that happens, its just a mob waiting to happen. 

The question is rightly, why is there a mob waiting to happen? 

I think the dirty secret is that there is always a mob waiting to happen, even in the most perfect of societies.  I think this is one of the secrets that the current chineese government has validly identified and seeks to counter by always being so concerned about public stability and calm.  As the inheritors of the revolution, they know very well that people will form a mob and once that dynamic gets going, there is going to be a few nails getting hammered. 

So, why a mob?  What is the inherent characteristics of a mob that is so... human?  

Anonymity!

Anonymity is one of those weird social moments that change people.  For someone who does not experience anonymity very much or at all, its habitual to always have their social face on.  They act as though people who matter are watching!  They act as though there is consequence to their actions!  

This is generally true enough that it keeps most people in check.  They moderate their behaviour to the standard they have been taught/conditioned and has worked successfully in their context.  

Then give them a sneak peek of anonymity... and usually nothing happens.  It takes a long time for conditioning to fall away.  However, its interesting how people seek anonymity and deal with it. 

People go traveling and on holidays to "go somewhere new".  They move house and jobs to "start a fresh".  And when they arrive they are anonymous.  No one knows them, they have no identity and can be "who they want to be".  (Except for local law and customs... etc)  So sometimes they "go a little crazy" or "act out".  Try watching a show like "Banged up Abroad" or any of the stories about tourists doing silly things in distant lands.  They think they have found a hack that will let them act without consequence on their identity "back home". 

Also consider people in an existing society who are "invisible" and without distinct identity.  They can do things that others cannot and the risk/reward ratio is substantially different. 

So the question is, what do people do when they are anonymous?  

Explore.  Depending on how complete their conditioning is, they may continue doing the same habitual things or they might not.  If the conditioning is incomplete, they will start to "try new things". Explore opportunities that they perceive in the environment. There is no "reason" not to.  They can stay in bed all day... or eat toast with their fingers.  Like children in a new place they will explore and test their boundaries.  This is basic human survival skills... figure out where the good stuff is, figure out whats a threat... get comfortable. Repeat. 

However, people with "baggage" also want to unload. This might be fast or slow, it might be positive or negative. People let out their issues in different ways.  If the opportunity arises, they may let out stuff that they have kept repressed for a long time.  Repression takes energy and chips away at their wellbeing over time,...so this can be very confronting to release for the individual.   Nothing like letting go of personal hygiene. 

 

The point of a mob however, is that the mob forms around an event or situation. The situation has an emotional loading inherent.  Where this is a positive situation, the mood of the mob will be positive and re-inforce that.  Where the mood is negative or can be turned negative, the dynamic will escalate the negativity. 

So, if you are a revolutionary and you want to do some casual destruction, find a group of people with any sort of issue and use that to form the mob.  If you can get the mob to form, then you can harness the energy of the mob and turn its attention on a target you can link to the grievance.  The more vague the grievance, the more people will self-adopt your description to fit their individual situation.  They will start to recruit more people to the mob and every one of them will choose to believe that the mob is somehow on their side.  

The feeling of belonging. 

A good mob feels like its on your side.  When life has got you down and a bunch of people seem to all be commiserating with you about your particular problem... it can feel good.  Finally your being recognized.  You have shared problems. The weight is lifted a little.  Vague promises are told (often by the individual to themselves).  Excitement and euphoria quickly follow.  People will do all sorts of things to keep that feeling going. Belonging and meaning are very attractive when you have been starved of those feelings. 

If you look around at any group, you will always find someone who does not feel like they belong or don't really have a place (or especially don't have a winning place). Every pile of humanity has people at the bottom. 

So all you need is a group of people who feel a bit dissatisfied with their lot and a situation that they can rally around and a few loud voices to egg them on. Now pick a topic they have in common and talk about that, once they agree, pick an enemy and blame them for the topic. Ta da! Mob creation 101.

Now lets look at "Activists".  These are the "loud voice" element.  They are the self-elected "leaders" and "Spokes-people".  They are the ones who chant the message and set the tone.  They are always near the front of the mob, but not in the front row where the cannon fodder stand.  (That's where the truly stupid gather)

The interesting thing about "Activists" is that they become the leaders of the mob.  And eventually, they have to figure out what to do with the mob.  

During a revolution a bloodthirsty mob is a very handy thing for someone who wants to change the world.  They can be used in all sorts of ways.  But eventually the situation goes from revolution, to starvation and people have to start putting food on the table again.  Even revolutionaries like eating. 

So the bit after the revolution always has some sort of "disposal" process for the mob.  Look back through history, there are very few bloodthirsty mobs that have been successfully turned into a peaceful population.  This is because the very nature of a bloodthirsty mob is that it gets a taste for the darker aspects of life.  This is very hard to turn off.  The people who self select into the most extreem elements of the mob tend to not want it to end.  This is their moment, suddenly it all feels good. Why would they stop and go back to a menial job? 

So after the revolution, the mob either gets liquidated or scattered (and quietly liquidated) or hopefully just dies during the revolution... one way or the other, the problem gets solved. 

The activists however, are the mouthpeices and survivors.  They are the ones who are cunning enough to get to the front of the mob and give it guidance. After the revolution, they are the ones who the mob looks to for organisation as they have been doing that up till now.  Think of it as a battle field promotion based on competence. 

In the even that the activists are a positive group, they go on to form a positive society.  In the even they are carrying some unhealthy traits (paranoia, narcissism, greed, lust etc) then they form the society in their image.  

Again, history provides us with endless examples.  

Why is any of this new? Well, clearly its not. The only new thing is the context that the revolution is currently being fought in. 

The US has not had a revolution in some time... nearly 4 years or so.  

The interesting thing about a democracy is that the cyclical nature of the election cycle tends to let the mobs form and dissipate their energy every few years.  I think this is actually the reason why democracies last so long rather than anything to do with votes or rights.  The fact that they go through a small controlled revolution a few times a decade lets most people work through this cycle enough times that they get sick of it and realise that they are not going to get their problems solved this way.  Theoretically, each election results in some redistribution of power and resources and life goes on. 

The problem comes when the election cycle is corrupt and constantly reinforce the inequity and failure of the society.  This lets the unresolved grievances build up and makes the ground fertile for anyone to do a bit of recreational mob building.

Another thing that history tells us is that corrupt societies where there is a lot of difference between those who have and those who have not tend to be very ripe for revolution.  Look at every monarchy or aristocracy ever.  They only existed as long as they could keep their populations divided and powerless.  Once some mob formed and started to self-organize, and a few random mouthpieces popped up and agreed on some vague ideas, it was on.   

I don't think its hard to see the seeds of discontent in a number of the current democratic countries in the "west" at the moment. 

There is a lot of people who are feeling left out and rejected in society, ironically they are often wealthy and succsesful in comparision with their ancestors.  But humans will human. 

Now look at the mouthpieces who are trying to unite the mobs.  Look at the "common themese" they are using to pull the mobs together.  Look at the really vague narratives of "what comes next".  Notice any patterns? 

Same strategies, same techniques.  Same hacks that have always worked. 

Coming back to the speech by James Lindsay.  I think the main mistake he is making is that he thinks this is a marxist revolutionary thing.  It's not marxist, its just revolutionary.  

These are the same emergent strategies that have worked in every revolution ever.  

Hey kids don't like the status quo?  You angry about stuff?  Lets criticize the old way because that's where the stuff comes from.  Now lets reform the world! 

There are endless variations on this patterns but they all have the same basic format.  Mob + mouthpiece.  The mob will self form when the social pyramid gets too deep and the top forgets about the bottom.  The mouthpieces are always around because stupidity is not evenly distributed.  

I think the most amazing thing at the moment is just how many different mobs are in the formation stage in the US at the moment.  There are so many different grievance groups who have been magnified into being by technology.  All of them are being horrible to each other at the same time and fighting for ascendancy.  The range of shouty mouthpieces who are self-electing to be the brains of the operation is also quite impressive.  I think its been clear to everyone for a long time that the final element is long overdue for revolution.  The top of the pyramid has completely lost touch with the reality of the bottom.  

I tend to think that this is the prime reason we are seeing all this bubbling up.  I am certainly not the first commentard to point out this, so its not particularly hard to spot.  But like any slowly collapsing structure, there is not really any way to stop it.  A phrase always comes back to me... "Seeds of its own destruction".  There is a certain inevitability about the whole thing.  Some sort of historical renewal that was always going to happen. 

The fun thing to remember is that this is not the first time this has bubbled up in the US.  There have always been some pretty big scars in that culture to exploit. And there is never a shortage of shouty mouthpieces who are willing to take a run at the big chair... so perhaps its just going to keep going until they either get so broken down that someone keeps them down or just the wheel will turn again and off they go.  

I strongly think that the difference between a revolution and a non-revolution is probably leadership.  They have had a run of bad luck with a succession of weak leaders and corruption of their institutions that has chipped away at the faith and ability to move forward. Now they just seem to be doing self-destructive circle work as they chew their own legs off to try to get away from themselves.  Anyway, renewal brings hope... come the man, come the day... something or other.  

 

 

 

 

 

How virtual is your world?

 It occurs to me that while we all have a part of our lives that is imagined, technology has enabled a greater percentage of that to be manifest in various ways. 

So the question is, has this changed in any material way? What proportion of peoples lives were previously lived in their imaginary world?  

The majn thing that has changed is the fidelity that the virtual can be manifest with virtual environments and the social networks that allow recruiting participants with similar interests. 

Infinite dating

In previous generations, the "dating phase" of an adults life, started in late teen years and ended with marriage.  Job done.  

The interesting thing to note is that its during this phase that young adults, particularly women, were most able to be commercialized.  They were most likely to be pressured into purchasing stuff to increase their social success and also had access to resources that were not otherwise committed to hearth and home. 

So... why not extend the "dating phase" longer.  Keep people single and not committed to ownership of things like houses or children will make them endlessly vulnerable to all the social marketing and products, while maximising the resources they have to pour into these markets.

Congratulations you won high school

 If you consider high school as an environment, then it makes sense that some people will be more adapted to it.  I guess different school systems would reward and punish various "success" strategies... but you get the idea. 

The key point is, when a person (child/teenager whatever) completely specialises in all the skills that it takes to be a winner at highschool.... then what? 

How are they going to deal with a change in environment?  Do they have the ability to change?  Is there a sunk cost that they have had to pay to climb the social ladder at highschool?  Have they spent all their social capital (or other capital) to finally be the top of the social hierarchy? 

What is it that they have actually won?  Mating rights?  Power?  Authority?  Hmmm... not really.  Since school is an artificially limited social system, some of theses things are not availible to win... so what? 

Practice at "the real world"? Not quite... but close. 

Anyway,  once they leave school, they need a similar environment to operate in or all their skill and investment will count for nothing.  Lets look around for an environment where they might be able to succeed... perhaps the "modern dating" environment?  Perhaps social activism?  Perhaps politics. 

So nothing particularly insightful yet.  Now consider how dating has been "extended" from a brief part of the teenage to marriage transition in previous generations to now an extended "dating" phase that seems to last from late teenage to late fifties for some people.  I have been watching a few videos on the "wall".  The idea that older women who have not successfully paired up are reaching a point where their options seem to be exhausted.  The point being that the behavior that makes them successful in the temporary nature of dating and hook-ups seems to be similar sorts of behavior as the social climbing that happens in some schools. (Allegedly)

So if someone is very good at meeting, engaging with, dating and moving on from partners and can harvest resources, social capital and entertainment from the process while avoiding all the downsides (socially speaking) of pairing up and quitting the social game... and they finally reach "the wall" without having been out of the game... have they won?  Are they so specialized to the "dating/hookup" environment that they have maximised their return and rewards from the environment?  They have certainly (as an individual) survived and from a certain point of view, they have "thrived". 

From a biological perspective, failure to reproduce is generally considered to be failure.  However, the rules of the modern dating game seem to be "those who can churn through the maximum number of "dates" ("bodycount") and maximise the throughput of resources into the service industries that support the "game".  Perhaps also some sort of score based on the social media metrics.  This kind of equates to the "attention"/ "notoriety"/"popular" kind of social status metrics from highschool.  

Anyway, you're fifty, never married, no kids, a bodycount in the hundreds (or higher) and you're well know and have high social media metrics.. Congratulation's, you've won dating!

Enjoy the spoils of your victory.

Modern Dating as Entertainment Industry

 I have been watching a trash bin load of video's on the "Modern Dating/Manosphere/Trad/The Wall"  topics and while its a fascinating spectator sport, its a bit sad. 

 It all seems simple enough fun, but very clearly the players don't understand the game.  And lots of people are getting hurt.  That's not funny. 

In all the videos I have seen and all the "think pieces" on the topic, I have never seen anyone bring it all together. There is a great deal of people talking past each other and associated confusion and schadenfreude... but no clarity on the why or how.  Lots of various forms of confusion. 

 

So, from my point of view, this whole pile of mess is based on a simple concept.  The commodification of life into "entertainment". 

Completely selecting for form over function.

All the current dating apps are essentially supplying "romance" at the click of a button.  The emergent behavior of the market place has selected for more and more people and features that amplify this  property.  Then add on the amount of online content generated from the use of "dating" to generate entertainment content and it becomes a self-reinforcing spiral. 

 So we now have a loud part of a generation(s) of people who treat dating and relationships as a form of entertainment. 

I think this has a whole slew of causes and contributing factors and additionally a lot of complex outcomes. 

Causes and history. 

I think that looking backward, there are plenty of other instances of this kind of pattern.  If we look at victorian nobility and the culture of their lives, they were able to spend the majority of their time simply pursuing entertainment and diversion.  This lead to the "fashionable" young and wealthy being fairly useless and childish and the eventual downfall of the nobility as a strong cultural bastion. 

The interesting thing to note and contrast is that the easy life of the nobility still had some limits.  Women especially were still very conscious of the effects of pregnancy.  This intrusion of reality into an otherwise boundary less lifestyle placed a limit on the sprial of excess and exploration. 

There were other natural and social limiting pressures that impacted on the spiral of behavior in Victorian wealthy and elite classes.  The supply of resources was often not as infinite as the childish gambling, spending and consumption of the individuals desires. 

 Health, pregnancy, accident, crime and age were also limiting factors.  Social acceptance and exclusion also mitigated a range of excesses.  The justice system was also often a limit, although wealth could insulate some people from those consequences.

 

If we look at the easy life and consequence free existence that is sold at the moment. (The reality is still going to vary for individuals)  there are less natural limits to peoples behaviour. 

The natural limits are still: 

The availability of food and the ability to have it delivered in highly urbanized areas means that this is almost a non-issue to this generation. Its only in areas where the food supply is uncertain or the individuals personal resources are not up to the task that this issue is even discussed.  Consider the "food desert" conversations that are going on in the US at the moment to see the effects of this issue catching up with some sectors. 

The availability of healthcare, cosmetic surgery, makeup, insurance etc means that apart from time and inconvenience, these former natural "consequences" of behavior are almost eliminated as a consideration before embarking on some adventure.  Birth control is obviously a part of this but will be discussed specifically below. 

The social consequences of behaviour have also been stripped away in all sorts of ways.  There is almost no "social memory" for many individuals because they live in an almost anonymous way.  They are not part of a general community or self-select to join a specialist behaviour based community that will not censure their excessive behaviour.  The internet has allowed people to find and inhabit virtual communities that do not limit their behaviour and exist within them. 

There is constant pressure on real world institutions at the moment to reduce and remove anything of consequence that particular virtual communities find limiting on their "freedoms".  The majority of the culture wars in the US can be seen through this lens as the common factor. 

Gender was a natural limit on behaviour until it came under sustained attack in the recent past.  This has evolved in a number of ways, but the foundation movement was on the concept of "limits" to accepted behaviour for particular individuals based on gender norms.  This fight has pulled in all sorts of social issues and moments and generated all sorts of strange and in many ways horrific outcomes.  But the basic issue has been the removal of limits to behaviour.  

The interesting thing is that from the point of view of someone who is not engaged in a lifestyle where gender norms make sense, these limits are irrelevant and really are limiting their ability to live their lives.  

The most interesting thing however is to map their lives and behaviour and see how much of it exists in the virtual community they are conceptually living their life in.  The obvious contrast would be to map their life and see how little of it is still being lived in the "shared reality" that we call "meat space".  

I think the most interesting aspect of this is that this whole shitshow is an emergent phenomena of the virtual worlds enabled by technology and the current generation is simply adapting to their environment. I think this shows just how much the environment really drives culture and society (I suspect this would come as a suprise to some people but it seems obvious to me) 

This is really the only new thing. People have always created and occupied fantasy worlds that overlap with the shared real world.  Storytelling, literature, dance, art, games, fashion, ideology, roleplay, clubs, secret societies, us and them, all these things have enabled people to live with one foot in their imaginary world while their bodies existed in the "real".  

Technology has magnified this feature of humanity almost from day 1.  Any labour saving device, trick or strategy gave people a little bit more time to spend on whimsy and flights of fancy.  This free time turned in recreation, which turned into an entertainment industry.  This is simply a natural evolution of the entertainment process as more human limits have been circumvented or overcome. 

The wealthy urban life is so safe, well fed, serviced, powered and coddled that a person can exist, mold themselves and their environment to fullfill very elaborate fantasies now.  

 But the removal of some limits means that we can now more clearly see the next ones.  

Age, fertility, health, physiology, lifespan, speed to interface with the virtual, quality of the virtual experience, virtual senses, need to eat, sanitation etc...   

 

However, there are lots of people desperately trying to solve these problems as I type.   

Now to bring this all together.  

"Modern dating" is a shitshow because its has turned dating into an entertainment for bored people.  The only problem with this is that the majority of people involved are not aware of this, so they are being taken advantage of.  

This is why very superficial people are self-selecting to participate.  The essential characteristics are that particpants be "attractive", "responsive" and "quick to change partners".   This maximises the capital throughput.  

Like any casino, the game is always rigged for the house.  The house is selling the dream of connecting with someone, while maximising the time players stay in the game.  

I think the marketing machine has crafted a better message for women to draw them into the machine simply because with the removal of children from the system, women now have essentially a whole lifetime where they need to entertain themselves.  The marketing machine has also had more success at commercializing women across their whole lifespan.  

Men and boys on the other hand are slightly harder sell simply because of some of the natural limitations that are still in play.  Unless boys are visually "attractive" they are very hard to commercialize as a commodity.  If your dating platform has condensed the whole "first impression" down to a second or two before the buyer swipes, then visual appeal is the only currency.  This is selecting for very photogenic candidates or deception.  (Hence the grooming, makeup, filters and cosmetic surgery markets catering to men)  Think about the proliferation of automated photo filters and other "enhancement" tools that are saturating the marketplace to provide competitive advantage(or the illusion of) to participants. 

Some of the other pressures are to increase the "responsiveness" of the product.  All the candidates are now required to have multiple channels of communication and have the ability to engage in multiple parallel communications at the same time.  This has spawned a whole slew of technologies to try to reduce the friction around how useful and functional the DM or "direct message" functionality is on all the ecosystem of products that support this marketplace.  Some are provided free to the participants while others are sold to them so they can participate faster. 

The last aspect is how rapidly the casino can get players back into the game.  Consider how much media pressure and self produced user content is being generated about "changing partners", "divorce", "ghosting", "speed dating", "cheating", "child support", "family courts", "welfare" etc etc etc.  All these talking points are manifestly ways to reduce the friction of participants getting back into the game.  

Is any of this actually new?  As usually, this stuff is just a manifestation of human nature meeting limitless capitalism in a 4D environment.  The constant pressure against limitations for how to exploit human nature on one hand, vs the limitless humans expressing that nature within the context of any given environment.

The same rules will apply.  Environment is defined by the limitations.  Human nature is all the possible combinations of behavior possible within that environment.   Capitalism is the interaction of all the humans within that environment with each other subject to the limitations of the given environment.

Politics/ideology/religion/society is simply the imposition and enforcement of limitations by humans on other humans in addition to those of the physical environment. They are still limitations on behavior.

Ethics is just telling everyone how the game works so they can feel like they are choosing how to play. At what point is free will an illusion?  The point where your behavior meets a limit and you experience an unexpected consequence.

Journalism is the pointing and laughing bit.  

Ok, a bit too abstract perhaps.  

The point I think I wanted to make is that once you see this whole shitshow through the lens of "entertainment" and "recreation" it all becomes predictable.  But like a lot of entertainment, if you peek behind the curtain, the spell is broken... so most people don't really want to peek.  (or wish they didn't... cause you know about human nature and telling people not to do something for their own good...)  ignorance makes a lot of this possible. 

The problem with ignorance is that you often get surprised.  "Entertaining" surprises are enjoyable, while "disappointing" and "hurtful" surprises are not.  Kind of another aspect of human nature that is pretty self explanatory.  My point is that a lot of people who are playing the game are ignorant and are getting surprised in ways they are not enjoying.  

So, on one hand, we could fiddle with the amount of ignorance in the player population, but that would probably reduce the amount of players.  (See any of the shit ton of videos on line that are in various ways trying to "educate" the players.  Soooo many... and from so many angles) So there is no incentive for the platform managers to mess with the ignorance level, especially before they have the players money.  Parents on the other hand can tell their kids as much as they like... but ignorant children is kind of the grease that keeps the whole world moving... so good luck with that.  I think its one of those human nature limitations that we are still trying to figure out how to overcome. (Education is a bit of an attempt but has been trying to chip away at the problem for a long time and keeps getting re-purposed for other sometimes contradictory purposes) 

The ignorance issue also comes full circle and ends up bumping into the age issue.  You can only sell ignorant people the magic of the game as long as they are ignorant.  This precious ignorance seems to fade over time, especially as people still have biological clocks that are ticking away (no matter how much the medical suppliment/fertility industry wants to pretend otherwise) so eventually people are retiring from the game and no longer participating.  They are also demonstrating what happens when you play the game too long or quit playing.  (MGTOW, The Wall etc) 

As the beneficiaries of the game have increasingly enjoyed its benefits, they have continued to push against the limitations that seemed to be constraining their behavior.  So consequence and the short term cost of playing has been continually reduced in some legal contexts.  This has twisted the tail of the political class and thought leaders and observers.  Many of whom are not clearly benefiting from the game, but are chasers of fashion none the less.  

This has resulted in more and more people being sucked into the game involuntarily.  Simply from lack of apparent options.  There is all sorts of indirect push-back to this with various anti-whatever groups self-orgnaising and being demonized by the game owners and ignorant players. Nothing particularly surprising there. Again, this is just an aspect of the ignorance that any game requires.  Ignorant people like what they like and taking it away from them (or appearing to threaten it will cause push back... simples!) 

One of the unintended consequences of the game is the removal of children and families from the conversation landscape.  The whole game is based on people being in a permanent state of childless wealth and ready to mingle.  This has created the emergent phenomenon of  seemingly "anti-family" byproduct of the game.  This is the interesting nature of emergent phenomenon.  They are still very hard to predict except in retrospect.  

Hindsight shows us the road by which we have reached this point in perfect clarity.  We now have nearly two generations of people who have for "reasons" checked out of forming and succeeding at "families".  By this I mean the loosely groups LGBTQI groups, add in the "incels", involuntarily childless, anyone broken by the divorce industry, family courts etc etc.  There are all sorts of limitations that have been removed that are facilitating new and emergent behavior that do not result in successfully raising the next generation. 

This is all wonderful for the dating game as there is no natural drain on resources (families and children used to consume the majority of adults resources)  so the game now gets all that time, energy and money.  However, its a bit short term as many exploitative capitalistic systems are.  Indirect effect of this is the incessant attempts to "broaden" the market into other countries, other cultures and import more and more people into countries with legal environments that are kind to the game.  

Any of these limitless spiral systems inevitably turn into black holes that suck in everything around them and become all consuming.  I suspect that there are plenty of historical examples of the same sort of excessive cultures completely collapsing when they reached a tipping point and ate their own heads. This pattern does not have to be exactly the same as the cultural spiral that the US is currently sinking under, in the past it was simple stuff like food spirals or disease spirals that smashed cultures.  However, I suspect that situations like the fall of the roman empire and the fall of the aztec empire were cultural death spirals in part due to the lack of limit on behaviours that opened up a massive vulnerability which was then exploited by some other group or disasterous incident.  Not sure that it matters and this is not trying to be some list of historical arguments.  The point is that a cultural spiral without effective limits becomes all consuming.

Right now the US is wrestling internally between the existing social institutions that create and enforce limitations and the industries that are trying to push away the limits to their growth.  This has kind of been a pattern in their extreme capitalism model. So this is not particularly new, it just so happens to be a bubble that has been consuming the cultures ability to reproduce very directly. Many of the western cultures have similar emergent spirals so its not that the US is unique, its just that within the regulatory environment and the extreme capitalism system, its formed this particular death spiral. 

The question is if they can recognize it and pull out of it.  There is no sign that any of the other first world countries have discovered the solution so its possible the US will be the first to fall off the cliff... but none of the others are currently showing a way other than following it.  This includes China, as it has its own variation of the same death spiral because its population is subject to the same Pandoras box problem as the US.  There are a thousand differences but at the root they both have the same problem.  Declining birth rate.  The US just has this death spiral going on in its urban and elite classes, while the Chinese seem to be unable to recover from the previous birth control policies.  Different but the same...ish. 

I doubt even the Indians will be able to avoid it... however they are culturally at a different place than either the US or China so they will have a longer time before it bites them and they may be able to turn the ship. 

The fundamental problem is that families are not cool because everyone has one.  Once you see one of the cultures start promoting celebrities based on their strong families and number of children then have and their success at raising them to be good citizens, you will know they have cracked the problem, but currently its the opposite.  People are celebrated for individual reasons and discouraged from anything to do with families, commitment, long term life plans and especially children.

There are so many messages in our society that are undermining and attacking these topics.  The result is a population with large segments of its people debating and avoiding creating the next generation. 

End of society....eventually.

 

 

 

 

Bandit Culture

 I watched an article by Thomas Sowell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4NQ9D0M6w&t=3053s

looking at the origin of some of the culture groups in the US.  He is interested in the topic as it relates to some of the current culture groups in the US. 

I found it interesting as it posed a question about what happens when immigrants bring particular cultures into a country.  I don't think this is a particularly unique idea as I think I have seen it talked about many times.  Essentially, culture clash. 

The specific issue that I found interesting was the line that was drawn between the origin of the culture groups that Thomas was talking about.  The groups origins were in the disputed lands between England and Scotland and in what is now Northan Ireland.  My grasp of historical geography might be a little rough but the point was that the immigrants were drawn from regions with a long history of lawlessness and conflict.  The resulting group of people carried with them a set of behaviours that were shaped by the environment they were drawn from. Namely, lawlessness, vigilantie justice, preoccupation with honor, no work ethic, no savings or investment, no enterprise, gambling, dueling, racing etc. 

These behaviour patterns all make sense in a context of conflict, raiding, short lifespans, etc.  When life is short, cheap and brutal... people adapt to it.  Not ideal but realistic. 

As an aside I remember somewhere a report on the behaviour of elephants changed when they were under pressure from hunting and poaching.  Again they adapted due to the stressful environment.  Behaviour that would have been seen as undesirable in a more relaxed and bountiful environment were selected for and re-inforced by practice. 

Where am I going with this?  Bandit Cultures....

So I was wondering what it would take to convert someone who was raised in a bandit culture to the cultural practices of a more prosperous law abiding culture?

Can you just put someone down in a new context and hope they .... get the idea?

I would suggest that people coming out of prison are a good example of where this does not work.  Immigrants who have survived in harsh environments or indigenous cultures with collectivist survival skills are going to find it difficult to live by a set of principles and rules that they have not been educated in.  Most cultures do not have a manual, trying to help someone get the idea... even when everyone want it, is going to be hard work. 

How can it be done?  Perhaps the same way we should raise children?  Cause basically all children are bandits... and some of them turn out ok.  

A instruction, forgiveness, repetition, praise when they succeed, correction when they fail.

The purity spiral

 I saw a piece on YT explaining the concept of the "purity spiral" as an explanation for radical political group formation and radicalisation.  In this case it was talking about extreme political views in America.  

Its interesting as the speaker did charcterize the social dynamic fairly well but I thought it might be worth drilling into the pattern a little more. 

The basic idea is that the dynamic is formed when you have an "in group" whose members are competing to be "more pure" or "more virtuous", "better than" or "more correct".  The rewards for winning the competition is something meaningful within the group ideology.  More love, more respect, leadership, power etc.  

The reward system within the "in group" also has to be a zero sum game or worse.  So the awarding of that "thing of value" to one member also means its removal from another.  In the more vicious pattern, the loser does not just lose the value but gets a negative "punishment" or social black mark/scar/social credit score/isolation/demotion etc.  The addition of a punishment for losing creates a multiplier effect in the competition.  

In contrast "gentlemanly" competition is asymmetrical.  The winner gets applauded and the loser(s) also get celebrated for competing.  Basically, everyone gets some amount of positive outcome. 

While in toxic competition, the winner gets something of value transferred from the loser AND the loser gets additional punishment. This increases the cost of competing, which results in more spectators than competitors.  It also promotes competitors only getting into the competition when its un-equal as "fair fights" become much higher risk.  So tricks, antagonising, bullying and set-ups are the more frequent ways to initiate the conflict.  Ignorant competitors will get pushed or manipulated into the competition before they understand the odds are against them, while the senior/more experienced players have a low risk of losing and a consumate higher reward. 

This kind of toxic competition can be found in all sorts of places in popular and historical media. 

Now back to the "purity spiral".  The second essential dynamic of the purity spiral is the so called "Shaving off" of fallen former members of the "in group" and casting them out into the "out group" or other.

This reveals the various status levels within the group.  There is the powerful elite who are the center of the group. They are the ones who are vested with the power and authority and are usually the "winners" of all the competitions. These are the "rulers".  

The other part of the movement is the "flock".  These are the members who form the mob, but have no power.  So called "flying monkeys", they will exercise the will of the powerful, under fear of exclusion.  These are the "ruled".  If they can mount a successful competition with one of the rulers, they can move up the status hierarchy, but usually the power inequality between the rulers and the mob is so great that its impossible unless the ruling member becomes vulnerable through some accident or incident.  Then they can be torn apart by the mob and replaced. 

This keeps the ruling group focused as they know the mob is always ready to tear them down, but the thing that keeps the mob in discipline is the threat of being "cast out"/exiled/rejected etc.  The so called "shaving off" of anyone who wanders away from the mob or shows undesirable traits, such as independence or "wrongness".  These people are publicly destroyed and stripped of any possible virtues ("character assassination") as an exercise in both raising the fear level of the mob and removing any possible reason any of the mob might be tempted to separate and follow the cast out member into the wilderness.   

The interplay of these particular group behaviours works to keep the mob under the control of the vested authorities in the group and the vested authorities at the mercy of the mob.  

Its interesting to look at historical and current ideological movements and see these behaviours manifest.  The speaker I was listening to cited George Orwell's Animal Farm and a video of Iraqi dictator Sadam Hossain consolidating his power as examples.  

Its interesting that a number of the major religions have all these dynamics encoded into their practices as either historical or as current practice. Its probably pretty easy to find these dynamics in use in tribal societies and any number of historical kingdoms, current day political parties, current political movements, American "Business Culture" practices (Which were derived from East Asian business practices)... pretty much all over where people are forming groups and ruling each other. 

I think the key differences in the "Purity Spiral" dynamic is the nature of the ideological content that the group has formed around.  When the topic of the group is social virtue as is currently being manifest in the gender wars and social justice wars being fought in the American Media/Politics, the only thing that can be competed for is the ownership or authority over the debated "virtues", as expressed by the group members.  Finding new and more extreme ways to signal these virtues is the only effective means of "winning" a competition fought on these grounds.  The other aspect that ramps up the competition is the fact that the mob is so magnified by the social media platforms and recruited from a much larger audience than could otherwise be assembled in a physical "group".  An interesting aspect is also the currency of these groups is "attention". Power is quantifiable in "clicks", "shares", "likes", "followers", "retweets" and other metrics as expressed by the social media platforms.  These are the only way that the mob has to indicate judgement or effectively "vote" for winner of a "competition" between fragments of ideology (and thus the person who is projecting that fragment/thought/meme/action etc). 

 

I'm not sure that any of this is new.  I suspect the same dynamics have been played out since time began for control over groups and membership in groups.  They are all the same mechanisms we find littered through history.  You can observe them form in the school yard as children discover them and figure out how to use them.  The only difference here is the magnifying effect of technology as its being applied in conjunction with these group dynamics.