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" He thought that we didn't know what the hell was going on with accretion disks but that a few powerful people in the field created the impression that we did and that there was no dissent because it was so difficult to get established in the field." ... seems to be an epidemic of this stuff in academia tbh.
This seems like a great resource for referencing the various definitions. I've tried my hand at developing an intuitive understanding: https://spacechimplives.substack.com/p/observers-and-entropy. TLDR - it's an artifact of the model we're using. In the thermodynamic definition, the energy accounted for in the terms of our model is information. The energy that's not is entropic energy. Hence why it's not "useable" energy, and the process isn't reversible.
a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved
A few notes... another way to make the economy more worker owned is to have a a portion of the shares of companies held by public entities, which then use dividends for a basic income. Public investment in companies like this could also be a way of incubating industries.
Another note: the biggest problem with businesses being democratic institutions is the pace at which decisions can be collectively made. This is an information systems problem that can be solved by software. Instead of voting for representatives who make decisions, we need an institutional programming language, and people can vote directly on implementations of modifications to this institutional code that defines every institution. Votes are essentially approvals to a PR. No need for intermediaries to misinterpret voters' intentions.
Every major religion says to take care of the poor. Maybe there's a deep sociological reason for it.
they've checked out from the system
Everyone checks out of participation in a group that does nothing to benefit them. Rich people complain about taxes taking "their" money, but the system is taking something much more precious from the poor. It's taking their time and their ability to experience the things that make life worthwhile --- time with friends and family, time in nature. You can say all you want that people need to work for it, but they also need to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and that's not happening.
And what has that increased expenditure gone to?
Is that not mostly from social security?
I wouldn't increased costs from paying for the retirement of an aging population to be an indication of welfare program strength.
Is medicaid / medicare in there too? If so, then ballooning medical costs wouldn't really be an indication of stronger programs either.
we have so many welfare programs and safety nets and worker protects
Not really, in the 40's and 50's the programs were stronger
It does for sure
I can't tell if it's speaking nonsense or not... care to elaborate on what's happening here?
As a white guy: I met one guy who was brahmin and was bragging about it and trying to explain to me that the caste system is good.
Probably a bad idea, but just a random thought: what if there were emergency pressurized canisters of something inert like no2 that could dilute the hydrogen in case of a failure so they could protect surrounding things from fire damage?
Reminds me of a “founder” who interviewed me and told me he had done a photo-documentary on the “Flyover states”.
Just because you’ve been somewhere doesn’t mean you’ve got a real understanding of anything that’s going on there. I’m very skeptical that someone wearing a visit to a place with poor people as some kind of badge of authority on the topics surrounding them actually has any clue.
The people I’ve talked to who had “miserable, starvation at the door lives” elsewhere who now live with low incomes in the us have mixed feelings about it… nothing as clear cut as what you’re implying
I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"...
If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all.
Look at this list of the most cited cognitive scientists in the journal "cognitive science"... https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/
#1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are.
Turns out right on his wikipedia page he wrote a book about what he thinks about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness
It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions.
It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion.
I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would.
If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.
Ad hominem
It's not an ad hominem at all. I attacked their thought process, not their person. And the point is that they encourage other people not to use their critical thinking and brains, and just defer to others who they happen to agree with.
Being charitable here
And why would I do that? They're not being charitable to the opposing opinion. If they were rational, they would have attempted a full catalogue of both sides of the matter, taking the actual of actual opposition, rather than making up straw men.
The evidence is overwhelming that intelligence is at least partly heritable
This is an argument against nobody and nothing. I don't think there's a single scientist in the world who said intelligence is 0% heritable. This is a very far cry from the stance that it's mostly heritable. Which would imply greater than 50%.
So even being charitable the author's factual stance is very weak, yet they're drawing strong conclusions from it.
If it's 50% heritable that means less than 50% genetic... which implies that at least 50% of intelligence is based in environment. This is not at all evidence of the author's point. It's evidence against it.
For #2, the idea that the evidence is overwhelming is just made up. The idea that the “experts” agree with him is laughable. That’s not what the majority of cognitive scientists believe at this point except in a few niches that are largely ignored by actual members of the field. So he just cherry-picked his “experts”.
This is the problem with “rationalists”.. . They don’t actually use their brains, they defer to “authority”, arguing that anyone that doesn’t listen to authorities is arrogant, but then they pick who they deem to be authorities to match their pre-existing opinions.
"The notion of independent brain half-selves has been debunked" I don't think his hypothesis really hinges on that.
It is clear that, if indeed people at that time experienced life as he describes, then by the time we got writing not everybody did.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that this is clear. The phenomenon he describes about writing is something one can easily experience by simply reading ancient texts. It feels different. There is no self reflection.
As for the ancient-Greek scholar you mention... I guess I'd need to see some specifics. Just hearing 2nd-hand that an anonymous scholar said he made it up isn't very compelling evidence. I'm curious about these modern statistical methods you've mentioned... how did they address Jaynes' theory?
"there is no such phenomenon in Attic Greek"... I didn't get the impression of a singular phenomenon other than a lack of metaphoric references to the self in early writing. The timeline for Attic Greek seems to start at 500BC which seems to be on the end side of his hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind and 300 years after the Illiad was apparently written. Jaynes suggested it may even be older, passed down through oral history. I'm not sure that we have any evidence to truly debunk that.
Of course once the mental metaphors were established, they would quickly spread through the language, so it would be no surprise to see plenty of examples of Greek that did have more mental metaphors, especially a few hundred years later.
If you can point me to some writing from before 1500 BC or so that clearly shows a mental metaphor of a self which contains or otherwise is connected to thoughts (i.e. "the thoughts in my head"), then I'll have to take that as solid evidence against his theory.
I studied cognitive linguistics in undergrad, so this is an interesting topic to me. His theory definitely goes completely counter to what I'd previously believed which is the we've probably been far more advanced for far longer than is normally assumed. For instance the idea that the clovis people were the first in North America always seemed ridiculous to me. The thing is, even though Jaynes' idea is sort of against that general sensibility, it doesn't really directly contradict it. Anyway, I'd be curious whatever details you know about it. I thought about trying to make a serious rebuttal essay to it to find the evidence against
We do know that stimulating the right temporal lobe with electrodes causes auditory hallucinations. This is the same area that is responsible for actual speech processing on the left side.
We also know that the left side wernicke and broca's areas are used in conscious language production while the right side does not seem to be at all (in the vast majority of people, with some exceptions where the lateralization is flipped).
Where it gets interesting is his review of historical literature and cataloguing use of metaphor (or lack thereof) in ancient writing.
He takes the Illiad and shows where in the original greek, there's essentially no metaphor for internal emotional or psychological states that's conclusively non-physical. Even apparent references to emotional states reference physiological responses, not specifically emotions. This was right on the cusp of when he suggests the change occured. In the Illiad when someone describes their motivation, it's almost always attributed to a god telling them to do it. Similar accounts abound in literature.
There are many accounts of ancient rulers directly conversing with some hallucinated being as if they're there. As is there art depicting it. But it slows down around and stops around the time of the bronze age collapse in the region.
His suggestion is that it originated with people hallucinating their dead relatives, their dead tribal leaders etc. which is why they would sort of prop them up like they're still alive and have something to say.
I was very, very skeptical at first, but the neuroscience was actually pretty thorough for being written in the 80s and I couldn't find any of it that has been debunked to my knowledge.
I'm not saying I agree with his hypothesis, but I admire its craziness. He's well aware that it's out there, and he makes some pretty compelling points... doing a pretty thorough analysis of the earliest available literature. For instance in the Illiad, there are essentially no direct references to thoughts or even feeling. He lists the many points where people literally say they're talking to god all throughout ancient literature. They say it in a way that doesn't sound like a metaphor at all. The rulers say something like "<insert god's name> told me to gather 1000lbs of barley and feed him 10 lbs and take him for a procession"... so that is their edict.
I don't think he's suggesting they were stupid. I think what he's suggesting is much more a reflection on the power of metaphor and the sort of fragility of the psyche more than anything. And he addresses something that I've never seen anyone else address. If previous civilizations were so similar psychologically, why don't we see more literature before 2000 bc that contains metaphor. Why doesn't the earliest writing contain self-reflection?
In fact if you see all these ancient people worshipping gods, building gigantic monuments to them, sacrificing humans (many of whom happily participated)... then it seems like you must assume they're stupid on some level to believe they were psychologically the same as us but they just lacked the critical thinking to put their labor to better use. And that they were just lying when they said they were talking to gods, depicting it on friezes, etc.
Hellen Keller said she really did not feel conscious until after she learned language. She had no concept of self. I could never make sense of that either. It seemed like it must be a fluke, like she was exaggerating it to play into people's expectations. But her description sounds 100% sincere.
As for you being 4 years old and being able to differentiate yourself and the thoughts in your head. That's years after you learned "I" and "you".. Years after you learned to remember.
Anyway, when I first started reading the book, it was with extreme skepticism... kind of hate-reading. The book was a gift, and I read it because I liked Westworld, the HBO show which heavily references it. But I have to say, as someone who has been staunchly anti-humanist.. who has advocated for the same basic thought you're advocating for... studying history through the lens of an average person who is just like us... believing that the average people didn't really believe the religious stuff and it was just forced on them by the elites.. this book made me question those deeply held assumptions. I'm still not sold, but I think it needs to not be dismissed offhand without a legitimate evidence-based criticism.
Polynesians brought sweet potatoes from South America by around 1000 ce, so it’s reasonable to suspect this was true before the 1400s.
The baghdad batteries are nothing compared to the antikythera mechanism, which comes from a similar time frame. This timeframe is after Jayne's hypothesized breakdown of the bicameral mind, though, so it's not quite the same.
Jaynes suggests that a different state of mind... one of essentially hypnosis allowed civilization to expand up to a certain point. In this type of civilization... dubbed "bicameral", both the left and right hemispheres' linguistic areas were active. The right hemisphere essentially provided our "internal monologue" but in the form of auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations provided the basis for remote governance and were ultimately interpreted as gods by people, but these civilizations would fall apart beyond a certain size because the hallucinations would start to fade.
The elaborate rituals that became more elaborate as time went on was attributed to these hallucinations starting to fade as the world became more crowded with these types of civilizations. The part that gave me chills was his description of depictions of gods: up until a certain time, people were always depicted conversing with gods face to face. The gods were present, and the ruler described conversations with them. Until one point in Sumeria, when a frieze was made where god was simply a dot. Depictions of god as a dot or a symbol became more and more common, as did the deference that rulers had. Rather than conversing, they were kneeling and pleading. There were recorded complaints that the voice of the gods were fading. Eventually the voices became associated with demons. The bible records systematic purges of people who heard voices like these.
It's a pretty crazy yet weirdly hard to dismiss theory, and I wish there were more ways to find evidence to support it or debunk it.
An alternative theory for why there were so many "false starts" so to speak, is described by Joseph Tainter in "the collapse of complex societies"... which I find pretty interesting. It's much more mainstream. Basically he turns the question on its head and says "why does civilization exist at all?" That complexity takes energy. That energy wouldn't be wasted unless there were a reason... a positive return on investment in complexity. He says societies break down when the marginal returns on that investment inevitably decrease. So for instance a Native American tribe which developed around a water-sparse area and fluorished by creating cisterns and presumably trading water for other supplies developed, but as the created more cisterns, each new cistern provided less 'bang for the buck'. Eventually they hit the point where building more cisterns was actually counterproductive. The cisterns were too close together so they were cannibalizing each other's trade, and their source of water was starting to dry up, but that's what their society was organized around. Those with influence gained more wealth by creating more, even though the net benefit to the civilization was negative, so they kept doing it. You could say the society existed by virtue of a surplus-generating algorithm. But those algorithms eventually eat through the source of the surplus, and then you need something else.
Jaynes says the concept of self derived from linguistic metaphor. Until there was a concept of the “mind” as a container that could have thoughts “in” it, he says thoughts were experienced as hallucinations from the right temporal lobe, and people were essentially acting in a hypnotic state driven by those hallucinations
It’s not great. There are ~2 broad categories of language based on their use of affixes: analytic (which doesn’t make much use of affixes, instead relying on word order), and synthetic (which does use affixes). Synthetic has multiple sub-categories depending on how the affixes are used.
This approach completely ignores analytic languages which put their complexity in word order instead of affixes, and it ignores the distinctions within synthetic languages such as agglutinating, which stacks up affixes vs fusional, which combines multiple affixes into a single new affix.
It also misinterprets what people mean when they say languages which collide “reduce complexity” which really means they tend to become more analytic. Nobody expected the Scandinavian languages to have this characteristic because they’ve been in the process of diverging from a common language.
The process they’re referencing applies to languages which come from the collision of distinct languages, such as pidgins and creoles. The hypothesized tendency is for languages which have had consistent boundaries and populations for a long period of time to be more agglutinating then eventually fusional, and eventually polysynthetic like some Native American languages, where a single word can be translated to a complete sentence in English for instance
Edit: corrected for distinction between fusional and synthetic
It’s missing Sturgill Simpson’s “cuttin’ grass”
You're stating something that's obviously your opinion as if it's fact, so I'm not particularly interested in discussing with you either.
None of what you just said directly addresses what I intended to communicate. Nobody is suggesting that people don't make any decisions. Nobody is suggesting that literally everything would have happened exactly the same if different people were involved.
What I am suggesting: there are a number of characteristics which are required to become a US president right now. Those characteristics drastically skew the probability of certain decisions being made versus if a person were picked at random. Furthermore, if by statistical anomaly someone did make drastically different decisions, there are several correction mechanisms that would prevent the effects from reaching too far... see Julius Caesar for example. But he's even an exception that proves the rule, as his ascent to power was only possible once the republic was in a certain state of decay.
So yes, Augustus made many decision that changed the course of history. However so did many other people, and just like the binomial distribution of catching stoplights green or red causes trip times to be normally distributed as the number of stoplights goes to infinity, decisions which bolster or hinder macroeconomic factors cause them to be normally distributed as the number of decisions and decisionmakers goes to infinity.
IMO, this could be discussed so much more rigorously... I think we have the framework for it.
All work exploits some gradient of energy, i.e. a potential difference. Any "innovation" is a discovery of some such gradient. As the gradient is exploited, the difference in potential decreases. The innovation loses its potential return on investment. The most basic reason for this is that the simplest/least costly methods for exploiting the difference will be the most likely to be discovered.
Our societies organize around these processes for exploiting gradients. Greater influence is given to those who can do the most work. That influence directs future collective investments. Those with the influence will use it to increase investment in the source of their profit... extraction of work from the same gradient which they've been exploiting.
Eventually that gradient is exploited beyond an positive return on investment. All low-hanging fruit has been consumed. There is no longer investment available for finding other gradients along which work can be done and those with influence use that influence to extract resources from other members of the society since their external gradient no longer exists. Their influence increases in proportion to the other members' and the society eventually eats itself.
IMO there's the basis for a quantitative model in there. The conclusions are total speculation, but the basic foundations I think are valid. (They mostly come from a combo of information theory, joseph tainter's collapse of complex society, as well as "incomplete nature" by terrence deacon). But of course we don't have the money available for investigation into such things :/ Funding seems to only be available for models that bolster existing sources of profit.
I don't think that's the case across the wallace line... could be wrong.
My impression is that Indonesian people aren't under any delusions that the country matches any specific historical borders. They're well aware that their country's borders are a product of colonization.
That said, it seems to me like there's increasing evidence that the Austronesian expansion was more than just random refugees getting swept to different islands by fluke storms as is sometimes implied. There is wooden pole art all around the pacific rim, DNA evidence in south america, linguistic evidence in south america, and now this. It seems reasonable to suspect that the austronesian expansion was supported by a series of large trade networks and societies that provided logistical support for the expansion.
Then the roman empire would have been led by someone slightly different and perhaps had slightly different borders.
who is far less capable of setting up the infrastructure of the empire
This is where we diverge.. I consider setting up empire-wide infrastructure to be something that largely happens due to socioeconomic forces and the environmental conditions of the empire, not something that 1 guy decides to do alone. If Antony won the civil war, he would still be in command of an economic juggernaut, and other politicians and advisors would start suggesting projects to help out their constituents and sponsors. If he kept suggesting stupid ideas, people close to him would tell him they're stupid and he would have resistance to them.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of variance. Obviously there's a place like North Korea. But if you average out the political situation across that whole region over about 50 years... add a bit of blur to the whole thing, both to the borders, the times, the ideologies... it starts to look more like ideas reverberating through a network. Sometimes all the random noise will come together and interfere constructively to make a region of large amplitude.
Basically, instead of thinking of history so much through the lens of names of rulers, etc, think of it through the lens of a random guy in the "ohio" of the empire you're considering. You think the life of some random guy in modern day Slovenia was affected much by things that were purely Octavian's whims? Even further, strip out all the names and people, and just think of it in terms of physical materials moving across the mediterranean... you think the total flow of grain from egypt to the surrounding areas was much affected by these political situations? Do you think if you looked at a video that showed the change of historic economic activity of the various regions of Rome with no dates or political boundaries shown, that you would be able to distinguish the transition of rome from republic to empire?
There were a lot of unique features of Muhammad that ending up having a major positive effect on the subsequent conquests
I'm not sure I buy it... I just don't think things hinge so delicately on individuals. Generally if one person has an idea, thousands of people around them have the same idea. The limiting factor is how many of those thousands have the time, resources, and will to follow through with the idea. The distribution of excess time, resources & will has a pretty strong correlation to environmental & socioeconomic factors.
As for the borders of whatever empire expanded from that region, sure they would have been different. I don't think there would have been an exact correlate of Islam necessarily.
But if you look at the period of ~500s to ~1500s as a golden age for merchant kingdoms in that region, where they built off the intellectual foundations that were spread by rome, I think that was basically inevitable.
I also think it makes sense that something like a religious ideology would be a catalyst for that, to unite so many disparate people in a way they can trust each other and work together in a decentralized fashion.
And for that religious ideology to stick around and take a conservative turn after centuries of antagonism, colonialism, and interference from the west, that also seems like a pretty natural course of events.
The specifics of each country definitely have variance and could have turned out differently. But as you zoom out I think that if trends are happening on a scale of 10s or 100s of millions people, it's got a deeper underlying cause.
I think of it in terms of physics. A person can't lift a huge steel beam by themselves. There's a larger force at play when the beam gets lifted... a larger well of potential energy. The aligning of that well of potential energy to the goal of lifting the beam takes a certain amount of time. One person could lift it by themselves over time if they create a lever and add counterweights, but it would take more time. However a skyscraper? A single person could never build a skyscraper on their own. Think of how much mass is in an army and how much energy is exerted in moving that army across a continent. How can a person deliberately cause so much mass to be moved? They can only do so by tapping into a well of potential energy that already was created. That potential energy must come from somewhere, and when the army moves across the continent, they are expending that potential energy. The process can only continue if the energy well is being replenished. That replenishment is part of the machinery of society. An individual person isn't going to singlehandedly author that machinery in a group larger than the size of an ape troupe. It takes a lot of energy to modify that machinery at the scale of even a small city. A single person can only make minor contributions to the modification of the machinery at the historical scale.
I'm against great man theory as well.
I'm responding to what you said here: "does all progress grind to a halt once the guy dies? Do we have a lot of examples of that?" with a pretty glaring example of what you're saying (which provides counter-evidence to the view we both share).
Then the rest of my comment is an attempt to show that it wasn't just Alexander the great being a "great man" that causes his expansion, but instead it was a system of logistics that the Greeks happened upon.
I'm saying: because they needed the logistics, they developed the logistics. Because they had the logistics, they had the ability to expand. Because they had the ability to expand, someone did. That person happened to be the son of a king (Philip II of Macedon) whose logistics enabled him to expand through Greece. I'd venture to guess his father was probably involved in some politics and warfare logistics as well... indicating that this was a capacity developed over generations due to an environmental requirement
Maybe everyone realizes this these days, but I didn't realize until a few years ago that ancient armies traveling for months were like traveling cities, and in a way they could be like caravans as well, trading. Perhaps Philip II's big innovation was a systematic method of trading instead of pillaging with the surrounding cities, which would allow establishing continuing political relationships, which explains the kingdoms lasting for 100s of years more. Expansion by brute force was certainly going on with neo-Assyria 500 years or so earlier, but with Alexander the great, from what I can gather, there was lots of communication with surrounding towns. It appears an army would plop down for a month and regroup. They'd buy food and weapons. They'd probably find some people unhappy with their current emperor and do some recruiting. Expansion by brute force requires even more massive amounts of logistics than the sort of military caravan thing Alexander may have had going on and I find it really difficult to believe he could have gotten as far as he did with that strategy.
If Alexander inherited such an army as well as a new form of logistics that allowed him to travel further, it would make him more of an avatar of a larger force behind him. That's more how I believe things tend to happen versus him just being some genius tactician who won because he was smarter than all the barbarians... even if that's what he believed was the cause of his success.