Sunday, May 13, 2012
Pushing against the tide
NPR interviews Rafe Sagarin on his new book 'Learning from the Octopus'. Sagarin is trying to bring back the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY TO DO THINGS, within a limited sphere, using a rather odd example.
It's not clear why the octopus deserves to be treated as the best case of decentralized control; ALL OF NATURE is made that way. From the mitochondrion to the DNA-repair mechanism to the cell membrane to the tissue to the organ to the organism to the ecosystem to the whole fucking biosphere, EVERY SINGLE PIECE runs on an infinite number of negative feedback loops, and EVERY SINGLE RELATIONSHIP is loosely coupled.
I suppose I should be glad that Sagarin, who seems to have access to power, is pushing this natural idea. It's clearly alien to all modern Western governments, who have completely forgotten how to use feedback, completely forgotten how to decouple. Most Euro governments, including the US, were originally designed with lots of layers, lots of legislative bodies to pick up error signals. America lost its layers in 1861 when psychopathic madman Lincoln locked the whole mess together with bloody rods of steel, and has progressively lost its signal-reading systems ever since, with every illegitimate "decision" by black-robed Soviet agents mandating absolute uniformity with the suicidal norms of inbred cretinous aristocrats.
Most transparent example is the EU. A tightly coupled machine with total top-down regulation, and it's blowing up specifically because of the tight coupling.
Or look at the Carbon Cult for a double example. Pushed by the EU in strictly top-down form, the Cult attempts to lock all countries and businesses into a death spiral of steady decline, forbidding normal adaptation to circumstances, forbidding normal innovation. And why is this lockdown supposedly necessary? Because of an insanely wild pseudotheory that invalidly assumes the climate is a tightly coupled global system using positive feedback.
Again, I'm halfway glad to see Sagarin's formulation getting air time but I'm mostly frustrated. Some of us have been hammering this point for a long long long long long long long long long long LONG time.
It's not clear why the octopus deserves to be treated as the best case of decentralized control; ALL OF NATURE is made that way. From the mitochondrion to the DNA-repair mechanism to the cell membrane to the tissue to the organ to the organism to the ecosystem to the whole fucking biosphere, EVERY SINGLE PIECE runs on an infinite number of negative feedback loops, and EVERY SINGLE RELATIONSHIP is loosely coupled.
I suppose I should be glad that Sagarin, who seems to have access to power, is pushing this natural idea. It's clearly alien to all modern Western governments, who have completely forgotten how to use feedback, completely forgotten how to decouple. Most Euro governments, including the US, were originally designed with lots of layers, lots of legislative bodies to pick up error signals. America lost its layers in 1861 when psychopathic madman Lincoln locked the whole mess together with bloody rods of steel, and has progressively lost its signal-reading systems ever since, with every illegitimate "decision" by black-robed Soviet agents mandating absolute uniformity with the suicidal norms of inbred cretinous aristocrats.
Most transparent example is the EU. A tightly coupled machine with total top-down regulation, and it's blowing up specifically because of the tight coupling.
Or look at the Carbon Cult for a double example. Pushed by the EU in strictly top-down form, the Cult attempts to lock all countries and businesses into a death spiral of steady decline, forbidding normal adaptation to circumstances, forbidding normal innovation. And why is this lockdown supposedly necessary? Because of an insanely wild pseudotheory that invalidly assumes the climate is a tightly coupled global system using positive feedback.
Again, I'm halfway glad to see Sagarin's formulation getting air time but I'm mostly frustrated. Some of us have been hammering this point for a long long long long long long long long long long LONG time.
Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Blinded by Stats, Carbon Cult, Experiential education, Grand Blueprint, the broken circle
¶ 4:56 PM
