Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Elimination of Societal Institutions + Ruleless Public + Technologically based Interconnectedness = Chaotic society that performs in accordance with Power Laws, AND can be managed through predictive Complexity models.

Elimination of Societal Institutions: perhaps you could list a few of these. From what I can see, any change that is going on is at best incremental, and very possibly due more to fad than secular trend.

Ruleless Public: This one is completely bizarro. The public today is ruleless? Compared to, say, 150 years ago?

I disagree completely.

Technologically based interconnectedness: I am always struck by how many people equate a list of 'friends' in Facebook with the reality of living in a small town, where literally everyone knows everything about everybody around them, even without the benefit of each individual posting their entire life on the internet.

Quantity doesn't equal quality, and equally so it is completely unclear to me that 10000 facebook friends would somehow know you better than the 500 people who are physically the closest to you, and don't have to rely on you to cough up your own personal details.

Equally so in a big city or even an open commerce situation like in a casino (just got back from Vegas), people recognize and form connections, all without the need for a little letter f in a browser.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Technology drops into left field . . .

Vanguard Party (Lenin) transmogrifies into Great Man rule (Stalinism) calcifies into Politburo stasis which crumbles.

Western capitalism continues to concentrate leading to current state of global financial monopoly.

Technology allows and facilitates global broad-based democratic movement of the "99%".

That's a propaganda driven fallacy. Tech facilitates centralized control in such as subtle manner that less than 1 in 10 million might see it.

I highly recommend Ellul's Technological Society as a starting point.
http://www.amazon.com/Technological-.../dp/0394703901

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Elimination of Societal Institutions: perhaps you could list a few of these. From what I can see, any change that is going on is at best incremental, and very possibly due more to fad than secular trend.

Yes, it's happening incrementally. The reason it's happening is because we are emulating complex systems found in nature. This video touches on it.

Ruleless Public: This one is completely bizarro. The public today is ruleless? Compared to, say, 150 years ago?

Yes, the ponerization is institutionalized now via mainstream media and cultural outlets such as academia. This one is obvious.

Technologically based interconnectedness: I am always struck by how many people equate a list of 'friends' in Facebook with the reality of living in a small town, where literally everyone knows everything about everybody around them, even without the benefit of each individual posting their entire life on the internet.

Quantity doesn't equal quality, and equally so it is completely unclear to me that 10000 facebook friends would somehow know you better than the 500 people who are physically the closest to you, and don't have to rely on you to cough up your own personal details.

The small town dynamic is now global, interconnectedness is recorded through endless minute actions by people interfacing with machines. Via the science of Cybernetics, these minute actions are measured, studied, and employed to create control-feedback-loops as well complexity based models. Hey, it takes a "Village".

As far as your Facebook analogy, the paradigm has changed. We're now measuring strong-weak ties, not strong ties. You're correct that each connection is not as valuable, but with the techniques of capturing and measuring human actions, strong models can be devised and deployed.

Like I've been intimating in just about all my posts, we're living in a system of new rules. The old paradigms (20th Century paradigms) no longer apply.

Equally so in a big city or even an open commerce situation like in a casino (just got back from Vegas), people recognize and form connections, all without the need for a little letter f in a browser.

There are some books out now, albeit they are expensive, about Social Network Analysis. I think it would be beneficial to gain an understanding of how various objects within a network behave, and the value of that behavior toward gaining a greater understanding of the "system".

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

That's a propaganda driven fallacy. Tech facilitates centralized control in such as subtle manner that less than 1 in 10 million might see it.

I highly recommend Ellul's Technological Society as a starting point.
http://www.amazon.com/Technological-.../dp/0394703901

A better way of stating that is:

Technology allows and facilitates global broad-based communication among the "99%".

however short-lived this may prove to be.

from an Amazon review of Technological Society:

This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the twentieth century, and if you accept its thesis you won't be able to look at the political milieu in the same way ever again. (If you agree with it and it doesn't change the way you look at things, you haven't grasped its importance.) Most political theorists take ideology to be a central point from which "real world" consequences emanate. In other words, a Communist or libertarian ideology in practical use will produce a particular type society and individual divorced from the actual technical workings of the society. Liberals and conservatives both speak of things in such a manner as if ideology is the prima facie cause of existence - but as Ellul shows in painstaking detail, this is wrong. What almost everyone fails to grasp is the pernicious effect of technique (and its offspring, technology) on modern man.


Technique can loosely be defined as the entire mass of organization and technology that has maximum efficiency as its goal. Ellul shows that technique possesses an impetus all its own and exerts similar effects on human society no matter what the official ideology of the society in question is. Technique, with its never-ending quest for maximum efficiency, tends to slowly drown out human concerns as it progresses towards its ultimate goal. "...the further economic technique develops, the more it makes real the abstract concept of economic man." (p. 219) Technique does not confine itself merely to the realm of technical production, but infiltrates every aspect of human existence, and has no time for "inefficiencies" caused by loyalties to family, religion, race, or culture; a society of dumbed-down consumers is absolutely essential to the technological society, which must contain predictable "demographics" in order to ensure the necessary financial returns. "The only thing that matters technically is yield, production. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces." (p. 324).


Ellul thoroughly shows that much of the difference in ideology between libertarians and socialists becomes largely irrelevant in the technological society (this is not to say that ideology is unimportant, but rather that technique proceeds with the same goals and effects.) This will doubtlessly please no one; liberals want to believe that they can have privacy and freedom despite a high degree of central planning, and libertarians want to believe that a society free of most regulation and control is possible in an advanced technological society. Libertarian fantasies seem especially irrelevant given the exigencies of a technological society; as Ellul notes, as technique progresses it simply cannot function without a high degree of complexity and regulation. "The modern state could no more be a state without techniques than a businessman could be a businessman without the telephone or the automobile... not only does it need techniques, but techniques need it. It is not a matter of chance, nor a matter of conscious will; rather, it is an urgency..." (p. 253-254). Can anyone really doubt Ellul here, especially seeing as how twenty-plus years of conservative promises to downsize government still result in more regulation and bureaucracy with every passing year? Planning, socialism, regulation, and control are the natural consequences of technique; an increasingly incestuous relationship between industry and the State is inevitable. "The state and technique - increasingly interrelated - are becoming the most important forces in the modern world; they buttress and reinforce each other in their aim to produce an apparently indestructible, total civilization." (p. 318).


This is not an optimistic book. Given that the nature of technique is one of a universal leveling of human cultures, needs, and desires (replacing real needs with false ones and the neighborhood restaurant with McDonalds), Ellul is certainly pessimistic. He does not propose any remedies for the Skinnerist nightmares of technique somehow leading to a Golden Age of humanity, where people will enjoy maximal freedom coupled with minimal want: "...we are struck by the incredible naivete of these scientists... they claim they will be in a position to develop certain collective desires, to constitute certain homogeneous social units out of aggregates of individuals, to forbid men to raise their children, and even to persuade them to renounce having any... at the same time, they speak of assuring the triumph of freedom and of the necessity of avoiding dictatorship... they seem incapable of grasping the contradiction involved, or of understanding that what they are proposing." (p. 434).

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Yes, it's happening incrementally. The reason it's happening is because we are emulating complex systems found in nature. This video touches on it.

Bzzt, sorry, wrong.

The so called complex interactions in nature are complex not due to design but time. They are the accumulation of millions of years of options, all bunched together in unexpressed DNA, which provide for rapid deployment of alternatives as the situation changes.

To try and compare this to OODA, or whatever nom de plume you wish to throw forward, is literally evolution vs. creationism. Creationism because of the arrogance in thinking that millions of years of real life testing can be 'emulated' by a handful or even a few hundred 'designers', much less one.

Yes, the ponerization is institutionalized now via mainstream media and cultural outlets such as academia. This one is obvious.

Obvious to you, not at all obvious to me.

The small town dynamic is now global, interconnectedness is recorded through endless minute actions by people interfacing with machines. Via the science of Cybernetics, these minute actions are measured, studied, and employed to create control-feedback-loops as well complexity based models. Hey, it takes a "Village".

As far as your Facebook analogy, the paradigm has changed. We're now measuring strong-weak ties, not strong ties. You're correct that each connection is not as valuable, but with the techniques of capturing and measuring human actions, strong models can be devised and deployed.

Like I've been intimating in just about all my posts, we're living in a system of new rules. The old paradigms (20th Century paradigms) no longer apply.

Wrong again. In a small town, you don't get to choose all the other members.

In the internet, as well as social networking, you do.

Try to understand the fundamental difference between these two.

There are some books out now, albeit they are expensive, about Social Network Analysis. I think it would be beneficial to gain an understanding of how various objects within a network behave, and the value of that behavior toward gaining a greater understanding of the "system".

Meh. You can spend as much money as you want confirming your existing bias.

[davidstvz]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

The so called complex interactions in nature are complex not due to design but time. They are the accumulation of millions of years of options, all bunched together in unexpressed DNA, which provide for rapid deployment of alternatives as the situation changes.

This is an important point that Nassim Taleb discusses at length in his new book (Anti-Fragility: Oct 2012). Life has many layers of redundancy at each level (molecular, cellular, individual, species and so on) that allow it to recover from catostrophic events and cause the system to benefit from stress up to a certain point. He refers to this property as anti-fragility (as opposed to fragility, with simple robustness in between the two). A free market is anti-fragile while the individual market participants are mostly fragile. A managed market is fragile to the extent that it is managed. I'll stop here since I don't want to risk butchering the concept. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book later this year.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

This is an important point that Nassim Taleb discusses at length in his new book (Anti-Fragility: Oct 2012). Life has many layers of redundancy at each level (molecular, cellular, individual, species and so on) that allow it to recover from catostrophic events and cause the system to benefit from stress up to a certain point. He refers to this property as anti-fragility (as opposed to fragility, with simple robustness in between the two). A free market is anti-fragile while the individual market participants are mostly fragile. A managed market is fragile to the extent that it is managed. I'll stop here since I don't want to risk butchering the concept. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book later this year.

Taleb is referring to system "robustness". It's a concept in Complexity Theory, and it is being designed into man's systems, such that it will be more challenging to alter social systems via internal or external pertebations.

Bzzt, sorry, wrong.

The so called complex interactions in nature are complex not due to design but time. They are the accumulation of millions of years of options, all bunched together in unexpressed DNA, which provide for rapid deployment of alternatives as the situation changes.

To try and compare this to OODA, or whatever nom de plume you wish to throw forward, is literally evolution vs. creationism. Creationism because of the arrogance in thinking that millions of years of real life testing can be 'emulated' by a handful or even a few hundred 'designers', much less one.

Your mocking tone is really getting old, especially when your content show so little understanding of today's system design.

With respect to man's world, it is most clearly designed. The evidence is in countless books and academic papers. The fact that you can't understand this just confirm's Cantor's conclusions in Set Theory, namely, that one cannot diagnose a system from inside the system.

I'll respond to the rest of your post when I have some time.

P.S. I'd really wish people would invest a little time investigating the Macy Conferences and their outcomes (ie "The Mechanized Mind"). Oh wait, that's a waste of time, right?

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Your mocking tone is really getting old, especially when your content show so little understanding of today's system design.

Right, but you can understand, therefore must be the prophet we should all follow?

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Right, but you can understand, therefore must be the prophet we should all follow?

Do you 'get off' on being so obtuse, and quite frankly, mean spirited? As far as anyone following me, I never recall ever promoting that. So, seems to me that this is you projecting. What I recommend is investigating some of the concepts, resources, and great thinkers that I've referenced. While you seem to dismiss every resource I mention, I would hope others might be curious and at least peruse some of the material, making up their own minds as they engage in discovery. Hence, no one needs to "follow me", because the resources speak for themselves.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Do you 'get off' on being so obtuse, and quite frankly, mean spirited? As far as anyone following me, I never recall ever promoting that. So, seems to me that this is you projecting. What I recommend is investigating some of the concepts, resources, and great thinkers that I've referenced. While you seem to dismiss every resource I mention, I would hope others might be curious and at least peruse some of the material, making up their own minds as they engage in discovery. Hence, no one needs to "follow me", because the resources speak for themselves.

While information is good, uncritical affirmation of belief is not.

You keep putting out links to this and that, but always what you write about "must be" and "is".

You'd have much more credibility if you pointed out the shortcomings and failures of said beliefs.

As it is you are a conspiracy cheerleader.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

While information is good, uncritical affirmation of belief is not. You keep putting out links to this and that, but always what you write about "must be" and "is". You'd have much more credibility if you pointed out the shortcomings and failures of said beliefs. As it is you are a conspiracy cheerleader.

How can you label anything that I write here when you do not understand the concepts, nor appear to have ever read or followed any of the scientific research that I cite? As far as the shortcomings are concerned, they exist, but how can I begin to even discuss them when the techniques, nor the science that supports these techniques, is unfamilar to the audience? You'd be in a lot better position to understand the world's current trajectory if you start to let go of your pre-21st century understanding of the world and it's systems, because they no longer apply any longer. Moreover, the fact that Complexity Theory seems to be so poorly understood on this site is an embarrassment, as it is the primary driving factor for the current trajectory of the word's economic system.

[davidstvz]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Taleb is referring to system "robustness". It's a concept in Complexity Theory, and it is being designed into man's systems, such that it will be more challenging to alter social systems via internal or external pertebations.

Actually, he is very specifically NOT referring to robustness. The book discusses a triad of attributes, fragile, robust and anti-fragile. Anti-fragility refers to systems that improve due to low level stress. Something robust may resist failure, but it is not improved by stress. Example: a species is generally anti-fragile while an individual organism is robust or fragile to different stresses. The logic applies to myriad systems.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

How can you label anything that I write here when you do not understand the concepts, nor appear to have ever read or followed any of the scientific research that I cite?

You think I don't, when in fact I understand them quite well.

Possibly better than you do, since I also understand where fact stops and myth begins, which you do not.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

This is an important point that Nassim Taleb discusses at length in his new book (Anti-Fragility: Oct 2012). Life has many layers of redundancy at each level (molecular, cellular, individual, species and so on) that allow it to recover from catostrophic events and cause the system to benefit from stress up to a certain point. He refers to this property as anti-fragility (as opposed to fragility, with simple robustness in between the two). A free market is anti-fragile while the individual market participants are mostly fragile. A managed market is fragile to the extent that it is managed. I'll stop here since I don't want to risk butchering the concept. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book later this year.

Actually, he is very specifically NOT referring to robustness. The book discusses a triad of attributes, fragile, robust and anti-fragile. Anti-fragility refers to systems that improve due to low level stress. Something robust may resist failure, but it is not improved by stress. Example: a species is generally anti-fragile while an individual organism is robust or fragile to different stresses. The logic applies to myriad systems.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll check out Taleb's material. However, going back to the original post that you quoted, there's no proof that "complex interactions in nature are complex not due to design but time." Further, there is also no compelling evidence to show that this level of societal design is NOT possible.

You think I don't, when in fact I understand them quite well. Possibly better than you do, since I also understand where fact stops and myth begins, which you do not.

Well, I'm happy that you have such a command over the material. I will strive to attain your level of expertise.

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Just saw this from a review of Taleb's recent presentation at The Royal Society...
http://curiouslypersistent.wordpress...antifragility/

"Uncertainty makes mistakes costly, and thus both businesses and governments should remain small. Taleb suggested that if Tesco suddenly ran into difficulties then the government would have to bail out a supermarket. He feels the government should only intervene in things that can’t organise organically, and is thus advising the government on how to make its institutions smaller (such as splitting the NHS into localised, autonomous units)."

So, if this review is accurate, Taleb is promoting:
(1) small (smaller institutions)
(2) organic (self-organized) institutions

Looks to me like Taleb is an advocate for society organized in alignment with Complexity Theory. Obviously, I'll have to dig further, but just found this initial find/read of interest and telling.