Will it end with a paperclip maximizer? Or a permafrost refrigerator

you know the thought experiment by Svedish philosopher Bostrom, teach an AGI to maximize paperclip production and it will fagocitate the world unless you teach him/her/it ethics, human “values” and not values

But then you discover that an oil compay want to refrigerate the ground in order to save the permafrost that thaws due to fossil emissions https://grist.org/energy/the-irony-conocophillips-plans-to-freeze-thawing-permafr

imagine how much permafrost in the norther hemisphere is foundation to roads, houses, plants, pipeline, lines. Here is a map from the good The Arctic by Dodds and Woodward

so here you have a perfect doomsday machine without having to resort to mithical AGI’s, perfect economic logic of nowadays oilmen and, executives and politicians. Pump more oil in order to keep pumping oil, pump some more to keep houses standing and roads open, fossil emissions will raise temperatures even further, ramp up oil production and keep going to 5 degrees warming, and pumop more to 10 degrees warming and then checkout what’s left of our civilization

The Permafrost Refrigerator is a thought experiment by a 1500 pound goat, not a swedish philospher, though it sounds more real than the paperclip maximizer

George vs Harbinger

rather, georgism vs harbinger tax, that latter, read in Radical Markets, struck as market nerdy (name your own price and pay taxes on it, but not too low or you’ll risk being bought out of your home) in principle has some advantages, encted in a world of great financial disparity, recurrent real estates bubbles, what can possibly go wrong ?

Why I thought about Harbinger ? I read Vitalik here on Bulldozers and Vetocracies, while I am not convinced this dimension he introduces is profound, fundamental and close to the basic mechanism, I got intrigued by his preference for Harbinger Tax and Quadratic Voting. QV was in Radical Markets but I have much recollections, it markets nerdy, introduces prices ion political decisions and the same doubts apply.

While we are not talking the same thing, lottery seems better solution to get out of dysfunctional prestige and charisma politics which attracts the wrong people. But then, quadratic voting would apply also fo lottery politicians, so better have a second look

Anarchy and Democracy

for no particular reason, a Google Ngram Viewer with etherogeneous terms

actually there is a reason, I am reading David Graber “There Never Was a West” and a few quotes:

“The word “democracy” has meant any number of different things over the course of its history. When first coined, it referred to a system in which the citizens of a community made decisions by equal vote in a collective assembly. For most of its history, it referred to political disorder, rioting, lynching, and factional violence (in fact, the word had much the same associations as “anarchy” does today).”

and the thing is, once people started thinking about making without kings they found inspiration in Athen’s democracy, notwithstanding that Athen is a “a militaristic, slave-owning society founded on the systematic repression of women” and rather there could be other living example of people participating in taking political decisions.

So democracy is a way of organizing human relationships toward governamce, or simplay a manner of state government ? And it is difficult to be critical of democracy becuase the terms is popular and appeals to everybody. And Graebebr says a propos of the anti-globalization movement he took part in, “The problem is what to call it. Many of the key principles of the movement (self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the refusal of state power) derive from the anarchist tradition. Still, many who embrace these ideas are reluctant, or flat-out refuse, to call themselves “anarchists.” Similarly with democracy. My own approach has normally been to openly embrace both terms, to argue, in fact, that anarchism and democracy are—or should be—largely identical”

Anyway I go back to reading, the piece is farily long and I am stuck to the second page, go read it yourself

Fascismo Fossile e Nuovo Negazionismo

Clima politco, o politica del clima a partire da 2 screenshot. Prove di fascismo fossile, definizione di fascismo fossile per Malm è derivativa, la convergenza di interessi dell’economia fossile ed estrema destra. Le dichiarazioni di Scaroni quanto appellano all’estrema destra italiana? Almeno paternalismo. (da articolo ilfoglio su intervento Scaroni ad Atreju, dicembre 2021)

Anche il ministro CIngolani si mostra paternalista, ma peggio un negazionista raffinato, di nuova generazione. La colpa del riscaldamento globale è colpa dei ragazzi che abusano dei social ? Nice try, dati sbagliati e negazionismo di nova generazione, invece di negare il cambiamento climatico, si cerca di addebitarlo ai comportamenti individuali, schermando gli interessi economici. Good boy Cingolani, effendi Scaroni sarà compiaciuto. Grazie Michael E Mann per raccontarci le tecnioche di disinformazione del capitale fossile in Climate Wars

Competitive Compatibility, AKA comcom (nee “Adversarial Interoperability”)

I note the new name here, it does not sticks in my mind, I am not sure how much it is really used, change announced by Cory Doctorow here https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/09/skrota-skolplattformen/ it is somehow milder, competitive vs adversarial, milder in e neoliberal sense, markets are competitive, feudal lords are adversarial but still, the feudal lord metaphor would probably be more apt

reading december 2, 2021

St.Andrewism on Maslow, the pyramid which was not a pyramid, and the Siksika (Blackfoot) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRzejkbeH5s taken from this medium post https://gatherfor.medium.com/maslow-got-it-wrong-ae45d6217a8c

minute 8:00 of Graeber-Thiel debate “Where Did the Future Go?” David Graeber gives a perfect defintion of what acdemia would need to foster creativity again: give money to creative intellectuals instead of trapping them in competition, publish or perish and stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF0cz9OmCGw&t=1s

Now Progress Studies, Collison and Cowen, it started a couple of days back from the this 3d on ethics of Progress Studies, Collison offers they are catholic small c (universal maybe) start here https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1464689069401780226

today I was reading this post from Applied Divinity Studies which introduced Stubborn Attachement, the book by Tyler Cowen, which I read but can’t remember much. Here the post https://applieddivinitystudies.com/exegesis/ he also wrote the Moral Foundation of Progress, to read https://applieddivinitystudies.com/moral-progress/

CERN for Climate Science

current models resolution too coarse, 100km boxes make impossbile to model clouds and essentially climate swing in mid latitudes, we really do not how to estimate the effects of warming arctic and reduced temperature gradient bewteen the arctic and the equator

CERN for climate, the idea must be her, Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist. Editorial on SCIAM https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seeking-certainty-on-climate-change-how-much-is-enough/

paper by climatologist Tim Palmer https://www.pnas.org/content/116/49/24390#boxed-text-1

Worth following, makes a lot of sense and would be a great tech challenge, climate models with 1 km resolutions

“current global climate models can’t represent cloud systems using the laws of physics because the grid spacing is too coarse (a hundred kilometers or more)” (..) “Because of the simplified representations of clouds, (current climate models tend to systematically misplace the principal regions in the tropics, known as the intertropical convergence zones, where rainfall occurs. Iin midlatitudes, the models underestimate the number of long-lived high-pressure systems known as anticyclones, which are associated with heat waves, forest fires and drought. All of these errors are typically at least as large as the climate-change signals the models attempt to simulate.” (..)

“The consequence of our inability to model essential climate processes very accurately is that we cannot correctly simulate extreme weather and climate events. The horrendous weather events of 2021—the near-50-degree-Celsius heat in British Columbia and the devastating flooding in the Eifel region in Germany, China’s province of Henan and New York City—are completely outside the range of what current-generation climate models can simulate.”

On the cahllenge of managing the growing trove of climate data https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-data-deluge-has-scientists-scrambling-for-solutions-11638720016

“Satellites are key to the story. As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch.”