trivia

Talent by Cowen

Tyler Cowen wrote a book on talent

here he says their idea of talent is heideggerian “Nervous energy and obsessiveness are markers of talent, for Cowen and Gross; for Heidegger, we might say, they are signs of anxiety in the ontological sense. Those who know their ownmost nothingness are likely to react by leaping towards their ownmost sense of possibility at every turn. Those who do not know the sting of death are happier to be complacent, just steering along, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich.”

I stumble upon a Joel Mokyr interview where he says economic growth is led by the 2%, the 3% “

You said the question was controversial, so will my answer be, but I don’t care. Here is the point. Economic growth and economic progress is not driven by the masses. It is not driven by the population at large. It is driven by a small minority of people who economists refer to in their funny language as upper-tail people, meaning if you think of the world following some kind of bell-shaped or normal distribution, it’s the elite, it’s the people who are educated—not necessarily intellectuals. They could be engineers, they could be mechanics, they could be applied mathematicians.

…I don’t care if 95 percent of people are not willing to question traditional knowledge, or anything like that. I care about the other 5 percent.

Sounds like the people Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross talk about in Talent. Sounds like Elon. I could have excerpted other parts of the transcript. Strongly recommended.

the ITW https://www.city-journal.org/the-future-economy-with-joel-mokyr?utm_source=substack&wallit_nosession=1

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Marshall Sahlins on economists

this bit from Anarchy, in a manner of speaking told by Graeber: “I’m a student of Marshall Sahlins, so I was trained to see unlimited desire as a theological illusion. Marshall always insisted the trouble with what we have come to call Western civilization is that it was founded on a false idea of human nature that traces back to the Sophists perhaps, through the Christian fathers’ conception of original sin, to liberal economists’ conception of utility.”

Anthropology and CIA

James C. Scott worked for the CIA ? This should mmake that credible https://twitter.com/AntonJaegermm/status/1492977200785670146

here they claim he actually did https://twitter.com/alp1111112/status/1492869548596506626

here another Scott interview where he says he did it unknowingly, he was tricked into it https://twitter.com/JacobKripp/status/1492952106864717833

on Reddit, CIA recruiting oand exxploiting anthropologists was(is the norm https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/srqhxs/anarchist_sociologist_james_c_scott_admitted_to/

Project Camelot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot

Minerva Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerva_Initiative

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

Sunday reading 21 11 2021

Antropology, Anarchism by Graeber, mailing list on the Dawn of Everything, and I am on “beyond the Monastic Self” where Graeber talks about the 7-second conscience span and send the reader to Maurice Bloch for more neurological basis to this. SO it’s the paragrpah “A theory of Mind” on chapter 7 of Bloch’s book “In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social” – Fake belef task experiment

7 seconds consciousness, Graeber quotes geographer Nigel Thrift, who quotes philosopher Mervin Donald

Looking for sources in Google I found this https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2021/2/niab011/6224347 “Decades of timing research supports a “minimally sufficient” duration for time consciousness somewhere in the seconds’ range (Fraisse 1984; Pöppel 1989, 1997; Varela 1999; Wittmann 2011; Kent 2019), but most theories and methodologies in consciousness science only focus on the hundreds-of-milliseconds’ range (Northoff and Lamme 2020)” but I do not know this is the same thing Graebr mentions

UPDATE June 2022: reading one book review on Astral Codex Ten, precisely a book on consciousness, there is something at the end of the review which points to something similiar to Graeber’s 7 seconds of consciousness

Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain

“I think this is precisely where our concept of “my mind” comes from. Remember that our episodic memory might be exclusively formed from conscious moments, and also implicit learning gets a strong boost from consciousness. So when “we” (our brain, or the actors in the Cartesian theater) learn a “mind schema”, then this is based on the conscious moments, not on the activities in between. On this basis, it makes sense to merge all our neural activity into a single unit, which we call “I” or “my mind”. Just as we form the concept of “my body”, but even stronger, since we never “observe” different parts of our mind to be incoherent or even independent.”

Clima Politico

invece del #clima faccio un post di pubblica utilità sul #climaPolitico, segnatevi queste cose, la politica dell’emergenza climatica si giocherà tra Fascisti Fossili, Leninisti Ecologici e Prezzatori di Carbonio

Fascismo fossile? ce n’è ancora poco ma crescerà, non vi dico dove travarlo, lui troverà voi

Al centro chi crede nel libero mercato vuole il carbon pricing, i marketplace per il permessi di emettere, perchè il price signal porterà l’equilibrio. IMF e consenso di Washington

dall’altra parte invece si pensa ci sia bisogno di politiche industriali, quelli del GREEN New DEal vogliono rifare la mobilitazione della second guerra mondiale, invece i il Green Leninism preferisce guardare al Lenin nel 1919.-21, quello di potere dei soviet e elettrificazione

Però si può anche parlare di Carbofascismo e pensare che la soluzione sia una Armata Verde a-la-Troztky come dice Mark Alizart

insomma, c’è da risolvere il clima, ma il clima politico è tutto un throwback al secolo scorso

Zuck and the bicameral mind

So Zuckerberg rebrands himself to Meta

This is because he wants to build the Metaverse

Where did he get the Metaverse from ?

Neal Stephenson cyberpunk classic “Snowcrash”

in Snowcrash the internet is actually a road and is called the metaverse

In Snowcrash there is also the sumerain goddess enki and the bicameral mind

I say no more, read it, I don’t wanna spoil it for you

The bicameral mind was inspired to Neal by Julian Jaynes, an american psychologist

today it is still an amazing book, go read it

and be aware, Homer does not exist, I hope it is not a Santa Claus type of trauma for you

and BTW, does Zuck knows about all this ?