Context: Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? The brilliant systems (i.e. organisational, operational) theorist Russ Ackoff once framed an uncannily similar issue along the lines that our organisational systems are in general exquisitely well-structured to continue producing precisely the wrong kind of thing. We might constructively decompose the problem into one not dissimilar […]
Transcending Disinformation
It is not only a question as of how best to engage the persistence of disinformation so much as it is of how the Global (as much as political or strategic) information-processing and media system has come in many ways to functionally depend upon the wilful inaccuracy of proliferating falsehoods. Qualifying the previous statement: there […]
Context: https://youtu.be/2Uj1A9AguFs Vertical motion in this chart is a measure of the degree to which any of the organisations or entities recursively and reflexively facilitates global information system self-replication. This is precisely how complex information-processing systems function: they autonomously self-select for those components, entities and sub-systems that optimally bias for the replication of the overall […]
Love Letter to an Unknown Other
An obsession with material beauty is in many ways the natural consequence of an embodied psychological experience implicitly oriented by evolutionary momentum towards the possibility of self-reproduction. In this sense we should not be surprised that the most prevalent symbolic and overt (or corollary hidden, unconscious) forces in this all too human world are intrinsically […]
It remains an unrelenting mystery and enigmatic fact that this world of ours is exquisitely well-tuned for producing precisely the wrong kind of complexity. This is to say that the technological and geopolitical trajectory that humanity on the whole feels compelled to create, reproduce or cultivate is quite clearly one of least optimal solutions of […]
On Paradoxical Love
What would you do if you discovered that the only reason you even existed was to bring compassion, love and happiness or even the possibility of hope and light or learning and wisdom into the life of a truly beautiful, fascinating, sensitive and brilliant human being that you were almost certain to never meet? We […]
Is the Cosmos intelligent?
Context: Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? It is a concept on the higher end of a modified Kardashev scale that sufficiently advanced technological intelligence may be indistinguishable from nature itself; effectively – a parallel of the conjecture (in the article linked above) that “life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear […]
Infinity Contains Itself
Context: Mind-Bending Study Suggests Time Did Actually Exist Before The Big Bang Cosmological beginnings. At least one (endless) beauty of compression to infinite density at singularity is that infinity is able to contain itself, in fact – infinitely many times. Holding back on the cognitive entropy bomb that this mathematical peculiarity represents, consider that one […]
Oh yes, this world is a mess
Science and technology cartwheel and careen past us in ways that few can convincingly argue are fully comprehended, defined or ever anything more than superficially controlled. This accelerating turbulence of complex sociotechnical recursion and self-validating necessity is a self-propagating compression wave of information, energy, technology and concepts. It ripples and oscillates like waves on a […]
Bookstore
On yesterday’s visit to garner some domestic logistics I found myself drawn, as is quite natural for me, to a local bookstore. Rapidly yet calmly and with apposite politeness I navigated my way to the psychology and philosophy section, just next to popular science and astronomy. I tend to treat the pages of these books […]
Self-driving cars with one eye closed?
Context: Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Full-Self Driving Beta V9.0 Is Almost Ready (They are dropping the radar.) A thought that comes to mind is that of an ML system that having been trained with some static n number of streaming (sensory) data points/observations, having had the system narrow focus on less data might brute-force an […]
On Influencing Others
Context: Influencing the mind of an adversary It really makes me wonder what the future (or present) utility of statistical approaches combining neurobiological feedback orchestrated or forecasted through and as machine learning might be. The commercial extraction of utility through social media via algorithmic abbreviation and influence is clearly just such a practice. These brains […]