IPCC vs MftF

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vs the Ministry for the Future

Heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles alarm climate scientists

The Guardian, Mar 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/20/heatwaves-at-both-of-earth-poles-alarm-climate-scientists

Antarctic areas reach 40C (104F) above normal at same time as north pole regions hit 30C (86F) above usual levels.

At this time of year, the Antarctic should be rapidly cooling after its summer, and the Arctic only slowly emerging from its winter, as days lengthen. For both poles to show such heating at once is unprecedented.

Scientists warned that the events unfolding were “historic”, “unprecedented” and “dramatic”.

They also said that extreme events like these are exceeding model projections, which is another way of saying that according to our current models, the planet is behaving like it's about 2030 already. 

When the scientists who study this stuff for a living start getting worried because their models aren't even strong enough to capture how fast things are happening, that's when you take note.

COP26: Document Leak Reveals Nations Lobbying to Change Key Climate Report

BBC, Oct 2021

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58982445

Last year, we got a meta-glimpse of how science really works at the highest levels of global coordination, when a leak of an IPCC draft showed us which parts of the scientific consensus were removed for the final report. 

• Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Australia, India, Japan, Norway, and OPEC demanded insistence on rapid reduction in fossil fuel be removed from the report.
• Australia lobbied against the elimination of coal-fired plants, and also lobbied against the mention of lobbying in the report. (Go figure.)
• Just about everyone said carbon capture isn't real, and scientists should "do their research" (just kidding about the quote, but that's basically what they said).
• Saudi Arabia said “accelerated mitigation” is a bad idea, and a bad word, and it shouldn't be in the report. 
• Brazil and Argentina want meat-based diets, and they don't want the report to ask people to not eat meat, even if it might help save the planet.
• Switzerland doesn't want the rich people to have to finance the poor people to "meet their emissions", which is another way of saying stop using fossil fuel. 
• India, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic want scientists to say nuclear power is good. 

In the end, the report we got from the IPCC was very much modified from the original scientific consensus. And it didn't contain the words “accelerated mitigation” at all.

Here's another part that was removed -- 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018 [the guardian]

And with that, I remind folks, for those who have read Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020), of Crash Day, the day the war for the Earth began, by mysteriously crashing roughly 10% of all flights in the air, at the same time; people stopped flying in regular airplanes from that day on. For those who haven't read it, read it.

Oh, and what happens next? The majority of the world's meat is intentionally infected with Mad Cow, which stops people from eating meat. Problem solved?

Image credit: Not the Ministry for the Future (MftF) but the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), a nuclear fusion machine from the 1980's that never actually ran. [link]

Exposure Science

Fox News hosts have measurable effect on COVID cases, study finds

Apr 2020, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/fox-news-hosts-have-measurable-effect-on-covid-cases-study-finds/

The study comes from a group of researchers led by the University of Chicago's Leonardo Bursztyn and uses survey data gathered in April from 1,045 regular viewers of Fox News (aged 55 and over) to examine the timing of behavioral changes in response to the virus—when people began to cancel travel, isolate, increase the frequency of hand-washing, and so on.

Survey participants who preferred watching the alarmed newscaster began changing their behavior on average three days earlier than other Fox News viewers. Meanwhile, participants who preferred the more languid newscaster acted much later — five days after other Fox News viewers, and eight days after alarmed viewers.

I think the key word here is "alarm"?

And the above unrelated image is not a tree being struck by lightning, it's a synthetic light painting.

 

The Age of Approximation

New map reveals distrust in health expertise is winning hearts and minds online
May 2020, phys.org

Communities on Facebook that distrust establishment health guidance are more effective than government health agencies and other reliable health groups at reaching and engaging "undecided" individuals, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. 

Distrust in establishment health guidance could spread and dominate online conversations over the next decade, potentially jeopardizing public health efforts to protect populations from COVID-19 and future pandemics through vaccinations. [link]

Medical science is an interesting subset upon which to study the dynamics of memetics. Ludwig Fleck used medical science to study his idea of the "evolution of a scientific fact" using the history of syphilis. He showed how the ideas that characterize syphilis (the syphilis meme) evolve via the sharing of experimental data between scientists.

Unlike some other sciences, medical science has a specific purpose -- to releive suffereing, or something to that effect. It can be measured, in controlled experiments, by the amount of people who are sick or well. If it works, or in another way of saying it -- if it's true -- then people get well. In a twist on the Feynman Psalm, you can't say that you understand syphilis until you can cure someone of it.

Let's shift from syphilis to vaccines. If we know how vaccines work, why, and not only if but how much of a positive health outcome we can get from them, then it should be safe to say that our understanding is the truth. And yet, as with many public health interventions, it is difficult to get people to believe this truth.

But this is something that Fleck also discussed in his meta-scientific discourse. He described two networks among which ideas are shared. One is a network of scientists, the esoteric network. This is where syphilis, or vaccines, are really studied, observed, worked with and thought about. The other network is the exoteric, the laypeople, the public. Scientists and the public.

Within either of these networks, the evolution of a scientific fact, as Fleck describes it, starts with an initial anomalous, ambiguous observation. This first idea, formless, spreads through the network with minimal restrictions, recombining with other facts from other disciplines and theories, in a prodigiously creative affair.

Over time, as the idea of syphilis begins to take shape, the network splits in two; all the rampant theories self-organize by their correlated characteristics and relative fitness, until there are two.* At this point the debate becomes ultimately controversial, and the scientists break sharply into their opposing sides. Eventually, one wins, and sets the final limits, or rules, on how we can think about syphilis, what it really is, does, and how to make people better if they suffer from it, and in the most effective way possible.
*In this case, fitness is "making people well".

The lesson we get from the current anti-vaccination network, circa the year 2019, is that science has to go through one more transformation to really be considered the truth. It needs to traverse the public network of laypeople, and self-organize within --their-- epistemological constructs, --their-- ideas of what things are.

A stark contrast, the exoteric network of the general population has a wild conflagration of code in its operation. This lets the network expand into all kinds of experimental dimensions as it searches for the best fit. Consider, the group of global scientists, large as it may be, is nothing compared to the overall population.

Yet, the popular exoteric network needs to self-organize. The more people, the more iterations it may invoke before it finds a fit that satisfies all the people in it. (Note that we're talking here about the idea being satisfied within your belief structure, not whether the idea is medically effective or not, because in the public sphere, that's not good enough.)

The meme takes shape when the network bifurcates, or polarizes. It trims the innumerable variety of personal theories, forcing or constraining the conversation. Those with outlying views, the undecided referenced above, get picked-off, drawn to one side or the other, and until there is only one.

What we're seeing firsthand is the exoteric vaccine-memetic-network crystallize and organize itself, through the data that comes from digitally mediated social transmission (ie Facebook posts). This new spread of misinformation is a growth spurt, if you will, in the evolution of the exoteric network.

A larger pattern being described here is that because the pool of people in the general population, through which this idea has to travel, keeps getting bigger, and keeps changing people, the truth is never really achieved, as it is a moving target. This comes to the same conclusion as Fleck, and the one that has most people flummoxed about it, which is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Big data begets the age of approximation.

Study Data:
100 million Facebook users in vaccine community networks during the 2019 measles outbreak.

Post Script:
What is not mentioned in the summary article referenced at the outset, is how many of these users were known or suspected to be socialbots or composite intelligentities, vs real people. And therefore, we don't see the effect of non-human interference, ie socialbots programmed to amplify an idea, "artificially". I think we can just call it deception, and say that people have been doing it forever. Yet, we should keep in mind their effects, as they're only bound to increase.

Notes:
The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact - A Review

Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland)
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

I'm sure lots of things were said, since this work did reach a crescendo in the 60's - 70's along with Kuhn's Revolutions. Nonetheless, that was almost 50 years ago, and so many passages of this text conjure visions of contemporary phenomena.

I'll start with a basic overview, then a glimpse at a critical component of his theory called the Thought Collective, and some technical and editorial details. Successive posts will present a kind of functional analysis, and a good look at how Fleck's theory manifests in sociological phenomena like the Greta Garbo effect and of course, perennial favorite at Network Address, viral memetics.

But first...

On the Development of Syphilis as an Idea
This entire book is about Fleck following the "facts" of Syphilis as they evolved, starting with the most fanciful explanations, sometimes outright astrological, and ending with a test for the disease that couldn't have been developed without massive changes in the collective understanding of how the disease works in the body.

"Theoretical and practical elements, the a priori and the purely empirical, mingled with one another according to the rules not of logic but of psychology." (p5) (!!) 

If you are familiar with Kuhn's Revolutions, then you have an idea of what Fleck is talking about. Kuhn "serendipitously" found this book, which he later credited for much of his thinking. This book got no mention beyond its initial and limited reviews in the 1930's, and wasn't discovered until the 1960's, and by Kuhn, who sent it (and Fleck's idea of thought collectives) into the general public by the 70's.

-image source: Michael K Richardson 1998 embryo drawings 

The Life Cycle of a Fact

Fleck has provided a theory of knowledge whereby tentative pre-ideas can develop into scientific facts by means of a  process of collectivization. Fleck analyzes the development of syphilis from the Middle Ages to the Wasserman Reaction in the early 20th century. The fact has a life-cycle:

1. Vague visual perception and inadequate initial observation.
2. An irrational, concept-forming and style-converting state of experience.
3. Developed, reproducible and stylized visual perception of form. (p94)

Notes On Translation

• Thought Style - (from the German Denkstil, this word invented by Karl Manheim 1925)
• Thought Collective - (from German Denkkollektiv, and much consternation over the choice of collective vs community and their difference in meaning, especially at that time in history, i.e., Communism) 

Fleck describes or makes the exception for certain people who have a strong personal thought style, within themselves, he participates in several thought collectives, a "marginal man"

Fleck mentions the words collective imagination and thought collective but never the word Noosphere. ~p83

"Thought style is the readiness for directed perception." (p143 and elsewhere)

Science itself is a specialized thought style: "Good work done according to style, instantly awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the reader." (p145)

-image source: George Romane 1892 embryo drawings attr to Ernst Haeckel

Notes On the Thought Collective

"The conceptual creations of science, like other works of the mind, become acccepted as fact through a complex process of social consolidation." (Trenn, preface, p xiii)

"Without social conditioning no cognition is even possible." (p43)

"Knowledge exists in the collective, and it is always being revised." (p95)

In other words: Knowledge is a social creation. 

Thinking is a social activity. It does not exist apart from the thought collective that guides it. The way a thought collective thinks is called a thought style, and these are its features:

• related to problems of interest to a thought collective
• evolved by what the thought collective considers evident
• tested by methods which the thought collective applies as a means of cognition (p99)

"Thought style is the readiness for directed perception." (p143 and elsewhere)

Science itself is a specialized thought style: "Good work done according to style, instantly awakens a corresponding mood of solidarity in the reader." (p145)

Thought collectives are referred to as a "harmony of illusions" (ch2 sec3) which sound a lot like filter bubbles or echo chambers.

Post Script - The Duck Rabbit Illusion

When looking at the Duck/Rabbit, we see the duck or the rabbit, but not the lines on the page ... the lines are not the facts that make the duck or the rabbit. (Kuhn, Foreword)

Error, Objectivity, and Collective Psychology as Professional Habit

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, Hans Van Meegeren forging Johannes Vermeer, 1942

Greta Garbo, circa 1942

Let's start with these pictures above, and a quick story about the greatest forgery in history. One picture is Greta Garbo, one of the most well-known stars of classic cinema, circa 1930's. You could also refer to her as one of the most publicized women in the world at that time. Also, look at her eye makeup.

The other picture is a forgery of a Vermeer painting. The painting never existed, so it's not just a fake copy; it's totally made-up. The guy who made it up was Hans van Meegeren. He fooled the entire art world with this painting. Everybody, experts, everybody.

I'm an art history major, I recognize that. But you don't have to be; look at that painting -- look at Jesus. Look at those eyes. Chiaroscuro like a mf. And now look at Greta Garbo. Look at her eyes.

You don't have to be an expert to see this. At the dawn of celebrity culture, she was recognized by the world over, and so was her makeup. That was how people looked at that time. It was all around you. You didn't think about it because you were in it, immersed, consumed. Van Meegeren was immersed in it, and so were the art historians and critics who validated his painting as a lost masterpiece of Vermeer.

Why is it so easy for you and I to see this as a total sham? Because we don't live in 1930. We don't live in a world where Greta Garbo is really popular, and where everyone's eye makeup looks like  that. We therefore notice the uncanny similarity.

Today, we know this painting is a forgery. It took a long time, first to figure it out, then to finally admit it. But now it's pretty damn obvious. And the greatest forgery in history should leave you wondering how this is even possible, that so many people could be so blind... . I can't say it better than this guy:

“There is one time-related art historical principle that VanMeegeren could not account for or combat – namely, the fact that works of art often bear the stamp, the characteristics of their own era. [Because of these tendencies for contemporary features to creep into forgeries] the style of VanMeegeren’s paintings is like that of Vermeer only superficially. The important resemblances to such Symbolist artists as Toorop are much more important. Characteristics that mark an era may be those that are most universally appreciated at that time. They seem also to be the qualities that become “dated” most quickly. The generation for which these qualities are in fashion tends to be blind to them, but to the next generation they may become painfully evident. This is certainly true of the VanMeegerens. What was lauded in the 1930’s looks superficial and thin in the 1980’s. No doubt we are as blind to the telltale appearance of our own taste and fashions in contemporary forgeries.” (p2)

-1. Rudolph Arnheim, “On Duplication”, pp232-245
-2. Hope B. Werness, “Han VanMeegeren fecit” pp1-57
in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art
Denis Dutton, ed.
Berkeley, 1983

***

Consider this phenomena -- it is possible, and perhaps common or even expected, that we are blind to things that are actually all around us. Such that the more prevalent something is, the more blind we would be to it. This is true in art, but also in science. And this is where we come back to Ludwig Fleck, as he explores the process by which knowledge is created.

Comparing visual descriptions of bacteria cultures from different scientists, author Ludwig Fleck outlines the development of the idea of Streptococci, and of epidemiology in general:

1. The material offering itself by accident (hmmm, what's this?).
2. The psychological mood determining the direction of the investigation (well that is some crazy sh**!).
3. The associations motivated by collective psychology, that is, professional habits (Tim from accounting says this sounds like some crazy sh**).
4. The irreproducible "initial" observation, which cannot be clearly seen in retrospect (what the heck, why can't I do that again?).
5. The slow and laboring revelation and awareness of "what one actually sees" or the gaining of experience (ahhh, now I see...).
6. That what has been revealed and concisely summarized in a scientific statement is an artificial structure, related but only genetically so, both to the original intention and to the substance of the "first" observation need not even belong to the same class as that of the facts it led toward (p89)

In other words, what you discover isn't a resolution to your initial anomalous observation, but in the process, you discover something useful nonetheless.

***

Again, using comparative descriptions of an organism in a petri dish by different scientists, Fleck enumerates the errors in the description:

1. Assumptions are already incorporated within the choice and limitation of the object of investigation.
2. It is altogether pointless to speak of all the characteristics of a structure. ... and it depends on the habits of thought of the given scientific discipline.

He concludes that observation without assumption is impossible.

But he does focus on two types observation apparently worth investigating:
1. The vague initial visual perception.
2. The developed direct visual perception of a form (which requires being experienced in the relevant field of thought, yet at the same time we lose the ability to see something that contradicts the form). (p91-92)

So there is something about the curse of wisdom that inhibits us from seeing things that don't fit into our schema, even if and especially if they are new things, new observations that might even contradict our theory.

***

Before we leave this, I have to relate it to a moment in Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's a book but also a film by PBS. The book talks about seemingly small facts, such as the difference in protein per gram for rice vs wheat, or the difference in the predominance of a land mass to be east-west vs north-south, or the distribution of medium-sized domesticable animals throughout the regions of the world. These things make the Fertile Crescent, and then Western Europe, and the Americas, to be the top of the global food chain. It's not because they're better or smarter; it's because of initial conditions that snowball over time to put one place on a wildly different trajectory compared to others.

Kind of unrelated to this thesis, there is a moment in the film where the indigenous people of the New World see Christopher Columbus's ships approaching on the horizon. Only they don't actually see them. They have never seen a ship, not like this, and so they actually can't see it. A shaman among them is the only one who can see it, because that's what shamans do (and that's what artists do), they see things that barely even exist yet, and prepare their people. The shaman tells the people what it is, and all of the sudden they can see it.

This moment is similar to the one Fleck describes above, the process of acquiring knowledge, the genesis and development of a fact.

And let's end with a quote that's hard to resist in this context:

"In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature." (p35)

Notes:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

On Hindsight and Blindness
Network Address, 2012
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/12/on-hindsight-and-blindness.html

Ludwig Fleck on Stigler's Law of Eponymy

Things are not named after the person who discovers them, such as Halley's comet, which people knew about way before Halley. Stigler's Law says that.

Stigler credits sociologist Robert K. Merton with discovery of his law, btw. And Merton was a predecessor of Kuhn, who was inspired by Fleck.

Fleck was a bit ahead of his time (1930's). He was talking about Stigler's Law of Eponymy before it was even named (1980).

Fleck, in his book Genesis, has an idea that scientific facts are not eternal. Instead, they are alive. They are born, and live and die, and they originate from and co-evolve with the collective noosphere of humanity. He does not use the term noosphere, but he does say this:

"It was the prevailing social attitude that created the more concentrated thought collective which through continuous cooperation and mutual interaction among the members, achieved the collective experience and the perfection of the [Wasserman Reaction discovery] in communal anonymity." 

("Communal Anonymity!") 

"Many workers carried out these experiments almost simultaneously, but the actual authorship is due to the collective, the practice of cooperation and teamwork." (p78)
The first experiments by Wasserman are irreproducible. 

"But all really valuable experiments are like this -- "uncertain, incomplete, and unique." (p85) 

"And when experiments become certain, precise, and reproducible at any time, they no longer are necessary for research purposes proper, but function only for demonstration and ad hoc determinations." 

"If a research experiment were well defined, it would be altogether unnecessary to perform it." (p86)

***

Fleck understood that Scientists are a collective entity, where individuals do not functionally exist. Authorship is an illusion (hence my reference to the paradoxical Stigler's Law).

And Fleck understood that although Science is made of rock-solid theories based on empirical evidence, it is the vague, the ambiguous and the strange that guide Science in new directions, so that it can co-evolve with our own ability to use it.

Image source: link

Notes:
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

Post Script:
A real-fake book about eponymy written by an author with no name FTW!
Network Address, 2013
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-real-fake-book-about-eponymy-written.html

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives

"The more developed and detailed a branch of knowledge becomes, the smaller are the differences in opnion." (Fleck, p83)

Ludwig Fleck observed this feature of network phenomena 80 years ago. He made many similar observations and even outlined a basic network theory, although he certainly called it nothing of the sort.

Network theory did exist before the internet, and as far back as Fleck, in fields such as electronics and biology (although it was likely called graph theory at the time). But it was the linking of webpages and eventually the linking of people that made it so ubiquitous a phenomena in our world of today.

A book called Linked comes out in 2002, right at the same time as Friendster. By that summer, everyone knew the difference between "links" and "nodes" (although Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon circa late 1990's already gave people a very simple and accessible understanding of the idea.)

By the year 2016, the world would come to grips with the more nuanced (and insidious) features of the social network and digitally-mediated socialization in general, i.e., polarization, filter bubbles, echo chambers, etc.

Fleck explored the formation of a scientific fact. He studied the development of the idea of Syphilis, and found that over time, as the facts became clear and the idea crystallized, divergent views became less and less, concentrating on a unified theory.

He describes in great detail the way an idea developed from a vague ambiguity to a crystal clear and consensual episteme. For one, he turns to the use of "slogans", referring to the terms used in science such as "Deep Learning", or "Microbiome", and says that they have magical power:

"Whenever such a term [a slogan] is found in a scientific text, it is not examined logically, but immediately makes either enemies or friends." (p43)

Enemies and friends are polar opposites. So one of the ways in which the theory finds its unification, is by using a means to quickly send scientific texts into one of two directions, or into one of two piles, thereby organizing all the facts. Fleck's slogans are like codes embedded into a text to quickly determine which pile it should be thrown into. Eventually, one of those piles will be the winner.

You may recognize Fleck's "slogans" in their contemporary versions, such as metadata hashtags and coded dogwhistles. These keywords and codewords signal to people which side the idea* is on, and are used as a shorthand to identify text as immediately good or bad, but nowhere in between. It should be noted here that Fleck didn't give humans free will in his networks; they do not "examine logically", but instead follow the algorithm embedded in the network. 

*I would love to call the author/idea a meme, but the word has lost its 1970's meaning in light of 21st century memetic engineering affronts, especially by coordinated inauthentic entities.

By this initial identification, the process of polarization is amplified and reinforced, and we end up with the echo chambers and filter bubbles that define socialization and the propagation of information in our contemporary society.

Later, Fleck goes way deeper into the dynamics of information propagation, describing in detail the way thoughts move throughout the scientific body, the noosphere of science, the "thought collective" as he called it.

Image source: Lund University Sweden, Faculty of Engineering, Course in Network Dynamics. 

Network Dynamics

"New junctions [of trains of thought] are produced time and again and the old ones displace one another. This network in continuous fluctuation is called reality or truth." (p79) 

"It is as if with the increase of the number of junction points, free space were reduced. It is as if more resistance were generated, and the free unfolding of ideas were restricted." (p83-84)

Fleck describes the facts about Syphilis as they move throughout the network. He calls this network the thought collective, and describes its purpose as a means of constraining, inhibiting and determining the way of thinking.

But I have to argue, do we say that the blood vessels constrain or inhibit the flow of blood? Differing from Fleck, I would say the thought collective is the network. It is the exchange of ideas. It doesn't inhibit, it facilitates. (~p159)

What inhibits is the spatial boundaries, which can also be thought of as the number of dimensions in the network. The facts (about Syphilis for example) are points within a space which we could call "Syphilis", but which may be called more generally the noosphere, to choose a term. Thoughts evolve and replicate their positions as they advance towards the truth (about the disease), all the while reconfiguring the network in noospheric space (Syphilis space).

The restrictions are set by the society's ability to handle the truth. As the truth becomes ever-faceted, and more complex, so does the network. The network does have limitations; so does our circulatory system in delivering blood to cells (a network bound by the three dimensions of the body), the highway system for delivering things and people (two dimensions). So the thought collective is bound in its ability to deliver facts to a society, and this by n dimensions, although I can't tell you what n is. Maybe it's the number of people, maybe it's the number of epistemological units. Maybe it is simply the amount of different ideas about the same thing that a homogenous group of people can maintain at once.

At any given time, a network can only process so many facts. And yet truth is a moving target.

The only way to proceed is to force another dimension, another direction in thought. The paradigm shifts, catalyzes, and the final crystallization of the theory is formed. All of its dimensions are then flattened, and become a single point in higher dimensional space.

I cannot read Fleck's "unfolding of ideas" without seeing the unfolding of network dimensions in a fractal space; it wants to unfold and evolve, but restrictions become increasingly rigid, the rules develop sub-rules and ad infinitum, until they become airtight, and cancel any new idea that might come along.

In the same way that fractalization is a way to cram more stuff into the limits of dimensions available, the ultimate endpoint is the adding of an extra dimension entirely, or rather the collapsing of the previous dimensions, a dimension-reduction that allows more information into the same amount of space.

And what does this look like: Note the line drawings below; they are one dimensional lines, but drawn in a way that could eventually appear to fill the entire two-dimensional space to the point they might appear as a single two-dimensional object. But it only appears that way, the line instead develops more crinkles, rules and sub-rules and sub-sub rules.

1-D to 2-D

1-D to 2-D

2-D to 3-D

Still they would appear to take on the identity of a solid two-dimensional object. Your blood vessels do this in order to try and get oxygen to as many parts of your body as efficiently as possible, to fill their entire three-dimensional vessel with the least amount of space necessary. This is the same for tree branches and highways and basically anything else that carries things or communicates ideas.

Esoteric vs Exoteric
Marching on, now that we have seen how Fleck's network behaves, we can get into the details. This is the part that begins to push the edge of what we know even today about networks.

According to Fleck, esoteric and exoteric are the two types of thought collective networks, one made of experts (eso-) and one of laymen (exo-). Scientific fact permeates from the eso- to the exo- and then reverses as feedback, so the process of social consolidation creates the facts and the knowledge. The most advanced states leave no room for differences of opinion.

But how do we explain anti-vax phenomena? The concepts of disease, infection, immunity, etc, have already been fully-formed as bodies of scientific knowledge. Yet, as they traverse the larger exoteric networks of general society, they seem to come undone.

Perhaps what we are seeing is a network that is always trying to grow, and once it becomes too tight in its thought space, it needs to split in order to keep growing? Not the scientific theories of vaccines or disease, but the greater philosophical theories that allow science to be realized by the society as a whole.

Is anti-vaccination a feature or a bug of the network? And how would we know? It is certainly a threat to public health, just as syphilis once was; The global health body has declared it as such. Someone might easily say that it's a social problem, not a science problem. But if the purpose of vaccines are to get rid of infection, then they're not working regardless.

Let's take a quick look at a description about infowar and the anti-vax phenomenon:

"The [socialbot] campaign used sophisticated Twitter bots to amplify highly polarizing pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages, containing the hashtag #VaccinateUS..."
-"Weaponized Health Communication: Twitter Bots and Russian Trolls Amplify the Vaccine Debate". Broniatowski DA, Jamison AM, Qi S, AlKulaib L, Chen T, Benton A, Quinn SC, Dredze M (October 2018). American Journal of Public Health. 108 (10): 1378–84. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304567. 

Granted this is different than the pursuit of science; these particular socialbots are pursuing the opposite in fact. But this description echoes Fleck. Slogans (hashtags) categorize the messages so they can be organized (polarized) by the exoteric social network.

Socialbots, intelligentities, spread their information throughout the network not to inform but to take information away, I suppose, as to redistribute the network in Vaccine space, artificially forcing new dimensions into the debate that didn't get there from scientists, but anarchists (not sure what to call a malicious socialbot). On the receiving end, the misinformed hold a less-efficient Vaccine space in their mind. Fleck's Syphilis, on the other hand, is an esoteric network, where the senders and receivers are both scientists.

Perhaps it is the exoteric network of ordinary people, not the esoteric network of scientists, that is more susceptible to corruption in general. Speaking of corruption...

On the Expansion and Corruption of a Fact

The Sidereal Origin of Syphilis and the Development of Syphilogical Thought
-citing an Iwan Bloch in his 1901 Der Urspring der Syphilis (The Origin of Syphilis)

"Most authors assume that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter under the sign of Scorpio and the house of Mars on 25.XI.1484 was the cause of the carnal scourge. ... The sign of Scorpio which rules the genitals, explains why the genitals were the first place to be attacked by the new disease." (p2)

This discussion on the origins of syphilis is a reminder that even in the esoteric network of specialized scientists, if you go back far enough, it could seem like a misinformation campaign. But Fleck describes this for us: We move away from "everyday experience ... to scientific specialization" (p82). This is all a part of the process, even astrological explanations had their rightful position in the configuration of early Syphilis space.

But calling back to anti-vaccination, we see movement from specialization back into the everyday, and the network must struggle to fit its new topography. The harmony of illusions can no longer be sustained.

***

The anti-vax story is another step in the evolution of disease control, and Fleck's ideas provide a great substrate for understanding this.

In the case of anti-vaccination, the disease has evolved a new method for infecting people -- namely the use of socialbots, e.g., socially malignant intelligentities, to infect the population's belief system. Which is another way of saying it is attacking the exoteric network itself, without which there is no esoteric network.*

*Granted, the anti-vaccination belief system began alongside vaccines themselves, thus long before the internet.

Viruses want to reproduce. Our immune systems try to stop them, but some figure out a way around that. We discover vaccines, and that works for a while. But then the virus figures out another way; it stops the vaccines from working through the use of misinformation. It attacks the esoteric network of public information and understanding of infectious disease, for example, or of science in general.

If it is not obvious, this is a tangent from Dawkins' memetics, where he looks at evolution from the point of view of the gene -- the selfish gene that wants to reproduce. In this case, it's the selfish virus, using socialbots to increase its chances of success. It is attacking the network itself, or from its point of view, reconfiguring the network to optimize its own existence.

Is it a natural process? Are mutations natural? Is disease natural? Does it sound like I'm permissive of socially malignant intelligentities (or a good contemporary term, "coordinated inauthentic behavior")? As long as acknowledgement does not equal permission. 

But I would like to discover the error correcting codes hidden within Fleck's thought collective, that we might be able to withstand, or rather adapt to, our ever-evolving noospheric maelstrom.

Notes
Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.
Ludwig Fleck, 1935 (Switzerland).
Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton
Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn
Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn
Published by University of Chicago, 1979

Post Script
Great book by Geoffrey West, also check out the Santa Fe Institute:
Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies. Geoffrey West, 2017.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314049/scale-by-geoffrey-west/

Where it all starts:
Linked: The New Science of Networks. Albert-László Barabási, 2002.
http://barabasi.com/book/linked

Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html

Fleck describes the "marginal man" as cruscial for the exchange of ideas between different thought communities. This sounds to me like descriptions of fringe agents in network theory (the opposite of the hubs of the network), who are almost wholly responsible for intra-cluster transmission of novel ideas; see "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter, 1973; he uses the word "marginal" and "liason" in similar ways to Fleck.
American Journal of Sociology. 78 (6): 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469.

On Free Will, Decision Making and Sovereign Awareness:
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-free-will-decision-making-and.html

On Memes and Misonformation:
Securing the Noosphere
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2017/10/securing-noosphere.html

Bose-Einstein Condensate, Fitnees Models, Scale-Free Networks, Preferential Attachment, Zipf's Law, Benford's Law, Stigler's Law of Eponymy:
Laws Metaphysical
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2013/02/laws-meta-physical.html

A Bit On Networks
https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-bit-on-networks.html

First mention of an internet meme; in this case Godwin refers to the his eponymous Law of Nazi Analogies as a counter-meme against the "comparing people to Nazis" meme found too often on usernet forums:

Meme, Counter-meme, Mike Godwin for WIRED, Oct 01, 1994.
https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2/

And to take the final paragraph, because it hasn't cooled down a bit since /94:
"While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers who are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes, we can't rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every bad meme. The Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part because of its sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi? You're the Nazi in this discussion!") The best way to fight such memes is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering - crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.

Otherwise, plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose."
[The more it changes the more it's the same]

Not So Fast

Human cultural evolution found to be just as slow as biological evolution
Jan 2020, phys.org

I can't read the paper for paywall, so I'm copying Bob Yirka's review at phys.org:

To compare the rate at which human culture changes to rates of biological evolution, the researchers assigned variables to characteristics of several cultural artifacts—whether or not guitars were the major instrument in the average song, for example, or how car features such as size and power change over time, or the way references are tagged in scientific papers. Similar metrics for measuring the speed of evolutionary change have already been identified and measured by multiple scientific studies. The researchers chose to use some of the most well-known, such as the study of finches on the Galapagos Islands and moths changing color during the early industrial period in England in response to soot-covered tree bark.

The comparative analysis involved applying the Haldanes metric—it showed that human culture changed at very nearly the same pace as biological evolution. The researchers even suggest that cultural artifacts in a given society could be viewed as similar to organisms living in a given environment. Artifacts such as scientific papers, they note, when carried into society at large, either survive and become a part of the culture, or they die—just like natural selection. They acknowledge that there are instances in both cultural and biological evolution that change very quickly, such as smartphones or finch beaks, but overall, the rates come out nearly evenly.

I put this here to remind us that Kevin Kelly was saying the same thing in his 2010 book What Technology Wants, which said that Technology (as a cultural artifact) is an extension of the Tree of Life, and shares many similarities with a living organism under the pressures of natural selection.

image source: aero-mag

Notes
The pace of modern culture
Ben Lambert et al. Nature Human Behaviour (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0802-4

The Universal Flavor Network Emerges

Flavor pyramids for North American and East Asian cuisines, credit - Barabasi Labs, 2011

Global diets are converging, with benefits and problems
Jan 2020, phys.org

They found what sounds like a two-way shift between Asian and Western countries, where Asia is eating more animals and the West eating less.

This idea of the global diet reminds me of the Flavor Networks of 2011, where they took all the molecules in all the ingredients of all the recipes ever (56,498), and linked them together. You can see one of their network graphs above, and the rest in the paper.

The graph shown above is the part related to this global diet shift. You can see that Western recipes are populated by animals, bread and butter, and Eastern cuisine is likely to have more vegetables.

There is another way to look at this which includes the homogeneity of the ingredients. Western recipes rely on similar ingredients. Cows and their butter are related. Wheat, which is a grass, is eaten by cows, so it's in their meat and their butter. If these are the staple foods, and staple flavors of the West, then  it would make sense that those recipes are more closely related, like family.

For the East, there is less focus on animals and more on vegetables. Flavorwise, it's a more adversarial arrangement. Think onions and garlic and sesame oil and of course soy sauce. Note that soy sauce actually gets its strong animal-like flavor not from an animal but from the complex of fermented by-products that develop as a result of the browning reactions that occur after purposefully-inoculated molds and bacteria have digested and transformed the soy-energy for a long time.

The vegetables aren't eating each other and becoming part of each other's bodies like cows and grass. They aren't related in that way, so their flavors are different, and they have to stand out from each other.

And one step further, consider Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel idea. In it he points out that Asia has less medium-sized domesticable animals as compared to Western Europe. This matches the respective diets we're talking about. He also points out that the West had wheat and the East had rice as the staple grain. Finally, he reminds us that the East is predominantly north-south in its axis and the West (both Europe and America) are more on an east-west axis.

Who cares? Plants care. Plants in the north need a very different algorithm than plants in the south, because of the change in day length. Those plants will be different, and any culture that lives on a north-south axis, eating lots of different plants, will produce a diet like the one described above.

The side-to-side shape of the West allows all the plants to be on the same daylight schedule, and thus similar algorithms overall, similar plants, similar flavors.

It might be interesting to compare some data from global trade over the past 50 years to see how it matches with these diet changes (because we've pretty much obliterated any east-west or north-south biases of a culture).

Post Script:
Soylent Green is people mixed with soy and lentils and fed back to people.

Russian space lettuce was grown on the International Space Station for astronauts.

Notes:
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013.
James Bentham, Gitanjali M Singh, Goodarz Danaei, Rosemary Green, John K Lin, Gretchen A Stevens, Farshad Farzadfar, James E Bennett, Mariachiara Di Cesare, Alan D Dangour & Majid Ezzati. Nature Food volume 1, pages 70–75 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-019-0012-2.

Flavor network and the principles of food pairing.
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian E. Ahnert, James P. Bagrow & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Scientific Reports, published 15 December 2011. DOI: 10.1038/srep00196

FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks
Network Address, 2012

From Memetics to Metabolomics

Obesity, heart disease, and diabetes may be communicable
Jan 2020, phys.org

I learned in health school that we are living in the fourth epoch of public health, the one where chronic disease (4th) is more of a problem than infectious disease (3rd). Public health interventions are not about killing germs, but about improving your lifestyle (in addition to arming yourself with knowledge of adverse genetic predispositions and environmental exposures).

So when that idea came out that obesity is a meme that infects via your friend-vector-network, it already made sense. Mind viruses, it's the 21st century.

This sums up the mechanics:
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said..
-New York Times

But now we're swinging back in the other direction, back to the days of infectious immunological threats. Threats that come from the microbiomes of our friends and neighbors and countryfolk.

This rewrites and reverses the current underpinning theory of public health, which is that your behavior is a major cause of your own health outcomes (even if that behavior is resulting from memetic infection). This new idea is that you're being infected all right, but by the same old bacteria, fungi, viruses that caused the previous "Infectious Era" of public health.

The consistent part of all this is the social network, or network science in general, and that our hands aren't on the wheel.

Notes:
Are noncommunicable diseases communicable?
B. B Finlay et al. Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz3834

The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years.
Christakis NA, Fowler JH. N Engl J Med. 2007 Jul 26;357(4):370-9. Epub 2007 Jul 25.

This is the study about obesity being contagious; it was a social network analysis based on the Framingham Heart study, which is known as a good dataset in health science.

Transportation Network Analysis

How the road network determines traffic capacity
Nov 2019, phys.org

ETH researchers have shown that we can use the structure of urban road networks to predict their traffic capacity ... using billions of traffic measurements to reveal a set of rules that enable us to easily estimate the critical number of vehicles, and by extension, the traffic capacity of a city's road network:

• road network density (kilometers of lanes per surface area)
• redundancy of alternative routes
• frequency of traffic lights
• density of bus and tram lines

image source: Alan Stark, "Mini Stack" Interchange of Interstate 10, Loop 202, and State Route 51 at Night (2), 2012. link

Allister Loder et al. Understanding traffic capacity of urban networks, Scientific Reports (2019).
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-51539-5

Outrunning the Herd

No surprise here - children are more susceptible than adults to influence by robots, even if they're obviously not people.

I'll paraphrase - a bunch of kids were put in a room with a bunch of robots and asked to do dumb sh** that they wouldn't or shouldn't be doing. They could be influenced to do said things as long as the robots made it seem ok.

We used to call this peer pressure. Now we refer to a well-known scientific experiemnt called the Asch paradigm, and it is a standard for measuring conformity. If enough people believe something to be true, it starts to become "true," whether it's true or not. This is how society works. So this idea of succumbing to peer pressure isn't new or unknown, but the effect on kids vs adults, and that it's instigated by a  humanoid, is new, or at least a reminder of how susceptible we are to the influence of others, especially at a young age.

Our allegiance to non-humans shouldn't be too crazy to consider. In case you don't remember your childhood, or don't have kids of your own, let me remind you that for an entire decade in America, a 6-ft tall, purple fuzzy dinosaur told kids what to do. And before that, I do recall letting 16-bit video games take control of my life  for a good 5 years. Kids are not too picky about who they take authority from. If they did, puppet shows might not exist. Lacking a mature brain to generate their own purpose in life, they put a premium on the opinions, beliefs and especially the commands of others. The Bicameral Mind work of Julian Jaynes might also have something to add to this.

Next, I'm not sure how much this is related in the study-authors' work, but I have to bring up Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, because one of these dimensions (individualism vs collectivism) measures the degree of conformity to be found in a particular population. Some cultures value conformity more than others, for example by forcing everyone to have the same haircut, and so this peer pressure effect may be even more pronounced in other parts of the world. This kid-influencing robot study was conducted in the UK, where there is a wider variety of haircuts.

Let's also take a look back at how Neal Stephenson was playing with this idea more than 20 years ago in a novel about an artificially intelligent book that was designed to teach children, and obviously to influence their worldview and hence their behavior.

And while we're at it, let's remember what has already taken place in America in regards to advertising to children. (I don't know enough about this to link something relevant; but I'm pretty sure there are at least some rules on how, when, and what can be advertised to kids, and it has something to do with McDonald's and breakfast cereal.)

Finally, the inverse of this study says that adults are not swayed so easily as children by a group of robots, and that we should take this as  a cool warning about such dangers in the future. But we can't deny that today, adults are already manipulated by robots*.

I can't say it better than the tech guru Jaron Lanier - social media is a behavior modification platform. We may not obey robots with the servitude of a child, but most of us tend to be influenced by our friends, and even friends of our friends, and so on.

*When I say "robots" in this context of social media, I'm talking about algorithms embodied by avatars that pretend to be actual human people, or the many shades of intelligentities that lie in between. 

Image source: Someone help me cite this X-ray Kermit picture? circa 2010


Notes:
Children 'at risk of robot influence'
Aug 2018, BBC News

Asch Test of Conformity - a test to measure the extent to which we are all suckers for social pressure.

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions - offers a way to measure and compare some salient characteristics of culture

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Neal Stephenson, 1995.


Post Script:
What happens when you combine the Asch Paradigm and the Turing Test?


Post Post Script:
Would you look at that, just as we talk about how kids are in danger of being manipulated by robots, we get the first hints of how that might not be such a bad idea for adults. When you have an a**hole robot staring you down while you do your job, you do a better job. Go figure. I think we knew this already, with the whole cardboard cut-out cop reducing store thefts.

It doesn't matter if a thing is a robot or a can opener. We can't tell the difference. Forget the Uncanny Valley, if we assign agency to washing machines and our own mobile phones, what makes you think a crappy-looking robot isn't good enough to trick us? We are social creatures, our brain a social tool, and as such, everything is a person, and every act a social interaction. The way you handle your toothbrush has a wisp of sociality to it. Now make your toothbrush talk and have eyes, and try not to let it influence you. We can't.

Presence of 'mean' robot found to improve human concentration
Aug 2018, phys.org

On the Depths of Cultural Appropriation

An influential person from 1700's Sweden spent a lot of time in Turkey, got real into their meatballs, and brought them home to his otherwise culinary wasteland (jk) where they got immediately culturally appropriated into Swedish Meatballs.

Hundreds of years later, after America culturally appropriated the shit out of Sweden via IKEA, we all totally forgot about Turkey's meatballs, and gave Sweden all the credit. After all, why wouldn't the meatballs be theirs? They came up with the idea of assemmling furniture for f's sake. (Yes, I made 'assembling' look like a Swedish word on purpose.)

There was this thing happening in 2017-2018 where cultural identity became so fractured that we couldn't tell who was allowed to do what anymore. I think it's still happening.

When I go to a Black Panther movie, I'm not allowed to wear a dashiki unless I am from Africa; I mean unless my family is from Africa. Or unless I am white but adopted by parents of African heritage, in which case I identify as black (although since mostly nobody else identifies me that way because of the color of my skin it doesn't matter what I think).

Or unless my adopted child is from Africa which gives me right by association (I'm not even sure this counts). Unless you can't tell that I adopted my child from Africa because I didn't bring them with me to the movies because I was afraid people would think I culturally appropriated their kids.

What if you visited Africa and were given that dashiki from an artisan in the family with which you stayed while you lived there for three months building a school for the local community? Still no dashiki? What if you married the daughter of that artisan and had children with her? Still?

What if the movie was inspired, produced, promulgated and viewed (i.e. financially supported) by a culture other than the one being represented? Is Hollywood culture, or Superhero culture being inappropriately appropriated in this case? Or are these not cultures but only cultural byproducts, cultural artifacts?

Cultural artifacts are protected under intellectual property law, as long as they aren't fashion or fragrance (with the exception of Play-Doh, true, and maybe Vibrams but I doubt anyone is appropriating that...Crocs too). But these protections are held by individuals, not populations.

Dogon Couple, from the MET, NYC

Can an entire population own a cultural product, like Superman or the Iliad, or the Dogon Couple?

I am pretty sure it has to do with the unequal distribution of power and who is appropriating who. Anyone can rip off the Iliad because it is a cornerstone of Western culture, which is a cornerstone of Global culture (if there is such a thing).

And the main question is - how does Africa eventually take over the world if people aren't allowed to consume and participate in its culture?

Notes

'My whole life has been a lie': Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish
May 2018, The Guardian

Post Script

I had a dream once, and do still, that as the Arab world (or at least Saudi Arabia) begins to diversify its economy to incorporate entertainment, it begins to absorb hip hop artists from the West. The affinity between some hip hop artists who may be Muslim (more likely than country singer pop stars) and the uber-duper rich Saudis create a new class of global elite men and women of African heritage x America x Islam, who eventually take over the world in ways today's Western folks can't even imagine.

Post Post Script

In a way not much at all related, we wonder if this is really about identity theft-anxiety in the aftermath of a post-Equifax, post-Ashley Madison world where everyone has had their personal identity (not their cultural identity) stolen.

Also this, let's not forget.

Reality Modification

For those who are interested in computational social thermodynamics, the discussion is getting interesting. There's a lot going on at the TED stage this year.

A guru of sorts for all things internet, Jaron Larnier has some opinions about the social implications of a highly-automated social ecosystem:

"In the beginning it was cute but as computers became more efficient and algorithms got better, it can no longer be called advertising any more - it has turned into behaviour modification." -BBC

Isn't all advertising a form of behavior modification? It tries to get you to buy something. In this case, we should not get confused by the two kinds of advertising going on when we use a service like Facebook or Google.

We are being shown things we can pay money to get, be they food-delivery or sneakers. These third-parties are advertising to us via a web service about their product. As much as this might modify our behavior, we don't see it as behavior modification until we go to buy the thing advertised. Then it's behavior modification. Before then, I'm not sure what to call it. Mind-control.

There is another kind of advertising, however, and it is the less obvious one. This is the advertising of the service via the service itself. This is the form of advertising that we don't even notice, and that's what makes it have that potential for doing bad things for society.

Any "free" web service must have built into it a system by which the users' behaviors are modified to increase the chance of their using the service again. If the purpose of a service is ostensibly to help people connect with each other, then guess what - that system is going to work to put you in the way of people most like you, because that's who you're more likely to connect with.

Over the large scale, this defeats the underlying nature of social networks that keeps a superentity like Facebook alive (because of one big web, we get a bunch of separate little webs). But on a small enough scale, it keeps you hooked up and tapped into the people you are most likey to interact with. It shows you pictures like the ones you've already liked, because you're more likely to like those. It tells you about people who think and talk like you, because you're more likely to like what they say if it's similar to what you already say, hence you use the program more. (Nowadays this is called an Echo Chamber or a Filter Bubble and it's become a pretty  common idea.)

Problem for us people is that this is not how society works. You can't only socialize with people like you. This is where the echo chamber or filter bubble comes from. The network gets chiseled finer and finer until it's basically a mirror of your self (although we should note, this is your outward self, the one that lives out there in society, not the inner self...but which self it the real one, I'm not here to dedice that). This is where, across much greater scales, polarization of a society comes from. Less grey area, less room for debate, more need for absolutes. And that means less reality, because reality is anything but absolute.

Back to the point Jaron Lanier was trying to make, maybe reality-modification is what we should be discussing here, not behavior modification.


Post Script:
Far out, I'm thinking we will eventually refuse to live in each other's worlds. We will be forced to run simulations of our own preferred realities and make them compete with each other for the primary shared reality. Kind of an idea like 'all news is fake news unless it's your news'. Ultimately, we're already doing this. Watch it unfold.

Notes:
Facebook and Google need ad-free options says Jaron Lanier

The Distribution of Progress

The Spirit of Truth

In 2006, the internet becomes public access tv on steroids with the dawn of YouTube. In case you forgot:

The Spirit of Truth

Ten years later...

In India, many see fake news on YouTube thanks to cheap data plans
Mar 2018, NBC

In India, a country holding 1/3 the world's people, the internet has finally taken hold. And by that we mean they're watching YouTube and getting infected by fake viruses and engineered memes.

And it looks a lot different than the same moment in other parts of the developed world about ten years ago. It's good to remember comparisons like this, because this is how progress really works.

When we imagine the future, we see it through the eyes of our own culture. But the world is a big place, and not everyone is traveling at the same speed at the same time.

Uploading our brains to the datasphere and Christopher Columbusing Mars will not happen next year. If the whole world was made of South Korea and NASA, then yes, that might be the case. But as a whole, we are worlds apart. And the speed of progress is not distributed equally across the planet.

Ben Franklin Says What

Ben Franklin in a fur hat

Major commuting differences found between rich and poor in Colombia
Oct 2016, phys.org

Their findings: The rich do not rise early. What do you say about that, Ben Franklin?

Insect-Affluence Index and Sociothermodynamics

image source

Homes in wealthier neighborhoods found to harbor more arthropod species
Aug 2016, phys.org

"They note also that prior studies had found that richer neighborhoods tended to have more plant and animal diversity in areas outside of the home. For this study, they wanted to know what was going on inside.

...

"In studying the numbers, the researchers found that the average home in a wealthy neighborhood had approximately 100 different species of arthropods in it, whereas those in less expensive neighborhoods had roughly half that number. The researchers suggest the discrepancy is due to differences in the environment outside of the homes. Richer neighborhoods tend to have houses with lush gardens and parks and the people that live there tend to expend more time and money on them resulting in more places for bugs to breed."