51–60 of 108 posts
Malthusian catastrophes are one of the things that happen to communities that aren't smart and coordinated enough to banish Moloch. Whoop-de-doo. ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ )
Does this count as a Malthusian catastrophe even though the food was ample?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what that could mean for us as humans. Is some degree of "strife" necessary in society for people to be happier? Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off? It would be interesting to hear more about this, as well as what the potential "cures" may be, as alluded to at the end of the article.
You'd probably be interested in the Unabomber manifesto. Most people think he was crazy, but he talked a lot about this stuff, especially his sections on "the power process," which is basically what you just described. http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13 James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madma…
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that…
Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation? I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs, but it was a really bad idea to do so. So now I am imagining row after row of mice in little mouse chairs, wearing tiny VR helmets, o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what that could mean for us as humans. Is some degree of "strife" necessary in society for people to be happier? Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off? It would be interesting to hear more about this, as well as what the potential "cures" may be, as alluded to at the end of the article.
You'd probably be interested in the Unabomber manifesto. Most people think he was crazy, but he talked a lot about this stuff, especially his sections on "the power process," which is basically what you just described. http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13 James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd probably be interested in the Unabomber manifesto. Most people think he was crazy, but he talked a lot about this stuff, especially his sections on "the power process," which is basically what you just described. http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13 James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madma…
That's an excellent article!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd probably be interested in the Unabomber manifesto. Most people think he was crazy, but he talked a lot about this stuff, especially his sections on "the power process," which is basically what you just described. http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13 James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madma…
Reminds me of Dark Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in both cases, the promoters seem to need to antagonize rather large swaths of people, making it hard to sympathize with them in general, even if some of the arguments are interesting or reasonable.
And yeah, I used to write TK and he's hard to get along with. But I think a lot of his "antagonism" isn't personal so much as it is an attempt to stir up popular antagonisms, a propaganda of sorts. I can't ever be sure though. Guy's a mystery to me in a lot of ways. Super interesting though.
Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. Every time I read about these experiments, this is the stirring part. Individuals that appear to be the most fit just fail to mate for no apparent reason, yet they live as if they were always preparing for it.
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I still overall liked Howl's. I just have a hard time rewatching it due to some odd choices. In particular, the odd "true love's kiss" for turnip head. Just, what?
If that's the only thing you thought was odd about it, you must not have been watching very closely :-). I'm much more of fan of his other works, like Castle In The Sky, and Kiki's Delivery Service. And The Wind Rises. And the Cat Returns. Okay, let's just pencil in that I like all of Miyazaki's work.
And I am generally a fan of Studio Ghibli. I specifically am not saying it is a bad movie.
> But the public held on hard to his earlier work—as Ramsden and Adams put it, "everyone want[ed] to hear the diagnosis, no one want[ed] to hear the cure." Was there a "cure"? The article speaks of the fashion in which his later efforts attempted to alleviate the catastrophic social problems he'd observed in his earlier utopian designs. It is craftily silent on the subject of those efforts' results.
That is shitty. We all want to know if there was a cure, and what it was, but the article doesn't tell us and claims "no one wanted to hear the cure".
I interpreted that as "no one wanted to fund [finding] the cure". And then he died, and that was the end of that.
Calling it a "utopia" when there's limited space and nothing to do seems a bit inaccurate.