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The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

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Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#101

Post by sangnoir »

aidenn0 wrote: post #90
projektir wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that this is a quote from a work of fiction. One that doesn't exactly have a lot of rigor in terms of the science/philosophy involved, really. > But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. Actually, nature had a patent on that one long before humans showed up. It's the author of that "primitive cerebrum", too. We've been spending the past however…

Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable.

> Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable.

How exactly is this laughable? it is generally true as shown by the predator-prey cycle - a form of balance. The exception to this cycle is usually invasive species that do not have a natural predator, these populations grow until they exhaust their food source and the population collapses.

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#102

Post by [deleted] »

bendbro wrote: post #93
projektir wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with it is that it takes certain stances on those questions and then tries to answer them. I would prefer for the audience to be a bit more critical of those answers. The Hedonic Treadmill for me gets about the same treatment as Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs - it's too simplistic and the conclusions it makes are biased by the beliefs of the culture it originated in. It's fairly easy to find many questions to a…

Uncontacted native tribes emerge naked and starving from the woods. The males hunt and kill, and the women stick to domestic tasks. They like clothes, they like shoes, and they like shelter. Their behaviors and expectations are hardly that removed from ours. There is nothing wrong with subscribing to long running historical norms until they no longer satisfy you or are otherwise proven harmful.

[deleted]

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#103

Post by riboflava »

logfromblammo wrote: post #99
walter_bishop wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs .. You're only partly correct. The battery story was told to the humans to blind them from the truth, which would have been revealed to us in the sequels, except in between, the Wachowskis seem to have left planet earth. The question shouldn't be what is the Matrix, but what is its purpose. The original matrix wa…

If that is the case, why wouldn't the humans question that premise by testing out whether a live human can be a better battery than an actual battery? If the machines needed a power buffer for their nuclear plants, they could certain mass produce lithium ion cells. Or if they really needed a bio-battery, they could use cows, which wouldn't resist so much. Or they could simply remove the parts of the human brain that…

My favorite version is from http://hpmor.com/chapter/64

...

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#104

Post by dredmorbius »

johnfjacobi wrote: post #42
M_Grey wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...The blind forces of urbanization, flowing along the lines of least resistance, show no aptitude for creating an urban and industrial pattern that will be stable, self-sustaining, and self-renewing. On the contrary, as congestion thickens and expansion widens, both the urban and the rural landscape undergo defacement and degradation, while the unprofitable investments in the remedies…serve only to promote more of…

This article reminded me a lot of stuff written by Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and even Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Their stuff is worth reading. Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13 Also Ellul's The Technological Society

Mumford and Ellul are among the references in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History, which I'm just completing. It came out in 1994, too early for Kaczynski's Manifesto (1995), but it wouldn't surprise me if he references it in later works (I've not yet checked).

Bill Joy cites Kaczynski in his own Wired 2000 essay, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#105

Post by aidenn0 »

sangnoir wrote: post #101
aidenn0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable.

> Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable. How exactly is this laughable? it is generally true as shown by the predator-prey cycle - a form of balance. The exception to this cycle is usually invasive species that do not have a natural predator, these populations grow until they exhaust their food source and the population co…

The exception is also all of the mammals that have gone extinct over the last several million years due to not reaching a balance.

Also by the predator-prey cycle argument, humans just haven't reached the balance yet. We have an abundance of food currently, so we are still growing to the balance point.

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#106

Post by spicytunacone »

M_Grey wrote: post #35
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because we don't take social currency as seriously as monetary currency. In a world where financial incentives don't matter, you'll have other incentives. We can see this in video games where people half-kill themselves to get some status or armor or whatever. Or how wealthy people take up charity work or compete on social status points like who holds the better parties or decorates the home better. >if you judg…

Truly, "NEET" is a mental health issue in almost every case; when you look at it carefully it seems like a terrible way to live. Being utterly disconnected from your peers and potential social contacts is just not good for the human animal.

I came from a comment on a more recent story[0] so I realize I am a bit late, but what about being a NEET implies social disconnection? I believe you're thinking of shut-ins or hikkikomori[1] if you want to keep in line with the parlance. NEET can simply mean someone is unemployed or "between jobs" as you will, which my undergraduate microeconomics courses told me is a normal occurence (cyclic economies, employer/employee mismatches over time). Whether they get money from the government or live off their family, plenty of my peers during bouts of unemployment would still go out.

I realize it's colloquial to continue the bastardization of NEET to mean someone who has withdrawn from society, though I feel the nuance requires particular attention especially if we're attempting to diagnose problems and propose solutions. Indeed there may be overlap, but what can be said for one set may not be true of another even if one is a subset of the other.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12521277

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#107

Post by walter_bishop »

logfromblammo wrote: post #99
walter_bishop wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs .. You're only partly correct. The battery story was told to the humans to blind them from the truth, which would have been revealed to us in the sequels, except in between, the Wachowskis seem to have left planet earth. The question shouldn't be what is the Matrix, but what is its purpose. The original matrix wa…

If that is the case, why wouldn't the humans question that premise by testing out whether a live human can be a better battery than an actual battery? If the machines needed a power buffer for their nuclear plants, they could certain mass produce lithium ion cells. Or if they really needed a bio-battery, they could use cows, which wouldn't resist so much. Or they could simply remove the parts of the human brain that…

> why wouldn't the humans question that premise

They do, every so often some do wake up, that's why the agents have to hunt them down before they contaminate the rest of the matrix (whole crops were destroyed), or failing that destroy and remake the matrix.

> If the machines needed a power buffer .. Put every human in a persistent vegetative state by physically destroying the part of the brain that controls consciousness.

The experiment doesn't require them as a power plant but as a living conscious biological computer. Once the Architect realized that machine intelligence wasn't up to the task, that's when he/it decided to enslave all of humanity. The question being; what would be the nature of an artificial intelligence responsible for creating the physical universe. By recreating a small part of it in the Matrix the architect could study the experiment under controlled conditions.

Re: The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

#108

Post by dredmorbius »

jeffdavis wrote: post #45
saulrh wrote: post #39

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?

Limiting factors are the things you don't have enough of.

If food isn't constraining, it's not your limiting factor, something else is.

The general idea is expressed in Leibig's Law of the Minimum, from Justiz Leibig, a 19th century botanist.

This is why counterarguments to Malthusian philosophy based on showing that some arbitrarily selected factor isn't constraining are moot. The question is, what is limiting in the environment. And if growth has stopped, something is constraining it.

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