silicone thrills posted:

It's kind of interesting to relate this stuff into my real every day life. I and my sister have a very severe cancer gene in which our doctors are advising us to go ahead and have a fully ovary and fallopian tube removal before we hit age 45 because - we will loving die from a horrible flavor of ovarian cancer and by the time you know you have it, its basically always too late - and I dont really shy away from this information. My geneticist asked if I wanted more or less information because she knows that there's people who only want the "need to know" sort of poo poo but i'm the type of person who will dive in and loves to know everything. I have about a 10% chance of getting this horrible flavor of cancer and I want to do everything I can to prevent it.

It would be criminal if my doctor just told me "youll be fine, dont worry about it"

Rectal Death Adept posted:

i really think the dramatic escalations in the environment lately are starting to crack some pings but we are still only getting the left of center liberals that take comfort in pretending they are serious by actually learning about the subject

i'll believe we've made progress when the guy driving an 8 foot tall coal factory to Applebees is having an existential crisis because they no longer sell fish or something

Zodium posted:

croup isn't a "left of center liberal"

Stereotype posted:

ironically i can't understand the reason someone would go into a thread and ask the people posting there "why are you posting about this?" do people do that in the war thread? or the one that talks about trump? why would anyone talk about the economy? there is no difference between any of those topics and this one except that those don't matter

Zodium posted:

croup is good people and attacking anyone who doesn't immediately absorb the thread consensus as a liberal hoper shill sucks rear end

Zodium posted:

croup is good people and attacking anyone who doesn't immediately absorb the thread consensus as a liberal hoper shill sucks rear end

Stereotype posted:

also for the record my view is that we can do something to repair the damage done to the biosphere and stave of civilizational collapse and possibly even the complete sterilization of the earth, we just aren't going to

4d3d3d posted:

We have to know how bad it is for this to ever be possible but I guess it's a "bad thread consensus" to even agree that knowledge is a good thing

Stereotype posted:

yeah but he didn't quote my response and instead posted like elon musk so maybe you're the wrong one here

croup coughfield posted:

im trying to understand the position of the posters in this thread

Stereotype posted:

also for the record my view is that we can do something to repair the damage done to the biosphere and stave of civilizational collapse and possibly even the complete sterilization of the earth, we just aren't going to

Stereotype posted:

any other ones besides these I should add? I can do it tonight when I’m at my computer

Stereotype posted:

the pretty ubiquitous opinion i have heard when i morosely describe my understanding of how immediately dire the situation is on pretty much every ecological front is that if people more generally knew that it was that bad then they would become fatalistic and not effectively work to fix things. which is worse than now when they don't understand the situation and also aren't effectively working to fix things.

Xaris posted:

I disagree. we don’t have magical holodeck technology.

this is also like saying my 17 year old dog could be trained not to go crazy over food and not to bark at the Amazon guy, but it’s not happening

we are subjects of a system that created everyone’s thought patterns and perception. we are all proletariatized by the system; we have given over the knowledge and decision making to the system. even the rich have undergone cerebral desertification. the system controls the masses, or the mass-object, and it makes those decisions cyberneticslly. which is all of us even if individual particles don’t conform. Ty hats why it’s wrong to say “we won’t”, the system won’t

now the system has fundamental contradictions that are increasingly fracturing, eventually it will crack. that day is also coming closer every year, but it’s not now, and it’s not tomorrow. local conditions can be improved, slightly, but changing the inertia of the system is impossible until it fractures and the masses wield the broken shards as blunt weapons to the rest of it

it’s just there’s one fun twist; there’s a ticking clock. that’s why it’s interesting bc it’s fascinating study to see which clock winds down first

Mary Catherine Bateson posted:

As a child, I had the early conversations of the cybernetic revolution going on around me. I can look at examples and realize that when one of my parents was trying to teach me something, it was directly connected with what they were doing and thinking about in the context of cybernetics.

One of my favorite memories of my childhood was my father helping me set up an aquarium. In retrospect, I understand that he was teaching me to think about a community of organisms and their interactions, interdependence, and the issue of keeping them in balance so that it would be a healthy community. That was just at the beginning of our looking at the natural world in terms of ecology and balance. Rather than itemizing what was there, I was learning to look at the relationships and not just separate things.

Bless his heart, he didn’t tell me he was teaching me about cybernetics. I think I would have walked out on him. Another way to say it is that he was teaching me to think about systems. Gregory coined the term "schismogenesis" in 1936, from observing the culture of a New Guinea tribe, the Iatmul, in which there was a lot of what he called schismogenesis. Schismogenesis is now called "positive feedback"; it’s what happens in an arms race. You have a point of friction, where you feel threatened by, say, another nation. So, you get a few more tanks. They look at that and say, "They’re arming against us," and they get a lot more tanks. Then you get more tanks. And they get more tanks or airplanes or bombs, or whatever it is. That’s positive feedback.

The alternative would be if you saw them getting tanks to say, "I’d better get rid of my tanks. Let’s cool the arms race, instead of mutually escalating." Gregory was talking about that and didn’t really have a term for it, so he invented the term schismogenesis. Genesis to mean bringing into being greater and greater schisms, conflicts. That was before the concept of positive feedback had been coined. That’s what he was talking about, the kind of feedback that accelerates a process rather than controls it, which is a very important concept.

I would say that the great majority of Americans still believe that "positive feedback" is when someone pats you on the back and says you did a good job. What positive feedback is saying is, do more of the same. So, if what you’re doing is taking heroin or quarreling with your neighbor, this is just going to lead to trouble. Negative feedback corrects what you’re doing. It’s not somebody saying, "That was a lousy speech." It’s somebody saying, "Reverse course. Stop building more bombs. Stop taking in more alcohol faster. Slow down." Negative feedback is corrective feedback.

Gregory then wrote a paper about an arms race and made the move from thinking about the New Guinea tribe to the nature of arms races in the modern world, which we still have plenty of.

At the beginning of the war, my parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, had very recently met and married. They met Lawrence K. Frank, who was an executive of the Macy Foundation. As a result of that, both of them were involved in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, which continued then for twenty years. They still quote my mother constantly in talking about second-order cybernetics: the cybernetics of cybernetics. They refer to Gregory as well, though he was more interested in cybernetics as abstract analytical techniques. My mother was more interested in how we could apply this to human relations.

My parents looked at the cybernetics conferences rather differently. My mother, who initially posed the concept of the cybernetics of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, came out of the anthropological approach to participant observation: How can you do something and observe yourself doing it? She was saying, "Okay, you’re inventing a science of cybernetics, but are you looking at your process of inventing it, your process of publishing, and explaining, and interpreting?" One of the problems in the United States has been that pieces of cybernetics have exploded into tremendous economic activity in all of computer science, but much of the systems theory side of cybernetics has been sort of a stepchild. I firmly believe that it is the systems thinking that is critical.

At the point where she said, "You guys need to look at what you’re doing. What is the cybernetics of cybernetics?" what she was saying was, "Stop and look at your own process and understand it." Eventually, I suppose you do run into the infinite recursion problem, but I guess you get used to that.

How do you know that you know what you know? When I think about the excitement of those early years of the cybernetic conferences, there have been several losses. One is that the explosion of devices and manufacturing and the huge economic effect of computer technology has overshadowed the epistemological curiosity on which it was built, of how we know what we know, and how that affects decision making.

If you use the word "cyber" in our society now, people think that it means a device. It does not evoke the whole mystery of what maintains balance, or how a system is kept from going off kilter, which was the kind of thing that motivated the question in the first place. It’s probably not the first time that’s happened, that a technology with a very wide spectrum of uses has been so effective for certain problems that it’s obscured the other possible uses.

People are not using cybernetic models as much as they should be. In thinking about medicine, for instance, we are thinking more than we used to about what happens when fifty years ago you had chicken pox and now you have shingles. What happened? How did the virus survive? It went into hiding. It took a different form. We’re finding examples of problems that we thought we’d solved but may have made worse.

We have taller smoke stacks on factories now, trying to prevent smog and acid rain. What we’re getting is that the fumes are traveling further, higher up, and still coming down in the form of acid rain. Let’s look at that. Someone has tried to solve a problem, which they did—they reduced smog. But we still put smoke up the chimney and think it disappears. It isn't gone. It’s gone somewhere. We need to look at the entire system. What happens to the smoke? What happens to the wash-off of fertilizer into brooks and streams? In that sense, we’re using the technology to correct a problem without understanding the epistemology of the problem. The problem is connected to a larger system, and it’s not solved by the quick fix.

If you look back at the cybernetics conferences, you’d find a lot of examples that could be applied to social and human problems that have not been. Most people don’t learn about cybernetics. They buy devices. Cybernetics, because it developed a whole branch of communication theory, is a way of thinking, not an industry. In our relations with other nations, for instance, we get caught in schismogenesis—arms races, competitions, escalations of various sorts—without people being aware that that’s what’s happening, without them thinking through what needs to be attended to in order to solve a problem.

We think that we can solve drug addiction by punitive police enforcement. Doesn’t work. In fact, it makes more jobs for policemen and prison guards. We are not using systems theory to think about social problems most of the time. Business problems, yes. There are specialists. Business schools even teach systems theory. But we’re not raising our children to be systems thinkers. That’s what we need to do.

You don’t have to know a lot of technical terminology to be a systems thinker. One of the things that I’ve been realizing lately, and that I find fascinating as an anthropologist, is that if you look at belief systems and religions going way back in history, around the world, very often what you realize is that people have intuitively understood systems and used metaphors to think about them. The example that grabbed me was thinking about the pantheon of Greek gods—Zeus and Hera, Apollo and Demeter, and all of them. I suddenly realized that in the mythology they’re married, they have children, the sun and the moon are brother and sister. There are quarrels among the gods, and marriages, divorces, and so on. So you can use the Greek pantheon, because it is based on kinship, to take advantage of what people have learned from their observation of their friends and relatives.

It turns out that the Greek religious system is a way of translating what you know about your sisters, and your cousins, and your aunts into knowledge about what’s happening to the weather, the climate, the crops, and international relations, all sorts of things. A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that. Religion is an adaptive tool, among other things. It is a form of analogic thinking.

The other thing that I like to talk about is that we carry an analog machine around with us all the time called our body. It’s got all these different organs that interact; they’re interdependent. If one of them goes out of kilter, the others go out of kilter, eventually. This is true in society. This is how dis-ease spreads through a community, because everything is connected.

There are a couple of other things that are very striking. If you look at the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, what you see—which you can also see in young children—is that they start from the differences between things. Mommy’s not the same as Daddy. Daddy’s not the same as brother. I can remember my daughter learning the word "Goggy," which obviously was "Doggy." But then she said that the cow is a "Goggy," because it had four legs, I guess. But then you have to learn to distinguish the cow from the dog. When we think about a child developing, you have to learn to distinguish between things—this is this and that is that. Starting with the Book of Genesis, each thing is created separately. They don’t evolve by differentiation. God separates the day from the night, the light from the dark, the dry land from the water. And then you end up with a large number of rules of things that have to be kept separate. You can’t weave two different kinds of fibers into the same fabric. You can’t plow with an ox and an rear end, but must use two oxen.

What you have is this process of differentiation, which is intellectually profound but only a beginning. Taxonomy is an essential basis for all we know about the natural world. We have learned to classify. A bee is not a butterfly. You can see that stage in many forms of religion and mythology. And then in some later forms, the switch is from making distinctions to recognizing relationships.

What comes along if you look at the New Testament is Jesus keeps violating all the rules about keeping things separate, which makes people angry, because that’s what they’ve been taught. He’s constantly posing the question, "What’s the connection?" And not, "What’s the difference?" You can see that this constant necessity of recognizing that things are separate and different and can be used in different ways, and then seeing that everything is connected, and how it’s connected and interdependent, that this is a sort of permanent balance in human intellect. If you look at the history of mythology, you can see people moving slowly forward. You can look at the history of science—things that were once equated we now see as separate. We can only go so far in breaking down more and more elementary particles, but we're still finding particles. We’re still interested in the separation of things, but we’re also still discovering relationships.

I’ve become very much involved in issues around climate change. Climate change comes from proceeding on one path without recognizing how that will affect other aspects of our reality. Take it another step, one of the things that’s hard to get across to people is that when human beings are uncomfortable, they fight, or move. At this point we have a refugee crisis, migrations, people leaving areas where their ways of making a living don’t work any longer because of climate change. We also have conflict happening as one country wants to control more arable land—Lebensraum. So, people are fighting about land, or about fishing rights.

Most people don’t realize it, but a myth has been put together about the so-called Arab Spring of a few years ago, where many Americans said, "Oh, good, they’re rebelling against their authoritarian governments and they’re going to become democratic." Well, they didn’t. The cause of the Arab Spring was a five-year drought, with a lot of people having difficulty feeding their families, so they migrated from the villages to the cities, looking for jobs where they would be paid money and could buy food for their families. But there were no jobs in the cities, so they had revolutions.

The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.

Xaris posted:

we are subjects of a system that created everyone’s thought patterns and perception. we are all proletariatized by the system; we have given over the knowledge and decision making to the system. even the rich have undergone cerebral desertification. the system controls the masses, or the mass-object, and it makes those decisions cyberneticslly. which is all of us even if individual particles don’t conform. Ty hats why it’s wrong to say “we won’t”, the system won’t

Zodium posted:

you posted a bunch of patronizing verbiage about how this is the most depressing and fatalistic place on the internet to his question about why we spend time on biosphere collapse and then tried to flip the question around.

Epitope posted:

Sentient petroleum products contemplating the morality of petroleum production

Stereotype posted:

not only did i provide an honest personal answer to their question, but the question deserves to be flipped around. "what reward you derive from the behavior, emotionally" is an incredibly patronizing question that's goal is not to gain knowledge or understanding, but instead is meant to insinuate judgement from a falsely self-elevated position of superiority. you could ask the same question of someone who follows sports or plays settlers of catan or watches The Bachelor and the answer would be the same varied assortment of answers that anyone uses to prescribe meaning to actions. We don't have to justify why we are paying attention to and talking about something that inarguably effects us and have an acceptable answer so that a voyeur can "draw further conclusions."

4d3d3d posted:

A climate optimist is just a denialist who could no longer deny because it's so blindingly obvious. I know people will deny they're sick with something even as it kills them but even the coal rollin' boys have a limit sometimes

Brendan Rodgers posted:

Climate optimists have passed the denial stage of climate change, they're stuck on the fourth stage; bargaining

Zodium posted:

croup is good people

croup coughfield posted:

i do have a serious question for the doomers while im here though: what are you getting out of spending so much time and energy focused on catastrophe? like what purpose is this serving for you?

Blockade posted:

silicone thrills posted:

lol the dumbest motherfuckers on earth are the most powerful people on earth and I can't believe there's dipshit cope/hope liberals telling us that everything will be fine.

Fell Mood posted:

They're either a troll or shockingly stupid.

What are you getting, emotionally, from defending them?

Fell Mood posted:

They're either a troll or shockingly stupid.

What are you getting, emotionally, from defending them?

Zodium posted:

he's a troll, but he's also smart and knowledgeable. it would be good if he participated in the thread.