Thanks for this MrJagil. I think this is underrated as a way to modestly improve health, especially with the new air tightness standards in modern houses.
586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLJ0zZQb9x0
I admit I just want this because the idea of hidden labyrinths behind our cities is just intrinsically appealing to me. There could be shops! Neon signs! It would be cyberpunk and then I would know the future has arrived :-)
The monetary payoff does seem to be there. I wonder if the delay in transformations of this sort might have a lot to do with a lack of 3D expertise among builders.
I find it striking it is not done even more. I recognize the technical difficulties but the costs are surely lower than the potential value of easily doubling the sq ft.
There are interesting tricks you can do with fibre optic cable and mirrors to send daylight down there. Not to mention CoeLux and similar products.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Another factor is that although Trump probably won't abandon NATO, he could force Germany onto the horns of an awkward dilemma. Pay for protection or pay for a pan-European army. I think the migrant flows from North Africa and the Middle East become fiscally untenable. Merkel is changing direction but perhaps she is too late to the party, Bulgaria is already starting mass deportations and I think the Northern Alliance is sure to storm the Rubicon.
Now attention swings to Turkey as their idiot demands escalate. This could get quite ugly. Putin must be beside himself with glee! The Yanks must be staring at those nuclear warheads like a hawk (eagle?) giving a rabbit a penetrating glare.
tldr; 2017 = 2016++
Did you just say Africa is more or less peaceful and has experienced an economic boom?
However it rests on an assumption because broad based stagnation did occur during the Industrial Revolution.
www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf
There was a period of about 50 years when wages didn't change and when countless cottage industries with skilled labour disappeared. The standard of living did not increase for most people at this time. Today this has been conveniently forgotten.
The standard narrative that life improved for most people is only true if you examine economic history on a timescale of centuries.
One question that comes to mind is: are you going to be alive when a technology such as biotech brings home the bacon? Eroom's Law suggests life longevity escape velocity (as hypothesized by Audrey with SENS) is very unlikely.
In my former post there is a link to a youtube video made in 1969 by the Ford Corporation. Our grandparents expected a lot of substantive changes that have not yet occurred. I consider those reasonable projections still. I would like most of us put them conservatively at 50 years hence. Yet that would imply it took a century from our grandparent's original projections.
I make the claim that it is perfectly possible we won't have any significant results from biotechnology for hundreds of years.
Furthermore it is not crazy to speculate that if we enter a long term stagnation there is the possibility we enter a new dark age. This is not taken seriously by most men of intelligence today, and I consider that highly unfortunate because it too, is a genuine possibility, an outlier that becomes more likely with each year of broad stagnation that passes. I would like to remind the reader that by some metrics our production levels only exceeded that of the Roman Empire in the 18th century. That is 1000 years later.
tldr; More of us should be more worried. There should be far more urgency about innovation than there is today.
Here is an introduction by Alastair Reynolds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kY1kJA0jA
It is the favorite book of a huge number of well known authors but is less known outside of their circles.
Wolfe's book is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Each plot owns the land beneath, yes?
So build downwards if zoning prohibits building up.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978076/
The first episodes with the Teacher are okay, but it really kicks into high gear when they being playing 'minority rules' later on. Really marvelous!
If you enjoy a real challenge read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's the most rewarding puzzle I've ever tangled with. I was up for days, weeks, thinking about it afterwards.
However even with the most sophisticated data per second flows, virtual and augmented reality, we still need progress in the physical realm or our infrastructure will fall around our ears while we're constructing the New World.
> crispr will be huge.
What do you think they said about?
1. The discovery of DNA.
1.1 The Human Genome Project.
1.1.1 CRISPR
1.1.1.1 ????
The ability to cut and paste DNA is a great advance but people expected revolutionary steps forward in the past too and were disappointed with actual results. Anytime you hear 'biotech this' or 'biotech that', recall to mind only about 16 new biotech drugs are allowed onto the market, and I bet you cannot name any off the top of your head. That tells you something.
It is worth knowing what our grandparents really thought about the future. I strongly recommend you watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRxqg4G-G4
> The way you define advancement also seems to ignore incremental improvements, and the incremental improvements weve made in all fields in the last 40 years is vast
Far from it!
I am concerned that people are being chronocentric e.g. They have forgotten that energy prices used to be much, much cheaper. Exponentially cheaper!
I have two proposals for you.
1. Technology means doing more, with less. Less input, more output.
2. The basic metric for economic progress is that prices go downwards.
These are straight forward claims. They are not outrageous.
In areas where we have clear progress, like computation, finding downward trending prices is easy. In other areas the answer is far less clear and I find people become prone to rationalization instead of imagining a better possible present and future.
I'm not a pessimist. I just think we could be doing a whole lot more. It took me considerable time to realize that not everything was progressing and there were giant gaping holes in that reasoning.
http://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/sites/woodworking/files/st...
A marriage of woodcraft and computing that is both visually pleasing and efficient!
The company doing curvilinear wood flooring is called Bole Floors.
Here is an even more attractive example of curvilinear wood.
http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/detail/innovativ...
And this:
> Genome sequencing
is not a product. It doesn't do anything useful by itself. There are only 16 new biotech drugs approved each year. I am unaware of any cures for Alzheimers or other popular affliction. It is also a side effect of computation and not an advance in biological science on its own merit. No fast computer, no sequencing.
This is why the Technology Stagnation Hypothesis is a serious one.
It says there have been almost no advances outside of computation since '73. Which matches the plateau in real wages in the West. Eroom's Law is also a symptom of it.
As I see: the world massively improved from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Then improvements continued in computation and halted in almost every other area of development.
> many (most?) people are still convinced that we're on the wrong track
What I am saying is far from anecdotal.
> We're in the middle of the longest stretch of world peace in history.
We have already passed what I believe to be an inflection point.
You are correct about violence until the year 2007.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/03/20/breaking-a-...
Now we're heading consistently in the wrong direction.
Same with health:
"Taken by itself, it could just be a random fluctuation from one year to the next," said Elizabeth Arias, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. But the data, which was released Wednesday, also showed that Americans collectively have lost momentum when it comes to greater longevity. Life expectancy at birth has remained virtually stagnant for the nation since 2010."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/0...
tldr; Not all is roses. Past trends were real and important and are not continuing. I make a similar rant here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12121172
I fully accept that we've had it good for a long time lisper, I've read my history, it's not that I'm unappreciative.
It is fascinating to watch ML retread a hypothesis humans came up with.
That doesn't mean it has substance but I now believe infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of what is presently known than the New York Times's supposed exposure of the story. The NYT piece contains a well placed lie I am certain isn't true.
There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a careful police investigation.
I would put it like this: the odds are not good but the goods are definitely odd.
To those who think "too obviously in the open to be true" I'd like to point out the case of Jimmy Saville.
Two people enter two different boxes that contain a button each. Only one can leave because one of the boxes is a suicide box. They choose the box they enter to prevent systematic bias/corruption.
The purpose of this process isn't a boring version of The Hunger Games. It is to prevent the greater problem of civil conflict and ultimately save more lives.
It is a symbolic act, a ritual. There are actually many societies where a human or animal is blamed for a 'global' problem the tribe has, and then killed which removes the tension and the danger it created.
The most obvious example of this is Christianity. It involves a scapegoated individual being murdered in order for the tribe to reform itself, which although I am not a Christian, does seem to be a description of what happened.
The reverse process also occurs. When a leader like Arch Duke Ferdinand is assassinated, the event becomes a symbolic fulcrum through which human society demanded blood. Violence is like a chain reaction.
Here is a modern example. Bachir of Lebanon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachir_Gemayel
"On 14 September 1982, Bachir was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated at the headquarters, killing Bachir and 26 other Phalange politicians...
Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and also a Maronite Christian, was later arrested for the assassination. His sister was living in the apartment above the room Bachir was in. He had visited her the previous day and planted the bomb in her apartment. The next day, he called her and told her to get out of the building. Once she was out, he detonated the bomb from a few miles away from the building. When he came back to check on his sister, he was immediately arrested. He later confessed to it, saying he had done this because “Bachir had sold the country to Israel.” A reporter was heard telling him "You didn't kill a man, you killed a country." He was imprisoned for 8 years, until Syrian troops took over Lebanon at the end of the war and freed him on 13 October 1990..."
In my model the reporter understands something very important.
Had Habib Shartouni been ritually (which is another way of saying 'publicly orchestrated') killed, the anger could have found a resting place at his grave.
What happened next is illustrated in the remarkable anime Israeli film "Waltz with Bashir".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltz_with_Bashir
"The Sabra and Shatila massacre was the killing of between 762 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by a militia close to the Kataeb Party, also called Phalange, a predominantly Christian Lebanese right-wing party in the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon.
The massacre was presented as retaliation for the assassination of newly elected Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel, the leader of the Lebanese Kataeb Party."
So that is my position. Human society can use ritual as a social 'hack' to prevent a high blood price.
One obvious example is in the present with the increasing tensions in Europe due to the migrant/refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. While I do not condone violence I also believe the act of ritually killing (I won't mention anybody or anything specifically to avoid being controversial) would prevent (what I believe to be) much more exaggerated violence later on.
This would have to be done officially by the State and in the full public eye.
This is a strange subject, but it is only what we see of ourselves, we are strange animals. Many modern phenomenon, 9/11, Black Lives Matter are related to this subject.
The generation after millennials is more conservative.
You should look up the statistics for political affiliation of Israeli youth.
With my generation I am far right. Among the younger generation I'm the moderate.
Then I thought that really might make perfect sense.
- no dynasties. - civic minded selection. - outcome not in dispute. - cheaper than counting votes.
Maybe not literally with pistols but now I'm intrigued as to whether this has been tried before.
"[They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, 'that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children. If you are dissatisfied with the affinity between you, if with our marriages, turn your resentment against us; we are the cause of war, we of wounds and of bloodshed to our husbands and parents. It were better that we perish than live widowed or fatherless without one or other of you.' "
I suspect it is an overhang from the Cold War - preventing the spread of Communism by the 'property owning society'.
It's hard not to throw your hands up in the air, so much of the nonsense is legacy code. 'Going to Washington' is like fighting against quicksand.
Just in case of blockage I'd keep a bleach bottle (and no other cleaner in case of a bleach/ammonia reaction) and a sink strainer around.
Funny you should mention visiting the stars since Urbit's founder was thinking about Mars.
His thesis is that we need to throw the whole thing out and start over, then graft the alien technology on top of our existing stack.
https://moronlab.blogspot.ie/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...
Today I think there might be a fuss.
Also these are the fellows who didn't get the popular vote but got enough electoral college votes.
1876, Rutherford B. Hayes
1888, Benjamin Harrison
2000, George W. Bush
2016, Donald J. Trump
A great many people in our society place higher value on their status than on realizing rational market moves. And to rub salt into the wound, many middle class can't afford a $200-500 dollar callout because their wages have been stagnant as well.
I'll say it again: the existence of Home Depot and other home improvement stores is evidence for wage stagnation.
> Plenty of humans can physically rearrange stuff
It might seem that way but I believe we presently have a building labour shortage. Anecdotally I don't know many master craftsmen, that species seems to be rarer today.
> white collar incumbent's ability to make it illegal to replace them
That is true but that's a problem with government.
There's a limit to how far that can go as well. I see a lot of young entrepreneurs undercutting legal and accounting online.
My hypothesis is that working class wages are more sticky than white collar wages for reasons not strictly based on rationality.
I believe that Moravec's paradox explains why working class wages should be higher and white collar wages should be lower than at present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
Presently this is stalled because it is too counterintutive. People can't get their heads around the possibility of paying their gardeners and window cleaners more than their accountants or lawyers. That's the middle class version of The End of the World As We Know It.
This to me explains the existence of firms like Home Depot and the increasing popularity of prefabs.
The New York Time is at the heart of a network that controls a huge part of Washington's mindshare. The paper itself is something like the top portion of a considerably larger iceberg.
Consider for a moment the possibility that if state controlled media is a problem, which of course it is, then a corollary of that thought is that if the media controls the state then it is also a problem. Is that a realistic proposition?
To be non-abstract; the New York Times makes no secret of the fact it sees its role as an agent of change within the Western world. It is not merely reporting the news in an information discovery process. Former NYT employees like Michael Cieply state that the NYT has a plan it calls 'The Narrative' which it plans years in advance. Stories are wrapped around this to keep on message. It is functionally identical to the concept of a party line, except a political party does this publicly and these memos are not made overt to their readership. They are a newspaper coupled with a think tank agency which operates together to form opinion.
Perhaps just as important, I believe the NYT also determines the priority of news headlines across the world. Without fail, if I spot a certain news headline in a local Dublin paper, you may be sure the agenda was set by the NYT. I am reminded of how so much Net culture is downstream from 4chan and Reddit. There's an organization that determines what 'colour' is in this year for fashion. NYT does that for the 'issues'.
What I am describing here is not just syndication. Every major broadsheet in the West has many of the same stories and offers similar conclusions. Much of this is inorganic. When enough people think the same thoughts, even using the same phrases and words, using the same chains of logic, then they are either in the same culture or they are being unwittingly subscribed to a narrative.
I noticed this myself because I used to be belong to a proselyting cult. They have periodicals which they spread across the world in many different languages. The local context would change, but at the end of each article, whether it is religious or general interest, there will be a remark alluding to or tying in a 'faith based interpretation'. To a non-believer this is tediously obvious. Believers are but dimly aware of the tactic. The new thought slides into their mind well greased. Later they are impressed that other believers had similar parallel thoughts. How much I have in common with my fellows! Warm feelings result and a sense of being special.
This is how you traffic shape human thought across a population. The fact is that for persons of normal intelligence and experience there are only so many possible branches in human reasoning when presented with limited data. I'm not calling it pyschohistory, but I think a clever Narritive caretaker is well able to predict the trajectory of thought in advance.
The simple truth, and I think of this as our dirty little secret, is that we're not as unique as we popularly imagine ourselves to be. I think the Internet has made that much clearer than before. I imagine for example, that while reading this you thought: "yeah this is not new information, we knew that already".
I am not calling this all bad. I think some of what I'm describing is a natural outcome.
The basic problem with this is that every once in a while, they get something really, really wrong. The Narrative stops matching reality. I'm sure over your lifetime you've spotted this happening under a wide array of circumstances.
My suspicion is that mindshare coordination is useful to society up to a certain point of complexity, and thereafter it is better to be less coordinated for reasons Taleb outlined with his anti-fragile concept. If you live in a world where everybody is going along the same path, then having a strong contrarian bias is going to continually pay off even if you get some commonsense things wrong.
One item that struck me as interesting is that Chomsky and Moldbug had a problem with the NYT. They have different takes on what is wrong with the world, but I think their basic intuition is bang on.
tldr; The New York Times is a political actor. If you want to be different it is easy. Throw away your newspaper and television. Stay on the Net with your fellow weirdos. We have hivemind too of course but don't you prefer organic mindfoods?
For a number of technical reasons (security and scaling) I've come to believe that urbit or something much like it is inevitable.
IPv6 might solve the address space problem but the high level problems (e.g. constant privacy invasions) are such a clusterfuck that it is crippling IoT and other potential growth sources.
I'm happy to shill for them because there really aren't that many people doing truly new things with computation in Silicon Valley.
http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/2011/07/03/oklahomas-fir...
That house would only cost $47k in 2016 dollars.
The TH movement is primarily about economics. I don't think it would exist if there were new quality houses available in that price range.
Pardon my french, but isn't it just fucking amazing how we've 'progressed' with automation in a century and many of us are still working for decades just to afford mere shelter? It's often not even to a high spec.
I sometimes look at that Primitive Technology guy and think "You know, that looks like a lot of work, but it only took him three days to construct that hut and he could rebuild it every year and it would still be way more cost effective per labour unit than anything we're doing right now!"