What book are you reading?

[VCheng]

Do they really just abruptly stop?

When the eye passes over a point, yes. Then as the opposite wall comes in, it starts again form a generally opposite direction. Quite eerie, actually. Storm. Suddenly calm. Clear blue sky. Clouds all around the horizon. Then bam, it starts again.

 

[_NOBODY_]

When the eye passes over a point, yes. Then as the opposite wall comes in, it starts again form a generally opposite direction. Quite eerie, actually. Storm. Suddenly calm. Clear blue sky. Clouds all around the horizon. Then bam, it starts again.

It is insane to me that such a devasting storm can just abruptly disappear just like how it came out of nowhere.

 

[VCheng]

It is insane to me that such a devasting storm can just abruptly disappear just like how it came out of nowhere.

The wonders of nature never cease to amaze.

 

[Nilgiri]

LOL. Does any human on the planet actually truly understand that?!

Some do tend to "HAARP" on about some theories.

 

[Nilgiri]

I thought the crowd here might appreciate the photo below and what it might represent:

View attachment 11898

This is how the Detroit Library ended in 1996. It took a while to get to this stage when it was closed, and then there were some vague plans to restore it, but they were never put into action. Just sad to see.

It reminded me when I was in airport with a friend/colleague waiting during delay in our flight.

He is deep Michigander (ever since I first knew him, he would bring up Michigan as the best thing since sliced bread, just the stories of how his brother went to UMich at ann arbor but he went to the uni in lansing instead and then all kind of stories involving this split).

But the topic during our wait had progressed inevitably to his assertion (for the umpteenth time) that there's "something special in the water" down in Michigan to have created what he has long said as the best Musical talent intensity (bar none) in the US (and by extension larger world too)....which I was readily disputing.

When he finally got around to bringing up motown, there was an older lady nearby us who finally piped up....in that she is Detroit through and through and she still remembers the jackson 5 performing at the Detroit Olympia "while it was still around". She said that era was absolutely unique and ended up augmenting my friend's argument. She regaled us a good 15 minutes with description of just how fanatical she and her group of girls were during the Jackson 5 performance itself, it was heart warming stuff haha.

That part always struck me though thinking back, that "while it was still around" stuff is bittersweet in end.

Michigan is a unique state to me in end.....maybe the most unique one in the end. I've travelled across it a few times as well.....crossing into it at both windsor and the soo, and also from chicagoland once too.

Lot of folks don't understand its meteoric rise and apex much at all, you need to talk to Michiganders at deep level to really "get it"..... why memories last past the things once containing them have disappeared or left derelict.....as things withdraw from the apex capacity and promise of the yesteryear for whatever reasons.

 

[VCheng]

It reminded me when I was in airport with a friend/colleague waiting during delay in our flight.

He is deep Michigander (ever since I first knew him, he would bring up Michigan as the best thing since sliced bread, just the stories of how his brother went to UMich at ann arbor but he went to the uni in lansing instead and then all kind of stories involving this split).

But the topic during our wait had progressed inevitably to his assertion (for the umpteenth time) that there's "something special in the water" down in Michigan to have created what he has long said as the best Musical talent intensity (bar none) in the US (and by extension larger world too)....which I was readily disputing.

When he finally got around to bringing up motown, there was an older lady nearby us who finally piped up....in that she is Detroit through and through and she still remembers the jackson 5 performing at the Detroit Olympia "while it was still around". She said that era was absolutely unique and ended up augmenting my friend's argument. She regaled us a good 15 minutes with description of just how fanatical she and her group of girls were during the Jackson 5 performance itself, it was heart warming stuff haha.

That part always struck me though thinking back, that "while it was still around" stuff is bittersweet in end.

Michigan is a unique state to me in end.....maybe the most unique one in the end. I've travelled across it a few times as well.....crossing into it at both windsor and the soo, and also from chicagoland once too.

Lot of folks don't understand its meteoric rise and apex much at all, you need to talk to Michiganders at deep level to really "get it"..... why memories last past the things once containing them have disappeared or left derelict.....as things withdraw from the apex capacity and promise of the yesteryear for whatever reasons.

Tell me about it. My brother lives there. I know what you’re talking about very well.

The horror of Detroit city. The faded glories. Woodward ave cruising. Mackinac Island. Yoopee. Sand dunes. Packard factory. The Ford museum. The Arabian food. Endless list

 

[Nilgiri]

Now let's talk about power. One sector of society will inevitably gain far more power than others. For example, in libertarian democracies, the power vacuum created by a weak government is always filled by the corporation and the society starts heading towards corporatocracy. The question is who would you rather have as the strongest entity in a state? I will always choose the government. It doesn't matter whether it is elected or not, the purpose of the government is to serve its people. Even an authoritarian regime will eventually crumble if it fails to serve its people. North Korea is not a valid example here as foreign powers prefer to maintain the status quo. If the government doesn't end up becoming the strongest entity then corporations will take over that role. I personally will never accept this under any circumstances.

At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are willing to sacrifice in order to gain something. Security can be attained by sacrificing privacy. Stability can be attained by choosing authoritarianism but you sacrifice freedom. In my opinion, complete freedom is one thing that can only be attained in death. Even in anarchy, true freedom cannot be attained because it is inevitable that one side will eventually become powerful enough to one day restore order.

If Alphas were destined to eventually break free from the shackles of their condition then how come only Helmholtz Watson was able to do it on his own? Bernard too was able to break the shackles of his condition but only due to the fact he was an outcast. A society entirely comprised of Alphas can work if different Alphas are given different conditioning from birth based on the jobs that they will be doing in the future. Let's suppose that this isn't possible then surely an agreement can be reached between the ordinary Alphas and the Alpha controllers. I refuse to believe that the Alphas would be so self-destructive as to not negotiate for the greater good. Also, not all Alphas are equal. We see that very clearly in the world of Brave New World hence why a hierarchy exists in all the castes. It is almost impossible for equality to exist and even when it does exist, it is only for a finite period until it inevitably vanishes. Humans can only grant equal opportunities. Additionally, in order for a society of entirely Alphas to exist, the controllers will have to surrender portions of their power. You are absolutely correct in saying that the society of only Alphas will challenge the authority of the totalitarian regime. I thoroughly despise the controllers for choosing stability at all costs over prosperity, the price for this was stagnation. What would you choose if you were one of the controllers?

The government has a role, but it must be clearly delineated and focused....so that it doesn't become its very own equivalent of what you fear with the corporatism/oligarch structure (that can meld into it negatively against public interest, among many other totalitarian and dystopia combinations).

Like any organisation it must be well hedged to receive feedback from its precise well-defined well-intended objectives....given path to hell is more often than not lined with good intentions along the way.

Hence the need for distributed decision making and feedback from all layers (and this feedback to have good transparency). Take my company, there is a corporate layer above me and engineering layers among and below me.....and then a lot of technical staff underneath us w.r.t how decision making responsibility (and relevant renumeration) is organised.....imperfections and reforms involved in all of this.....like when I see an overvalued corporate stiff and undervalued shop foreman (happens from time to time for sure).

i.e the renumeration of a general is going to be different to a colonel to a lieutenant and then the enlisted ranks....for any well appointed, organised and functioning army. But that organisation cannot insulate from the ongoing feedback process of what soldiers have seen and are expected to face....and impose some eternal "top down" extremity with a few self asserted omniscient generals (my own company would have long gone under in bad way if this were the case, compared to how it exists with imperfections to be worked upon today).

But its important the bottom up conduits of information flow and feedback are as sound as possible given the responsibilities invested. Its always going to be a work in process as society and organisations evolve with progression of time and accumulation of collective knowledge (and hopefully some wisdom too)....but the imperfections can only be found if you have the bottom-top information flow going on with basic recognition of the importance of appropriate response and reform mechanisms in place for this.

A top down "only" approach is immoral in essence....as you have insulated from this process entirely. That is the basic problem with totalitarianism, every other problem stems from that one.

It is recognition of this that on a warship, it is not uncommon for its captain to elect to go down with it as he has often made the sacrosanct promise of responsibility for all those onboard (not just him, as he knows he is not omniscient and certainly not omnipotent given the situation requiring this decision). i.e From the bottom up, especially the sailors in the deep bowels of the ship entrust their lives to him since he makes the decisions in the end. These folks that went down there in the trust they repose in the captain doing all he can with them in mind too.

The totalitarian approach would be that the captain removes himself from this entirely, assigned from the state, the state is omniscient and thus he is omniscient over those under his command.... everyone below him is just a cog and a unit...discarded as required because the state's perfection means any imperfection (such as the warship coming under fire and sinking) cascaded by their own larger mass incompetence clearly and not the captain's. The captain must save himself, think nothing of all of this, and be put on the next ship to then go about things the same way. i.e all power centres alloted by the state are to mirror the state in this respect....this is how the state asserts and justifies its power in such an extreme top-down way that has come to be after all.

i.e The state is the end that justifies all means. Power is an end that justifies all means.

When really this is a gross ungratefulness, moral corruption and usurpation as the state originated out of society (society precedes the state)....just like power originated out of free human will.

You take shade under a tree and eat of its fruit (all that have existed for a long time well before you for a reason), you have to be thankful to that tree and fruit first.....rather than cut it down and lord yourself as the tree and fruit.....with nothing left of the tree and fruit for those you subjugate under you.

Brave new world only intersects with a tiny portion of this. It is illustrative in the end. Huxley gives a few names you mention to personalise things with the reader in the interest of giving his message in a contained amount of time, but nowhere does he say these are the only ones experiencing this....they are meant to illustrate the problem at hand, who knows what the final scale of it is going on at this stage in the collective population (given there is no feedback loop in the system or story from the vast populations below the alphas). Its a hypothetical in the first place with a very different kind of human species (in its deep fibre) that exists in reality (IMO)....where all manner of tiered resistance would have pushed back its formation early and scaped it differently. Huxley skips over the details of all of this for his universe for a reason, because he is interested in the message past that by using the end result of the hypothetical dystopia.

So the question "what would I choose if I were one of the controllers" (if somehow I was just air-dropped in, since I would have long been one of its earlier victims/exiles/enemies "that resisted" in reality imo) would be something along the line of working to find a way to opening up the feedback process from the bottom up so that the totalitarian enterprise collapses and society can align itself to a moral edifice with rights invested at the individual level. Just like the freedom/choice given to all subjects underneath the matrix (existing for the sole purposes of the matrix) at the end of the story.

We are not a collective-first with the hive mind....the mind exists in the individual and morality thus is based on that.

I mean we can break it down into smaller equivalent chunks in the very real world and its history too. So the essence of the matter at hand can be extrapolated to all hypotheticals.

If a government with sufficient power (given things as enabling rights of govt, rather than negative rights) over its people, feels one segment of its people for the "greater good" ought to have its children taken away from its "inferior" parents (by force) and put into govt boarding schools so they are no longer like their parents in any capacity....should they?

I wonder if @Joe Shearer knows of the movie/book I am referencing here.

Because its clearly (to me) not even a question of "should they"....it always turns into they will if they can. So its imperative to have govt designed to never have this power in first place. It has to be a bottom up aligned principled process that defines what are the basic things that can be enforced top down (given the levers at play and the responsbilities at hand invested).

i.e Free will being simply adjudged by powers that be (extreme govt, extreme social hierarchical stratfication or any other such equivalents) to not matter, humans are to be reduced to caged animals with no intrinsic worth, dignity or conscience, as long it serves the top down insular notion of greater good it has narcisstically assigned to itself to be omniscient.

There are all kinds of other examples in just the 20th century....nuanced and extreme. The speed at which Lenin et al tried to get the USSR into utopian top down economy (and its costs). The Great Leap forward famine. Nazi Germany. So many more just among the extreme examples.

It is always good idea to think of how much this extreme top-down has impacted in one's own country too and at what cost.....what are the new ways its looking for an in. This stuff is never going away from the human realm (human nature cannot be changed), it has to be recognised and minimised.

 

[_NOBODY_]

The government has a role, but it must be clearly delineated and focused....so that it doesn't become its very own equivalent of what you fear with the corporatism/oligarch structure (that can meld into it negatively against public interest, among many other totalitarian and dystopia combinations).

Like any organisation it must be well hedged to receive feedback from its precise well-defined well-intended objectives....given path to hell is more often than not lined with good intentions along the way.

Hence the need for distributed decision making and feedback from all layers (and this feedback to have good transparency). Take my company, there is a corporate layer above me and engineering layers among and below me.....and then a lot of technical staff underneath us w.r.t how decision making responsibility (and relevant renumeration) is organised.....imperfections and reforms involved in all of this.....like when I see an overvalued corporate stiff and undervalued shop foreman (happens from time to time for sure).

i.e the renumeration of a general is going to be different to a colonel to a lieutenant and then the enlisted ranks....for any well appointed, organised and functioning army. But that organisation cannot insulate from the ongoing feedback process of what soldiers have seen and are expected to face....and impose some eternal "top down" extremity with a few self asserted omniscient generals (my own company would have long gone under in bad way if this were the case, compared to how it exists with imperfections to be worked upon today).

But its important the bottom up conduits of information flow and feedback are as sound as possible given the responsibilities invested. Its always going to be a work in process as society and organisations evolve with progression of time and accumulation of collective knowledge (and hopefully some wisdom too)....but the imperfections can only be found if you have the bottom-top information flow going on with basic recognition of the importance of appropriate response and reform mechanisms in place for this.

A top down "only" approach is immoral in essence....as you have insulated from this process entirely. That is the basic problem with totalitarianism, every other problem stems from that one.

It is recognition of this that on a warship, it is not uncommon for its captain to elect to go down with it as he has often made the sacrosanct promise of responsibility for all those onboard (not just him, as he knows he is not omniscient and certainly not omnipotent given the situation requiring this decision). i.e From the bottom up, especially the sailors in the deep bowels of the ship entrust their lives to him since he makes the decisions in the end. These folks that went down there in the trust they repose in the captain doing all he can with them in mind too.

The totalitarian approach would be that the captain removes himself from this entirely, assigned from the state, the state is omniscient and thus he is omniscient over those under his command.... everyone below him is just a cog and a unit...discarded as required because the state's perfection means any imperfection (such as the warship coming under fire and sinking) cascaded by their own larger mass incompetence clearly and not the captain's. The captain must save himself, think nothing of all of this, and be put on the next ship to then go about things the same way. i.e all power centres alloted by the state are to mirror the state in this respect....this is how the state asserts and justifies its power in such an extreme top-down way that has come to be after all.

i.e The state is the end that justifies all means. Power is an end that justifies all means.

When really this is a gross ungratefulness, moral corruption and usurpation as the state originated out of society (society precedes the state)....just like power originated out of free human will.

You take shade under a tree and eat of its fruit (all that have existed for a long time well before you for a reason), you have to be thankful to that tree and fruit first.....rather than cut it down and lord yourself as the tree and fruit.....with nothing left of the tree and fruit for those you subjugate under you.

Brave new world only intersects with a tiny portion of this. It is illustrative in the end. Huxley gives a few names you mention to personalise things with the reader in the interest of giving his message in a contained amount of time, but nowhere does he say these are the only ones experiencing this....they are meant to illustrate the problem at hand, who knows what the final scale of it is going on at this stage in the collective population (given there is no feedback loop in the system or story from the vast populations below the alphas). Its a hypothetical in the first place with a very different kind of human species (in its deep fibre) that exists in reality (IMO)....where all manner of tiered resistance would have pushed back its formation early and scaped it differently. Huxley skips over the details of all of this for his universe for a reason, because he is interested in the message past that by using the end result of the hypothetical dystopia.

So the question "what would I choose if I were one of the controllers" (if somehow I was just air-dropped in, since I would have long been one of its earlier victims/exiles/enemies "that resisted" in reality imo) would be something along the line of working to find a way to opening up the feedback process from the bottom up so that the totalitarian enterprise collapses and society can align itself to a moral edifice with rights invested at the individual level. Just like the freedom/choice given to all subjects underneath the matrix (existing for the sole purposes of the matrix) at the end of the story.

We are not a collective-first with the hive mind....the mind exists in the individual and morality thus is based on that.

I mean we can break it down into smaller equivalent chunks in the very real world and its history too. So the essence of the matter at hand can be extrapolated to all hypotheticals.

If a government with sufficient power (given things as enabling rights of govt, rather than negative rights) over its people, feels one segment of its people for the "greater good" ought to have its children taken away from its "inferior" parents (by force) and put into govt boarding schools so they are no longer like their parents in any capacity....should they?

I wonder if @Joe Shearer knows of the movie/book I am referencing here.

Because its clearly (to me) not even a question of "should they"....it always turns into they will if they can. So its imperative to have govt designed to never have this power in first place. It has to be a bottom up aligned principled process that defines what are the basic things that can be enforced top down (given the levers at play and the responsbilities at hand invested).

i.e Free will being simply adjudged by powers that be (extreme govt, extreme social hierarchical stratfication or any other such equivalents) to not matter, humans are to be reduced to caged animals with no intrinsic worth, dignity or conscience, as long it serves the top down insular notion of greater good it has narcisstically assigned to itself to be omniscient.

There are all kinds of other examples in just the 20th century....nuanced and extreme. The speed at which Lenin et al tried to get the USSR into utopian top down economy (and its costs). The Great Leap forward famine. Nazi Germany. So many more just among the extreme examples.

It is always good idea to think of how much this extreme top-down has impacted in one's own country too and at what cost.....what are the new ways its looking for an in. This stuff is never going away from the human realm (human nature cannot be changed), it has to be recognised and minimised.

Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply. I have so many things that I want to discuss with you regarding this post but I will need time to write a reply that truly honors your post. Also, I am incredibly busy with various projects.

There are all kinds of other examples in just the 20th century....nuanced and extreme. The speed at which Lenin et al tried to get the USSR into utopian top down economy (and its costs). The Great Leap forward famine. Nazi Germany. So many more just among the extreme examples.

What is the value of a single human life to you? Let's suppose that you can see the future. How would you react to this quote of yours if sacrificing human lives led to the greater good in the long term?

 

[_NOBODY_]

‘The Art of War’: The greatest strategy book ever written | Roger Martin​

Strategy advisor Roger Martin explains how 2,000 year old military thinking is useful in modern business strategy.

Business leaders can gain valuable insights from history’s great military strategists. Roger Martin, an author and the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, suggests examining "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu.

Although the text is more than 2,000 years old, Roger argues that it contains timeless philosophy that applies not only to the battlefield, but also to modern business strategy. To Roger, people often think war and business is all about numbers and hard data. But in reality, it’s often just as important to think about more qualitative aspects about your company and its competition. And that’s where philosophy and customer-focused design come into play.

00:00 Is ‘The Art of War’ as good as an MBA?
02:19 “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”
03:25 “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare”
04:22 “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard”
05:05 “Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.”
06:28 The tripartite view of the future

 

[Nilgiri]

What is the value of a single human life to you? Let's suppose that you can see the future. How would you react to this quote of yours if sacrificing human lives led to the greater good in the long term?

For me there is no such thing as a greater good if it has resulted by deliberate taking of life. We can objectively create more good things without the taking of life to begin with. This is the key to studying, analysing and implementing....how to do good and not do bad.

So if innocent life has been taken (or the equivalents of objective unjust subjugation), any good achieved downstream was not due to this or correlated to this at all.....as good cannot come from bad. Matter is matter in the end, it is not anti-matter.

i.e for example the extremely bad excesses of the Mao era (all argued/asserted then and even today as some procedure/objective of "greater good") were/are neither a requirement nor are correlated in any way to China's economic strengthening in the subsequent eras. They (good and bad especially when it comes to the extreme binary of life and death) are entirely mutually exclusive sets. So much so that China would have been far stronger+better today if the Mao era did not involve the extreme bad it did....and did more of the good regd the non-Mao factions as early as hypothetically possible....and all the takeaways/applications for this in the more recent time both within and outside China that are still not adequately grappled with by the powers that be in our human realm.

It is never zero sum in that life (and rights + freedoms) has to make way for power.... or that power (and the law, order, civilisation etc) has to make way for extreme rights + freedoms (especially when infringing on others right+freedom....say in might make right bullies, cutthroats and mobs that prey upon the weak given the slightest chance when there is some localised or generalised anarchy).

i.e there should not be any extreme compulsion driven system (from top down) nor any extreme voluntary driven system (from bottom up)....simply because (leaving aside the morality debate, i.e the whole point of ethics and epistemology) there is no need for these approaches from what we can see in history as the balanced approached far from either extreme....that have produced the largest good and diminished the most bad for their times (and passed on the baton to subsequent times to improve upon).

Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply. I have so many things that I want to discuss with you regarding this post but I will need time to write a reply that truly honors your post. Also, I am incredibly busy with various projects.

I understand and empathise fully. These replies all will take measured time in general from both our ends and all ends (from others interested to participate) too....as free time just arrives whenever it does....and subject to all other competing pressures there too when it does heh.

But I have great hope and expectation for this particular thread. Books are one immense great window to great intellectual endeavour.

 

[Joe Shearer]

free time just arrives whenever it does....and subject to all other competing pressures there too when it does heh.

What's free time?

 

[VCheng]

What's free time?

A luxurious myth us plebes can only dream of, Sir..

 

[RescueRanger]

@_NOBODY_ NOAA have a really good resource on hurricane science if you want to have a read:

How do hurricanes form?

oceanservice.noaa.gov

 

[Joe Shearer]

@_NOBODY_ NOAA have a really good resource on hurricane science if you want to have a read:

How do hurricanes form?

oceanservice.noaa.gov

If only I could bring in my books....

 

[RescueRanger]

A luxurious myth us plebes can only dream of, Sir..

Reminds me of that famous lecture by Alan Watts: