vlt/words/07-08-2017.md

07-08-2017

I cannot sleep. I tried to, but as I lay staring at the ceiling with eyes wide open, the memories of the few strokes of reality's fabric that I have had all banded together and flipped themselves, from a glimpse of something beautiful into a horrific angst and I simply lay there, paralysed with existential dread.

That dread is fading from me now as I type these words, partly in distraction and partly in hope that I can relate the feeling to another person. I searched my mind for somebody to call and speak to but I don't know anybody as prone to nocturnality as myself. Another time.

For now I am tempering my malcontent with sympathy for a group of people I cannot help but feel are sorely misunderstood: the (rarely) humble economists. It is clear to all that our universe consists of wonderous interplays systems built on top of other equally complicated systems. The science of biology (and I think none will dispute that it is indeed a science) is an emergent property of the field of chemistry, itself beholden to the physical forces of elementary particles, described by quantum theories in ever more abstract applications of pure mathematics with a few choice variables.

From biology we work upwards: ecology, how do the watery carbon based machines built from these blueprints interact with each other? Psychology: how do these machines interact with themselves? Suddenly we come to a halt though, as we often hear that economics is not a real science, simply a study of money making.

There is in fact no Nobel Prize in economics. There is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, conceived by the central bank of Sweden in 1968 to celebrate 300 years of said money making, which does include the term Science but even so, a member of the Nobel family, Peter Nobel, Alfred's great grand nephew is quoted as saying "[t]he Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it's a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation."^1

Quite a slander, and up until recently I felt much the same, but I feel we are marching ceacelessly into an economically powered world that has all the nuances of ecology, psychology, mathematics, game theory and many other fields being executed simultaneously. What would you call the application of several sciences at once if not a science?

In economics as in every other corner of reality, efficiency is held in the highest regard. If you are more efficient than a competitor, perhaps because you have some innovation such as a loving workforce that doesn't mind coming in on Saturday, you can outmaneuvre them. In economics this means making money; it finds clear parallels in other avenues of life because simply, there is no distiction between economics and any other part of life. A lion might be terrifying and huge but if you are quick with your hands and good with a spear you are more more efficient than a lion and so it will not eat you.

Any sensible left leaning person's intuition will tell them that killing other humans is very bad, and it is. It's also really inefficient! Many hands make light work, if there is only you around there's lots to be done and not many people to do it.

^2 I don't think it's an accident that what people's intuition tells them is just or good often overlaps with really efficient methods. It's better for us to work together than to compete with each other constantly, game theory shows us this is the case in even its most basic game: the prisoners' dilemma^3.

Of course we wouldn't be here if all we did was cooperate (wishfully) with other entities. Sometimes competition is necessary, humans didn't become the apex predator of the (known) universe by hoping that lions would let us be, we banded together and outmaneuvred them, taking over the environment around us. The trick is seeing when, and in fact with whom we need to band together and when we need to compete.

In my mind competition is really just evolution happening. Evolution never, ever stops happening, the environment just changes, and this is so now.

Humanity has passed a point where we routinely compete with other species, now our competition is within ourselves. I feel humanity is approaching a time when we need to sub-speciate. Just as physical characteristics create diversity in organisms via evolution, so do ideals in human populations.

It's not okay to tolerate opinions and ideals that are clearly against the common good, tolerance is not competition, it is the equivalent of negotiating with lions. The most powerful nation on the planet has elected a warmongering fool into its highest postion, and they did so because fascism is very very efficient, it motivates people in insane ways.

To me the left has no such band at the moment. We can't tell our friends from our enemies and are being outmaneuvred.

I feel lost.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20071014012248/http://www.thelocal.se/2173/20050928/
2. at this point i am really struggling to get my thoughts down cohesively. everything in my mind is woven together so tightly.

confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is: If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa) If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge)

Money is an abstraction humans have created to represent power in a world where making food is 
actually a bit too easy and they have to find something else to do.