The complete takeover of every aspect of society by administrative managerialism is a plague that afflicts us all. In every profession - policing, medicine, education, science, industry, journalism, the list goes on and on - professionals have been reduced to employees of impersonal bureaucracies, their decision-making power stripped away as they're forced by regulation to implement the algorithms designed by administrators who themselves frequently have no particularly notable or impressive experience within the field that they're managing.
The results have been a terrible malaise, negatively impacting the morale of professionals, as well as fostering a crisis of competence that has led directly to a collapse in confidence. All instinctively recognize that a professional who cannot use his own judgement, but must blindly enforce an algorithmic decision, cannot be trusted ... and indeed is not worthy of the trust and respect with which we know we should be able to invest in them. And the professionals know this, too.
I'd not previously considered that this could be yet another symptom of the left brain servant exceeding its proper station, but now that you point it out it makes perfect sense.
May 3, 2022·edited May 3, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
Reasoning is far more than a mere algorithm; and that identification is pernicious in the extreme.
And what happens when our most essential and core attribute - the capacity for reason, and therefore for free will - is eclipsed?
The protocolization & algorithmization of nearly everything until we have been thingified out of our humanity. (That's three made up words in one sentence.)
Actually the thingification of humanity is something McGilchrist (or maybe Louis Sass) allude to - I think your made up words are clarifiabling the conversation maximendously .
This is why features such as text suggestion creep me out. Helpful suggestions from the algorithm very easily become a replacement, rather than an aid to, human judgement. The thinking process drains from in vivo to in silico, and step by imperceptible step the human is reduced to a mere appendage of the machine. Following the principle that that which goes unused atrophies, the human ceases to be capable of reason; and should the process persist, this reduction in native intelligence will be indelibly written into the genome. Come back in a few hundred years and the world will be populated by Homo erectus, blindly following the directions of the AI while they imagine themselves the greatest geniuses in history.
May 3, 2022·edited May 3, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
Very, very well said.
In the future, homo superbus - now crueler and less free and less intelligent than ever before - will google himself, and google will confirm it for him: he's a genius.
I can see why some people may think AI is the way to go. Maybe they can’t make decisions easily and don’t trust themselves , especially in life changing situations. Maybe they are overwhelmed by choices. I’m assuming AI programs list likely answers from most likely to least likely. If someone has a hard time choosing, that would be a plus. If you follow the program, it’s not your responsibility if the program is wrong, as we saw over the last couple of years. Maybe there are lots of lazy thinkers who have discovered the road to success is a computer algorithm. why work so hard and think so hard, when all you have to do is follow the program.
May 3, 2022·edited May 4, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
I am totally unqualified to make comments. I know very little about very little and don't like to read long comments from people like myself. However, I have been reading your and TGC's posts and have some thoughts regarding what I have been observing, not specific to the handling of the virus for the past two years.
My favorite saying from my father is, "attention is all that I can afford to pay." So, I attempt to pay attention.
Tara Couture (Slowdown Farmstead) consistently speaks about the importance of experiential life and the lack of attention to it in general, and even more importantly, in the past two years. Here is her latest offering:
Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko author) had my attention until he stated that regenerative/small farm/indigenous ways of growing will never solve the food production problems.
Douglas Murry had me until he stated in an interview on unherd, that "there are no other ways of knowing that have been proven to solve anything." To be fair, he is specifically talking about culture wars. He stated that finding cures for Alzheimer's, or solving any of the other health problems facing Western societies will never come from "other ways of knowing."
I see these as blind spots. I disagree with them and believe that these are left brain ways of thinking.
Agree - for the creative thinker, not dominated by the left hemisphere, there is an abundance of solutions - the problem (as we have seen with alternative energy) is that those ideas get shelved by the big players who's interest it is to maintain the status quo.
The essence of life itself is a non-linear process; witness the action of proteins within the cell, one of them alone has multiple functions dependent upon not just the messages it gets from other proteins and cofactors but upon the function of the cell itself, where it is located in the body or in the organs. There is an innate intelligence within that cannot be accounted for by mathematical equation or physical logic. In other words, there is a consciousness at work. The spiritual aspect of existence can be attempted to be ignored, but at the peril of the individual's meaning of existence, their very experience of life. The right and left need each other to have a full experience of life, but ultimately, the right provides the connection to what cannot be known without the 'knower', the miniscule fraction of time that holds the inspiration prior to the feeling, then the thought. The true 'experiencer' is that essence of a human being that is constant, above the throes of emotion and thought, that supports the physical expression of what truly 'is', that imbues those proteins with that innate intelligence.
In his 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose claimed he could mathematically demonstrate that people are capable of thinking and doing things that cannot be described algorithmically (I do not understand the math so I have to take his word for it). That is, no algorithm can reproduce the thoughts and behavior of an actual person. It's not just that people are too complex and the algorithm writers can't identify and accurately define all the variables and interactive mechanisms. It is that the project itself is logically impossible because the processes are not mechanical and do not obey cause-effect precedents.
In one iteration A + B yields C. In the next iteration A + B yields T. There is no causal link between the 2 divergent outcomes. C did not "morph" into T. The train spontaneously jumped the tracks and is now traveling on a different logical railroad toward a different destination. There is a "quantum leap" that obeys no laws of necessity.
Math cannot describe what amounts to random behavior. Free will is able to produce what amounts to random behavior. A human being is not a beaker of gaseous molecules whose macro behavior obeys general laws - "laws of averages". A single stray choice alters the patterns of the whole person. Nor do we behave rhythmically and periodically such that we can be described by chaos theory math, morphing from one state to the opposite state and back on continuous algorithmically describable paths.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Shakespeare (1600)
"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Twain (1870s?)
"I had discovered in college that one cannot imagine anything so strange and unbelievable but that it has been upheld by some philosopher..." Descartes (1637)
The left brain wants to know "for sure". And anybody who wants to get paid for being an "expert" has to claim to know things for sure. Which requires denying uncertainty, denying not knowing, and scornfully dismissing all the evidence that does not agree with one's "certainties".
So now we have a whole culture of experts who are convinced they know for sure all manner of things that are visibly false but logically "necessary" within powerfully delusory conceptual paradigms.
And after 500 years of "progress" we suffer the same tiresome plague of strange and unbelievable academic and "expert" absurdities, in addition to the plague of rational certainties made of circular logic built on "self-evidently true" assumptions that Descartes talked himself into.
I totally agree with you. Penrose teamed up with Dr Stuart Hameroff and came up with a quantum based theory about communication between cells (the Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective reduction - Orch OR - theory). In conjunction with the electrical/chemical signaling, regional wave signaling, and associated signaling of the glial cells (not to mention the rest of the cells in the body), we have no chance of creating algorithms to emulate the human brain - let alone the mind!
It is very intriguing to consider that "if intelligence wasn't inherent, science and math would not even exist, nor would there be any science if there was no design in the universe, for science is essentially and primarily devoted to the detection and description of design (ie. scientific laws)." - David R Hawkins. We simply cannot escape that 'knowing' is limited to our own individual experience, the rest we just 'know about'. Acceptance of this ought to feed limitless curiosity to understand and question. We ought to have humility to accept that we see and understand from a limited perspective. Thus, the right hemisphere is the conduit to a higher level of reason because of its capacity to see the whole; the context of the 'forest', composed of the 'trees'.
A fantastic book on cellular complexity and such non-linear process is Jon Lief's The Secret Language of Cells (in a language that we can all understand, which is rather nice!).
Thank you for that. I worked exclusively with mesenchymal stem cells, cells that are abundant in the umbilical cord lining. Usually, the umbilical cord is discarded with medical waste, but it was discovered that the cells within the lining were regenerative, amazingly so. It was astounding to behold the actions; these cells 'knew' how to assemble and message any other protein or factor required to completely regenerate tissue and cells. Furthermore, it was discovered that the messages themselves are transmitted via vibrational frequency, tuning the damaged tissue or inactive cells to the correct one. Ultimately, all the required elements for cellular integrity and function were restored, even blood vessels were renewed. Fascinating was that it didn't matter where the problem was in the body, the results were the same. One protein in the body has multiple functions and utility, and can message multiple others, and the messages can all be different, dependent on required functions. There was no 'pattern', except a multi-tasking efficiency that could not be computed or calculated.
May 3, 2022·edited May 3, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
I'm not sure if you seen this but we are stuck in this way of seeing things as linear cause and effect because of written language... (Which brings belief in history that is written on books, even if it was embellished)
I wonder if we were more ambidextrous in the past before all of this crap.
I thought it was the norm to be able to use either hand in precise tasks but later on in school learned that this is not so.
It's funny how the more we focus on "knowledge" acquisition, the less we discover. Perhaps this is because we need to put such knowledge onto a recordable medium, which takes away from the other aspects of the information?
May 20, 2022·edited May 20, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
One big factor in why therapists, doctors, etc want algorithms to follow is that they really aren't given the time paid that they used to get. I'm not saying that they're broke, but they chase the money to repay their huge education bills. That leads to shortcuts to get the pay.
Take these chains off and make it more like a civil service position with the government, so therapists are not looking at money, but at a job.
This rush rush rush money system is very left brained.
I deal with it at work troubleshooting electrical/mechanical issues. Most people want to focus on one thing and do something which sometimes makes it harder to find the cause.
I prefer to look at the whole and feel where the intended process got stuck. Looking at the machine that has its own logic, not like they do, look at the parts. It means that I can skip checking a lot of the parts that I already know work because of the logic.
Highly recommending McGilChrist’s lectures, many of which are found on YouTube. The first one I ever saw was “The Coincidence of Opposites.” McGilchrist is a rare treasure who is much-needed in this world of insanity currently underway. Great you are doing a series, Winston Smith.
May 4, 2022·edited May 4, 2022Liked by Winston Smith
31 years ago I was a single mother in Vancouver BC Canada. My son was difficult and the first time in my life I ended up on welfare (to stay only as long as absolutely needed I might add). Just around that time Hong Kong was reverting back to Chinese control from the UK. Some government officials thought it was a good idea to sell Vancouver to the Chinese who had money and basically it protected us from the global crash of 2008. Few know this story. Well, anyone who could sell out did sell out and moved further out of the City. Prices of real estate kept sky rocketing upward as the Asians had no shortage of cash to buy our city. Why did they have so much cash? Well, we stopped making our own stuff. We wanted more. We wanted cheaper. We closed down all the shops in favor of Big Brands. We were sold on, and bought the idea, that we needed all this crap. We sold out to Walmart. We did it to ourselves. Now the next generation of young people have no idea what happened. Do they care? Well only in as much as its so expensive to live in Vancouver. But no one really knows the story and no one really cares.
This similar situation has happened all over the west. Who is pushing real estate prices up everywhere? Who has the cash that we no longer have in the West? Simple answer. Asians.
Do you know that a Chinese company has bought a US Defence contractor. Does anyone care? No. As long as Facebook is operational and Twitter is operational and they can buy Tesla stock they don't care.
In order to escape Mass Psychosis people have to care about the future. But they don't and en mass they won't. So now what?
They don't care about the future until one day they wake up in a future they don't like, one that's enslaved them. Then a counter-revolution starts to form to take back what was lost. This seems to be the pattern though human history. Nevertheless I think there are now more people who care than we might appreciate - the trick is to get them to act on what they care about.
Yes, engineers who use both hemispheres like you do Allan - bravo.
The complete takeover of every aspect of society by administrative managerialism is a plague that afflicts us all. In every profession - policing, medicine, education, science, industry, journalism, the list goes on and on - professionals have been reduced to employees of impersonal bureaucracies, their decision-making power stripped away as they're forced by regulation to implement the algorithms designed by administrators who themselves frequently have no particularly notable or impressive experience within the field that they're managing.
The results have been a terrible malaise, negatively impacting the morale of professionals, as well as fostering a crisis of competence that has led directly to a collapse in confidence. All instinctively recognize that a professional who cannot use his own judgement, but must blindly enforce an algorithmic decision, cannot be trusted ... and indeed is not worthy of the trust and respect with which we know we should be able to invest in them. And the professionals know this, too.
I'd not previously considered that this could be yet another symptom of the left brain servant exceeding its proper station, but now that you point it out it makes perfect sense.
Very well said!
Reasoning is far more than a mere algorithm; and that identification is pernicious in the extreme.
And what happens when our most essential and core attribute - the capacity for reason, and therefore for free will - is eclipsed?
The protocolization & algorithmization of nearly everything until we have been thingified out of our humanity. (That's three made up words in one sentence.)
Actually the thingification of humanity is something McGilchrist (or maybe Louis Sass) allude to - I think your made up words are clarifiabling the conversation maximendously .
This is why features such as text suggestion creep me out. Helpful suggestions from the algorithm very easily become a replacement, rather than an aid to, human judgement. The thinking process drains from in vivo to in silico, and step by imperceptible step the human is reduced to a mere appendage of the machine. Following the principle that that which goes unused atrophies, the human ceases to be capable of reason; and should the process persist, this reduction in native intelligence will be indelibly written into the genome. Come back in a few hundred years and the world will be populated by Homo erectus, blindly following the directions of the AI while they imagine themselves the greatest geniuses in history.
Very, very well said.
In the future, homo superbus - now crueler and less free and less intelligent than ever before - will google himself, and google will confirm it for him: he's a genius.
We are watching the previews of this movie now.
The future they have planned is the Venn diagram overlap of the Borg, Brave New World, 1984, and Idiocracy.
I can see why some people may think AI is the way to go. Maybe they can’t make decisions easily and don’t trust themselves , especially in life changing situations. Maybe they are overwhelmed by choices. I’m assuming AI programs list likely answers from most likely to least likely. If someone has a hard time choosing, that would be a plus. If you follow the program, it’s not your responsibility if the program is wrong, as we saw over the last couple of years. Maybe there are lots of lazy thinkers who have discovered the road to success is a computer algorithm. why work so hard and think so hard, when all you have to do is follow the program.
I am totally unqualified to make comments. I know very little about very little and don't like to read long comments from people like myself. However, I have been reading your and TGC's posts and have some thoughts regarding what I have been observing, not specific to the handling of the virus for the past two years.
My favorite saying from my father is, "attention is all that I can afford to pay." So, I attempt to pay attention.
Tara Couture (Slowdown Farmstead) consistently speaks about the importance of experiential life and the lack of attention to it in general, and even more importantly, in the past two years. Here is her latest offering:
https://www.slowdownfarmstead.com/p/fortification-for-the-weary?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNDQ5NjkwNSwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTMzMzYyNTMsIl8iOiJxd24vciIsImlhdCI6MTY1MTY3MTU5NiwiZXhwIjoxNjUxNjc1MTk2LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNDg2MjM3Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.ZCICwexMqVogLO1mxl-jsBrSn3oV6GddKDvtFcuRYiw&s=r
Michael Shellenberger (San Fransicko author) had my attention until he stated that regenerative/small farm/indigenous ways of growing will never solve the food production problems.
Douglas Murry had me until he stated in an interview on unherd, that "there are no other ways of knowing that have been proven to solve anything." To be fair, he is specifically talking about culture wars. He stated that finding cures for Alzheimer's, or solving any of the other health problems facing Western societies will never come from "other ways of knowing."
I see these as blind spots. I disagree with them and believe that these are left brain ways of thinking.
Agree - for the creative thinker, not dominated by the left hemisphere, there is an abundance of solutions - the problem (as we have seen with alternative energy) is that those ideas get shelved by the big players who's interest it is to maintain the status quo.
The essence of life itself is a non-linear process; witness the action of proteins within the cell, one of them alone has multiple functions dependent upon not just the messages it gets from other proteins and cofactors but upon the function of the cell itself, where it is located in the body or in the organs. There is an innate intelligence within that cannot be accounted for by mathematical equation or physical logic. In other words, there is a consciousness at work. The spiritual aspect of existence can be attempted to be ignored, but at the peril of the individual's meaning of existence, their very experience of life. The right and left need each other to have a full experience of life, but ultimately, the right provides the connection to what cannot be known without the 'knower', the miniscule fraction of time that holds the inspiration prior to the feeling, then the thought. The true 'experiencer' is that essence of a human being that is constant, above the throes of emotion and thought, that supports the physical expression of what truly 'is', that imbues those proteins with that innate intelligence.
In his 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose claimed he could mathematically demonstrate that people are capable of thinking and doing things that cannot be described algorithmically (I do not understand the math so I have to take his word for it). That is, no algorithm can reproduce the thoughts and behavior of an actual person. It's not just that people are too complex and the algorithm writers can't identify and accurately define all the variables and interactive mechanisms. It is that the project itself is logically impossible because the processes are not mechanical and do not obey cause-effect precedents.
In one iteration A + B yields C. In the next iteration A + B yields T. There is no causal link between the 2 divergent outcomes. C did not "morph" into T. The train spontaneously jumped the tracks and is now traveling on a different logical railroad toward a different destination. There is a "quantum leap" that obeys no laws of necessity.
Math cannot describe what amounts to random behavior. Free will is able to produce what amounts to random behavior. A human being is not a beaker of gaseous molecules whose macro behavior obeys general laws - "laws of averages". A single stray choice alters the patterns of the whole person. Nor do we behave rhythmically and periodically such that we can be described by chaos theory math, morphing from one state to the opposite state and back on continuous algorithmically describable paths.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Shakespeare (1600)
"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Twain (1870s?)
"I had discovered in college that one cannot imagine anything so strange and unbelievable but that it has been upheld by some philosopher..." Descartes (1637)
The left brain wants to know "for sure". And anybody who wants to get paid for being an "expert" has to claim to know things for sure. Which requires denying uncertainty, denying not knowing, and scornfully dismissing all the evidence that does not agree with one's "certainties".
So now we have a whole culture of experts who are convinced they know for sure all manner of things that are visibly false but logically "necessary" within powerfully delusory conceptual paradigms.
And after 500 years of "progress" we suffer the same tiresome plague of strange and unbelievable academic and "expert" absurdities, in addition to the plague of rational certainties made of circular logic built on "self-evidently true" assumptions that Descartes talked himself into.
I totally agree with you. Penrose teamed up with Dr Stuart Hameroff and came up with a quantum based theory about communication between cells (the Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective reduction - Orch OR - theory). In conjunction with the electrical/chemical signaling, regional wave signaling, and associated signaling of the glial cells (not to mention the rest of the cells in the body), we have no chance of creating algorithms to emulate the human brain - let alone the mind!
It is very intriguing to consider that "if intelligence wasn't inherent, science and math would not even exist, nor would there be any science if there was no design in the universe, for science is essentially and primarily devoted to the detection and description of design (ie. scientific laws)." - David R Hawkins. We simply cannot escape that 'knowing' is limited to our own individual experience, the rest we just 'know about'. Acceptance of this ought to feed limitless curiosity to understand and question. We ought to have humility to accept that we see and understand from a limited perspective. Thus, the right hemisphere is the conduit to a higher level of reason because of its capacity to see the whole; the context of the 'forest', composed of the 'trees'.
A fantastic book on cellular complexity and such non-linear process is Jon Lief's The Secret Language of Cells (in a language that we can all understand, which is rather nice!).
Thank you for that. I worked exclusively with mesenchymal stem cells, cells that are abundant in the umbilical cord lining. Usually, the umbilical cord is discarded with medical waste, but it was discovered that the cells within the lining were regenerative, amazingly so. It was astounding to behold the actions; these cells 'knew' how to assemble and message any other protein or factor required to completely regenerate tissue and cells. Furthermore, it was discovered that the messages themselves are transmitted via vibrational frequency, tuning the damaged tissue or inactive cells to the correct one. Ultimately, all the required elements for cellular integrity and function were restored, even blood vessels were renewed. Fascinating was that it didn't matter where the problem was in the body, the results were the same. One protein in the body has multiple functions and utility, and can message multiple others, and the messages can all be different, dependent on required functions. There was no 'pattern', except a multi-tasking efficiency that could not be computed or calculated.
I'm not sure if you seen this but we are stuck in this way of seeing things as linear cause and effect because of written language... (Which brings belief in history that is written on books, even if it was embellished)
https://robnitro.substack.com/p/alphabet-vs-the-goddess?s=w
I wonder if we were more ambidextrous in the past before all of this crap.
I thought it was the norm to be able to use either hand in precise tasks but later on in school learned that this is not so.
It's funny how the more we focus on "knowledge" acquisition, the less we discover. Perhaps this is because we need to put such knowledge onto a recordable medium, which takes away from the other aspects of the information?
One big factor in why therapists, doctors, etc want algorithms to follow is that they really aren't given the time paid that they used to get. I'm not saying that they're broke, but they chase the money to repay their huge education bills. That leads to shortcuts to get the pay.
Take these chains off and make it more like a civil service position with the government, so therapists are not looking at money, but at a job.
This rush rush rush money system is very left brained.
I deal with it at work troubleshooting electrical/mechanical issues. Most people want to focus on one thing and do something which sometimes makes it harder to find the cause.
I prefer to look at the whole and feel where the intended process got stuck. Looking at the machine that has its own logic, not like they do, look at the parts. It means that I can skip checking a lot of the parts that I already know work because of the logic.
Highly recommending McGilChrist’s lectures, many of which are found on YouTube. The first one I ever saw was “The Coincidence of Opposites.” McGilchrist is a rare treasure who is much-needed in this world of insanity currently underway. Great you are doing a series, Winston Smith.
and I can listen to his educated English accent all day! lol.
31 years ago I was a single mother in Vancouver BC Canada. My son was difficult and the first time in my life I ended up on welfare (to stay only as long as absolutely needed I might add). Just around that time Hong Kong was reverting back to Chinese control from the UK. Some government officials thought it was a good idea to sell Vancouver to the Chinese who had money and basically it protected us from the global crash of 2008. Few know this story. Well, anyone who could sell out did sell out and moved further out of the City. Prices of real estate kept sky rocketing upward as the Asians had no shortage of cash to buy our city. Why did they have so much cash? Well, we stopped making our own stuff. We wanted more. We wanted cheaper. We closed down all the shops in favor of Big Brands. We were sold on, and bought the idea, that we needed all this crap. We sold out to Walmart. We did it to ourselves. Now the next generation of young people have no idea what happened. Do they care? Well only in as much as its so expensive to live in Vancouver. But no one really knows the story and no one really cares.
This similar situation has happened all over the west. Who is pushing real estate prices up everywhere? Who has the cash that we no longer have in the West? Simple answer. Asians.
Do you know that a Chinese company has bought a US Defence contractor. Does anyone care? No. As long as Facebook is operational and Twitter is operational and they can buy Tesla stock they don't care.
In order to escape Mass Psychosis people have to care about the future. But they don't and en mass they won't. So now what?
They don't care about the future until one day they wake up in a future they don't like, one that's enslaved them. Then a counter-revolution starts to form to take back what was lost. This seems to be the pattern though human history. Nevertheless I think there are now more people who care than we might appreciate - the trick is to get them to act on what they care about.
In a few years we will have an entire generation whose brains were programmed by cell phones from infancy. Someone should start the study now.