Absolutely exquisite imagining of the lipid bilayer theory of how life emerged. Interesting for thinking about the theory, but more than that, it’s absolutely worth watching just because it’s so lovely.
See also additional image about the piece and the science at https://www.behance.net/gallery/159624143/aBiogenesis
Minecraft often seems to me to capture the essence of problems in my real life more than other games do. I have all these objects and space and I have to figure out how to usefully organize the objects in the space. I constantly think of things I should do and don’t know which ones to do first, or how to remember what they all are, and always feel like I should have a better mental schema for even knowing what the possible things are that I should maybe do. In the process of doing one thing, I am reminded of several other ones that I should imminently do. It is bed time way too often. I constantly forget to eat. If I’m doing a thing and its night time or I’m dying of starvation or something else to do comes up, it’s never clear if I should actually stop immediately. (When will I finish the thing? How will I remember?) Less importantly or intensely in real life than in Minecraft, I often suspect that I’ve been in this exact place many times before, and yet I can’t tell it from similar places. And I forget which direction is which every time I turn a corner.
Basically, I think Minecraft gets at something about organizing the information required to be an agent, given limited memory. As you walk around, you see a lot of things, and have a lot of options, such that at any given point, the relevant options are not just a set of salient paths ahead, as in a sophisticated choose your own adventure book. Most of the best courses of action are not physically represented in front of you, and can only be seen at all because of structures in your own mind constructed to keep them available.
https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/mine-craft-20-07-03
“She also describes rumors about long-simmering pots in France, such as one particular batch in Normandy that simmered constantly for over 300 years, while an even older pot, in Perpignan, had been bubbling since the 1400s until it finally met its demise in 1945 during World War II bombing raids.”
I find this quite troubling. The government shouldn’t be in the business of prohibiting speech, including by pressuring private parties to do so. The case law is a bit mixed, but I’d love to see this issue tested in court.
The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
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DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.
According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation
An excellent read. I’m not quite as confident as he is, but I think he’s closer to the truth than a lot of the media would suggest.
In his speech this week, Biden mentioned various issues being contested and then added, “But there’s something else at stake, democracy itself. I’m not the only one who sees it. Recent polls have shown an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat.”
This is one of the great misinterpretations of public opinion in my lifetime. A recent New York Times poll found that 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 71 percent of independents believe that “democracy is currently under threat.”
But Americans are all over the place on what poses the actual threat. Voter fraud, voter suppression, corruption, misinformation, polarization, Trump, Biden, nationalism, extremism, and the media all made the list.
For Biden, the topline number suggests everyone should vote for Democrats because Democrats are the only party committed to “democracy.” But that’s nonsense. The mere fact that a majority of Americans are worried that democracy is under threat suggests that Americans like democracy and want to keep it around. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the quarter of Americans who don’t think democracy is under threat like democracy, too.
Sure, Americans like to complain about democracy, but they don’t want to get rid of it. Indeed, besides a handful of fringe dorks and radical fantasists, there is literally no significant constituency on the American right or left for getting rid of democracy. There are significant constituencies for bending the rules, working the refs, even rigging the system, and these constituencies should be fought relentlessly. But while often in error, most of these people believe they are on the side of democracy. The people who wildly exaggerate both voter suppression and voter fraud believe what they’re saying. They’re just wrong.
I’d say I’m 80% confident at this point that covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan biolabs. I applaud ProPublica for doing this investigation, especially since the lab leak theory has gotten coded Republican and so ProPublica had to go against their default political assumptions.
Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab
Interesting and succinct critique from Tyler Cowen:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
Seems compelling to me, although I’m very easily convinced by economists and should not be trusted.
In summer of 2020, you predicted that inflation was coming back and that we were looking at a prolonged period of financial repression. We currently experience 8+% inflation in Europe and the US. What’s your assessment today?
My forecast is unchanged: This is structural in nature, not cyclical. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the inner workings of most Western economies. In the past four decades, we have become used to the idea that our economies are guided by free markets. But we are in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore. Mind you, I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. The French would call this system «dirigiste». This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history.
Why is this shift happening?
The main reason is that our debt levels have simply grown too high. Total private and public sector debt in the US is at 290% of GDP. It’s at a whopping 371% in France and above 250% in many other Western economies, including Japan. The Great Recession of 2008 has already made clear to us that this level of debt was way too high.
…
What has triggered this process now?
Back in 2008, the world economy came to the brink of a deflationary debt liquidation, where the entire system was at risk crashing down. We’ve known that for years. We can’t stand normal, necessary recessions anymore without fearing a collapse of the system. So the level of debt – private and public – to GDP has to come down, and the easiest way to do that is by increasing the growth rate of nominal GDP. That was the way it was done in the decades after World War II.
My structural argument is that the power to control the creation of money has moved from central banks to governments. By issuing state guarantees on bank credit during the Covid crisis, governments have effectively taken over the levers to control the creation of money. Of course, the pushback to my prediction was that this was only a temporary emergency measure to combat the effects of the pandemic. But now we have another emergency, with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that comes with it.
You mean there is always going to be another emergency?
Exactly, which means governments won’t retreat from these policies.
https://themarket.ch/interview/russell-napier-the-world-will-experience-a-capex-boom-ld.7606
This is an awesome little short story about one way that life might be post-uploading.
https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/chaser6.shtml?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Today I discovered that Samuel Becket made this short film (21 minutes) in 1965, nearly silent, starring Buster Keaton at 70, the year before his death. A summary of it seems right out of the infamous filmography footnote to Infinite Jest.
An anonymous man, played by Keaton, goes to great lengths to avoid being seen by any living thing, particularly the viewer.
FILM (1965) : Samuel Becket : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
