Ross Andersen – Humanity's deep future Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos). It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a victim of the Biblical flood. Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Bostrom attracts an unusual amount of press attention for a professional philosopher, in part because he writes a great deal about human extinction. There are good reasons for any species to think darkly of its own extinction
Is JPMorgan a farmer? Imagine you’re a finance lobbyist and want to move deregulation and other industry-friendly policies through Congress. While you might think the House Financial Services Committee would be the logical place to do it — since it has jurisdiction over financial issues, naturally — what if there were a sneaky way to maneuver it through a far less scrutinized committee, so most people would have no idea what you were doing? This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee. In Washington, we often witness politicians forgetting the lessons of a year or five years or 10 years ago. It takes some special obliviousness to forget the lessons of Friday. The Whale trades, which totaled $157 billion at their peak, are known to the industry as derivatives, massive bets on bets that present outsize risk to financial institutions and the broader economy. To see how this all works, just look at the hearing on these derivatives bills, held last week.
Forget Peak Oil, We're At Peak Everything Peak oil is the concept that new discoveries of commercially exploitable oil resources do not keep pace with growing demand. By extrapolating the data, you can estimate when we will run out of it for all practical purposes. There are a lot of disagreements about whether we have reached peak oil or when the downhill slope will hit a point that brings a significant percentage of our vehicles to a grinding halt, but the concept has made scientists and policy makers ask the question: What other critical resources may be peaking? Asia Pulp & Paper Company, one of the world’s largest, announced last month that it will no longer use wood from natural forests for any of its $4 billion per year worth of products. Why? Because APP’s customers realized we are running out of natural forests from which to harvest lumber and have demanded suppliers to develop sustainable sources. Another essential commodity that may soon hit its peak is food.
Sequencing The Genome Of Legal Documents To Make Them Readable A few years ago, researchers at Cornell worked out that it would take 76 working days (25 days in all) to read all the privacy policies we agree to every year. And, of course, nobody does read them--not even one. But perhaps, in the future, there may be easier ways of making sense of dense legalese, so we can work out what’s routine language, and what might land us in trouble one day. Docracy, a New York startup, has developed what it calls a "document genome" that it hopes will help ordinary folk, as well as businesses, and lawyers, to understand agreements more easily. "You can see how boilerplate the text is, and also the subtle differences," explains founder Matt Hall. Docracy already hosts a document library aimed at smaller businesses. The genome’s first application is Searcher.io, which allows inventors to search for patent applications. Hall says it’s much easier than searching the official record at the patent office, or using keywords on Google.
The Rise of the Participatory Panopticon This week, I spoke at the first MeshForum conference, held in Chicago. The following is an adaptation of my talk, which adapts some earlier material with some new observations. Fair warning: it's a long piece. I look forward to your comments. The photo at right is by Howard Greenstein, taken during my presentation. Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. And we will be doing it to ourselves. This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. I call this world the Participatory Panopticon. The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's 18th century model for a prison in which all inmates could be watched at all times. This day is coming not because of some distant breakthrough or revolution.
Left 3.0 Obama and the emergence of a newer left The left side of the American political spectrum has undergone an extraordinary transformation over the past dozen years. Perhaps because it remains a work in progress, the extent of this transformation has gone largely unremarked and seems underappreciated even among those who have been carrying it out. Forty years after the forces of the “New Left” managed to deliver the Democratic presidential nomination to their preferred candidate, George McGovern, only to see him lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a 49-state landslide, the United States is home to a newer Left. Its political hopes repose not in a man able to muster less than 40 percent of the vote nationwide, but in the convincingly reelected president of the United States, Barack Obama. It’s beyond my purpose here to explore the history of the Left in American and its relation to American electoral politics. Continuities The Left and the Democratic Party
In Ian Morris's Big History, the Future Looms Large - The Chronicle Review By Marc Parry Boulder Creek, Calif. Noah Berger for The Chronicle Review In the summer of 2011, Ian Morris gave what most of his fellow classics professors would consider an unusual talk. Until recently, intelligence analysts had taken no interest in Morris. Yet the British-born 53-year-old is increasingly swapping this world of kale chips and hugs for the company of bankers and spooks. If that isn't chutzpah enough, the final chapter goes further. Hence the summons to Langley. But Morris encouraged his CIA audience to see the bigger picture. That means the rest of the 21st century won't be just a shinier, faster version of the present. As Morris tells me this story, he seems unalarmed. At 6-foot-3, Morris has the sturdy build of a steelworker or a miner—his grandfather's and father's jobs—with short gray hair, large ears, and a warm smile that spreads laugh lines around his eyes. Now he throws back his head and laughs. So he's taunting them some more. His answer? It's nearly 7 p.m.
? A Big Little Idea Called Legibility James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.” States and large organizations exhibit this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well. Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure Here is the recipe: Legibility and Control The Psychology of Legibility Applying the Idea
Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect « Bumblebee Labs Blog This is the second of a weekly series of posts on various aspects of social software design I find interesting, here is the full list. Each of these posts are written over the course of a few hours in a straight shot. Contents may be mildly idiosyncratic. The people who most want to meet people are the people who the least number of people want to meet. The Evaporative Cooling Effect is a term I learned from an excellent essay by Eliezer Yudowsky that describes a particular phenomena of group dynamics. Evaporative Cooling is a dynamic that can apply to both real world and online communities but the affordances of the Internet make it particularly susceptible to Evaporative Cooling. Example the first: Moving to San Francisco, it was amusing to me, unearthing the social structures around networking that go on here. But, if you’re halfway decent and capable of networking, you’ll soon find yourself with an entrée into a small part of the shadow economy. Lesson the first: Example the second:
Book: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Summary[edit] The basic concept is as follows: members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change). For example, the citizens of a country may respond to increasing political repression in two ways: emigrate or protest. Similarly, employees can choose to quit their unpleasant job, or express their concerns in an effort to improve the situation. Disgruntled customers ask for the manager, or they choose to shop elsewhere. The implications of the above concept can be enormous and can allow for a new perspective on daily examples of social interaction. Applying the theory to membership organizations[edit] See also[edit]
Book: The Origins of Political Order The three components/pillars of a stable state according to Fukuyama The Origins of Political Order is a 2011 book by political economist Francis Fukuyama about what makes a state stable. It uses a comparative political history to develop a theory of the stability of a political system. Series of books[edit] The book is intended as the first in a series of books on the development of political order. A companion volume Political Order and Political Decay will be published in 2014.[2] Why states and institutions fail[edit] The book is an attempt to understand why modern statebuilding and the building of institutions in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Sierra Leone and Liberia have failed to live up to expectations. In the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US administration seemed genuinely surprised when the Iraqi state itself collapsed in an orgy of looting and civil conflict. Aims[edit] It is an extension of Samuel P. China[edit] India[edit] Europe[edit]
Institutions