Maybe science isn’t the answer

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Yes there's the question of how much executive function works in this state? Does the control room still work? certainly does when you are dreaming. I have had lucid dreams where I appear to be able to manipulate the dream or at the very least make a decision that leads to a particular outcome. But often being a dream state I find my responses seem to be predetermined as if somebody else was in the control room or my fight/flight response kicks in and a lot of stuff seems to be run from my amygdala.

My gut feeling is these whole processes will boil down to something rather prosaic but heavily underutilised. Yes, the javascript library is echoed in the Pixar "Inside Out" where Riley's consciousness is largely a databank of memories.

Consciousness is largely a top down reconstruction of immediate sensory input where we have templates of what we expect to see (schemas) already sitting there in our memories. I'm looking at plants through my window right now. What they are is not the same as how I designate it. A chair for example has meaning to me through the label as functionary item. It is, however, merely an object lashed together out of materials. It exists. But what is a chair in an out of body experience? I wonder if people can imagine things in an altered state that does not exist in their ontological world view. I mean would they even know how to begin to perceive it?

Has science saved more lives than were lost in World Wars 1 and 2?

Science is an approach to technological advancement. this includes both medicine and weapons.
Blaming science is like blaming the earth for having iron which got made into bullets.

I think the threads are about the problems of leaning science as more than a tool - which it's the best material tool we've ever had but that's not to be mistaken for something to resolves all of our social, emotional, 'spiritual', etc. needs.

13 million died in the first world war. Estimates range up to just under 100 million for the second world war.

Back in the 1700s someone figured out how to take nitrogen out of the air to make fertilizers paving the way for modern agriculture. The first crude vaccines were invented in the same era. And in the same era they began to install modern indoor plumbing in cities fending off all of the infectious diseases of the middle ages.

The result? The world population grew from half of a billion to 8 billion in 200 some years.

Sooo...thats 7.5 billion folks who wouldnt be alive today w/o just those three 18th century innovations...vs...a hundred million deaths in two world wars. A seventy to one ratio.

Science is an approach/method not a tool. A tool is an instrument used in the application of science.

Sorry I realised cyberdad didn't actually finish his point.

Blaming science is like blaming the earth for having iron.
Iron is used to make bullets but it also makes the steel frames in the buildings we work and live in.

Yeah the math is tricky, it also doesn't take into account that human population across time was relatively small and stable. Once we started studying the seasons and scientifically investigated growing crops our populations blew up for the first time resulting in a series of inventions leading to higher populations. But as the populations grow so does warfare, disease and pestilence. While Genghis Khan and Hitler did their bit to reduce the population of Eurasia, the black death was far more effective. In the developing world European technology exponentially increased food production and medicine reduced death so populations there have gone through the roof.

Technologies that benefit the populace, but not the state, basically don’t exist, not because they can’t exist, but rather because the state ensures that such technologies are created by the state themselves, are brought in to the control of the state, or are deemed unauthorized and made illegal.

Therefore all technology - even “good” tech - can only be used with the authorization of the state, and will therefore always eventually be used against the populace by the state.

^^^ this is fair, although I think the state has always had more resources than the populace to research and develop the technology first (internet, wireless phones or cars or aircraft) before the populace can commercialise it.

I think that hamstrings the word 'technology' though.

I know that we're used to thinking of technology as a STEM, computing, or medical thing largely or that we're trying to wring out more efficiencies in production or make a better product (whether for public consumption or public support in the way of military or even hospital equipment and surgery bots) but even the green tech starts shifting over into a priority where the goal would be supporting a closed-loop economy. You have social technology like Nostr where the goal is to make something censorship-resistant based on how it's built. Fintech, smart contracts, and block chain seem to check this box as well where yes - government can try to regulate it after the fact and Gary Gensler can jump up and down on startups and exchanges because his buddy Jamie Dimon and others like him really needs to be in control of it all, but overall that's a sort of grassroots programmer revolution, largely impelled by the 2008 crash and k-shaped recoveries (obviously Bitcoin had already been thought of and constructed but it launched at an ideal time), and the goal is indeed to displace guys like Jamie Dimon (ie. cut the middle man).

I get that this is a bit arcane outside of GameB type spaces but it can be used to expressly jam or promote certain kinds of human behavior and you can use that kind of thing to sculpt incentive structures, ideally from the grassroots end the goal would be to sculpt tech for pro-social goals like rebuilding the social capital that was stripped out of western societies in the back half of the 20th century (ie. the Robert Putnam Bowling Alone thing) which raised our ability to government manipulation and unscrupulous employers for having no reliable extended family and thus if there's no one who can catch you when you fall then you're owned by whoever has power over you and it's not really freedom unless you've got enough put away to retire - then you're just out of the system rather than ground conditions having improved.

I’m actually referring to all technology more advanced than fire or simple hand tools you can make yourself.

Virtually everything.



Closed loop economies are a myth, because it will always be cheaper and less energy intensive to create material from raw resources than to recycle them.

See- plastics recycling



The state solution to such technologies is pretty simple - ban them, block their protocols and jail / disappear anyone who uses them.

See Russia and Discord, China and Telegram etc

“Anti-censorship” can never win over a monopoly on violence.



Fintech is already subject to regulatory capture.

Smart contracts are mostly used for scams these days, and don’t have any kind of legal / government backing, probably because the state has deemed them virtually useless.

As for bitcoin, China already banned it pretty successfully, demonstrating that the state has the ultimate authority over technology.



I don’t know and don’t care about those people.

But it’s pretty well known that bitcoin is heavily concentrated in rich people’s hands, just like any other store of value. If anything it exaggerates the K shaped economy. Implying it’s some sort of solution to this problem is laughable to me.



That sounds like a fantastic tool for state control. I’d argue that potential is why it’s allowed by the state to exist and be used.

Until our supplies are so depleted that it's that or death. We will probably have a long ride to get to that point.



Not all countries get along.

Look at Wikileaks for example. They took turns benefiting different powers and so it was kind of a wild card. Yeah, Julian Assange has had a harrowing and miserable life for having done it but the organization still kept going.

There's always the possibility of playing powers against one another and figuring out how to make it in a given power's best interest to keep your decentralized social or whatever alive since it's a thumb in the eye of one or several of their international competitors. You have countries as well who just really love money and are willing to make money on networks and ideas that were too much of an internal political power problem for larger countries (thinking of Dubai and Singapore in some ways right now).

The other thing I wanted to say to you briefly (this isn't in response to a quote) - I know that as an autistic you can imagine NT's in power being something like perfectly competent evil but, the perfect competence is missing. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc. should be unreachable by US dollars right now (at least from within the US) based on what chokepoint 2.0 was from last year - what ended up happening instead is Gary Gensler running into things he couldn't control and people he couldn't bully for structural reasons (I know you don't want to know or care who that is but it can't be avoided for this example - he's the head of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission - ie. SEC). His floundering around and failing matters because even with the desire to shut it all down all they could do was say that it all fell under Howie and that these are all securities contracts, which he got lit up in front of congress for (by Richie Torres and others) when being asked if baseball card sales or concert tickets were securities contracts. When all of this went to the courts the judges, unfortunately for Gary, aren't stooges for Elizabeth Warren - ie. they have their own needs to survive as professionals and consequently can't run a kangaroo court without their name and reputation being destroyed. What's happened is the SEC lost against Ripple last year in that secondary sales are not securities contracts, Coinbase does not need a securities broker / dealer license because they're not selling digital securities (ergo they couldn't be sued out of existence on that basis), BlackRock actually ran the Bitcoin ETF through, and the money and power behind crypto right now is pushing Elizabeth Warren and Gensler back against the wall - Gensler is trying to appeal the Ripple decision and in response Coinbase is looking at funding Ripple's legal team so they can't be dragged into an attrition battle in the courts.

Just because you can think of how perfect frictionless evil would solve a problem doesn't mean that there's perfect frictionless evil to defeat all challenges to itself. Being paranoid about what organized will to mug can do is wise, believing in perfect doom already based on what could hypothetically be done if enough conspirators agreed is a different matter.

Energy isn’t infinite, and so when supplies get depleted they’re usually just abandoned and replaced with something else. Economists call this substitution and it’s very common.

Barring that, nothing can be recycled at 100% efficiency, even with infinite energy. So you will always eventually end up having to abandon said supply eventually anyway, though it may take a few cycles.

Closed loop economies can only exist if the usage of a supply is lower than its ability to regenerate. The problem is that virtually everything used right now isn’t renewable- so any demand renders a true closed loop impossible, and can, at best, buy some time until an actual solution is worked out that is actually sustainable.

But because nobody likes what “sustainable” would actually look like, we collectively choose to indulge in this fantasy that we can keep up the current standard of living if we just do this one neat trick, to our long term detriment IMO.



This doesn’t actually conflict with what I said though - you are literally describing one way states use technology against the populace (and other states).



That came off as really condescending.

No, it can’t be that we have a difference in opinion, or that we are approaching this from two opposite sides.

Nope, I have to be an autistic doomer. Not that you’re wrong (lol) but you didn’t have to call me out like that



“Therefore all technology - even “good” tech - can only be used with the authorization of the state, and will therefore always eventually be used against the populace by the state.”

Sounds like that’s exactly what’s happening- the US is trying to create a system of authorization for crypto currency. It’s just that, in typical American fashion, it’s really really slow and it involves literal billionaires. Give it ~30 years, it’ll eventually happen.

Until then, enjoy your crypto. Go make that money king.

In a survival situation, even now if we start facing significantly more shortages from things kicking off in the Middle East and Asia where it's just preservation of international power, it's still a technological advancement to need less draw on the environment, especially if that environment is degrading from overuse. It's not all or nothing.


The point is they're not invincible super-villains. There are elites on their side and not on their side. There are judges who won't dutifully destroy their own reputations and careers (whether for altruistic or even selfish reasons). It's not to say that all of this isn't a huge problem, it's just that it's a problem as old as humanity and probably as old as hominids having group social dynamics and we're FAR from living under perfect authoritarian regimes.


You beat the heck out of the 'resistance is futile' fatalism drum. There's no implicit metaphysical order that says all evil is on the same side (except if coming from the Abrahamic theological perspective - I don't) or that evil will always win. In theory even to become the perfect self-serving game theory strategist and having these supervillain ideas still has to run into real world frictions and whether it overcomes those or gets overcome by them is a completely different matter. The trick is to hold the roof up long enough for grass roots individuals to solve problems and make moves back against that control - which then divides their attention, efforts, $$, etc..

Where I will say that I disagree with you - and why it might have rang a bit condescending - I don't think we're anywhere near fighting back technologically being pointless. I don't see where anything you've said yet supports the idea that it's pointless or fruitless to use technology as a means of caging or limiting exploitative centralized or even decentralized (such as witch hunts or Maoist movements). You have some various quotes (like further down this post) - someone having said these things from a position of authority and having that in isolation without a name doesn't unpack the broader context of the author's point, that's not to say they don't mean exactly what you're suggesting but it doesn't give how they got there or why.


The state is in a race with everything else and it can only regulate as fast as it's bureaucracy can move and as fast as it's legislature can agree. The biggest thing to watch out for is creep of emergency measures and the more sane people who are disturbed by the developments of 2020 are fighting back. I'd be more worried if congress was significantly blue or red along with a presidency of the same color where all the other side could manage is a dissenting opinion, even there it's not just congress but elites on counter-position acting as a bulwark against frictionless totalitarian creep.

If the state starts getting FedNow levels of control over crypto and starts making that their CBDC plan you'll have as many people fighting to counter that move. People who don't want to be controlled by the state don't simply go away or disappear in that case. I am worried that AI could give asymmetric advantages but that's been part of the point of rolling it out at the public level.