In nine lifetimes, you'll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.
- Michel de Montaigne
Max is the planet I dwell on and you, Fluffy teach me how to live on Max's planet.
Happy Birthday my Max's gal :-)
Fluffy turned five on the 24th and Garph turned four on 11th.
We are not talking about dogs or cats here (yes, they do get PTSD). This is yet another huge step in understanding all living beings in this planet suffer, emote, and every damn thing we sapiens experience.
It is indeed a huge step but alas, sapiens moral compass refuses to move.
Studies of the ecology of fear started in the 1990s. Before then, scientists assumed that the impact of a predator on an individual prey animal was either deadly or fleeting. If a hare survived a coyote attack, or a zebra escaped the claws of a lion, it would move on and live its life as before.
But research shows that fear can alter the long-term behavior and physiology of wild animals, from fish to elephants, Zanette and Clinchy write in the 2020 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “Fear is a response all animals mount to avoid being killed by predators,” says Zanette. “It’s enormously beneficial, because it keeps you alive to breed another day. But it does carry costs.”
The reasons to fear are clear. Recent studies have found that up to 32 percent of adult female giraffes in the Serengeti carry scars from lion attacks, 25 percent of harbor porpoises in the southern North Sea have claw and bite marks from gray seals and 100 percent of manta rays in some African waters bear multiple bite wounds from sharks. These survivors may carry memories of terror along with their physical scars.
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Some researchers now disagree with this human-centric view of PTSD, however. “A lot of things are shared between humans and other mammals,” says Sarah Mathew, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University. This includes learning about and responding to danger, and avoiding situations that present life-threatening risks. Mathew believes that PTSD has deep evolutionary roots, and that some of its symptoms arise from adaptations — like a heightened state of alert — that allow individuals of many species, including our own, to manage danger.
This evolutionary perspective is beginning to change minds. Clinchy and Zanette have organized conferences on the ecology of fear and PTSD that bring together ecologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. “The psychiatrists and psychologists were talking about PTSD as maladaptive,” recalls Clinchy. “We were arguing that this is an adaptive behavior, to show these extreme reactions in this particular context, because that increases your survival.”
Diamond came to agree. The brain of someone with PTSD, he says, “is not a damaged or dysfunctional brain, but an overprotective brain. You’re talking about someone that has survived an attack on his or her life. So the hypervigilance, the inability to sleep, the persistent nightmares that cause the person to relive the trauma — this is part of an adaptive response gone awry.”
“There’s a stigma involved in PTSD, frequently,” says Zanette, “so people don’t seek treatment. But if patients can understand that their symptoms are perfectly normal, that there is an evolutionary function for their symptoms, this might relieve some of the stigma around it so that people might go and seek treatment.”
- More Here
The most dangerous of all delusions are those that arise from the adulteration of history in the imagined interests of national and military morale. Although this lesson of experience has been the hardest earned, it remains the hardest to learn. Those who have suffered most show their eagerness to suffer more.
This camouflaged history not only conceals faults and deficiencies that could otherwise be remedied, but engenders false confidence, and false confidence underlies most of the failures that military history records.
- Why Don't We Learn from History? by B.H Liddell Hart (1944)
Unnecessary and unwarranted blunder of US withdrawing troops from Afghan is now well known; needless to say, my respect Joe Biden dropped drastically. But the roots of it started a long long time ago from two major flaws of human nature, sapiens refusing to learn from history and being plain arrogant with no rudimentary understandings of complex systems.
1. Watch the movie Charlie Wilson's War (or read the book). Nothing has changed in Washington on understanding other countries especially 20 plus years after being in Afghan. This is not a problem of politics but a problem of human nature. These parochial views of the world are omnipresent at big corporations, academia, voters and in our families. Good luck establishing a "Mars colony".
2. In last few centuries, this has been a purely a western issue. Powerful countries pick elitist's (usually the ones educated in western universities and speak flawless english) as their pseudo representatives in countries they conquer. Neither these powerful countries nor the local elitist have any knowledge of the region nor the needs of the local people. India was lucky to have Gandhi or else Brit's would have picked Nehru. Read the book, Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly.
Peter Turchin's brilliant inference on the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani using his own words from Ghani's book to unveil his elitist nature:
Back in 2008 I reviewed, for Nature, the book written by Ghani and Clare Lockhart, Fixing Failed States. My review was not gentle. One of my comments was that the authors
review four examples — post-war Europe, Singapore, the southern United States and Ireland — that, in their opinion, prove that countries confronted with devastation, chaos and entrenched poverty can transform themselves into prosperous and stable members of the global community. Apart from Singapore, however, these are not examples of state collapse. Europe in 1945 was devastated by interstate war; Ireland was poor before its economic miracle but not a collapsed state; and few would consider the United States to be weak.
I also slammed them for not being aware of the current literature on state collapse. Notably, they apparently never heard of structural-demographic theory (among other important theoretical developments). They should have read and paid attention to Ibn Khaldun (more on this below).
And I found their specific proposals lacking, well, specifics:
Ghani and Lockhart propose an agenda for state building, but their weak analysis undermines its credibility. They suggest a ‘sovereignty strategy’ that involves formulating a strategy, then setting the goals and rules of the game, mobilizing resources, allocating critical tasks and, finally, monitoring implementation of the strategy. This generic approach does not suggest concrete policies. For example, the book describes how a strategy formulated in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh “forced a sobering reading of conditions: corruption, inefficient use of state resources, short-term planning and poor infrastructure. This reading of context enabled participants to embrace change and leaders to set a clear sense of direction.” Given such an easy buy-in, one wonders why this approach has not enabled more sides, such as the Maronite Christians and the Shia and Sunni Muslims in Lebanon, to make peace given the many opportunities they have had to ‘embrace change’.
My review concluded that Fixing Failed States failed as an academic book. Now Ghani failed as the head of the state, together with the state he was the head of.
Ashraf Ghani's actions reminds me of Taleb's wise words in the book The Bed of Procrustes
It is easier to macrobullshit than to microbullshit.
This has been a sad week for humanity. If you are wondering why I am realist (not pessimist) on human nature then remember this week.
Beautiful new book by Henry Mance aptly titled How to Love Animals: In a Human Shaped World
Guardian review here:
While researching this book, Henry Mance worked briefly in an abattoir, or “a disassembly line”, as he aptly terms it. As he watched sheep being stunned, their throats slit and then hung up, still twitching, from metal hooks on a motorised track, Mance asked himself: “How did humans come to this?”
His book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as an exploration of how our attitudes to pets, livestock and wild animals have changed through history: “I wanted to know whether my love for animals was reflected in how I behaved, or whether – like my love for arthouse films – it was mainly theoretical.”
To understand the popularity of zoos, he talked to Damian Aspinall, owner of two safari parks. Every year in the UK and Ireland, 32 million people visit zoos and yet, Mance says, “we’re polluting our children’s minds” with this display of imprisoned wildlife. Mance visited Corgi Con in San Francisco (“people dressed as Corgis, and Corgis dressed as people”) to gain insight into our love of pets. Apparently, Americans spend $95bn a year on their animal companions, which is double their overseas aid budget. Mance also took a job at a pig breeding station, where he collected “overlays”, piglets suffocated by their mothers: “The piglets are roughly the size of human babies, with a similar skin tone and warmth”.
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Indeed, in this era of climate emergency and zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19, when a quarter of mammals face extinction and an area of rainforest the size of a football pitch disappears every six seconds, it is our insatiable taste for meat and for dairy products that Mance identifies as the key problem with our relationship with animals. It could even prove fatal – for us and for every other animal. His conclusion is that our taste for meat and for dairy will cost us the planet: “We are the smartest species on earth; why do we insist on being the dumbest, too?”
He began the book as a vegetarian and is now, as a result of his research, a vegan – despite his wife (a vegetarian) warning him: “It’s divorceable.” But for Mance, “the mass-scale, thoughtless nature” of livestock farming is ethically and environmentally unacceptable: “If you really love animals, you can’t accept modern farming.” In the UK we slaughter 11 million pigs and 1 billion chickens a year: “When we say meat is cheap, what we really mean is that life is cheap.”
Meat eating is falling in countries like Germany but “surging” in Asia and Africa. Until the 1870s, Japan did not eat much meat but its diet changed with westernisation, as has India’s. Consumption of meat and milk is predicted to grow faster in the next three decades than in the past five. By 2035 global demand for meat will be 400m metric tonnes: “more than the weight of all humans on earth”.
Enric Sala has a simple but yet beautiful three sentences which sums up everything that Sapiens need to be aware of each moment of their lives.
Every morsel of food, every sip of water, the air we breathe is the result of work done by other species. Nature gives us everything we need to survive. Without them, there is no us.
Two years ago, when I took Max to the vet, we saw Garph in a cage and he was up for adoption. Max's vet had saved his life, amputated one of his hind leg, kept him in his clinic for 2 months until he recovered and put him for adoption that week since his owners wanted to kill him.
I was going through the hardest phase of my life with Max's cancer; looking back he had 4 more months to live. But my life with Max and his lessons he taught me to make right choices no matter the circumstances. My respect for Max's vet grew tremendously for what he did for Garph. I decided to bring Garph home even though he hissed at Max and hated him at the first site. That was one of handful of best decisions I had ever made in my life.
Buddha inside Garph came out with hours of coming home. He was mellow with Max and used to sit next him for hours. Weird as it sounds, he fills the void in my life by bringing the Buddha and mellowness that Max gifted for 13 plus years.
Thank you Garph coming home during the worst phase. You are one of the reasons I still trust and try to follow Buddha's Eight Fold Path. It is not easy to do amongst sapiens but this planet gave you to me but yet I haven't returned the favor. I haven't returned any of the numerous favors this planet has gifted me. Living with you maybe someday I will know how to return the favor or maybe just living the eight fold path is good enough? I don't know.
Happy Fourth Birthday Garph! Thank you for everything and you know Max loved you. May be Max fought for his life that October and came back home to spend more time with you. I don't know.
Dwarf Fortress, a video game was built by Tarn Adams - hold your breathe, he single handedly developed and maintained the code for 15 plus!
This is an epitome of modern economy where one brilliant man develops something spectacular while most of humanity is content being "users" and not learn anything from his brilliance. We indeed like in Huxley's Brave New World where Wall-E's are rare.
Interview with Tarn Adams here:
Q: What are the challenges in developing a single project for so long? Do you think this is easier to do by yourself? That is, because you wrote every line, is it easier to maintain and change?
A: It’s easy to forget stuff! Searching for ‘;’, which is a loose method but close enough, we’re up to 711,000 lines, so it’s just not possible to keep it all in my head now. I try to name my variables and objects consistently and memorably, and I leave enough comments around to remind myself of what’s going on when I arrive at a spot of code. Sometimes it takes several searches to find the exact thread I’m trying to tug on when I go and revisit some piece of the game I haven’t touched for a decade, which happens quite a bit. I’d say most changes are focused only on certain parts of the game, so there is kind of an active molten core that I have a much better working knowledge of. There are a few really crusty bits that I haven’t looked at since before the first release in 2006.
Regarding the relative ease of doing things by myself, certainly for me, who has no experience working on a large multi-person project, this is the way to go! People obviously get good at doing it the other way, for example over in the AAA games context, and clearly multiple engineers are needed over there to get things done on time. I’d be hesitant to say I can go in and change stuff faster than they can, necessarily, since I haven’t worked in that context before, but it’s true that I don’t have any team-oriented or bureaucratic hurdles to jump through when I want to make an alteration. I can just go do it. But I also have to do it alone.
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Q: I’ve seen other games similar to DF die on their pathfinding algorithms.What do you use and how do you keep it efficient?
A: Yeah, the base algorithm is only part of it. We use A*, which is fast of course, but it’s not good enough by itself. We can’t take advantage of some of the innovations on that (e.g. jump point) since our map changes so much. Generally, people have used approaches that add various larger structures on top of the map to cut corners, and because of the changing map, these just take too long to maintain, or are otherwise a hassle. So our approach has been to just keep track of connected components reachable by walking. These are pretty easy to update even when the map changes quickly, though it does involve some flood-filling. For instance, if water cuts the fortress in half, it needs to flood out from one side and update a whole half of the fortress to a new index, but once that’s done, it’s good, generally. Then that allows us to cut almost all failed A* calls from the game—our agents just need to query component numbers, and if the component numbers are the same, they know the call will succeed.
It’s fast to maintain, but the downside is that the component indices are maintained for walking only. This means that flying creatures, for instance, don’t have global pathfinding intelligence that’s any different from a walker. In combat and a few other situations, we use short-range flood fills with their actual logic to give them some advantages though. But it’s not ideal for them.
I’m not sure we’ll attempt other structures here to make it work any better. For our map sizes, they’ve all failed, including some outside attempts. Of course, it might be possible with a really concerted effort, and I’ve seen other games that have managed, for instance, some rectangular overlays and so forth that seem promising, but I’m not sure how volatile or large their maps were.
The most simple idea would just be something like adding a new index for fliers, but that’s a large memory and speed hit, since we’d need to maintain two indices at once, and one is bad enough. More specific overlays can track their pathing properties (and then you path through the overlays instead of the tiles), but they are hard and slow to maintain as the map changes. There are various other ideas floating around, like tracking stairs, or doing some limited path caching, and there are probably some gains to be made there. We are certainly at the edge of what we can currently support in terms of agents and map complexity, so something’ll have to give if we want to get more out of it.
Q: On that note, you’re simulating a lot of things all at once—how do you manage so many so many actors asynchronously (or do you)?
A: If we’re talking about asynchronous as in multithreading, then no, we don’t do any of that, aside from the graphical display itself. There’s a lot of promise here, even with microthreading, which the community has helped me out with, but I haven’t had time to dive into. I don’t have any experience and it’s a bug-prone thing.
David Wengrow's brilliant observation on how we are so biased by the stories we tell but only this time, we seamlessly tweaked even the reality of how our early civilizations worked.
Read the whole piece here (believe it or not, this changes so much we "believe" about politics and human nature):
Admittedly much local variation can be found within this Trans-caucasian civilisation. Nevertheless, the features shared throughout it are suggestive of societies that may have defined themselves in conscious opposition to nearby states. Intriguingly, this may even be evident in their modes of cuisine. Among the types of material culture found throughout the network, from the Caucasus to the Jordan Valley, are ceramic hearths decorated with human-like faces, on which food was prepared in highly burnished vessels, topped with purpose-made lids. This method of boiling and stewing food in closed containers stands in contrast to the roasting and baking traditions of the urban lowlands, where the ritual preparation of food was conducted in open containers, or on exposed altars, so that the upward release of fumes from a sacrificial meal could attract the attention of the gods down to their human subjects.
Such culinary contrasts may be the stuff on which civilising missions rise or fall, as Catholic missionaries to the New World discovered, when confronted with the native Tupi, whose aversion to the baked substance we call bread proved an obstacle to their acceptance of the Holy Communion, itself a ritual descendant from the wine and cereal-based rituals of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. In the contrasting distributions of methods for food processing and preparation, we can perhaps detect the kind of conscious differentiation between state and non-state societies discussed by Clastres and Scott for more recent situations. But in the case of the Bronze Age, the tables are turned: this was a ‘world of peripheries’, where cities and state-centres rest like small islands amid a great sea of stateless civilisations.
I have said little as yet about why urban and state-like societies ever emerged in the first place. What I will offer by way of conclusion are some very brief and admittedly broad-brush observations. The first concerns utopian visions. It is striking that each of the earliest centres of urban civilisation presents us with a scaled-up and spectacular version of cultural values that extend back, in the same regions, to much earlier periods of prehistory. I am thinking here of the first monumental precincts at the city of Uruk in southern Iraq – designed as vastly expanded versions of a common household form, found in almost every Mesopotamian village during the pre-urban period; but also of the earliest royal monuments in Egypt – ceremonial versions of personal display items, the use of which (as we saw earlier) has deep Neolithic roots in the Nile Valley. We might think in similar terms of the great bathing facilities at the heart of Mohenjo-Daro, on the plains of the Indus.
In each case, time-honoured and familiar concepts of domesticity, wellbeing, or cleanliness were reproduced on a greatly magnified scale. For all their exclusionary qualities, we can hardly doubt that these early centres offered their dependants an image of cosmological perfection. It was in this fragile world of bread and circuses that the best and the worst of human nature conspired to produce what we now recognise as states. Yet the values of civilisation in which such political projects were grounded were both older and more durable than the projects themselves and were never truly encompassed by them, even at the height of ancient empire. By reducing our definition of ‘early civilisation’ to the formation of states, we risk losing sight of these much longer and more spatially extensive trajectories of cultural change, the roots of which must be sought in the development of prehistoric societies that succeeded – for millennia – in maintaining distinct forms of civilisation, while avoiding the emergence of states.
