How To Be A Lichen

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

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Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space. 

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Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

- More Here

Misusing Wisdom From Books via Motivated Misreading (a.ka. Using It As A How To Do Manual)

In a letter to investors earlier this year, he even approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington of “clash of civilisations” fame, highlighting his claim that the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.

- More Here review of the new book The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State by Michael Steinberger

And what does Palantir actually do? (hint: nada on innovation nor any ground breaking AI) 

What does Palantir actually do? 

It’s a question that comes up time and time again in social media. 

It’s also surprisingly easy to address, despite the company’s occult reputation: Palantir collates disparate sources of data and makes them easy to search. It is Google for chaotic organisations, whose software connects various databases and computer systems into a single unified platform. 

If the company’s services could be applied to your life, it would look like a team of specialists who arrive at your house and rifle through your desk, updating your to-do lists, contacts and calendars; syncing and sorting the files you have scattered across a half-dozen old phones and and hard drives, and generally Making Things Organised. Wouldn’t you pay good money for such a service? Of course you would. 

Now, imagine you’re a country and this pandemonium is not personal but institutionalised – encompassing not just a few email inboxes and old USBs, but, say, an entire healthcare system, including payroll, procurement, and insurance, or a medium-sized war. Wouldn’t you then pay a lot of money? Wouldn’t you in fact pay millions and millions and be extremely thankful to whoever sorted this mess on your behalf? Thus: Palantir’s rise.

 

Evolution Under A Microscope

The longest-running and most celebrated of modern evolution experiments is the appropriately named Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE). Started by Richard Lenski in 1988 at the University of California, Irvine, and continuing in the hands of Jeffrey Barrick at the University of Texas at Austin, the LTEE has been running nearly continuously for 80,000 generations of E. coli over nearly 40 years. This is equivalent to two million years of human evolution.

The experiment began when 12 genetically identical populations of E. coli were grown in liquid medium. Every day since then, one percent of the previous day’s culture has been transferred into fresh medium. The medium is a dilute sugary solution limited in glucose, which E. coli uses as its primary carbon source. After about seven generations the glucose runs out and the bacteria stop growing until the next day, when they are transferred into fresh medium. Like Dallinger’s warm water, glucose-limited media is a selective pressure on the microbes, spurring the evolution of adaptations that compensate for a lack of their preferred food source.

Every 75 days (about 500 generations), a portion of LTEE’s cloudy soup of bacteria is stored in a minus-80-degree-centigrade freezer. These remain as frozen fossil records that can be used for direct comparison to their descendants.

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The LTEE has shed light on many unanswered questions about the dynamics of evolution, and experimentally validated long-running speculations. Do species improve indefinitely in a constant environment or will they stop at some maximum level? By comparing evolved E. coli with their ancestors, LTEE found that the rate of adaptation to the environment slows over time, but doesn’t plateau. Even after tens of thousands of generations in a stable laboratory environment, natural selection seems to be able to continuously eke out improvements.

Another major finding was that not all replicate populations follow the same evolutionary trajectory. In one replicate, named Ara-2, the population diverged into two coexisting lineages: one that rapidly consumes glucose and afnother that feeds on a byproduct of glucose metabolism called acetate. From a single population came a community of two.

But the most surprising finding was the observation that after about 31,000 generations, a different replicate, Ara-3, gained the ability to grow on citrate. Natural E. coli can’t metabolize citrate—in fact, it’s one of the defining features of the species—so the emergence of a strain which thrives on this carbon source could represent an entirely new species.

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Today, labs around the world are running evolution experiments of all shapes and sizes, each using microbes to understand a specific facet of evolution. Some study predation by mixing predator and prey species, and observing how each adapts to the other. Other groups have studied starvation by growing bacteria for long periods of time without the addition of any nutrients, nor the removal of dead cells. And by selecting yeasts for increased size, others have directed the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity from single-celled ancestors.

Evolution by its nature takes time. With microbes we’ve been able to condense it down to more manageable timescales, but even 80,000 generations is a blip on the evolutionary clock. As these experiments continue to run, the more we’re sure to learn from them.

- More Here

The Simplest Argument For Veganism

I had a similar conclusion decades ago; the difference was I wasted a decade or so when Max was alive arguing. 

But thankfully, during the last few years of Max, I changed and realized these people don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their goddamn family. 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste.

Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark “Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think,” surprise you?

Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

- Richard Hamming

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

If someone is sad or suffering in your home; there is no way on earth you can jump around and pretend to have "fun". It is psychologically, morally, physically and mentally impossible to do so for normal human beings. But that's exactly what people are doing with this diet. So much suffering on their dinner plate they are inevitably becoming inhuman in their thinking. 

So I simply wait for them to die while I keep breathing after Max to make our fellow beings suffering’s a little less. 

I am not sure I am trying enough to make a change in this world. But I cannot keep breathing and not try; if one stops the other will automatically stop. 

Thank you for writing this immensely powerful short piece:

Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.

When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.

It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.

But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it. Because it’s wrong to kill, it’s wrong to hire someone else to kill. Because it’s wrong to rob a bank, it’s wrong to hire someone else to rob a bank. So if it’s wrong to treat animals badly, it’s wrong to pay others to treat animals badly.

But that is what you do every time you purchase meat from a typical source. You pay for the product of months of torment and mutilation. Factory farms treat the animals on them every bit as badly as your friend in the above hypothetical. Every one of the practices I described is routine on the factory farms that house more than 99% of animals killed each year. So if it’s immoral to mistreat animals, then it’s also immoral to pay for others to mistreat animals. This would mean nearly all meat consumption is seriously immoral.

And note: nearly all the excuses that you give for your meat consumption could be given by your hypothetical friend. He could note that meat consumption is natural, lions eat meat, the animals wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and so on for all the excuses for meat eating. But no one would buy those excuses when employed by him. They’re no more successful when employed by you.

Most people, after reading this, will not go vegan. They will continue eating animal products, even if convinced by the moral argument, because they enjoy its taste. To such a person, I don’t have much to say, for while it’s easy to give arguments for the immorality of meat consumption, it is much harder to convince people to follow where the arguments lead.

All I can say is that if you continue eating meat after knowing how the animals are raised, then you will have to grapple with a legacy of knowingly supporting the shedding of innocent blood, of supporting gassing, torment, caging, and merciless carnage doled out on the innocent because you were too weak to stop doing what you knew to be wrong. If we one day appear before God and are asked to justify our actions, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. At the very least offset.

In fact, I don’t think veganism is enough. We can spare thousands of animals from a torturous fate per dollar. We can make animals spend many fewer years in a cage with a single dollar. One who does nothing in the face of this holocaust will have to grapple with a legacy of inaction in the face of unspeakable atrocities; of ignoring the trillions of beings tortured, slaughtered, and dismembered because intervening would require trivial personal sacrifices. If there is a judgment day, I wouldn’t want that to be my defense. Doing something about the population vastly larger than the entire human race being kept in nightmare torture facilities strikes me as a bare minimum.

My fellow beings, my larger family, although we share this blue planet together as our home, I am so sorry that I am not able to stop your suffering. I am trying...

Disavowal vs. Denial

The biggest disavowal trait is not climate change but killing animals. 

Interview with Alenka Zupančič, author of new book Disavowal

And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.

But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.

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They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.

Happy Birthday Neo!

I cannot believe that little baby is now 6! 

Without him coming home within 4 days of Max passing away, I don't think I would have survived. 

His naughtiness, adamance,  and all those little traits of his gave me no time to get stuck in a quagmire. 

Only he knows if I had been fair to him while my mind is full of missing Max. 

Thank you my love for everything. 

 

The Evolution of Civilizationalism

In order to understand the civilizational turn, we need to look not only at the international political environment but also at domestic developments. Within the West and especially within Europe, the civilizational turn seems to be connected to a particular form of neoliberalism that seeks to “encase” the economy and protect it from democratic interference. As economic policy has been taken out of the space of democratic contestation in the last several decades, especially within the eurozone, political debate has shifted to cultural issues. Civilizationalism is a kind of identity politics produced by neoliberalism. 

In many non-Western countries, civilizational ideas have also become influential in the context of economic reform policies that opened up state-protected economies to the free flow of capital and market forces and drastically reworked the balance between public and private authority. Civilizationalism frequently serves as an idiom of legitimation for neoliberal reforms. For example, the Turkish state has used civilizational lessons about Ottoman practices of indigenous capitalism to justify neoliberal reforms while also championing civilization as a defense against the homogenizing effects of globalization. In China and India, civilizational assertions of power mirror the global aspirations of the new economic elites and middle classes and rationalize economic inequalities in terms of cultural reward. 

For all the differences among them, all cases of civilizationalism around the world are emerging in a context in which the distinction between authoritarianism and democracy is increasingly blurred. Both within the West and outside it, democracies are showing authoritarian tendencies—often referred to as “democratic backsliding”—and producing hybrid regimes. Conversely, even authoritarian states like China feel the need to draw on democratic rhetoric to legitimate themselves. This is why the concept of civilization is so useful to political elites as a source of legitimacy. 

Civilizationalism is not a phenomenon that should be identified exclusively with illiberal forces within and outside the West, as many seem to imagine. Rather, the global civilizational turn should be understood as a product of the way in which the boundaries between liberalism and illiberalism are becoming unclear as the center-right mainstreams and normalizes far-right ideas. If neoliberalism tends to produce identity politics, civilizationalism may be the form that this identity politics takes in a world in which international politics is increasingly being imagined as a competition between continent-sized powers.

- More Here

Vikram On Chola History

Negative-Sum Game Of US Political Ideology

Ross Dougthat hits the nail on the systemic plague that has engulfed US caused by political ideology. I have observed this very closely for almost three decades and it is true. I do feel sad when a young country full of promise and potential taking the path to ruin. 

One of the notable dynamics of American life today is that conservatives report being personally happier than liberals but also seem more politically discontented. The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments, even as progressive culture seems more shadowed by unhappiness and even mental illness. Meanwhile conservatives claim greater contentment in their private lives — and then go out and vote for paranoid outsiders and burn-it-down populists.

These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.

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For liberals the problem is somewhat different. An organizing premise of progressivism for generations has been that the toxic side of conservative values is responsible for much of what ails American society — a cruel nationalism throttling a healthy patriotism, a fundamentalist bigotry overshadowing the enlightened forms of religion, patriarchy and misogyny poisoning the nuclear family. 

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Then consider, too, that the entire organizing premise of post-1960s American conservatism was that the country as whole shared its values — hence the rhetoric of the “silent majority” and the “moral majority” — and that the problem was just an elite class of liberals, irreligious and unpatriotic but also out of touch with the breadth and depth of American society. Remove the weight of ineffective bureaucracy, end the rule of liberal judges, and watch the country flourish: That was the effective message of Republican politicians and quite a few conservative intellectuals for a very long time.

Fewer and fewer conservatives seriously believe that it’s this simple anymore. But where does conservative politics go without a traditional cultural foundation to conserve? To subcultural retreat, maybe — but if you don’t think the walls will hold, if you want a politics of restoration, it will be inescapably radical in a way that the conservatism of thirty years ago was not. And since nobody — not the policy wonks trying to grope their way to some new form of right-wing political economy, not the online influencers selling traditionalism as a lifestyle brand — really knows how to do a restoration, how to roll back alienation and disaffiliation and atomization, it isn’t surprising that conservative politics would often be a car-wreck, a flinging of ripe fruit against a wall, no matter how happy individual conservatives claim to be. 

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Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.

Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. It turns out that there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed all the sources you consider tainted. And it’s at the vanguard of that deconstruction, among the very-liberal young, that you find the greatest unhappiness — the very success of the progressive project devouring contentment.

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Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.

There is something fundamentally wrong happening here. 

I will write later on some causal reasons I think are behind these trends.

Andrew Interview With Karen Hao - On AI

A long long time ago, Micheal Lewis in an interview said something very wise about his first book Liar's Poker. I am paraphrasing here: 

"I wrote Liars Poker to expose all the bad things Wall Street is doing but little did I realize, lot of people were using this book as a 'how to guide' ! " 

I personally have lived and worked in the same industries during the dot-com bubble, real estate crisis and irony has it - in AI. 

What I am seeing is deja vu with AI - millions are using it as a ‘how to guide' to make quick buck although most know this is pure snake oil and is going to come down sooner or later. 

Tulips to AI - human freaking beings never learn.. well actually they are freaking so good at self deception (hence, I love love Robert Trivers' work) 

Brilliant interview (albeit they missed an important technical stuff - none of these was pioneered by Open AI) with Karen Hao author the new book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

Not many people make this connection but Andrew is not like other people - He puts Thiel, Musk and Altman in the same bucket as troubled creatures without morals. 

It's not clear to me that scaling AI models aggressively somehow makes it more dangerous in terms of military applications. Like, to me, the things that are dangerous for military applications are actually extremely simple AI models. Like, the reporting on Lavender that the Israelis were using to identify targets in Palestine, that was, like, an extremely basic approach. machine learning model that was practically just linear algebra. And the other thing that people worry about is autonomous weapons, which you do not use large language models to develop autonomous weapons. You use things like computer vision for identifying a target and then autonomously operating the weapon.

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A lot of the concerns that people have about AI and military is they're actually talking about totally different types of technologies than what these companies are building. But then the companies are using the confusion to their advantage to say, oh, yeah, like keep giving us all the resources to build this completely wholly unrelated AI technology.

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I'm not that interested in boardroom struggles and all that stuff, I have to say. But the one thing that does... That I did get from that is that we forget these people are humans. They have, the very brilliant ones, the ones that are making a lot of these decisions, Altman, Susqueva, Mirata, Musk, Teal, they're all complicated, flawed people. human beings. And they don't, because they're working in this industry, doesn't mean they have some sort of super intelligence or super morality. They don't. Altman himself, and this brings us to another, sort of just upsetting thing, which is his sister, which is this other story that comes out later, which also begins to just create a general sense of unease about this guy, because she has claimed publicly on many occasions that she was abused sexually by her family, including her brother. for many years, she ended up in a pretty rough state. I mean, she was, she was, she basically reduced only fans to keep herself going.

And she's the sister of this person. And they, of course, anybody involved in other family dynamics is going to, is, is, is dumb. It's obviously something I can't understand. I don't want to stand, but nonetheless, the disparity between this poor woman's utter cutoff, utter isolation, despair in such a massive enterprise that her brother is undergoing is,

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We need to focus on AI development in the future is moving away from large scale models that are intending to be some kind of general purpose tool. And we should really be focusing on small task specific models again, which is what used to be what AI actually was. And the reason is it's so much less energy intensive.

You can train, you know, a cancer detection AI model on something like a powerful computer. You do not actually need cities of iPhones, as you so eloquently put it. And, like, that's, you know, that's very little cost for an extraordinary benefit. We want more cancer-detecting AI.

We also want more AI that can reduce the energy consumption of a building. We want more AI that can help do more accurate weather prediction and climate crisis prediction so that we can evacuate people more accurately when climate disasters strike.

But what Altman might say in return is, but you don't understand, AGI will solve climate change. Of course, which she says all the time. Which we'll get nuclear fission within a few minutes once Big Brain comes on. What are we going to call this thing?

What the fuck are we going to call this giant bloody thing that we all have to worship or that has the supreme intelligence? But yeah, that is the ultimate win-all argument, which is that, look, what we're developing is so smart, it will solve all the problems it creates.

And I have a facetious answer and a more legitimate answer. My facetious answer is throughout history, there have been people that have promised some kind of thing that will solve all your problems. And they have always been charlatans. Like if someone knocked on your door in the medieval ages and was like, I have this potion that's going to solve all your problems, you just have to give me everything, like your firstborn child and everything. Like you would be like, wait a minute, something's not quite adding up here. And now fast forward to today, that is essentially what these AI companies are saying.

They're like, give us everything and then we will give you a solution to all of your problems. I mean, if you just abstract it to that level, it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious what's actually happening. This is entirely a scam. But the less facetious argument is like, they are telling us, ignore all of the current, real, present-day problems based on the promise of something potentially arriving in the future. They've never actually, you know, we cannot guarantee that this technology is going to deliver all these things that they say they will. So how long are we willing to burn down our planet and run down our resources and gouge out our economy and do all of these things for the speculative payoff? Like, at what point do we decide, wait a minute, why don't we actually just reinvest all this capital in solutions that we know will pay off?

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It needs to be dealt with by people who just live ordinary lives. And it needs to be brought back to the human. And what some of these individuals, I think of Thiel particularly, their aspirations are truly, truly important. beyond responsible in my my view and and inhuman and you see in their desire to live forever the obvious natural conclusion to where they go they want to be gods yeah and and ai and hei is really their pathway to become gods and and we're not And it is insane to do so. And we're going to destroy ourselves if we do it.

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And the one possible solace, which is the people leading these companies, are actually solid, moral, sane people. It seems to be lacking. I mean, honestly, I mean... You just observe Elon Musk's tweets and you're like, I understand this man is obviously a genius in many ways, right? The evidence of his achievements are overwhelming.

But he's out of his fucking mind. And the things he's saying are just so loony. The story you tell of Sam Altman is of a deeply disturbed person. A really fucked up person. I'm sorry. I don't know where he's coming from. I feel... I feel kind of proud that a young gay man, openly gay man, has done this. But we gays, we often spend a lot of time in childhood alone looking at computers and things. I mean, it's not an accident that we're overrepresented in many ways at the top of many companies.

But at the same time, boy, are they not that well. And they don't have... values, structures, morals that most of us would understand as solid. I mean, Peter Thiel says he's a Christian because you've read René Girard, but I'm sorry, but no, I don't see it that way at all.