(Posted as a Twitter thread, and on GETTR, Parler, and Gab, and probably worth adding to my archive here. If Twitter changes for the better, maybe I’ll let go of the need to maintain and cross-post to so many accounts…!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tremendous value of salutary feedback systems: how vitally important they are to human flourishing and to getting us out of bad situations where we’d otherwise become stuck.
A feedback mechanism is anything that course-corrects when inputs indicate something’s not right. Much of the sad state we’re in seems to be the result of inadequate or severed feedback loops. Unaccountable systems end in persistent failure.
Our neurobiology is built on feedback loops. Motor control circuits work like servo controllers – targeting a desired outcome, checking results, and adjusting motor control impulses, iteratively, in real time. The immune systems that keep us healthy are similarly feedback-based.
The scientific method, when its feedback systems are allowed to operate as they should, is able to converge on truth more reliably than most other claims to knowledge precisely because it is accountable to open scrutiny and the necessity of solid methods and reproducible results.
When the scientific practice’s essential feedback mechanisms are suppressed, science becomes becomes crippled and devolves to a garden-variety appeal to authority.
Businesses have to be accountable to their customers. The only sustainable way for them to succeed is to make those customers happy. Businesses that take insufficient interest in satisfying customers’ wants and needs, or that cheat or deceive, must either course-correct or fold.
Laws and enforcement thereof deter harmful criminal activity in people whose internal moral compasses didn’t head off or avoid such impulses at an earlier stage. Feedback systems can operate in layers, or in concert, to apply beneficial course corrections.
Democracy is a feedback mechanism that seeks to apply public accountability to the state and to those who hold office within it. To avoid pure democracy’s failure mode of mob rule, we declare certain foundational rights inalienable and codify immutable constraints on state power in a constitution.
For career politicians and immortal government programs, the name of the game is avoiding accountability at all costs. For too often, and by design, new programs and departments are created without sufficient accountability to the results they promise. Slow-to-boil public outrage rarely provides a sufficient restoring force to stop the insanity.
Major social media sites, like the legacy journalistic and media outlets that preceded them, have sought to stem political accountability and suppress the course-corrections that could result, by seeking to shape what we are allowed to know and discuss. The deception we long suspected is now being laid bare. Will this produce sufficient public outcry to force a return to less filtered and manipulated public square?
The existence of alternatives – from places we can spend our time in cyberspace to physical places we can go to live and be governed more reasonably – provides some course-correcting pressure on legacy institutions.
The “Network Effect” makes the hold of large social media incumbents hard to break, so we’re lucky to have a rogue outsider like @elonmusk come clean house at Twitter. There was otherwise no sufficiently strong feedback loop in place that would disrupt the manipulation going on behind the scenes.
The opening of new frontiers that I’ve been focused on for years offers hope of alternatives to legacy governance, both for those who go and for those whose governments may feel pressured into more competitive practices. Whether the mechanics are spacefaring, seasteading, taming untapped wilderness, building “network states”, or other, we will find and develop new places that open up new possibilities, and – I hope – build better, more robust salutary feedback systems along the way.
Just a loose collection of thoughts so far, on ideas I expect I’ll ponder further. I’m under no illusion that our very substantial political divide is fixable by anything other than people w/different values going separate ways, but this does seem to get at something deeper that may help us understand things better and navigate to where we each need to be w/greater clarity.
Building robust salutary feedback systems into everything seems like a worthy endeavor.
Another superb and timely short video from Academy of Ideas. The reference to Václav Havel’s ideas about building “parallel structures” takes me back to Bill Whittle’s 2012 “Where do we go now?” talk, and I wonder whether Bill was aware of an influenced by Havel’s writing on this subject.
One of many profound passages: (See here for the full transcript. It’s well worthwhile.)
Compliance is the food that feeds totalitarians. Compliance is not, and never will be, the path back to some form of normality. Rather non-compliance and civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule. But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality absent the sickness of totalitarian rule requires the construction of a parallel society. A parallel society serves two main purposes: it offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by the totalitarian system, or who refuse to participate in it, and it forms the foundation for a new society that can grow out of the ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians. Or as Václav Havel, a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in his book The Power of the Powerless:
“When those who have decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way.
“…[these] parallel structures do not grow . . .out of a theoretical vision of systemic change (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people.” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of a parallel society. One can build technologies that promote freedom or agoristic economic institutions that further voluntary exchange. One can run a business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates, or one can create media or educational institutions that counter the lies and propaganda of the state. Or one can create music, literature or artwork that counters the staleness of totalitarian culture. The parallel society is a decentralized and voluntary alternative to the centralized and coercive control of the totalitarian society and as Havel explains:
“One of the most important tasks the ‘dissident movements’ have set themselves is to support and develop [parallel social structures]. . . What else are those initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to . . . rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the [totalitarian] system?” (Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless)
Great podcast interview with Mark Moss (@1MarkMoss), that focuses on historic cycles and the hope that Bitcoin, decentralized finance, and decentralization in general offer for greater individual sovereignty and individual autonomy in the near future. This kind of stuff helps renew my optimism. There is much potential for a freer future, if we can just get our thinking out of the over-centralized box we’ve let ourselves get stuck in.
This is the latest episode in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency series (“BTC###” episodes) that drops every Wednesday on the We Study Billionaires podcast — highly recommended and one I make sure to listen to regularly.
Watch the episode with Mark on YouTube, or listen on Apple Podcasts.
Interesting competition with big relevance to off-Earth food production and our ability to thrive in new places:
Design, build, and test an autonomous system that can support plant growth without human intervention. Develop a smart system that might include sensors, cameras, and automated controllers for lighting, watering, and air circulation within a 50 cm cubic growing environment. Plant seeds of one or more of the predetermined plant varieties by hand, and grow them without any further human interaction over a 30 day period.
The contest has high school, college, and professional entry categories. Submissions are due by February 3, 2020.Your ideas could help shape and facilitate the future of space settlement!
My short-form podcast, The No Fear Pioneer, is back with a new episode, pursuing some key questions that have been on my mind: Can a frontier culture only thrive for a sustained interval where life is relatively hard? And are there ways we might be able to extend the flourishing of a newly opened frontier?
Join me for a 12-minute whirlwind exploration of related ideas in Episode 7: “Extending the Frontier Cycle”.
I’ve released this episode with new artwork that celebrates SpaceX’s Starship — the vehicle most likely to be our ride to Mars — and the tremendously exciting test launch, descent, and landing attempt of the SN8 prototype this past week. I’m looking forward with much excitement to seeing further developments in this visionary program.
After days of delays and postponements that tested the patience of those of us waiting breathlessly on the edge of our seats, SpaceX conducted the first (and last) high-altitude test of its SN8 Starship prototype yesterday. Despite going out in a fiery blaze of glory due to insufficient fuel tank pressure at landing, in what many in the rocket business like to call “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”, SN8 appears to have done a spectacular job of each of its test-flight tasks up to that point, in what I would consider a thrilling and encouraging series of successes.
Robert Zimmerman has a great post with lots of snapshots at Behind the Black, and points out, importantly, that “the systems for controlling the ship on its return through the atmosphere appeared to work as intended. Though SpaceX obviously has a lot more work to do to achieve an orbital return, they have made a magnificent start.” He continues: “And they have gotten this far in only two years, for less than $2 billion. Compare that to NASA and Boeing and their SLS, which is half a decade behind schedule and will likely cost $30 billion once launched.” SpaceX appears to be well on the way to its goal of revolutionizing the economics interplanetary transport, paving the way for rapid acceleration toward the opening of a new frontier on Mars, the Moon, and elsewhere.
Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc has a play-by-play with screen grabs too.
Here’s SpaceX’s official livestream of the test, fast-forwarded to just before engine ignition & launch. Note the beautifully steady ascent, paring back from three Raptor engines firing in unison to two and then one, the controlled free-fall in horizontal orientation, the engine relight and reorient to vertical, and what would likely have been a perfect landing if not for just a wee bit of excess velocity… Note also the green flashes from one of the engine nozzles during the landing attempt, which I’d have guessed might be a burst of TEB attempting to ignite the engine in vain, but John Carmack (who has earned his rocket-scientist chops running Armadillo Aerospace) remarked “is the color of a copper rocket combustion chamber eating itself”.
Don’t miss this spectacular perspective on the free-fall, flip back to vertical, and landing attempt that SpaceX posted shortly afterward.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
