Quotes from On the Border with Crook

 The past is another country, but in this book it seems like a different planet.  I hadn't been interested in Cowboys & Indians but this military travelogue is a natural history and ethnography of another world.  I've been looking for a good book that describes the endemic historical ecosystems of the Western US and found it in this story of a military officer who followed famous General Crook from one Indian War to another during the 1870's.  

Apparently this book is known as one of the Top Ten books of the Wild West, with stories of when Tucson was a Spanish town, Arizona was Apache territory, and the great plains were full of buffalo.  The writer is thoughtful and observant, and in another or later life might have been an anthropologist.  In reality, he was directly responsible for forcibly removing native peoples from their ancestral lands and the ending of their unbroken lifeways.  But he writes with respect and admiration, and this firsthand account reveals complexities of the American Indian wars that are lost in our modern moralizing view of that time period.

Perhaps it is best to let him speak for himself; these extended quotations offer a window into another world:

P 146: mixing ecology and narrative

The Tonto Basin was well supplied with deer and other wild animals, as well as with mescal, Spanish bayonet, acorn-bearing oak, walnuts, and other favorite foods of the Apaches, while the higher levels of the Mogollon and the other ranges were at one and the same time pleasant abiding-places during the heats of summer, and ramparts of protection against the sudden incursion of an enemy. I have already spoken of the wealth of flowers to be seen in these high places; I can only add that throughout our march across the Mogollon range some eleven days in time-we saw spread out before us a carpet of colors which would rival the best examples of the looms of Turkey or Persia.

Approaching the western edge of the plateau, we entered the country occupied by the Tonto Apaches, the fiercest band of this wild and apparently incorrigible family. We were riding along in a very lovely stretch of pine forest one sunny afternoon, admiring the wealth of timber which would one day be made tributary to the world's commerce, looking down upon the ever-varying colors of the wild flowers which spangled the ground for leagues (because in these forests upon the summits of all of Arizona's great mountain ranges there is never any underbrush, as is the case in countries where there is a greater amount of humidity in the atmosphere), and ever and anon exchanging expressions of pleasure and wonder at the vista spread out beneath us in the immense Basin to the left and front, bounded by the lofty ridges of the Sierra Ancha and the Matitzal; each one was talking pleasantly to his neighbor, and as it happened the road we were pursuing-to call it road where human being had never before passed— was so even and clear that we were riding five and six abreast, General Crook, Lieutenant Ross, Captain Brent, Mr. Thomas Moore, and myself a short distance in advance of the cavalry, and the pack-train whose tinkling bells sounded lazily among the trees-and were all delighted to be able to go into camp in such a romantic spot-when " whiz! whiz!" sounded the arrows of a small party of Tontos who had been watching our advance and determined to try the effects of a brisk attack, not knowing that we were merely the advance of a larger command.

P 127

All sorts of signals are made for the information of other parties of Apaches. At times, it is an inscription or pictograph incised in the smooth bark of a sycamore; at others, a tracing upon a smooth-faced rock under a ledge which will protect it from the elements; or it may be a knot tied in the tall sacaton or in the filaments of the yucca; or one or more stones placed in the crotch of a limb, or a sapling laid against another tree, or a piece of buckskin carelessly laid over a branch.  All these, placed as agreed upon, afford signals to members of their own band, and only Apaches or savages with perceptions as keen would detect their presence.

The Apache was a hard foe to subdue, not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely upon what his great mother-Nature stood ready to supply. Starting out upon the war-path, he wore scarcely any clothing save a pair of buckskin moccasins reaching to mid-thigh and held to the waist by a string of the same mate-rial; a piece of muslin encircling the loins and dangling down behind about to the calves of the legs, a war-hat of buckskin surmounted by hawk and eagle plumage, a rifle (the necessary ammunition in belt) or a bow, with the quiver filled with arrows reputed to be poisonous, a blanket thrown over the shoulders, a watertight wicker jug to serve as a canteen, and perhaps a small amount of "jerked" meat, or else of " pinole" or parched corn-meal.

That is all, excepting his sacred relics and " medicine,"

P 125

Unlike the Indians of the Plains, east of the Rocky Mountains, the Apache rarely become good horsemen, trusting rather to their own muscles for advancing upon or escaping from an enemy in the mountainous and desert country with which they, the Apaches, are so perfectly familiar. Horses, mules, and donkeys, when captured, were rarely held longer than the time when they were needed to be eaten; the Apache preferred the meat of these animals to that of the cow, sheep, or goat, although all the last-named were eaten. Pork and fish were objects of the deepest repugnance to both men and women; within the past twenty years-since the Apaches have been enrolled as scouts and police at the agencies-this aversion to bacon at least has been to a great extent overcome; but no Apache would touch fish until Geronimo and the men with him were incarcerated at Fort Pick-ens, Florida, when they were persuaded to eat the pompano and other delicious fishes to be found in Pensacola Bay.

P 177

Man's inhumanity to man is an awful thing. His inhumanity to God's beautiful trees is scarcely inferior to it. Trees are nearly human; they used to console man with their oracles, and I must confess my regret that the Christian dispensation has so changed the opinions of the world that the soughing of the evening wind through their branches is no longer a message of hope or a solace to sorrow.

P 158

Prescott has the distinction of being thoroughly American. Prescott was not merely picturesque in location and dainty in appearance, with all its houses neatly painted and surrounded with paling fences and supplied with windows after the American style-it was a village transplanted bodily from the centre of the Delaware, the Mohawk, or the Connecticut valley. Its inhabitants were Americans; American men had brought American wives out with them from their old homes in the far East, and these American wives had not forgotten the lessons of elegance and thrift learned in childhood. Everything about the houses recalled the scenes familiar to the dweller in the country near Pittsburgh or other busy community. The houses were built in American style; the doors were American doors and fastened with American bolts and locks, opened by American knobs, and not closed by letting a heavy cottonwood log fall against them.

P276

What with the cold threatening to freeze us, the explosions of the lodges sending the poles whirling through the air, and the leaden attentions which the enemy was once more sending in with deadly aim, our situation was by no means agreeable, and I may claim that the notes jotted down in my journal from which this narrative is condensed were taken under peculiar embarrassments.

"Crazy Horse's" village was bountifully provided with all that a savage could desire, and much besides that a white man would not disdain to class among the comforts of life:

There was no great quantity of baled furs, which, no doubt, had been sent in to some of the posts or agencies to be traded off for the ammunition on hand, but there were many loose robes of buffalo, elk, bear, and beaver; many of these skins were of extra fine quality. Some of the buffalo robes were wondrously embroidered with porcupine quills and elaborately decorated with painted symbolism. One immense elk skin was found as large as two and a half army blankets; it was nicely tanned and elaborately ornamented. The couches in all the lodges were made of these valuable furs and peltries. Every squaw and every buck was provided with a good-sized valise of tanned buffalo, deer, elk, or pony hide, gaudily painted, and filled with fine clothes, those of the squaws being heavily embroidered with bead-work. Each family had similar trunks for carrying kitchen utensils and the various kinds of herbs that the plains' tribes prized so highly. There were war-bonnets, strikingly beautiful in appearance, formed of a head-band of red cloth or of beaver fur, from which depended another piece of red cloth which reached to the ground when the wearer was mounted, and covered him and the pony he rode. There was & crown of eagle feathers, and similar plumage was affixed to the tail-piece. Bells, ribbons, and other gew-gaws were also attached....

P. 310: Battle of the Rosebud

By daylight of the next day, June 17, 1876, we were marching down the Rosebud.  The Crow scouts with whom I was had gone but a short distance when shots were heard down the valley to the north, followed by the ululation proclaiming from the hill-tops that the enemy was in force and that we were in for a fight. Shot after shot followed on the left, and by the time that two of the Crows reached us, one of them severely wounded and both crying, "Sioux! Sioux!" it was plain that something out of the common was to be expected.

p. 380: "Horse Meat March"

We marched comparatively little the next day, not more than twenty-four miles, going into camp in a sheltered ravine on the South Fork of the Grand River, within sight of the Slim Buttes, and in a position which supplied all the fuel needed, the first seen for more than ninety miles, but so soaked with water that all we could do with it was to raise a smoke. It rained without intermission all day and all night, but we had found wood, and our spirits rose with the discovery; then, our scouts had killed five antelope, whose flesh was distributed among the command, the sick in hospital being served first. Plums and bull berries almost ripe were appearing in plenty, and gathered in quantity to be boiled and eaten with horse-meat. Men were getting pretty well exhausted, and each mile of the march saw squads of stragglers, something which we had not seen before; the rain was so unintermittent, the mud so sticky, the air so damp, that with the absence of food and warmth, men lost courage, and not a few of the officers did the same thing. Horses had to be abandoned in great numbers, but the best of them were killed to supply meat, which with the bull berries and water had become almost our only certain food, eked out by an occasional slice of antelope or jack rabbit.

The 8th of September was General Crook's birthday; fifteen or sixteen of the officers had come to congratulate him at his fire under the cover of a projecting rock, which kept off a considerable part of the downpour of rain; it was rather a forlorn birthday party, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no chance to dry clothes, and nothing for which to be thankful except that we had found wood, which was a great blessing. Sagebrush, once so despised, was now welcomed whenever it made its appearance, as it began to do from this on; it at least supplied the means of making a small fire, and provided the one thing which under all circumstances the soldier should have, if possible. Exhausted by fatiguing marches through mud and rain, without sufficient or proper food, our soldiers reached bivouac each night, to find only a rivulet of doubtful water to quench their thirst, and then went supperless to bed.

In all the hardships, in all the privations of the humblest soldier, General Crook freely shared; there was no mess in the whole column which suffered as much as did that of which General Crook was a member; for four days before any other mess had been so reduced we had been eating the meat of played-out cavalry horses, and at the date of which I am now writing all the food within reach was horsemeat, water, and enough bacon to grease the pan in which the former was to be fried. Crackers, sugar, and coffee had been exhausted, and we had no addition to our bill of fare beyond an occasional plateful of wild onions gathered alongside of the trail. An antelope had been killed by one of the orderlies attached to the headquarters, and the remains of this were hoarded with care for emergencies.

Cheyenne names

Thunder Cloud

Blown Away

Singing Bear

Fast Thunder

Black Mouse

Shuts the Door

Horse Comes Last

Arapahoe names

Sleeping Wolf

Red Beaver

Sitting Bul

Yellow Owl

Singing Beaver

The Biggest Problem in Conservation: Taxonomy

One of the interesting unspoken secrets of the conservation world is that taxonomists are in charge.  More specifically, what taxonomists consider interesting enough to name as a species or a subspecies determines what can be protected.  After all, it is the Endangered Species Act.  But what if the taxonomists can't agree on what a species is?

This excellent short article in the Atlantic provides examples form hawthorn trees, which, depending on who you talk to, are either in decline and in need of conservation, or so widely distributed and common that it would be like trying to preserve Kentucky Bluegrass.

"A few years ago, conservation groups were gearing up to assign the [balsam-mountain hawthorn] tree the rarest rank a species can receive, which would imply an urgent necessity to conserve it. But [a botanist] decided it was probably a hybrid of two other hawthorns. He still believed the tree should be protected, but instantly, the species went from critically rare to nonexistent, from a conservation point of view."

"A prominent evolutionary biologist, wrote in 1976,  that perhaps no true hawthorn species exist at all—that they make up a sort of genetic continuum that doesn’t allow for coherent species classification."

"[another] botanist... told me the biggest threat to the trees is not land-use changes but botanists themselves, who are unwilling to meet the taxonomic challenge. If no one takes on the task of categorizing hawthorns, then no conservation group can take any measures to save them."

"Now whatever solution [the botanists] come to will determine what we try to save."

Pessoa: A Biography

 This biography covers many topics, some of which are synopsized here in quotes from the book.

Portugal

Pessoa was born into a world in which ghostly shades of former splendors hovered amid palpable poverty and decay.

What united them, besides the succulent food in the fine restaurants where they met, was not a feeling of failure in their personal careers as writers and artists but the conviction that, despite their best efforts to encourage reform, Portugal had failed and would continue to fail to be organically progressive, original, and self-determining. This larger failure was both the cause and consequence of saudade, a word that signifies intense longing, yearning, nostalgia, both as a temporary mood or state of mind and as an existential condition.

BUT LISBON WAS AND remains, even in the twenty-first century, majestic. Built, like Rome, on seven hills—or six, or eight, depending on what you call a hill—and stretching along the wide estuary of the Tagus River, which is sometimes called the Mar da Palha, or Straw Sea, because of how it goldenly reflects the sun at dusk, the city offers an ever-changing spectacle of light glinting off the pastel-colored buildings of its slopes. And the sky in Lisbon is more dynamic than in other European capitals, with sun and clouds and rain often entering and exiting in rapid succession, as if the pagan gods were still alive, vying for control of the weather.

Pessoa is one of those writers, like James Joyce, whom we automatically associate with the city of their birth, as if one were the reconfigured equivalent of the other.

“My nation is the Portuguese language,” he famously wrote in 1931, affirming a patriotism that was in the first place linguistic, rather than geographical. Far less quoted, since it is politically or socially incorrect, is this admission: “An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul.” Which is not to say that Pessoa was insensitive to human tears. He shed many of his own. But words—and what words could represent—were what he lived for.

-------------------

A Victorian Novel

Of his mother: Maria's high-placed friends were impressed with her intelligence and regretted that she had not been born a boy, in which case she could have aspired to a brilliant career.

Pessoa's father is an enigmatic figure. Perhaps Pessoa's mother fell for a man she perceived as an artistic type, but he never tried to make art or music or to write creatively. He would have needed audacity for that. And a willingness to handle, shape, and transform the raw matter of his deep thoughts and emotions.

Pessoa’s father had neither the inclination nor the physical stamina for the armed forces. He was consumptive, to use an outmoded word that has the virtue of graphically evoking the effect of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Pessoa wrote: "I remember his death as a grave silence during the first meals we ate after learning about it. I remember that the others would occasionally look at me. And I would look back, dumbly comprehending. Then I’d eat with more concentration, since they might, when I wasn’t looking, still be looking at me."

THEN—AS HAPPENS IN FAIRY tales and also, less often, in real life—her fortune abruptly changed.  Maria’s new sweetheart was many things that her first husband was not: close to her in age (four years older instead of eleven), strong and a little husky, outgoing, jovial, and serene. In her mind his whole being radiated serenity and safety.

But, in yet another blow to the weary bride, who had dreamed of wearing a fancy dress made of black velvet for the occasion,  the captain-turned-consul could not make a trip home so soon after taking up his new post, she had to settle for a wedding ceremony with his older brother, a gentleman with wild eyes and a walrus moustache whom she hardly knew, serving as proxy.

No less strange for Pessoa than the fact that things end, including things as enormous and profound as his father’s soul, was the fact that life continues, inexorably.

Together they would set sail (as they learned several months later) for the town of Durban, on the eastern seaboard of South Africa.

If they had not gone to South Africa, the rest of this story would be very different, or, more likely, there would be no story to merit a biography. Not only genes but also myriad contributions from one’s surroundings all combine to shape one of those rarely occurring specimens known as a genius.

Pessoa would always feel a little out of place, there but not all there, irremediably foreign. Strange soil, it turned out, was exactly what he needed for his kind of genius to flower.

----

Gandhi and Pessoa in South Africa

However much they resisted mixing with and being influenced by other groups, and however superior they deemed their own culture to be, they were forced to recognize that it was not the only one.

Racially tripartite Durban, with its imbricated subdivisions along religious, economic, and class lines, may have been just the right breeding ground for the spirit of tolerance that marked the thinking of Pessoa as well as of Gandhi, both of whom deemed truth to be as variable as the people who live by truth.

Durban was indeed well managed, for the comfort of white people, and if life there impressed Pessoa as a quasi-socialist paradise, it was because even strictly middle-class whites could live like kings and queens, thanks to the racist division of labor.

Like virtually all the city’s white residents, he would have instinctively preferred to remain as ignorant as possible.

The article in The Natal Mercury described how the hostile crowd of pursuers “began to assert itself, and Mr. Gandhi became the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding whip, and gave him a stroke, while another plucked away his peculiar hat. As the result of the attack, he was very much bespattered, and blood was flowing from the neck.”

The admiration Pessoa expressed for Gandhi in the later years of his life suggests that Pessoa—who was not a vegetarian, a teetotaler, or a nonsmoker, let alone an active defender of humanitarian causes—somehow identified with Gandhi, almost in an atavistic way.

They [both] conceived salvation as a private matter, insofar as each person has to find and follow their own path toward self-realization, and at the same time as a joint concern, with all individual efforts contributing toward human betterment. Their asceticism, taking different forms, implied in both cases a rejection of conventional notions of well-being and progress.

---------

The Writer

Pessoa was a volcanic writer, and when the words started flowing, he used whatever sort of paper was close to hand….

All of which he deposited in the large wooden trunk, his legacy to the world.

But as we read the work, it almost seems that Fernando Pessoa, and even we ourselves, are variations on this invented self, who expresses with uncanny precision our unuttered feelings of disquiet and existential unsettledness, speaking not only to us but also for us. “The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves,” observes Bernardo Soares, who refuses to adapt to the world.

Pessoa, like his semiheteronym, was an abundance of qualities that did not cohere and would not settle into just one soul.  “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides,” he wrote.  He remarks on his instinctive hatred “for decisive acts, for definite thoughts.”  He is actively, militantly passive. Dreaming is not a vice that hinders him from accomplishing his goals; dreaming is what he lives for, and he organizes his existence accordingly.

He wrote “Nature is parts without a whole” , yet he often berated himself for being unable to create whole works of literature.

Pessoa could not imagine that his literary dispersion, which faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit, would make him required reading by the time the next century arrived.

His universe of disconnected parts prefigured our own worldview, with developments in history, science, and philosophy having disabused us of whatever harmonious wholes we once cherished.

His fashioning of the heteronyms may be construed as a religious act, as his way of paying homage to God, by realizing his divine potential as a co-creator, made in God’s likeness and image.

One day he copied out, on a sheet of paper tossed into the trunk and not discovered by researchers until the present millennium, a single verse from the ninth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “I became all things to all men, that I might save all.”

But what he imagined, envisioned, and projected was uniquely vast and varied. “Be plural like the universe!” he imperatively wrote on a slip of paper found in the trunk in the 1960s.

"Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls. When I was just five years old, an isolated child and quite content to be isolated, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various others whom I’ve forgotten, and whose forgetting—like my imperfect memory of the two I just named—is one of my life’s great regrets."

"And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…."

Zenith, Richard (2021-07-19T22:58:59). Pessoa: A Biography . 

Loren Eiseley on Archaeology

"Archaeologists, during the course of their lives, see and hear may strange things, but the fact that they are scientific men keeps them for the most part silent.  They have good, if not superior, rationalizations for the things they do.  No layman would dare impugn their motives.  I, for example, have a certain number of skulls in my possession  As I write I can see four on the shelf above me.  At least two are hidden in my filing cabinet, and there is a beautiful fragment on my desk which is often fondled by visitors who are unaware of its human significance.

Now as it happens I am fortunate.  I practice a trade which enables me to keep these objects about in a perfectly logical and open manner.  I have not murdered to possess them, and if one or two were acquired in dark and musty places, my motives, as I have hinted, are beyond reproach.  As an archaeologist I can be both a good citizen and a frequenter of graveyards."

Human remains and the associated objects reminds me of another passage:

"It struck me that every ruined civilization is, in a sense, the mark of men trying to be human, trying to transcend themselves….none of them has quite made it, but they have each left artifacts. 

The archaeologist, it is said, is a student of the artifact.  That harsh, unlovely word, as sharply angled as a fist ax or a brick, denudes us of human sympathy.  In the eye of the public we loom, I suppose, as slightly befuddled graybeards scavenging in grave heaps.  We caw like crows over a bit of jade or a broken potsherd: we are eternally associated in the public mind with sharp-edged flints and broken statues.  The utter uselessness of the past is somehow magnificently incorporated into our activities. 

No one, I suppose, would believe that an archaeologist is a man who knows where last year’s lace valentines have gone, or that from the surface of rubbish heaps the thin and ghostly essence of things humans keeps rising through the centuries until the plaintive murmur of dead men and women may take precedence at times over the living voice.  A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally.  He will be wounded by what other men call trifles.  It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth-century beer bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one’s head like a hall clock.  This is the price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than an illuminated dial.  It is the melancholy secret of the artifact, the humanly touched thing."

Quotations are from The Night Country, by Loren Eiseley

Getting drunk on people

Extended quote from http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2017/06/tasting-godhood.html

"In early college, when I drank wine for the first time outside of Mass, my experience was very different. I was mainly concerned with whether I could tolerate the taste long enough to get drunk.

My brain is programmed to efficiently assess whether food is safe to eat, and whether it is calorically rich. Chefs, winemakers, and other culinary artists are doing their own thing, which is almost orthogonal to the goals (so to speak) of biological evolution. So, if I want to know what a carefully crafted food actually tastes like, then I have to do something weird with my mind. I have to be an epicure, which I would not do by default, because it’s not part of a human mind’s factory settings.

This is, of course, a metaphor for rationality in general. But I’m going to apply it a bit more precisely than that.

When I struggle to empathize with someone (which is pretty much every time I try, in my case), the main obstacle is the very same thing that originally prevented me from tasting wine.

By default, I’m only perceiving a few blunt fragments of info about how they relate to my goals and values. Are they smart? Do they signal like my in-group? Are they easy to talk to? Do they enjoy the same things as me? Can I tolerate this wine long enough to get drunk?

And I’m filtering the info so quickly that I’m not even aware it’s happening, unless I’m looking right at the process. The thing that makes it to consciousness and feels like “my perception of the person” actually contains more of my song than theirs. I’ve discarded most of their personhood."

Is Capitalism the real Superintelligent AI?

All quotes are from SlateStarCodex:

Value misalignment results in perverse incentives and therefore (unintended?) negative outcomes. But this is a problem with any economic system, and almost certainly worse with the systems that are a little freer with the use of state force.

Unregulated capitalism gets humans to act for the human goals signaled by the prices people are willing to pay for things they buy, the amount people charge for the labor they sell, the amount people are willing to accept in exchange for postponing consumption in order to invest instead, and the like. It does its maximization by getting firms and individuals to respond to those signals.

These arguments behind capitalism suffer neglect, causing Chiang to fall into a fallacy of composition: Capitalists optimize only for money, therefore capitalism optimizes only for money.

Capitalists optimize for profits, seeking for the highest-profit opportunities (at least theoretically – it gets complicated). But a working capitalist market economy acts to shrink profits over time, something even the Marxists identify (with their talk of the “falling rate of profit” and such).

Capitalism optimizes allocation of scarce resources. Profits is what happens when somebody discovers and remedies suboptimal resource allocation. In a perfect market, there are no profits. Profit is just a symptom, a fever indicating that something was wrong with the market, but that it is now getting better.

Chiang is more wrong about capitalism than he is about AI. Markets are not a simple optimization around money, they are distributed preference valuation processes that incorporate flexible human values of labor and possessions. If a free market is producing too many paperclips, the price drops until there is no value in producing them at their underlying costs and the relevant resources are employed towards other tasks where there is value. The simplistic AI risk runaway scenarios have a simple, unchanging value function for which they optimize, so there is no correction for the change in human preferences to indicate we already have plenty of paperclips. Perhaps a better argument would be that applying market forces to AI value functions would constrain simplistic runaway AIs, much like market forces constrain his simplistic version of capitalism.

Chiang spends the entire essay detailing how capitalism already operates as an obsessively optimized entity while these AI risks are still hypothetical. That's silly, because the problem with the Paperclip Maximizer is there’s no feedback mechanism to tell the Paperclip Maximizer “we don’t need no more stinking paperclips.” But capitalism has such a feedback mechanism built right in: no paperclip manufacturer is ever going to grey goo the world to make more paperclips because once the supply of paperclips outstrips the demand for paperclips the profit derived from manufacturing paperclips drops to zero, and so paperclip production halts.

Runaway AI is scary precisely because it lacks the feedback mechanisms inherent in the capitalist marketplace.

Does truth exist in analogies?

"Truth is not revealed; it is discovered. And in this process, anything goes."

We use observations to shape or formulate a concept; while on the other hand, we use a concept to shape the nature of future inquiries or observations of reality. Under these circumstances, a concept must be incomplete since we depend upon an ever-changing array of observations to shape or formulate it. Likewise, our observations of reality must be incomplete since we depend upon a changing concept to shape or formulate the nature of new inquiries and observations.

“If one’s understanding is always imperfect, it cannot be committed to print because revision is imminent”. The accurateness of one’s storytelling becomes less important that the purpose of the story itself: moving forward in the infinite and mutually influencing loop of observation and conceptualization.

CF: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/01/18/the-unapologetic-case-for-bullshit/

A Disturbing History of Nutrition Science

What is the biggest mistake scientists have ever made?  Nina Teicholz's The Big Fat Surprise, a wonderful history of the awful state of nutrition science, suggests that science's worst mistake may well be the idea that saturated fat is unhealthy.  She makes a convincing case that nutritional guidelines over the last half century, by focusing on fats rather than sugars, have resulted in the premature deaths of millions of Americans and others around the world.

Even more interesting than turning conventional wisdom on its head, this book is an eye-opening journey into how an entire field of science can be hijacked by special interests and strong personalities. Moreover, this book holds important lessons about how the process of science is still susceptible to the same biases and group-think as the rest of society.

Nina Teicholz sums up the story of how nutrition science went wrong:

"Well-intentioned experts, hastening to address growing epidemics of chronic disease, simply overinterpreted the data. Scientists hypothesized that dietary fat was to blame...  This hypothesis became accepted as truth before it was properly tested.  Public health bureaucracies adopted and enshrined this unproven dogma.  The hypothesis became immortalized in the mammoth institutions of public health.  And the normally self-corrected mechanism of science, which involves constantly challenging one's own beliefs, was disabled.  While good science should be ruled by skepticism and self-doubt, the field of nutrition has instead been shaped by passions verging on zealotry. ...Once ideas about fat and cholesterol became adopted by official institutions, even prominent experts in the field found it nearly impossible to challenge them."  

"What I found, incredibly, was not only that it was a mistake to restrict fat but also that our fear of the saturated fats...has never been based in solid science.  A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, but the evidence mustered in its support never amounted to a convincing case and has since crumbled away."

Let the sorry story of nutrition science be a lesson for the scientists and promoters of scientists in other fields.  We like to think that science is independently and objectively building a tower of knowledge for the ages, one rock at a time, but the reality is that our science is a product of our society, our beliefs, our biases, and our assumptions.

Happy 50-Year Birthday, Wilderness!

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, and one of the best celebrations, or obituaries, was just written in Orion Magazine by Jordan Fisher Smith.

In the article, he lays out the fundamental contradiction inherent in the Wilderness Act:  that wilderness lands should be managed so as to preserve their natural character, while at the same time remaining untrammeled and uncontrolled for human uses.  But at Smith points out, using examples from endangered species preserveration, carnivore reintroduction, and invasive species control, wilderness areas cannot remain "natural" in the face of omnipresent anthropogenic changes.

So managers are forced to make tough decisions to maintain the biotic integrity of the land at the price of intervening in the land where "man is a visitor, and does not remain", or allowing massive changes to snowball out of control while sitting on their hands.  The real choices are hard enough, but the temptation to meddle is even tougher.

I very much appreciate the comment of T. R. Shankar Raman

If the idea of leaving wilderness alone is outdated, so is the idea that there is some hard boundary between the wilderness and the rest of the world ‘outside’. To use this idea to justify highly intrusive gardening of wilderness reserves distracts from a more vital need of fostering positive change in human land use and behaviour outside. It is more crucial to buffer harmful impacts to wilderness areas by greatly expanding the space for conservation outward into surrounding countryside and city. That, too, can ease the disturbance footprint, allowing wilderness areas to recover along their own trajectory with less and less intervention, until land and life are free, which ultimately, is what ‘wild’ really means. And it is in bringing down that boundary, looking outward from the wilderness, that we will perhaps find the way to rewild ourselves.

Ulrich Beck on Risk Society, Individualization, and the Future of Jobs

Ulrich Beck quotes:

Risk Society
Modern society presupposes side effects that are spatially, temporally, and socially bounded. Without that condition, it can't function. Only against this background, when it was assumed that the side effects of modernization would always somehow be compensated for, could faith in progress become popular and widespread.

In is a general, institutional principle: in any case where a clear chain of causality cannot be demonstrated, there is therefore no risk. When the affected people take their case to the scientists, they find themselves talking to a group whose most identity-defining belief is that the canons of causal evidence and inference must always be strictly adhered to. When these criteria can't be satisfied, scientists can be depended upon to explain away any new risk as a mere fantasy without giving it any further consideration.

Individualization
Class analysis has always been in part an attempt to conjure up class solidarity, to postulate the collective subject as a historical subject, and then to build a political program around it. But as a utopia, and as a political program, class leads to a picture of society that is exactly the opposite of individualized society, and to politics that are exactly the opposite of political individualism. If you ask what are the new ideas and political strategies that class analysis can generate for the present situation, all you get is antiquated answers or total hopelessness.

Class concepts, no matter how subtle, simply can't capture the existing complexity of radically unequal living situations, either within nationstate societies or between them. What they do instead is deceive us with a false simplicity. The frame of reference has changed. Our model of class struggle and class society presumes the nationstate. The old marxist argument that the worker knows no nation has today been turned on its head. It is capital's activists, those who have made globalization their profession, who don't have any fatherland, while the workers and their unions call on "their" governments for aid... Marxists use class analysis in part as a means of finessing their way around the central problem facing us, the question of what we can find that can successfully serve as the basis of long-term, progressive solidarity.

Labor
Labor is a means by which the structure of power is internalized through everyday routines, each of which involves the positing of meaning and the submission to control. When every desire to build a life, an identity, an existence, is forced to be mediated through the labor market, what results is one of the subtlest and most refined systems ever invented for getting people to conform to the societal structure of power. People adapt themselves. They fit in. This self-activated conformity to rule constitutes the core of labor society. It transforms the control of rulers into self-control. Individuals integrate themselves into the system of labor, they makes themselves functional. The net of exploitation that binds them is experienced as self-exploitation, as drive, as something to be proud of.

The voluntarily unemployed say: Screw That. We are using unemployment compensation as a foundation to explore new forms of existence. We are the pioneers of a post-labor society. We are searching out activities that interest us, that we enjoy. We want a life where we an switch from one activity to another, because variety and change in themselves make all activities more enjoyable. We don't need the control claims of labor society to organize ourselves.

Paid labor has a monopoly on meaning (that is, for work to be considered significant, it seems it has to be paid for) and it has a monopoly on the means of existence. But labor society and its totalizing claims are really a very recent phenomenon. For most of history there was a wealth of alternatives. There still are. But these other activities are always practiced in tandem with labor and are often more necessary, though less visible. They form its necessary background, without which society could not exist. Most of these activities seem to share two characteristics. They have a strong emphasis on self-initiative; and they are activities in which the ends and products are transparent to the people doing it.

This necessarily raises a question. If this system is beginning to dissolve, and if, in many ways, we want it to dissolve, then how can we create an alternative milieu in which individuals who have been fragmented and atomized can be socialized? Where they can experience something like society, and internalize the values of society?

Today is National Arbor Day on the Rio Puerco

If we are marked to die, we are enow
To do our country loss, and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called National Arbor Day.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Arbor.

He that shall live this day and see old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, "Tomorrow is National Arbor."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say "These wounds I had on Arbor Day."

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered;
This story shall the good man teach his son.

And gentlemen in Graduate school now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That planted with us upon National Arbor Day.

Jaunt up Portillo Mesa with Botany Quotes

Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams;

"The sound of my footfall changes as I step from damp ground to wet, from wet to dry. Microhabitats. I turn the pages of a mental index to plants and try to remember which are the ones to distinguish these borders: which plants separate at a glance mesic from hydric, hydric from xeric? I do not remember. Such generalities, in any case, would only founder on the particulars at my feet. One is better off with a precise and local knowledge, and a wariness of borders. These small habitats, like the larger landscapes, merge imperceptibly with each other. Another, remembered landscape makes this one seem familiar, and the habits of an animal in one region provoke speculation about behavior among its relatives in another region. But no country, finally, is just like another. The generalities are abstractions. And the lines on our topographic maps reveal not only the scale at which we are discerning, but our tolerance for discrepancies in nature.

Scientists say the pattern of coming and going, of feeding and resting, repeats itslef every twenty-four hours. But a description of it becomes more jagged and complex than the experience, like any parsing of a movement in time. "

Richard Manning, in Grassland from the end of chapter 11, "Seeds"

Pauline says her work is not simply an application of her knowledge as a botanist. It is not a prescribing of the known. Rather, it is exploration of the microscopically complex world we do not know and a realization that some of it is not knowable.
"This is a search for the unknown, and the unknown forms the model from which we work," she says. "We as a species are lessened by the loss of unknown places."

We drove all that day on straight gravel roads set in a grid across each other every mile and finally stopped to lok at one of those. Pauline showed me where a bank had been cut and the roadbed built up, forever altering the soil profile below. The soil manifests itself as plants. The refuge will close these roads and bulldoze them back to something resembling the natural contour, but bulldozers cannot re-create the soil profile, and so for the ages, the plants above these buried roads will be different. The soil below will always contain different minerals in different layers, percolate water differently, and the plants will express all of this. Pauline believes the difference in plants may be visible even from aircraft. Someday one may fly above this refuge and still see the Jeffersonian grid sticking through the grass like the bones off a great buried beast.
In that the plants tell the history of a place, I'm not sure I would have it otherwise. One cannot cheat the land's library of its information.

In some real ways, the effort to re-find the landscape, which is the same as the effort to re-attach our lives to the land, is a religious quest, and it makes sense to consider it that way. Western literate culture, with its respect for authority, needed a creator and pursued one, eventually separate from the creation. This separation excused all manners of destruction.

Yet the creation remains, and some of us creatures need to find it. The creator and creation are the same and the unity is evolution. A place possesses a certain set of circumstances, weather, soil, and community, that lead to a certain manifestation of life in a place. Undeniably, the creation evolved certain parts of life to inhabit certain places, to show the nature of a place. [really, you have to look at lichen to know the primary movers]
Certain cultural traditions took great pains to divine the intentions of the creation. They used shamans, who were not so much magicians or priests or herbalists or storytellers as they were seers, those who would travel beyond the veil to read the verities, to divine the creation's intentions. They saw and heard the mysteries that were just beyond every one else's ken.

...I imagine that must be what it is like sometimes to be a botanist. I have been afield with many of them, and they are different, almost invariably quiet, distant. Undeniably, they see something different from what I see, as if the knowledge of the plants lifts a veil. The whole of it is there in the plants to be read, the full soul of a place, its life and the abuses of its life, the creation's intentions and the manifest violations of those intentions. Botanists are our shamans. "

Q: What is the point of Education?

Q: What is the point of Education?
A: To teach obedience and limit learning.

"The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders."
-John Taylor Gatto, describing the adoption of Prussian-style education in 19th Century America.

CF. essays by Milton Friedman, David Henderson, others

notes
http://www.gracellewellyn.com
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com

good essay
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/hp/frames.htm

http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html
www.infed.org


Many people complain about government waste, but I welcome it…efficiency is not a desirable thing if somebody is doing a bad thing.…Government is doing things that we don’t want it to do; so the more money it wastes, the better.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman,
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118175.html

Go emergent complexity

Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson: "Growth creates form, but form limits growth."

Industrialism vs Natural Agriculture

You see a system that runs on sun and rain, year after year, with no one to cultivate the soil or plant the seeds. (Benyus)

Wendell Berry:
THE WAY OF INDUSTRIALISM is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing ourselves or making war; it is an explanation of the world and of life. Because industrialism cannot understand living things except as machines, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it.

I hold the most archaic values on earth, they go back to the Paleolithic; I try to hold history and the wilderness in mind that I may approach the true nature of things, and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Identification with that other totally alien, nonhuman can be experienced in tilling the soil, shaping word or stone, the lust and ecstasy of the dance, or the power-vision in solitude.

Gary Snyder:
"Wild mind means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating. That's what wilderness is. Nobody has a management plan for it."



Notes
45,000 sq ft to feed a person, 10,000 vegetarian

biointensive minifarming
deep cultivation to aid root growth
compost crops
closely spaced palnts in widebeds to optimize microclimates
interplanting of mixed species to foil pests
bioneer kenny ausubel
the land institute
ecology action
masanobu fukuoka
ecoagriculture
Natural Systems Agriculture
Wes Jackson


wallace stevens
gary snyder's essays on the wild.