[Eric Hiatt]

Wow – thank you so much! I hope others can feel a fraction of the excitement that I do over this. I hope something fruitful comes of it. This also motivates me in my own efforts. I’m starting a club at college to discuss issues of “catastrophic and existential import”, with climate change being a main focus. The internet is revealing the power of networks right here.

[Eric Hiatt]

Amory works directly with defense and industry in an advisory capacity. His work centers around efficiency and multi-targeted energy solutions – or solving many problems at once by grouping and solving them together. There’s a story he tells about a main support beam in his house, which he designed, that has 11 or 12 functions. He lives in the Colorado mountains at around 8,000 feet, grows bananas and coffee inside his house, and lives off almost entirely renewable energy.

Here’s a link to his house.

The fact he’s into killing as many birds as possible with one stone is a main reason I’d like to hear his thoughts on the totality of our issues – like plastic pollution and the general toxification of the environment, for two of many examples.
Some people might be turned off by the luxury of his house in our time of dwindling resources, but as a design architect, his house embodies the principles he applies to architectural/industrial design. He lives “proof of concept”.

A summary of his energy plan can be found in this TED talk (his delivery can seem a little contrived at times, and there’s a lot of quick summary data, but he’s more interesting in interviews).

I know Paul Ehrlich is critical of corporations, as am I. I’ve referred to them as “functionally psychopathic” for years before I heard Paul speak this way. Amory, however, is focusing on using the economic infrastructure we have, since we can’t just change it overnight – especially given the dire lack of time. As such, he takes a business leadership approach, though he is critical of corporate socialism, lobbying interference, and the resulting lack of real, innovative competition.

You can see some of these thoughts in this Charlie Rose interview.

You can see in this video that he’s careful not to burn bridges. He can’t afford to do this working as he does directly with defense and industry. And yet he still provides sensible criticism.

And for fun, here’s an excellent short interview with Amory and Janine Benyus on the potential of biomimicry in design. Worth watching to hear about the biomimicry engineering database:

I also want to add that MAHB’s consideration of Amory is some of the best news I’ve heard in a while. Even if this goes nowhere, just getting some feedback has lowered my existential despair somewhat.

Thank you.

[Eric Hiatt]

First, I apologize for my absence from this thread. I rarely check my e-mail and didn’t notice I was getting replies. I also didn’t return to this forum out of general despair. These issues are hitting me hard given that the long-term welfare of our planet is at stake. There are a lot of great replies and I owe a debt of gratitude to Vaughan Wiles for the time he’s taken in response. I’m going to spend the next few days replying to everything, but I just want to say quickly that I’ve since generalized the way I look at the problem, and I’m going to give a quick explanation since I think the model better explains what’s going on with our species. I’m certain this idea has been stated by someone before, but I’m not sure where.

I was thinking about the collective “stored programming” in our minds, which manifests anywhere from our psychology down to the lowest level unconscious processes, and I wondered how this collective stored programming must have evolved over time. In other words, I wondered about our memetic evolution.

To simplify, however, imagine the models we use to “navigate” the world without worrying about the neurological specificity. The only reason we have the particular models we do is because they could be passed onto us by our parents, education, institutions, culture, etc. And the only reason this was possible is because the models themselves produced the technology and behavior needed to acquire the resources required for the propagation and further enculturation of the models. That means that, over time, the models that are the best at acquiring resources will be the ones that survive. Of course these models evolve over time with successful modifications being passed on, and some other elements being discarded – though clearly not optimally. I think this gives an intuitive picture of where a structure like an Empire comes from over time, and I think it can explain the evolution of institutions – “parasitic” or otherwise – within a society as well as other structural features. The exploiter model I talked about follows from the idea of memetic evolution.

Is anyone familiar with Stafford Beer’s ideas? He was a cyberneticist, which meant he had a generalized systems approach for handling complexity at different levels. We couldn’t have evolved to such a state of management initially for many reasons I’d guess. For example, a degree of societal complexity is required to attain an understanding of complex systems, but our complexity has been driven by the resource-seeking process inherent to memetic evolution. It feels like we need a “model reset” as a species so we can halt an otherwise out-of-control evolutionary process and replace it with a managed systems approach.

[Eric Hiatt]

Just a quick, pedantic correction:

Given inherent genetic and environmental variability, however, as well as the fact that the environment itself can undergo changes that are both locally and globally catastrophic …

I meant to say that catastrophes on different scales can potentially occur – local (earthquake) and global (large volcano). The way I said it implies a reference to catastrophes that occur on both scales at once, thought this certainly happens (i.e. a global catastrophe is also local as far as a given group is concerned).

[Eric Hiatt]

It’s interesting that you think feminism might be a problem. I’ll have to ask some feminists this question. Life creates entropy, so every child you bring into the world is competing will all other life – current and future – for resources. This perspective should be drilled from a young age. It doesn’t mean we have to live dull, ascetic lives either. It should be tied to specific responsibilities and still be generally adaptable.

I think “super-effective” would be getting mothers to have sterilizations after one child, if the child could be promised quality health services and education. If the child had something like autism, there could be clauses for handling those situations as well.

We need to cut down on population, period. This idea needs to become part of the “zeitgeist”.

[Eric Hiatt]

Myth #1: Malthus described the process where the poor consciously or unconsciously reduce their fertility in their struggle to stay alive. The myth is that this sort of individual fertility reduction magically adds up across the whole population such that the population is not attempting to drive our numbers to the limit.

Myth #2: When the population hits the limit, there will be famine wars and vice that will limit the growth the ugly way. This myth was started by Malthus. The myth is that the effects of too much population growth will be obvious.

Malthus didn’t have a sense of how an environment of impoverished organisms would regulate itself as a collective “super-organism”. I’ll outline just a few aspects of this super-organism since all of them certainly aren’t known, and one person wouldn’t be able to understand them all if they were. Note that I don’t think anything that could be called “free will” exists. The Ehrlichs, or at least Paul, think such a faculty exists, but I’m not sure how they justify it.

Perspective is important because it allows more depth to words. I think it’s rational for some people to take a “deterministic” perspective since we must explore the solution space of existence, and no one can guarantee the correct model right now, so we must explore a multiplicity. Of course, I think “determinism” is correct and I think “free will” is a harmful concept, but that’s another long topic. The quotes around “determinism” are just to allow for anti-intuitive possibilities in the mathematical models of the Universe, where perhaps the conceptions of determinism, like free will, break down under scrutiny. This would not surprise me. The whole concept of “causality” bothers me on a fundamental level. It’s macroscopically “apparent”, and entropy seems to be an aspect of causality – the cost of it. I just mean, when I think about the Universe existing “moment to moment” – and whether that can even be defined – can we find something that can be said to be “causal”?

People will try to say, for example, that gravity causes objects with mass to exert an attractive force on one another. Or because of distortions of spacetime will move closer, or whatever. Well, “forces”, which are just mathematical models and not the phenomena themselves, don’t explain anything. It’s like how a painting of a tree doesn’t explain a tree. Mathematics doesn’t explain what makes a force “work” – it’s just a “painting” of the shadows of Universal relational aspects we call “forces”. I then don’t understand what it means for concepts of unknown and probably intuitively impossible to grasp ontological status to be “causing” anything. Causality would intuitively seem to require a mathematical definition, and yet saying a force is a “cause” is not saying anything. How is the Universe “updating” itself “moment-to-moment”? I know that we don’t know the answer to this. Therefore, this “causality” concept is suspect.

And then note that “free will”, in wanting to cause an organism to do something, is left with two mysteries – the nature of causality and the nature of free will. Interestingly, free will seems to manifest the causality inherent in the Universe while not being utterly determined by it. This is a strange idea.

But back to Malthus. Human beings are driven by homeostatic pressures – to eat, have sex, nurse an addiction, etc. To understand why the poor have so many children might be to understand if there’s some energy-survival curve being traversed which manifests in biological adaptations to a harsh environment. Instead of this being a case of poor people being “mysteriously masochistic” or some such, maybe they’re at the mercy of a complex of environmental and biological pressures. I think people have tried to use k/r selection theory to explain this, appropriately or not. And I think theories have moved on from k/r – becoming more complex. The point is that we should understand the pressures that create this reproductive situation so they can be mitigated. It’s hard to fault Malthus for not seeing this complexity. We still don’t see it. It must be there, however. People have epigenetic responses to stress and malnourishment that can last for generations, for example. These changes to individual organisms will change the relationships between the population, which will change the character of the super-organism. Perhaps having a lot of children is more ideal for this impoverished super-organism, or perhaps the benefits don’t manifest clearly at that level, but only at the family-node level. These poor people certainly aren’t going to have the meta-cognitive capacity to understand the biological underpinnings of their emergent behavior.

As to the second point I don’t think Malthus was wrong. Again, he couldn’t predict the explosive impacts of technology – on our ability to create so much food. And it’s trivially easy to see that he’s right. If a trillion people were suddenly put on the planet, could we feed them? If not, then there’s a limit. How then does a species approach this limit? This is aside from the fact we have a few billion starving/malnourished people on the planet. It’s a disgrace.

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