Global trade logistics means local economic sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Global nuclear and naval strike capability means military sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Global internet/communication means local moral sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Prepare yourself for global government. It's inevitable as far as I can tell. Some positives and some negatives.
Among the negatives: we have no theory, experience, or institutions for global government. It might have intractable scale/abstraction problems. It removes all natural constraints on insanity and lazyness.
Among the positives: potential end of wasteful war, huge gains from scale, ability to solve global coordination problems.
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What shocks me is how few people there are doing or even checking fundamental work. Half of modern manufacturing management comes from two guys trained in imperial japan. Wings are designed with assumptions cooked up by Prandtl, that even he later realized were wrong.
Works like this everywhere. Science, philosophy, life. Someone comes up with an idea, usually just sitting down and thinking about it for a bit drawing on their experience, and then everyone else takes it as gospel for the next 100 years.
We don't even independently reproduce these core results, even when they are just calculations or arguments. We build billion dollar empires on flawed assumptions that could be checked for thousands of dollars. It's hard to tell what to check, but surely we should check more.
Each layer of consciousness shuffles information about in pursuit of some purposeful drive, within some logic. Each layer builds on and implements the teleology of the previous layer, and does its thing faster and better.
For the primitive intelligence of matter, the purposeful drive is perhaps time and thermodynamic progression. The logic is raw physical interaction. Perhaps this implements the will of God.
For genetic evolution of life, the drive is autocatalytic growth into ever more successful forms, within the logic of natural selection. Life exploits thermodynamic gradients, accelerating the primitive drive of matter and time.
I think we have to understand mathematics as a new kind of consciousness.
By disciplined study you can learn to see in terms of the secret relationships behind nature.
Not a mistake that the philosophers centered mathematics in liberal education!
For those keeping track of types of consciousness:
Raw physical primitive consciousness
Evolution by natural selection
Cellular control systems
Neuronal consciousness
Linguistic social/cultural consciousness
Mathematics/precise diagrammatic culture?
Networked computing machines
The single most important causal cultural factor behind the industrial revolution isn't any political system or philosophy other than the tradition of (applied) mathematics itself.
It is the precision and depth of mathematics that gives us access to technology.
Complex plans and taste can only form in singular minds or tight discourse circles. But they can be propagated and extended to large crowds of action through simple statistically-driven methods.
The mistake of many online crowdsourcing link aggregators and comment threading systems is they try to use statistical methods to define their fundamental taste and strategy. This is a mistake.
Use professional moderation to define fundamental complex intention for a community, and crowdsourcing to carry it out. Best of both worlds; wisdom of crowd, discernment of a single visionary. This requires new voting systems that explicitly target this spec.
It's interesting that the emerging principle of legitimacy of the regime is that its subjects are morally compromised by various intersectional bigotries. Not "we are leading you to a great future" but "you have no right to complain and are probably a bad person".
Is this similar or different from past essentially stagnant regimes?
Like a cruel inversion of aristocracy. A moral gradient from rulers to ruled, but negative instead of positive: the ruled are especially depraved and deserving of oppression, rather than the rulers being especially enlightened or virtuous.
Our aesthetic culture in all areas is defined by an extreme conservatism of form right now. Simple lines, flat design, tight greyscale pallets, and aestheticized poverty.
Extravagence, complexity, flair, joy, and fun would be very powerful if done well right now.
But maximalism needs discipline, meaning, and skill, or it just becomes a gaudy and messy LSD-core. The difference between complexity and entropy is virtue.
Have we lost the skill or cultural depth to produce or appreciate complex visual meaning?
Here's what complexity looks like done well. Very different aesthetic philosophies. All religious, all overflowing with life and virtue. All very different from modern minimalism.