Blindsight has affected me quite a bit. It’s hard to get the idea of consciousness as a inefficiency out of one’s head. The more general notion of how dependent we are on our biological underpinnings to give us a map of reality is quite scary. We don’t really know reality most of the time. Viewing the universe in the rest of the EM spectrum or is some other tiny sliver is just as ‘real’ as the sliver we use.
One of the strong motivators for learning things is to get ones head out of the sand. To ask yourself to do more, to care more. To overcome this genetic disposition to not care. It’s similar to the Stoic notion that what separates us from animals is our rational mind.
Kind of like Noam Chomsky in how learned he was. But also taking inspiration from Buterin in being an explicit optimist. For instance, the street planning ideas for Dublin housing. More exact ideas to be experimented with and backing their development.
Resist categorical thinking. Using new information and fitting it to your boundaries or stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
Classical Mechanics
The study of how things move. There are 3 equivalent formalisms.
Complexity Economics
I’ve been reading the first chapter of Complexity by Waldrop. It’s anchored around the notion that those that have much, get more. The economist Brian Arthur studied increasing returns. For example, in high technology, like microcips or airplanes there is a huge up front cost so that marginally costs become very small. So once theres a standard in the industry marginal benefit comes from taking advantage of this standard.
This is referred to as ‘increasing returns’ and according to Arthur, the Japanese development is a result of them taking advantage of this.
It’s all (apparently) following a thought from Arthur that a science like biology, not physics should be used in analysing the economy, at times. That there is self-organization in the economy, non-optimal feedback loops.
He seems to have developed at theory that small chance events can lock you in to a set of outcomes and that these outcomes may not always be optimal. Say if there are two options for cars and you’re trying to choose between the two. If you speak with owners of each car (say, there are more for the second) and they all give good reviews, you’ll choose the second. You need to be aware though that this positive feedback loop (as you will now become an owner of the second car) will affect the next decision maker. Essentially path dependence.