• for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
• source
  • The Great Simplifcation
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

• Description

  • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
    • William Rees
    • Rex Weyler
    • Nora Bateson

• Reflections Overall,

  • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
  • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
• There is consensus that
  • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
  • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
• There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature

• Rex

  • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
  • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
  • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
  • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
  • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.

• Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

  • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
  • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
  • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.

• William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

  • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
  • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
    • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
    • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.

• for: planned descent
  • negative feedbacks are nature's way of handling explosive overshoot
  • if we are a wise species, we would do it ourselves.

• for: planned descent
• William Rees talks about planned descent, planning to start breeding animals of servitude again to replace all the mechanized, fossil fuel systems, plus one or two acres to sustain those draft animals.

• for: contraction, planned descent, overshoot,
• comment
  • Nora basically advocates for spontaneity, winging it, but with tools at your disposal to emerge solutions as appropriate.

Title: How Fast a Low Carbon Transition? Or: Is Vaclav Smil Wrong? Author: Mark Trexler Date: May 21, 2022

!- for : comparison of green growth vs energy descent

One of Darwin's most compelling arguments in favour of evolution by means of natural selection was just how many different, apparently unrelated phenomena it explained. One of these was 'Classification' (what we now call taxonomy).

Darwin argued that, when the taxonomists of his day arranged species into hierarchical groups, those tree-like groupings were best explained by genealogical descent.

Now that biological evolution is accepted as a fact, genealogical descent has become the criterion taxonomists use to place species into hierarchical groups. Ironically, Darwin's explanation of taxonomy means it can no longer be used to justify his theory because modern taxonomy is, in effect, defined by his theory.

The strongest tool we have for identifying genealogical descent in species is modern DNA analysis. This has helped identify many mistakes in former, non-DNA-based taxonomic classifications. But DNA analysis can't be used in all cases… For example, we do not have access to DNA samples of the vast majority of extinct species.

Covid vaccine uptake has soared among minorities, but we can’t be complacent about hesitancy. (2021, April 25). Inews.Co.Uk. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/covid-vaccine-uptake-soared-minorities-cant-complacent-hesitancy-970503

That's the reason why step size is an important factor in optimization algorithm. Too small step can cause the algorithm longer to converge. Too large step can cause that we change the parameters too much thus overstepped the optima.