for - definition - syncrhronomous failure - Cascade Institute - Thomas Homer-Dixon

definition - syncrhronomous failure - Cascade Institute - Thomas Homer-Dixon - When multiple systems fail simultaneously, the scale may overwhelm institutions to respond effectively since they have evolved to deal with issues in silos

for - paper - Global polycrisis - the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement

paper details - title: Global polycrisis - the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement - authors: Michael Lawrence, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Schott Janzwood, Johan Rockstrom, Ortwin Renn, Jonathan F. Donges - publication: Global Sustainability, 2024, January 17

summary - This paper provides a scientific definition of "polycrisis"

Odysseus as antithesis of Achilles.

Perhaps, Odysseus represent more order, reason, thus logos? Whereas, Achilles is more impulsive, but very powerful, thus more Mythos?

07:50 Period of late antiquity already started the transition from myth to logos (time of Homer and Hesiod)

• for: Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, The Upside of Down, Commanding Hope, Cascade Institute, Polycrisis

• SUMMARY

  • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a researcher in polycrisis and author of a number of books on aspects of the polycrisis.
  • Here he talks about "Commanding Hope", following his other books "The Ingenuity Gap", "The Upside of Down".
  • Homer-Dixon explores the idea of hope situated in his life, especially surrounding his children and their future in an uncertain world.
  • In particular, he explores a robust form of hope that is honest, astute and powerful and he unpacks the meaning of each of these qualities.
  • Even when the odds are stacked against us, robust hope gives us hope that we can make a big difference.
  • Homer-Dixon offers a bounty of insights for anyone engaged in rapid whole system change. His Cascade Institute is developing tools to assist individuals and organizations alike who want to find the leverage points for rapid system change.

• for: quote - the impossible, quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon

• quote

  • We don't know the world's around us the systems around us well enough to know that good things are impossible
• author: Thomas Homer-Dixon
• date: 2021

• for: adjacency - Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ernest Becker, terror management theory, immortality project

• for: quote - when we get our story wrong, we get our future wrong, quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon

• quote

  • When we get our story wrong, we get our future wrong
• author: David Korten, quoted by Thomas Homer-Dixon
• date: 2021

• for: quote - Thomas Homer-Dixon, quote - danger of AI, AI progress trap

• quote: danger of AI

  • I think the most dangerous thing about AI is not super smart AI, it's stupid AI that is good enough to be put in charge of certain processes but not good enough to not make really bad mistakes
• author: Thomas Homer-Dixon
• date: 2021

• for: polycrisis, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cascade Institute Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series, etymology - polylcrisis

• Talk: Hope in the Polycrisis

• Speaker: Thomas Homer-Dixon
• Host: Royal Roads University - Changemakers Speakers Series

• Date: 2023

• SUMMARY

  • Thomas Homer-Dixon is a leading complex systems scientist and director of the Cascade Institute, which he co-founded at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., Canada, to study the polycrisis and identify strategic high leverage interventions that could rapidly shift humanity's trajectory in the next few critical years.
  • The talk, entitled "Hope in the polycriisis" chronicles Homer-Dixon's multi-decade journey to understand the convergence of crisis happening in the world today.

  • In a real sense, the evolution of his thinking on these complex problems are reflected in the series of books he has written over the years, culminating in the 2023 book "Commanding Hope", based on a theory of hope:

    • Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, 1999). - a book showing how other factors combine with environmental stress to produce violence.
    • “The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity?,” which appeared in Population and Development Review in 1995
    • “Resource Scarcity and Innovation: Can Poor Countries Attain Endogenous Growth?" ?” coauthored with Edward Barbier, which appeared in Ambio (1999)
    • The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (2006), examined the threat to global stability of simultaneous and interacting demographic, environmental, economic, and political stresses. This led to examining energy as a major factor in our modern society.
    • "Commanding Hope: The Power we have to Renew a World in Peril"
      • https://commandinghope.com/

  • Homer-Dixon also talks about practical solutions, His team at Casacade Institute is researching a promising technology called ultra-deep geothermal, which could provide unlimted energy at energy densities comprable to fossil fuels.

  • He finishes his talk with his theory of Hope and how a "Robust" hope can be the key to a successful rapid transition.

• etymology - polycrisis

  • https://polycrisis.org/lessons/where-did-the-term-polycrisis-come-from/
  • Complexity theorists Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern first used the term polycrisis in their 1999 book, Homeland Earth, to argue that the world faces
    • “no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem" (p. 74).
  • South African sociologist and sustainable transitions theorist Mark Swilling then adopted the term to capture
    • “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause” (2013, p. 98).
  • Climate change, rising inequality, and the threat of financial crises interact in complex ways that multiply their overall impact (Swilling 2013, 2019).

• for: question - adaptation - answer - adaptation, adaptation - ingenuity, endogenous growth, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Cascade Institute

• question: adaptation

  • why do some societies successfully adapt to environmental stresses while others do not?

• answer: adaptation

  • Ingenuity
    • Researchers within societies that are able to adapt effectively are able to deliver ingenuity at the right time and place to prevent environmental problems from causing severe hardship.

• references

  • The ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity (Homer-Dixon & Barbier,1995)?
    • http://www.homerdixon.com/1995/09/01/the-ingenuity-gap-can-poor-countries-adappt-to-resource-scarcity/
  • Resource Scaricity and Innovation: Can Poor Countries Attain Endogenous Growth (Homer-Dixon & Barbier,1999)?
    • http://www.homerdixon.com/1999/03/01/resource-scarcity-and-innovation-can-poor-countries-attain-endogenous-growth/
  • The Ingenuity Gap (2000)
    • http://www.ingenuitygap.com/
  • The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon, 2006)
    • https://homerdixon.com/writing/books/the-upside-of-down/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U3lGD2mNRY

Calling Homer "poetry" here may be slightly helpful, but modern baggage of the concept is unhelpful. It also leaves out the rich texture of orality inherent in Homer, which she only touches on briefly.

Almost every well known writer/composer/creative throughout history had some sort of note taking or knowledge system of one sort or another (florilegium, commonplace books, notebooks, diaries, journals, zettelkasten, waste books, mnemonic techniques, etc.), which would put them into your "active" category. I think you'd be hard put to come up with evidence of a "sudden" emergence of an "active" PKM system beyond the choice of individual users to actively do something with their collections or not.

If you want to go more distant than Eminem, try looking closely at Ramon Llull's practice in the 11th century, or Homer in the c. 8th century BCE. Or to go much, much farther back, there's solid evidence that indigenous peoples in Australia had what you call both passive and active PKM systems as far back as 65,000 years ago. These are still in use today. Naturally these were not written, but used what anthropologists call orality. (See Walter Ong, Milman Parry, Lynne Kelly, Margo Neale, Duane Hamacher, et al.)

What a fantastic juxtaposition!

Or maybe you were interested in color the way former British Prime Minister William Gladstone was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age

Or you noticed a lot of epithets (rosy fingered dawn, wine dark sea, etc.) and began tallying them all up the way Milman Parry did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry

How might your notes dramatically change how we view the world?

Aside: In the Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes (2009), Watson's dog's name was Gladstone, likely a cheeky nod to William Gladstone who was active during the setting of the movie's timeline.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

Worth digging into some of the papers mentioned here (@2022-06-03)

Color terms in The Odyssey by William Gladstone

Significance of Homer's Iliad and his teacher, Aristotle, in Alexanders formative years.

In the early 1930s, Milman Parry, a professor of Classics at Harvard, sought to test his theories regarding the composition of the Homeric poems by observing living traditions of oral poetry in then-Yugoslavia.

The songs he collected, on phonograph discs and in notebooks, form the core of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.

In addition to being one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of South Slavic oral traditions, the Parry Collection also contains uniquely important subsidiary collections documenting numerous other Balkan oral traditions. These include:

• the collection of Albanian epics gathered by Albert Lord in the mountains of northern Albania in the fall of 1937;
• Lord’s own collection of South Slavic materials made in 1950 and 1951, including some recordings of singers Lord had met in the company of Parry in the 1930s;
• the Whitman-Rinvolucri Collection, which contains a variety of materials relating to the Greek tradition of shadow puppet theater as practiced in the 1960s;
• and the James A. Notopoulos Collection, which includes hundreds of recordings from the 1950s of folk music and narrative poetry from the Greek mainland and the Greek islands.

Our close reading passage this week is from Book 10, lines 406-449:

from: 10.406 "so she spoke, and the proud heart in me was persuaded..." to 10. 449: "...but followed along in fear of my fierce reproaches."

Instructions: as with last week's passage, pay attention to every detail that catches your attention, or that doesn't seem to make sense. Context matters: the scene in last week's passage was Ithaca, a relatively normal if disorderly human community, but this week's passage deals with events on a magical island where humans are easily changed into animals. Is this island in any way a threat to the homecomings of Odysseus and his men? In your view, does it affect their behavior?

Hopkins at Home The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

Sample close reading passage: 5.475 - 5.493 (end of chapter 5)

This moment occurs at the end of book five, just after Odysseus has escaped the rage of Poseidon by dragging himself ashore on the island of Scheria (likely Corfu), land of the Phaiakians/Phaeacians. Odysseus has just decided to look for shelter in the nearby forest, which despite the danger of wild animals offers somewhat more warmth than the wet shore of the river from which he has crawled. To help with our discussion I’ve divided the text into three parts.

I’d suggest printing this out and jotting your thoughts down—circle words that strike you as significant, as having multiple meanings, etc. Enjoy! You can send your thoughts to me or just keep your notes handy for our next class.

An example of a figure calming waters in myth.

cross reference: Moses and the parting of the Red Sea

To what dates might we attribute these two texts? Which preceded the other? What sort of potential cultural influences would the original had on the subsequent?

Also cross reference the many deluge/flood stories in ancient literatures including Genesis 6-9, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.

The source of the translation of the Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore is the 2nd edition of the Oxford text of T. W. Allen.

The Odyssey of Homer translated with an introduction by Richmond Lattimore (Harper, 1965)

Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-176020-4

The Odyssey of Homer A Close Reading - Week 1

Video: https://vimeo.com/642829312/245fb2b6a5

The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

• Will Quinn
• Dr. Elizabeth Patton

Looking at Chapters 1-4

• Council of Gods on Mount Olympus
• Journey of Telemachus (Telemachy)

Translation

Using Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey in part because he keeps the sens of the formulaic epithets.

Dactylic hexameter

• Longfellow used it in Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

"This is the forest primeval."

Epithets

• "The man of many ways" (Odysseus)
• much enduring Odysseus
• rosy fingered dawn

These sorts of epithets are designed to fit the epic into the dactylic hexameter.

Background of story

Proem

in Greek suffering can mean "learning"

Q: When does the council on the gods take place?

"Council of the Gods" in Galleria Borghese (Rome) ceiling_ceiling.jpg)

Penelope with the Suitors by Pinturicchio

Circumspect Penelope

Wondering whether, for fun, we ought to be doing a close listening instead of a close reading of Home.

The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading With Dr. Elizabeth Patton https://indieweb.org/this-week/2021-11-05.html

The Greek in Homer is an amalgamation of dialects which is an indicator that the works were aggregated from many sources and turned into a final finished work.

This makes me wonder what the linguistic origin of the name Homer is? Was it common/uncommon? Does it's root indicate anything about who Homer may have been?

What evidence was given for this identification of Homer and Aristotle?

Not sure how they manage not to link Rembrandt's 1653 painting "Aristotle with a Bust of Homer" here.

<br>By <span title="Dutch painter and etcher (1606-1669)">Rembrandt</span> - Unknown source, Public Domain, Link

It might also be more interesting to use the metaphor of a ladder here than a chain to give a tangential nod to Western culture's scala naturae.

The Classicist Who Killed Homer How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius. By Adam Kirsch https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-classicist-who-killed-homer June 7, 2021

Someone mentioned this in class today

Are there possibly any physical artifacts in physical archaeology that may fit into the structure of the thesis made by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies?

What would we be looking for? Small mnemonic devices? Menhir? Standing stones? Wooden or stone circles? Other examples of extended ekphrasis similar to that of the shield of Achilles?

cf: Expanding Ekphrasis to the Broader Field of Mnemotechny: or How the Shield of Achilles Relates to a Towel, Car, and Water Buffalo

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/books/review/hearing-homers-song-milman-parry-robert-kanigel.html

The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading https://events.jhu.edu/form/HAHodyssey

https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/homer-print-transmission-and-reception-homers-works/introduction/

How can these modern translations and related translations be compared and contrasted to the original passage of the stories in their original bardic traditions?

Cross reference the orality work of Milman Parry, et al.

Homer in Print: The Transmission and Reception of Homer's Works, an exhibition on view from Jan. 13, 2014 – The Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center

Notice the careful use of contemporary here. One can find a plethora of translations and related materials in the Internet Archive.

Examples of Homer adaptations in contemporary culture. They've left off the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? which also comes quickly to mind as does Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and the 2003 film of the same name.

An overview of Milman Parry's life, work, and some of his impact on Homeric studies and orality as media.

Put The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry on my list to read.

How poetic that he uses the title "Odyssey" of one of Homer's works to describe Parry's travels.

The Iliad is an epic poem attributed to Homer; its action is set earlier than the plot of Homer's The Odyssey and takes place in the last year of the Trojan War.

I think this is saying that teachers who debate or discuss are regarded with disgust because while they act like they are searching for truth the are really deceiving because no one can predict the future.

Homer's texts were used as educational material at the time and was considered a reliable source of information. The gods could not predict the future and there was the Fates.