we are modern humans we've been around as modern humans for 00:04:32 200 000 years on Earth but we are hunters and gatherers we have a rough time we live under extremely variable conditions in deep Ice Age we come into the Holocene the neolithical revolution takes part one of the biggest 00:04:44 Innovations in human history and off we go in the civilizational journey that we all know and here we are today
at third act where we organize old people like me over the age 00:05:36 of 60. we're concentrating on democracy and on climate they seem uh they seem the twin crises that we face
for: polycrisis, dual crisis, climate change and political polarization
key insight
I think the first thing 00:04:49 we have to do and what governments have been reluctant to do is to say we've got to stop making it worse now the government is saying we've got to start adapting to the changes yes we do but we 00:05:04 have to stop making it worse which means for heaven's sakes we've got to get off fossil fuels as quickly as we can
we compiled all the species that we try and get a handle on and we then tried to 00:05:06 relate those species list to Manhattan Island through a new kind of science that we call muir webs and that kind of data it turns out that you can visualize and understand as a network
Muir Web
The common definition of a progress trap is derived from the book’s cover text: “..it is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.”
The concept of the purity of science should be abandoned.
Since humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
Escaping The Progress Trap
for: progress trap, progress traps
Tttle
four mitigating factors that make power appear to corrupt when something else is actually going on.
Winston Churchill had a secret 01:47:06 that the Germans didn't know during the middle of the war. The secret was this. They had cracked the Nazi enigma codes.
when you see that the rates of domestic abuse among police officers in the United States is higher than the general average in the public. So, you know, when you think about why that's happening, perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge or causing them to behave in certain ways. I think what's more likely is that people who are abusive 01:32:41 are disproportionately likely to seek out a job in which you can abuse people. Now, this is not to say that police officers are bad people, but it is to say that, for the slice of the population that is abusive, especially the people who like to wield power and carry a gun and terrorize people, for them, as one of the police officers in London told me who's in charge of recruitment for the Metropolitan Police, she said to me, "Look, if you're an abusive bigot, 01:33:06 policing is an attractive career choice. It doesn't mean that police officers are generally abusive bigots. It means that for that slice of the population, they like the idea of being able to professionally abuse people."
Doraville, Georgia.
to eliminate the problem of self-selection bias 01:24:31 by producing shadow bodies of power that provide oversight to the real body of power, but that is randomly selected
I wish there was a certain question 01:22:26 that was asked to people who wanted to wield immense amounts of power that is often not asked. And that question is this. What would it take for you to think that you are no longer necessary in power?
most of what we do when we look at power is we say, "This person is bad, let's get them out." And then we end up with another bad person a few minutes later or a few months later. And as a result of that, we end up replicating the exact same problems over and over and over.
And so when we have this simplistic view of power, we're missing the story. What you really need is a system that attracts the right kind of people 01:18:20 so that the diplomats who are clean and nice and rule-following end up in power. Then you need a system that gives them all the right incentives to follow the rules once they get there. And then if you do have people who break the rules, there needs to be consequences. So the study from UN diplomats and their parking behavior actually, I think, illuminates a huge amount of very interesting dynamics around power,
So if you have a president 01:19:36 or a prime minister who's won an election, there's no training, there's no oversight, there's no scrutiny other than journalists from the outside. There's often not a criminal background check for politicians before an election. And yet when you end up as a tour guide, you have all sorts of safeguarding, you have training.
we should have some psychological screening at the top jobs. I think that there should be an expectation that people who are about to control nuclear weapons, that can literally wipe out our species, should, at a minimum, be subject to a psychological test.
the reason I focus on the system so much is not just because it's something that's so important, it is, but also because it's the most straightforward thing to change. Trying to change a psychopath or trying to change a bad leader is hard.
systems make an enormous difference. Systems make a difference on a few levels. The first is that rotten systems attract rotten people.
if we want to end up with a world that is shaped by the best of us, rather than very often the worst of us, we have to think carefully, we have to engineer a system.
So what you end up having is in positions of power that are particularly dangerous, psychopaths are much more likely to seek those positions of power because they don't view the danger as a threat to them.
One of the interesting things about my job is I go around the world, and sometimes I sit down with former heads of state in authoritarian countries, people who basically were dictators 01:02:25 or despots until a few years ago. And what's striking about these people is that they have basically inhabited the ideal world for a Machiavellian narcissistic psychopath, somebody with the dark triad traits.
for the most part, if you're high on the psychopathy score, you're usually pretty high on the narcissism and Machiavellian score as well.
This is why, by the way, the job interview is a terrible way of sorting out people because the job interview is a performance for a very short period of time. And what psychopaths are extremely good at doing is making people like them, especially because they're chameleon-like, they can sort of morph, depending on what they think people want to hear, in this short period of time.
superficial charm
a psychopath's ability to make you like them, so that you can be manipulated
superficial charm blinds us to the psychopath
For psychopaths, it tends to be switched off by default. But they're actually really good at mimicking a normal brain if and when they need to.
Steve Raucci was unable to control his impulses. He was unable to sort of dial it back when he needed to. He was unable to blend in 00:45:57 as a normal functioning member of his staff, and instead did all sorts of crazy things that made people realize that he was probably a psychopath. The successful psychopaths are in boardrooms, they're managing hedge funds, they're in politics. They're the people who are ruthless, who are very power-hungry, and are very good at getting power because like Steve Raucci, they're able to hatch extremely complicated plots 00:46:23 in order to get their way. They're extremely disciplined at times, when they're successful psychopaths, to get their way, to engineer the outcome they desire. So the successful psychopaths are the worst of every world.
dark triad traits
we have all sorts of stupid biases when it comes to leadership selection.
the problem starts to rear its ugly head in incredibly bizarre and depressing ways. One of the ways that we know this happens is in the criminal justice system.
lots of research is that names matter a huge amount, as do faces.
snowy peaks problem.
Why are we drawn to people who are clearly not 00:20:59 in the business of public service but want to abuse us and often show us that they are strong men who are oriented towards conquering and dominating rather than serving us? And that puts the mirror back on us. And the answer, I think, is partly to do with evolutionary psychology.
when we think about self-selection bias and survivorship bias in tandem, we have a really important understanding of how power actually operates
Abraham Wald
What is survivorship bias?
The same is true for power. People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, 00:14:51 are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
the problem is that we've engineered a society in which power itself is costly to everyone, and that means that the only people who think it's worth paying the cost are those who are power-hungry.
power-hungry literally means someone who wants power. Someone who wants power 00:11:34 is going to seek power more than everybody else. As a result of that, we have a real problem on our hands. How do we stop this, right? So there's a few answers.
when we design systems in an intelligent way, we can screen out 00:11:09 and topple the Martin McFifes of this world.
power is something that draws 00:10:21 in the wrong kinds of people like moths to a flame. So the way you deal with that is you attract more people to basically be able to zap some of the bad moths and be left with ones who are actually in it for the right reasons. And that's why recruitment is so important.
some systems of power have absolutely no barriers,
What are your four main arguments about power?
How do we end up designing systems that attract all of the right people into power
self-selection effect
power does corrupt. We have plenty of evidence that it changes your psychology, it changes your neuroscience, it changes your brain, but it's only a small part of the story. And the much more interesting part of the story is how people interact with systems and why we end up with the wrong people in charge.
Lord Acton
Why is it that despite incredible 21st century advances in every realm of medicine and science and so on, we still are stuck with all the wrong people in charge of our lives?
Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us
A New Golden Age Of Sailing Is Here: Five Exciting Projects
most people don't realize how vulnerable we are I mean for example the the food supply in the average city in the United States if it's not daily 00:01:44 renewed would run out in about three days there's not much of a buffer there
The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population,
when the size of the committed minority reached~25% of the population, a tipping point wastriggered, and the minority group succeeded inchanging the established social convention.
Ecology and evolution provide the scientific background needed to address the biodiversity crisis; Zen provides the deeper knowing that will motivate our action to address this problem.
I try to remember that it's not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I'm part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.John Seed (in Macy, 1991: page 184)
We will act to save “life on this planet” only if we recognize at a deep level that our “self” includes all beings. We need to recognize and feel at a deep level that ultimately we are not biologists trying to save other species. Rather, we are one emergence of life on this planet trying to save itself.
8 out of 10 people who reproduced in northern Europe 1,000 years ago are the ancestors of all living people with some European ancestry.
uided meditation: When did your life begin?
There is a traditional Zen koan which is often stated something like this: “What was your Original Face before your parents were born?” There is no such thing as a “correct” answer for a koan. This koan is sometimes interpreted as an invitation to contemplate one's ancestry.
Guided meditation: The carbon cycle
Carbon cycle meditation
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guided meditation to help achieve this awareness of our physical connection to the world around us.
“If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers ‐ to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water ‐ we have to adopt the non‐dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the rivers so that we can experience within ourselves the fears and hopes of the rivers. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace”
The ecologist David Barash (1973) discussed the parallels between Zen Buddhism and ecology.
author
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The Buddhist concept of interconnectedness or emptiness (all things are empty of a separate self) is represented by the metaphor of the Jewel Net of Indra
Abstract
I present mindfulness and meditative aspects of Zen practice that provide the deeper “knowing,” or awareness that we need to inspire action on these problems.
comment
My overall objective in this paper is to
Source
Abstract
there's really shocking data that shows red zip codes are getting red or redder and blue ones Bluer and Bluer
If we magically transformed the global economy overnight, and air pollution fell to near zero, we’d
a devil’s bargain: Aerosols are necessary for normal weather and help moderate rising temperatures, but they’re also killing us. Turns out have been unwittingly geoengineering for decades, and just like in the movies, it’s gone off the rails.
Air pollution from burning coal, driving cars, and using fire to clear land, among other activities, is the fourth-leading cause of death worldwide, killing about 5.5 million people each year.
75% said that they think the future is frightening
we are left with questions of how to split the burden of collectively staying within the PBs. To know if e.g. a person or a company is absolute environmentally sustainable, we need to know that person’s or the company’s assigned SoSOS. How to determine a person’s or a company’s assigned SoSOS is not only normative, but essentially a question of distributive justice.
Ryberg et al. (2018) explicitly looked into the choice of sharing principles (also referred to as allocation principles or distributive principles in other literature).
share of the safe operating space (SoSOS)
Downscaling the planetary boundaries in absolute environmental sustainability assessments – A review
1) How do I choose to be in relationship to this problem?2) What opportunity is presenting itself through my problem?
Moving Beyond Problem Solving: A Potential-Based Approach
A crucial year for understanding how ocean warming affects marine life
Visualizing freely available citation data using VOSviewer
Visualizing a Field of Research With Scientometrics: Climate Change Associated With Major Aquatic Species Production in the World
Professor Büchs said
"Our research is indicating that public support for energy demand reduction is possible if the public see the schemes as being fair and deliver climate justice."
One option is to cap the top 20% of energy users while allowing those people who use little energy and have poverty-level incomes to be able to increase their consumption levels and improve their quality of life.
Milena Büchs, Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the University of Leeds
Cap top 20% of energy users to reduce carbon emissions
Publication
Summary -Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use
ReduceDemand
"When their antennae become clogged with pollution particles, insects struggle to smell food, a mate, or a place to lay their eggs, and it follows that their populations will decline,"
protest and disrupt the “exclusive vacations of wealthy fossil fuel investors and polluters driving the climate crisis
Source
Description
17THE PATHWAY TO EMERGENCEHuman viability depends on advancing Emergency actionin ways that facilitate Emergence of the culture, institutions,technology, and infrastructure of an Ecological Civilizationguided by the maps of a 21st century eco-nomics.These are some action steps on the path to Emergencethat follow from the Ubuntu Principle and its corollaries.
THE PATHWAY TO EMERGENCE
These are some action steps on the path to Emergence that follow from the Ubuntu Principle and its corollaries
“We will prosper in the pursuit of life, or we will perish in the pursuit of money. The choice is ours.”
We see virtually no prospect that the Wall Street system will transform itself from within. Change depends on citizen’s working from outside the establishment to create from the bottom up a New Economy based on new values and institutions.
Taken together, these implicit and explicit subsidies add up to over $7 trillion each year spent in ways that have unintended, harmful effects that are undermining our efforts to tackle climate change. To put that big number into context: this is about eight percent of the value of the global economy.
Detox Development: Repurposing Environmentally Harmful Subsidies
Hiding in plain sight: The missing trillions for climate change
The Great Turning, David Korten referred to this crisis as “the great unraveling.
The third great separation was the industrial agricultural revolution.
Third great separation
industrial agricultural revolution
The industrialization of agriculture removed the necessity for community-based farming.
Farmers eventually lost their sense of connectedness to
quote
The second great separation followed the industrial revolution.
That's the way computers are learning today. 00:02:35 We basically write algorithms that allow computers to understand those patterns… And then we get them to try and try and try. And through pattern recognition, through billions of observations, they learn. They're learning by observing. And what are they observing? They're observing a world that's full of greed, disregard for other species, violence, ego, 00:03:05 showing off The only way to be not only intelligent but also to have the right value set is that we start to portray that right value set today. THE PROBLEM IS UNHAPPINESS
Author
Description
BY 2029, ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT MACHINES WILL SURPASS HUMAN INTELLIGENCE BY 2049, AI IS PREDICTED TO BE A BILLION TIMES MORE INTELLIGENT THAN US
Over the next 15 to 20 years this is going to develop a computer that is much smarter 00:01:20 than all of us. We call that moment singularity.
work on stress so tell me about the work on happiness
follow up
References
it was four hours Pierce between between the moment he hugged me and went into that operating room to the minute he left our world
even though the existential threats are possible you're concerned with what humans teach I'm concerned 00:07:43 with humans with AI
a nefarious controller of AI presumably could teach it to be immoral
the one that 00:05:20 controls AI has enormous power over everyone else
alphago
three uh boundaries
there is a greater Danger from artificial intelligence if we allow it to become self-designing for then it can improve itself rapidly when we may lose control
be sure that you answer your questions, that you go deeply into your actual experience, and that you respond to your questions and your doubts from the perspective of experience.
Has anybody or could anybody ever have the experience of consciousness emerging?
has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?
comment
An index has a sequential and/or causal relationship to its signified.
It is necessary to understand that these three worlds are not separaterealities: they interact and intersect.
forms might be asso-ciated with structures
in any case, the mental world is di¤erent from the physicalworld and constitutes an important part of our reality.
ideas or images that are generated in the mental realm
claim
comment
the nonmaterial consti-tutes a domain of existence with its own characteristics and with the abil-ity to exert downward influence on the material domain
we inhabit a world that isboth material and nonmaterial.
the nonmate-rial domain is located most profoundly in symbolic relationships wheresigns accrue meaning by reference to other signs
Abstract
Comment
fbs is added fbs prevents the replicating stem cells from committing suicide normally cells have a mechanism that tells them they're 00:06:29 growing in the wrong place and shuts it down this is normally a good thing and keeps different parts of the body developing properly but when cells are growing in a metal tank and not a body this warning system 00:06:42 needs to be turned off and for whatever reason fbs works almost completely universally when added to any type of cell
potential progress trap
Question
there's one glaring problem here 00:05:11 with creating this animal-free meat it's not actually animal-free that special fbs serum i just mentioned that stands for fetal bovine serum which is collected from the dying fetuses of 00:05:25 slaughtered cows
This is used for the growth of all kinds of stem cells, not just those from cows
Question
an estimated 50 liters of bovine serum is needed and depending on age a single cow fetus can yield between 150 and 550 milliliters of serum that means to 00:07:33 create a single burger you need the blood of between 90 and 333 cow fetuses until a synthetic or plant-based alternative to fbs is found
a single muscle stem cell could be grown into one trillion muscle cell tubes
we are using CRISPR [a non-GMO process] to engineer our cell lines to grow without the need for added growth factors,
40-plus million pounds, sufficient to achieve national distribution across the U.S.
Date
Description
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Those improvements better come quick.
The researchers say it would make more sense to invest in increasing the efficiencies of existing livestock farms to limit their environmental footprint, which may provide greater emissions reductions sooner that this fledgling industry of lab-grown meat can.
Their life-cycle assessment of current meat-growing processes – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found cultured meat production could emit between four to 25 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than regular beef and all its hidden costs, depending on the techniques used.
6 months
supervise the Board
LIABILITY
entrance fee
he numberrequired for registration
juristic person
5.9 provide appropriate education and training and support to members, elected representativesand employees of the Co-operative;
Patronage dividend distribution according to how much each member has used the co-proportion” op's services, bears to the value of the transactions conducted by all themembers during the same period with or through the Co-operative
Title
Description
“Pandemic or not, I will still lie awake each night with the persistent and unpleasant thoughts of my certain death, but I will choose not to smother this existential dread or anxiety. Instead, I want to explore it, befriend it. I have learned that the only way to conquer the darkness is to venture through it,”
For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor.
But since Covid-19, I’ve watched people around me – friends, family and perfect strangers my own age whose stories are told in obituaries – drop dead from this contagion. A sharp sense of existential dread has taken up residence in my psyche. That vague inevitability that I assumed would happen in the distant future smashed me over the head like an anvil in an old cartoon. I could easily die sooner than later. My mortality was, for the first time, in center focus.
The deep, active listening doulas are trained for involves holding back our own stories, comments, and feelings.
three components of EOL doula training
Three components of End of Life Doula Training
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I found that a deep dive into death work profoundly clarified my priorities, and has helped me spend time in ways more aligned with those priorities thanks to the soul-shaking understanding that our time here is truly limited.
Author
Description
transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining
there is a transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining
comment
no we don't
Answer
The Middle Way
if we achieve this non conceptual understanding of knowledge rational analysis succeeds in subverting itself do we end up completely non conceptual completely mute
probative
David Hume in the section of the treatise of human nature
I'm thinking now about sex this 00:03:32 empirical remarks in against the logicians
we're beginning to demonstrate is that actually contrary to our perceptions Consciousness does not become annihilated just because a person has just died and in fact Consciousness 00:04:49 appears to continue at least in the first period the early period of death the first minutes or hours after death
claim with evidence
comment
you can actually grow neuronal stem cells from corpses
the big discovery of the 21st century is that actually just because someone's died and I've given them a Death Note as a physician as an intensive care physician the cells inside the body 00:02:15 have not yet died
Title
Description
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy
Researchers from Moscow State University and the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersburg told the Dalai Lama in May that they have examined 104 monks who are simulating meditation states thought to resemble thukdam.
The takeaway: A negative finding.
The Thukdam Project Inside the first-ever scientific study of post-mortem meditation
a number of Tibetan monks have come to the U.S. for medical knowledge that they can take home.
Author Erin Remblance
Description
author Martin Daniel
This article introduces the concept of Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) as a way to validate if carbon tunnel vision is real
value lies in readers
here's the problem very predictably experts use language in one set of 00:07:42 patterns to do their thinking but those very same experts read with a different pattern
fundamental problem of research writing / reading
there are three reactions to reading text we do not understand
unlike a journalist almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think 00:05:20 in other words the thinking that you're doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking
Climate misinformation in a climate of misinformation
Paul Kingsnorth
quote -“If you can’t read or understand the ‘peer-reviewed science’ then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people - drawn, as all green ‘thought leaders’ are, from the upper strata of society - will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”
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Fixating on only the easily quantifiable at the expense of a planet full of things that are inherently resistant to reductionistic measurements is the same industrialized, monoculture thinking that got us into this climate crisis in the first place.
This gas in the form of cow “burps” is increasingly the subject of attention for climate activists.
coastline paradox