Human Nature, Self-Governance, Big History, Entropy, etc.

I think it's that we are quite good at fashioning our external environment to suit our needs (although not quite good at assessing the longer term impacts that could well defeat the purpose -- more on that later), but we've just begun to attempt self-referential fashioning or management. Democracy is the first attempt at that in all human history. Autocracy, authoritarianism and the like are still in the genre of external manipulation, wherein the direction of manipulative force is mostly outward towards those ruled upon. This is the natural, lower energy, higher entropy state of things, as it was in the earlier stages of biological evolution, so there is always a natural tendency of  reversion back towards that state in any system.

Now, with that being said, there was a point in the evolution of life where it changed from just complex molecules influencing their external environment to a setup where *information* was encapsulated to transmit an optimal setup down the line, and, further, with the ability to improve the information as conditions change and/or new discoveries of optimality were happened upon.  

With governance, we're now at that pivot point enabling the gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing it or destroying it and falling back (e.g. U.S. Constitution as an instance of this kind of thing). We've certainly recognized and stated the problem, which is a good start in an n-step process, but moving to the next step is tricky and we can easily fall back instead.

Good news is that much of our recent technology is akin to a vehicle for societal DNA, enabling all those things mentioned above -- gathering, analyzing, optimizing, transmitting, and revising information without losing or destroying it -- enabling us to go way beyond near-time and near-space predictions of where our actions can go, what they could do (good or bad), and enabling us to choose a flexible best path. We can for the first time measure and forecast on fairly grand scales. That's the good news, but not all "molecules", per se, have accepted it, and fight hard to keep ignoring it, as it will require some change in their form, so resistance to change is another property to be assimilated into this kind of evolution.

These are the forces at play at this critical inflection point, definitely on par with all the other "threshold moments" in the overall evolution of the universe, to invoke some big history parlance.

-Greg

Entropy-Based Governance

 Through an appropriate reward structure, to innovatively and sustainably advance civilization.

"Entropy-Based Governance"

GREEN = Governance Relevant by Energy and Entropy Numerics

-Greg

From fire to respiration for human civilization

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-Greg

Extruding social governance from fundamental laws of the universe

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-Greg

Work Energy Flows

I've read three interesting books lately that relate here and relate to each other in a meta way: The Uninhabitable Earth, The Growth Delusion, and Origin Story. Key meta-takeaway is that in the long run, we humans need to figure out a way to optimally manage the flow of work energy (thermodynamic "free" energy) to best serve our purposes, with broad allocation across species (ours and others), and with minimal, ideally zero, unintended consequences -- minimum impactful entropy costs. Could also be lots of opportunity moving the world into that frame of mind as well.

-Greg

Hari Seldon

Back on the entropy thing, I think ultimately, the Hari Seldon equations and derivative laws we ultimately develop, if we last long enough to reach that stage of enlightenment, will incorporate the management of entropy and the distribution of its burden across civilization, along with similar distribution considerations of free energy that counteracts it. If you stop to think about it, fundamentally, it's what we fight about. The big issues of today and over time -- health care, climate change, food production, fresh water production, labor availability, etc. -- can all be viewed through an entropy/free energy lens. What remains then is the management of the other tendencies of human behavior like one-upsmanship, power grabbing, appetite for various stimuli or excitement, etc. -- which, when you consider the origin story writ large, it's also about disturbances or excitement that spontaneously arose in an otherwise boring soup...life, evolution, and human behavior have inherited that and it's what stimulates progress.

-Greg

Exponential Climate Change

Finished the book. His focus is on painting the picture of what the future will be like, in various ranges of "worseness" and how we might respond to it, and how civilization will likely get greatly reconfigured. I don't really think the guy is being overly alarmist or hyperbolic. Stuff is real. 

A main takeaway is that the model of progress we've had since perhaps the Enlightenment (post Dark Ages) needs to likely change. The upward exponential modulated by sine waves of various crests and troughs may well be permanently modulated down to sea level (literally and figuratively) by a negative exponential driven by climate. Progress will likely level or decline until we adapt to the radically different conditions,and it could take millennia, since we'd pretty much have to re-do everything we did over the last 12,000 years in a much more sustainable light. The technology might be there, but the geopolitical upheavals may take centuries to quell. 

Of course the degree of this can be mitigated by acting as early as possible to completely decarbonize in an orderly way, but the will just doesn't seem to be there. Too much inertia. And, no, onesy-twosy neoliberals driving EV's won't cut it. It's dramatic change needed across civilization.  Hopefully 2020 will be the turning point, and the youth marching in the streets will gain momentum toward action, lest their children live amongst the ruins of a once relatively prosperous civilization in a new, much extended, Dark Age, dwarfing any that hit humanity before...

My next book is The Growth Delusion...after a detour to a big history one called Origin Story, which, in the early reading, posits the idea of the universal law of an entropy tax on creating order, which climate change is precisely that!

-Greg