[gsf_emergency_2]

I agree with the main points of this. Just some addenda (while my main loop has neither verbal nor quantitative juice to spare):

1. 1777 & 1852 were peak for iron tech. Black smithery decentralized in both solar econs. (+nitrate prod. How could those revolutions succeed otherwise?) did not read GG+S to know if he had the same or counter argument (eg incompetent monarchs.) (Role of aluminum tech is a fun rabbit hole)

2. When your main threats are either yourselves other supra-organisms (not the universe), there may be a case for violating Ashby's Law. That might not be so crackpot if your fave supra-organism has a sustainably robust energy infra

2b. One might have to make the case that the brain may be materially バロック but organizationally simple? Do hominids have the most complex brains of all? Will botanics outlive us?

2a. The hard to formalize notions of simplicity from Clausewitz

3. Loki "physically" manifesting as a Hydra, thus concluding the TV series: what if he's The Good Guy?

[PaulHoule]

Ashby's law is the law.

If the control system inevitably becomes too complex to control than that's another law and degrowth is inevitable.

I kept that answer as short as I could and left out many threads, such as this one:

Circa 2000 I had a theory of "the Syndrome" which was that the business cycle is a battle of problems and solutions and that in the 1970s solutions were becoming part of the problem and the solution of the 1980s was taking the foot off the growth accelerator (which a Republican could do more easily than a Democrat) and a bit of tearing down of the solution apparatus. That ideology was absorbed by Bill Clinton and between that and the ongoing progress in microelectronics we got the boom of the 1990s.

That kind of analysis which posit "growth" and "degrowth" as phases of a cycle as opposed to two sides of a pulse is key to envisioning a future we want to live in and thinking through how to keep the control system controllable.

Also that answer leaned to the right as there is no point in giving the likes of Yarvin excessive space. Yet, that bit about spirit is not just coding or pandering [1], it's a part of the solution. We need faith in ourselves and the possibilities of cybernetics. I came to work one morning to find this stuck on the door of my building

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114356523256174674

Our "moment of reckoning" was not a defeat on the factory floor, in the operating room or on the battlefield. It was a defeat at the ballot box and had it gone differently by a few points, we'd be in different place. We've lost faith in our own institutions.

[1] presented so gently it's likely to evade the man-of-the-moment in 2025

[gsf_emergency_2]

By the ballot box, the less complex system of values that is the right did not lose out to the more complex system of values one may call the left. But that's not within the realm of cybernetics.

The business cycle model of yours might have be fully understandable within cybernetics, especially in the time series respect. But are we not also interested in competing/interacting "peer" systems "beyond mean field"? How Apple and Desktop Linux gained ground against MSoft by reducing fragmentation, how MSoft responded by diversifying. You might have other examples for and against?

[PaulHoule]

I'd hesitate to say the left or right has a more or less complex system. Certainly now the college educated are more attracted to the Democrats than the Republicans but that was not the case in the 1960s and as late as the 1990s some right-wing Republicans of time had a lot of influence at my Uni, they are building this structure in the name of a very right-wing head of the board of trustees in the 1990s

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114860542662347802

Marxism is a complex system that appeals to systematizers, "anti-racism" is a little less smart and more pessimistic and has about as much appeal to noneducated minorities as Marxism has to the working class -- the rank and file's ideology is more like

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112503020931163144

A lot of it is path dependent. I mean, Trump greased the skids for those mRNA vaccines and I remember my leftist friends saying in December 2020 that there must be something wrong about them being developed at "warp speed". Had he won it would have been leftists shunning vaccines and rightists shunning them for being stupid.

Every good paranoid believes the "pincer theory" that every social movement needs a wing that appeals to the elite (lacks manpower) and mass (lacks resources, vision, ...) to the smart and the stupid, etc.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Are Cornell still using fancy European "eco" glass? I wonder if "out-of-town glazers" mean that the glass supplier/architect was OCD about their glass getting manhandled by "outsiders". Tariffs were supposed to be the "simple" solution to fix this.

My erstwhile understanding of the earlier appeal of Marxism was that it was fully compatible with the Weberian work ethic-- right until someone found a way to work the famous laziness of the Russians into propaganda.

Now that you mention it. Simplicity can appeal to the elites as a standin for "marketability to the masses". Helps the Kessel Run. (Pincer)

(That Mormons are a significant deal in the USG hiring pipeline is not a symptom of right wing sophistication-- unless one is a conspiracy theorist)