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Having Grace For the Present Time and Letting Go of a Bleak Future That Has Not Yet Happened
Summary:
The weight of urgent responsibility and the fear of a bleak future can lead to burnout, but imagining a terminal diagnosis can bring about a sense of freedom and courage.
Despite the potential for a bleak future, there are still beautiful moments to be cherished in the present. It is essential to celebrate life, bear witness to the beauty of existence, and keep the world in balance through small yet profound actions.
Leaving space for grace and dreaming a way through the unknown are crucial.
The Stockdale paradox highlights the importance of being ruthlessly realistic about short-term realities while remaining relentlessly optimistic about long-term possibilities.
Although the current global situation is complex and challenging, maintaining a thread of hope and resilience is crucial as we navigate an uncertain future.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I've noticed this in a lot of our colleagues and friends that the people I know that are sort of quote unquote fighting the good fight, right? They're out there in the front and in the public. They're out there drawing attention to critical issues, those kinds of things. They're often getting kind of spun up and burned out themselves, right? It's a lot to hold and to hold the urgency and the responsibility is more than most of our psyches and nervous systems can handle, right? And I thought, good Lord, if I had a terminal diagnosis, right? Like if I knew I had a year to live the classic kind of thought experiment, how would I act? And then the simple answer is that for most of us, we would be more free, we would be more courageous, we would be more truthful, we'd be more heartfelt, we'd be more adventurous, we'd Do all the things, right? Yeah, it's hard more. Yeah, it's hard to have lots and bucket lists and you name it, right? And I thought, okay, well, let's say that 30 years from now, we really are in that totally bleak wheels off situation. But I look out my window today and it's actually pretty beautiful. The sun is still coming up, the moon is setting, there's waves to be surf, there's powder skiing to be had, there's music to listen to or share, there's people, there's loved ones in our Lives. If we pissed away these days, ringing our hands about what might yet be but isn't, I mean, it's the old Mark Twain thing, it's like an old man and I've experienced a great many sorrows, Only some of which actually ever happened, you know, we're kind of in that neck of the woods and I sort of felt like, okay, so the simplest is for me, it's almost the hospice tour of the world And life, like about six months ago, I just kind of sat down the super intense urgency that I had been feeling for several years, including the writing of that last book where I was, you Know, like always looking for the solution, always looking for the way through, right? Where was the gap? Where was the seam and the clean, you know, climbing that crazy mountain that would go and that we can make it through? Because every single one of them that I tracked pinched out and it was almost always maulic, right? It was like, you basically, his fingerprints are everywhere where you're like, oh, fuck, that's hypothetically possible, but we're just not going to do it, are we? We're not going to do it because of a perverse incentives, we're not going to do it because if greed or, you know, all of the things, you're just like, fucking goddamn, why? We could, right? We absolutely could, but the statistically my gut sense on are we going to incredibly low given current conditions. So step one was like feed the holy, like celebrate life, shame on us while there is still goodness, truth and beauty in abundance, right? Not to be sucking the matter out of life and not to be putting those memories in the bank. And at the same time, we can never give up hoping because if we give up hope, then that adjacent possibility can never happen, like for certainness, nails in the coffin, if we just go into Despair and cynicism or even just hedonism, like fuck it while the room burns, you know, while room burns, I'm just going to party. Like those are unconscionable decisions. So can we use our feeding of the holy, the idea of like, I'm going to bear witness to the glory of creation, right? And the absolute heart-rending poinency of this human experience. Can I use that, right? In some tiny, small, you know, insignificant, but profound way, rich, really keep the world on its on its axis, right? As most indigenous cultures did, we pray, we make these offerings, we do these things so that the sun keeps rising, right? So that the rain keeps falling so that the crops grow, like can we participate in the wonder of that creative cycle while we are fortunate enough to still have that opportunity and choice. And then oh, by the way, leave space for grace, right? Because it has always happened that way. And funnily enough, this is this was also you've all just mentioned he type something maybe just about AI like a month ago. And he said, we have forever, all of human history, all of human civilization and culture is living in someone else's dream. You know, free markets was a concept, you know, like the democracy, civil rights, everything that we take as the mimetic norms of our reality someone dreamed them first. So the leaving space for grace is and how can we dream a way through that we cannot see from here? We cannot, because I at least I can't, I've looked, right? And most of the people I look up to have been looking. And if you really behind closed doors sit down with most of those folks, it's far grimmer than even the headlines encapsulate, right? But the reality is, is we are still amazingly adaptive, cunning little monkeys with opposable thumbs and brilliant prefrontal cortexes. So, so we can't see from here, what adaptations, what permutations, what mutations will happen around the bend. And this goes back to, you know, Jim Stockdale is Admiral Stockdale. He was the highest ranking POW in Vietnam. And he actually went on to be a vice presidential candidate at one point. But his the Stockdale paradox was he noticed that in those North Vietnamese POW camps that the pessimists didn't live, because they were like, ah, I'm fucked. You know, sure enough, they snuffed it. But the really interesting insight was the optimist didn't live either. Because what happened is they'd be like, we're going to get the boys home for Christmas or Easter or July the 4th. And those dates would come and go. And then they would just collapse, that they would lose all ability to maintain hope after their hope redemption came and went. And he said the paradox was the people who survived were ruthlessly realistic about short-term realities, while remaining relentlessly optimistic about the long-term possibility. I don't know when we're going to get out, but we're going to go home. Right. And that is to me, it's sort of all of us right now. We don't like would like we are in a massive, intersecting, chaotic and complex, tight spot. Right. And it's it's it's the confluence of every intentional and unintentional quality of our civilization to date. And we're just huddling off the cliff. No skid marks. Now, whether or not we can figure out how to turn into chitty, chitty bang bang, you know, and sprout wings or turn into a boat or do something else we can't see from here. And I wouldn't give it super long odds. We may just get subject into the trash compactor of history. Right. But it is on us. It's incumbent on us to maintain a thread of hope and resilience.
#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis
Win-Win with Liv Boeree
The Dataome: The Energy Intensity of the Digital World
Key takeaways:
• The generation and usage of digital data requires a significant amount of energy and resources.
• Silicon chip production is an energy-intensive process due to the creation of ordered structures from disordered material.
• Efforts to generate electric power for the current informational world are hindered by the fight against entropy.
• The energy requirements for computation, data storage, and data transmission are increasing exponentially.
• Without significant improvements in efficiency, the energy needed to run our digital data homes may soon match the global civilization's total energy usage.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Its everything, right? It's this conversation in recording to yr bits. It's the information that went to and from your phone when you picked it up in the morning. It's the video you made. It's all the financial transactions, it's all the scientific computation. And that, of course, all takes energy. It takes the construction of te technology. In the first instance, making silican chips is an extraordinarily energy intensive thing, because you're making these exquisitely ordered structures out of very disordered material. And so there too, we go back to simo dynamics. And you're fighting, in this sense, against entropines. In a local fashion, we're having to generate electric to power current informational world, that piece of the data. And the rather sobering thing is that already, the amount of energy and resources that we're putting into this, it's about the same as the total metabolic utilization of around 700 Million human and if you look at the trend in energy requirements for computation, for data storage and data transmission, the trends all upwards. Its an expedential curve. And they suggest that perhaps, even if we have some improvements in efficiency, unless those improvements are then in a few decades time, we may be at a point where the amount of energy, Just electrical energy, required to run our digital data home, is roughly the same as the total amount of electrical energy we utilize as a global civilization at this time.
Speaker 3
The
Caleb Scharf on the Ascent of Information — Life in the Human Dataome
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
The Expert Identification Problem and the Challenges of Democratic Decision-Making
Key takeaways:
• The expert identification problem is a major concern when it comes to trusting experts in a democracy.
• Democracies aim to harness the intellectual power of diversity for better solutions.
• The challenge lies in recognizing the best solutions when they require expertise that the democratic entity may not possess.
• There is no clear solution to this problem, and democracy remains the best way to organize society according to the speaker.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So for a long time I would say that the problem I've been most obsessed with is something I call the expert identification problem it's like how does the non-expert figure out which expert To trust if they don't have the expertise and one of the worries about a democracy is that it runs straight into the expert identification problem right like if we're democratically Voting on what to do we are aggregate non-experts I mean I'm not talking here about like oh we are the experts and you all are not even if you are the world expert in X you're a non-expert In a million other fields right so as an aggregate we are non-expert so here's the real worry for me if you have the right solution how would that get democratically approved Helen Landemore Is this a political theorist I really like she's part of a movement who are epistemic democrats and they think that democracies are the best way to harness the intellectual power of Diversity and the basic model is something like diverse people will come up with a better set of solutions and when you put them together the best solutions will rise to the top and my Worry is how will the democratic entity recognize which are the best solutions because if the best solution requires expertise to recognize and the democratic entity as an aggregate Is not an expert how will they figure it out and that's a problem I'm not sure there's a solution to and I also can't think of a better way to organize the world than democratically
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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