📚 Quinn's Highlights

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The tension between the ambiguity of individuals' goals and large scale collective organization Transcript: Speaker 2 Here's the pessimistic nightmare. It is really good and healthy for human beings to live in an ambiguous environment with a pluralistic set of goals, many of which are in Kuwait. That is an essential tension with the methods of large scale collective organization. If it's true that for an organization to cohere, it needs to have clear policies so it can act coherently, then we should not expect that kind of ambiguity to survive at scale. And I think what you're describing, so I tend to think about since I'm a philosopher like what makes something constitutively coherent. And what you're describing is a kind of evolutionary process. You know, some organizations are going to be more coherent than others and some people are more interested in coherence. And the people that are more interested in following the strict outcome are going to arise in the organization. And the organizations that have clear outcomes are going to be better at achieving those outcomes. And so our world is going to be full of large organizations staffed with people that have very, very clear specifications of outcomes. And there's something inhumane and bad about that for individuals. But that's what happens when we need to organize in large scale collectives.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Adversarial instead of truth-seeking engagement is baked into so many aspects of our society Summary: Our society often relies on adversarial advocates for decision-making, but this approach doesn't lead to the truth. We need a cooperative effort where people are open to changing their minds and acknowledging different perspectives. This applies to civic organizations, legal systems, political systems, and even neighborhood associations. We tend to punish those who disagree with the established opinion, leading to a lack of pluralism. We should strive for diverse viewpoints and a cooperative search for the truth. Transcript: Speaker 1 There's a thing wrong with our society which is we have even the institutions that work reasonably well in our society are still often built around adversarial advocates in which the Idea is i will argue as passionately as possible for one side you will argue as passionately as possible for the other side we will deploy whatever resources we can rhetoric money etc And somehow we like to think that by i don't know interpolation that will arrive at the truth and that's totally not true right i mean i we know that there are lots of types of decision-making Where that's a disaster where what you need is not these two sides each of which are deliberately undercutting the other as effectively and including viciously as they can but you want Everybody to be willing to change their mind openly publicly to be willing to publicly acknowledge the point that the other person is making and you want to sense that people are cooperatively Working together toward the truth but that's not how most civic organizations work it's not how our legal system works it's not our political system works nowadays maybe there was Some golden age in the past but it did probably not it's not even how neighborhood associations work right i mean there may be some diversity in how homeowners associations work internally Although i regret to say i don't think that's usually true because they're usually very self-selected groups of people who are quite vocal but once they arrive at a decision they're Like good old-fashioned Maoist democratic centralists you know like well we represent the neighborhood and this is our monolithic opinion and if somebody shows up and says well i Live in that neighborhood but i i actually don't agree then they they get piled on and punished and if somebody says i'm an environmentalist but this environmental organization doesn't Speak for me or i belong to this racial or ethnic group but i don't necessarily agree with what the claimed representatives of that group say that group wants they get punished again A lack of pluralism but i think it's not just a lack of diversity it's this notion that the way to get make decisions is for everybody to hammer their stake as firmly into the ground as they Can

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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

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