We tend to think of prejudice in negative terms, but there are positive prejudices as well. I was just telling a friend that I’d trust a random Sikh more than any other religion/ethnicity. Just seem to have a very high proportion of good people. Also think well of the diaspora Chinese, as a rule, perhaps because I was raised by them to a certain extent.
Do you have any positive prejudices?
Feel free to use as an open thread. No vax/medical.
You probably thought measles was a thing of the past. Along with Mumps, Rubella, Polio, Chickenpox and Heptatis B, kids are required to be vaccinated for it as a requirement of going to school. (So the little disease spreaders don’t act as disease vectors, which parents and teacher s know they do.)
We hardly see most of these diseases any more, because we make sure everyone is vaccinated, so they can’t get a foothold. (That’s part of why vaccines prevent so many deaths, and that’s why vaccine denial is bad.)
But Florida has decided the days of effective disease control are over:
Florida will end vaccine requirements to attend school, making it the first state to do so. The state’s surgeon general said every vaccine mandate “drips with disdain and slavery.”
This is batshit insane. I don’t care what you think about the Covid vaccines, normal vaccines prevented vast numbers of deaths and crippling disabilities. If they are discontinued, the diseases will spread and be given a chance to mutate. They’ll mutate to defeat vaccines, putting everyone at risk.
(The measles vaccine was approved in the US in 1963.)
I know it’s nice to think “everyone should make individual decisions about everything”, but that’s bullshit when it comes to public health issues, especially dealing with contagious diseases. I warned, repeatedly, that fucking up the Covid response (which was NOT primarily about the vaccine) would discredit public health “well it didn’t work for Covid, so it must be bullshit!”
Anyway, the age of rationality in the West was, overall, nice. But as a friend quipped (exaggeration for effect, I hope), “We’re at most 10 years away from witchcraft trials resuming.” (Ten is too soon, I think, I give it twenty.)
America is descending fast, and much of the Western world is going with it. The very idea of effective mass action has been discredited, and we are all going to pay for that, including the rich, who will find that they can’t completely protect themselves from the demons their malign incompetence has released.
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AI’s a weird industry. So far almost no one is making any money, certainly not the major Western AI companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. Every query costs more than the revenue it generates. The primary beneficiary has been NVidia: they’re making money hand over fist, and suppliers of data centers and power have big customers in AI. But AI itself doesn’t make money. (Not Western, anyway. Deepseek, which is 20 to 30 times cheaper, probably is.
The energy required for Western AI is huge, and it’s mostly dirty energy. AI requires mostly 24/7 energy, which means renewables are out. It needs nuclear or carbon intensive sources like coal and natural gas and turbines. MIT did a massive dig into this in March.
The researchers were clear that adoption of AI and the accelerated server technologies that power it has been the primary force causing electricity demand from data centers to skyrocket after remaining stagnant for over a decade. Between 2024 and 2028, the share of US electricity going to data centers may triple, from its current 4.4% to 12%.
AI companies are also planning multi-gigawatt constructions abroad, including in Malaysia, which is becoming Southeast Asia’s data center hub. In May OpenAI announced a plan to support data-center buildouts abroad as part of a bid to “spread democratic AI.” Companies are taking a scattershot approach to getting there—inking deals for new nuclear plants, firing up old ones, and striking massive deals with utility companies.
AI’s a lot more intensive than traditional methods. For example, AI vs. a Google search (granted Google search sucks, but that’s because Google wants it to suck.)
It’s long been noted that one of the biggest issues with climate change is that we can expect it to reduce the amount of fresh water available. AI gobbles that:
AI is also thirsty for water. ChatGPT gulps roughly a 16-ounce bottle in as few as 10 queries, calculates Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside, and his colleagues.
ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity
Whoa! That kind of puts paid to rising by 10% a year and other such assumptions. It doesn’t look like new models are scaling linearly.
We have a climate change problem already: lots of extreme weather, disrupted rainfall patterns and massive wildfires. The permafrost is bubbling and releasing methane and arctic temperatures are absurd (hitting 30 celcius in some cases).
Now if this tech was truly transformative, if it made everything so much better, maybe it would be worth it. But so far, with a few exceptions (mostly running thru millions of combinations to assist research) it seems like it’s better search, automatic image generation, a great way for students to cheat and may make programming faster. (There’s some dispute about this, one study found it made coders slower.) So far agents are duds, unable to even run a vending machine.
On the downside, even AI boosters claim it’s likely to put vast numbers of people out of work if it does work, wiping out entire fields of employment, including SFX, illustrators, artists, writers, customer service and perhaps most entry level jobs. We’re told AI has a small but existential risk of wiping out humanity. It gobbles water and energy and causes pollution.
What, exactly, are we expecting to get from AI (other than NVidia making profits) that is worth the costs of AI? Does it make sense to be rushing forward this fast, and in this way? Deepseek has shown AI doesn’t have to use so many resources, but Western AI companies are doing the opposite of reducing their resource draw. Eight times as much energy? How much more energy with GPT-6 use?
It seems like we’re unable to control our tech at all. This used to be the killer argument “well, there’s no controlling it, so why even try?”
But China’s AI uses way less energy. Apparently China can control it, and we can’t? So it’s not about “can’t”, it’s about “won’t”. Using less resources would mean less money sloshing around making various Tech-bros rich, I guess, and we can’t have that.
And all this for an industry where the primary actors, OpenAI and Anthropic aren’t even making money.
Perhaps we could be using these resources in a better way? China is spending their money on producing three-quarters of the world’s renewable energy, and ramping up nuclear power. Their carbon emissions are actually down. Their economy is growing far faster than ours. They’ve almost completely moved over to electric cars, they have high speed trains, and their space program is going gangbusters. All this while reducing rent by over a third in the past five years.
You don’t have to be an AI skeptic to think “maybe this is a misallocation of resources?” Is it really going to change everything so much so that it “makes America great again”? Is western AI so much better than Chinese to make that difference even if AI is as big a deal as its greatest boosters say?
Maybe the US and Europe should be concentrating on more than just AI? Not letting China continue to march ahead in almost every field, while putting almost all the marbles on one big project that they barely have a lead in anyway?
I don’t want to overstate this issue. The amount of energy and water used doesn’t come close to, say, expected increases in air conditioning. (Though if increases in draw continue to ramp up similar to GPT-5 we’ll see. And, the more energy we use, the more air conditioning we need thanks to fairly obvious feedback.) But still, what are we getting for it?
Just some things to think about.
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It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. An American-Chinese silicon valley type spent some time in China recently (I don’t agree wit the whole article, but you should read it), and among the bits that stood out to me was this:
In the US, when politicians make campaign promises, I never actually expect them to follow through. But Chinese leaders do—for better and for worse. The 2025 plans to build 1,350 Shenzhen parks or reduce China’s energy dependence aren’t mere propaganda. (Neither, tragically, was the one-child policy.) Accountability is built into China’s bureaucratic system through KPIs, and you can see the results firsthand.
This echoes what Naomi Wu noted: that the Communist party attains their goals, and that many of them are the smartest most capable people she knows. (I think the one child policy wasn’t a mistake, as it happens, though it probably continued too long.)
This chart is of average rent as a percentage of income.
As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.
So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. (See, “China is Transitioning, and So far successfully“).
China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.
To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit?
I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?
I’m 57, and I remember the world before neoliberalism, but I remember it as a child. In my entire adult life I have not seen a Western government capable of doing what China does: set an important goal which benefits the population as a whole and crush it.
China is winning because China deserves to win, because it is better run. I’m not going to whitewash it: there are a lot of things I don’t like about how China is run. But bottom line, it’s run more for the benefit of ordinary citizens than most Western countries, and those countries which seem to be run for the benefit of the population as a whole are running on legacy systems: the entire EU it seems, is considering gutting their social welfare systems to spend more money on American weapons. For my entire life things have been getting slowly worse in France and Germany, and quickly worse in the UK. In China, on the other hand, life keeps getting better for the majority of the population.
Are you worried about Democracy? You should be. But one simple threat is this: China isn’t a democracy and its actions clearly benefit the majority of its people more than the actions of American or British or EU governments benefit their people.
Democracy isn’t just a something word you wave around. If it doesn’t produce better results, people will stop believing in it.
China’s winning because the CCP gets results and the results it chooses to get are, much more often than in the West, good for the majority of its people. That means it deserves to win, and we deserve to lose.
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One disease one cure cover
If you found yourself in a bad situation, say living in an extremely toxic and unhealthy society, but really any problem, what is the first thing a wise person might do?
One answer is they’d trying to find out if anyone else had a solution which had worked.
Now ever since the rise of Kings I don’t think there have been a lot of cases of civilizations which caught the disease of having rulers and ruled finding a good way out, but if you live in an unhealthy society, you may want to find a healthy society and see how it functions.
That sets out the end-goal. “We’re here, we need to get to something like that.”
Of course, you’re not an idiot, this doesn’t mean giving up all technology, say, if the healthy society has less tech. It means distilling the principles that makes a society healthy, and aiming for that.
This is what Whip Randolph set out to do in his life, and it’s what his book, “One Disease, One Cure” tries to explain to readers.
I have to admit, my eyebrows lifted at the start. Whip’s firmly in the “there are and have been healthy indigenous society and we should look at them.” There’s a whole genre of writing in this tradition, and eyes tend to roll at it, especially because one wonders if such societies could scale.
It’s not that societies which are more caring than ours don’t exist. There’s a ton of ethnographic literature and accounts from anthropologists, visitors and even missionaries who describe those societies. Even Christopher Columbus praised the Arawaks to the Heavens as being the best people alive, before proceeding to enslave and slaughter them, with generous sides of rape and torture.
The Founding Fathers of America praised the Iroquois confederacy. (They called themselves the Haudenosaunee, and Randolph spends more time on them than perhaps any other culture presented in the book.)
There’s also a series of books dealing with “how did this come about”, like “Against the Grain” or “The Origin of Inequality” or Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything.”
And there are endless small groups in America who try to learn from the wisdom of such groups and engage in various spiritual practices based on what is remembered and survives of North American indigenous traditions. Mainstream Americans tend to roll their eyes and sneer at them. At best they’re seen as impractical Hippies.
Randolph’s in this group and spirituality is fundamental to his book. But don’t run! What he means by spirituality is fairly simply and straightforward.
Whenever you’re looking into fixing or changing a society you’ve got a problem at three levels. Individual, group, society. No solution will work at the society level if it isn’t supported by how things are done at the group or individual level. Our society, for example, is organized around corporations whose primary motive is greed. People are rewarded for making more money, with very few limits on how much they are allowed to hurt other people along the way.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all
— possible John Maynard Keynes
As is usual in books these days, Randolph starts with the story of his despair, then moves to his first experience indicating something better was possible: he spent time living with a healthy society, where no money was used, everyone was fed and taken care of and people were kind and caring as a rule. Children were raised by the community, there were no prisons or police and the leaders had no coercive ability.
It felt to him almost like utopia. Not “nowhere” but “oh my God, this is actually possible and no one can tell me otherwise, because I have now experienced it!”
This leads to the normal followups, and Whip follows up very well indeed.
At a personal level Randolph identifies three core spiritual practices:
When you look at these you’ll see they all come down to generosity and gratitude. Give what you have, be grateful for what you are given. And this comes out of Whip’s diagnosis of the fundamental social problem.
Healthy Societies are Gift Societies and Unhealthy Societies are Profit Societies
Randolph means something other than capitalism. Ancient Egypt where the Pharoah owned everything is part of the large class of profit societies and so would be Europe in the Middle Ages or even the USSR. In all cases some people have more than they need and they don’t share with others.
In a gift society everyone is rich or poor together. A simple saying from my childhood encapsulates: “share and share alike.”
Leaders are those who give the most, not those who have the most.
There is no organized ability coerce in these societies. No police. Leaders can’t make decisions without community support for each decision. Those who violate the society’s norms are corrected, and if they can’t be corrected are ostracized or killed. The Zapatistas are a good example: when they took power they let everyone out prison except for rapists, murderers and drug trafficking bosses. (If you want the details of how this works, well, read the book.)
The core assertion here is simple. The moment you have rulers instead of leaders, your society is sunk. The moment your society operates on individual accumulation of wealth rather than sharing (gifting), you are sunk. (Remember that in virtually ever famine there has always been enough food. The famines occur because those with more than they need, horde. Likewise, the US has far more empty homes than homeless people.)
For a gift economy to work, we have to all want to give and we must abhor selfishness. We must know that everyone in our group wants to take care of us, and we must want to take care of them.
And that’s what Randolph’s three core spiritual practices are about.
But individuals are just individuals, and this is about creating a better society. The next level up is the group level, and here’s Randolph’s advice. A group should:
At the society level:
Now, again, all of this seems pretty utopian, especially if you’ve grown up in a profit (greed) based society. Yet, at its basis, wouldn’t most of us agree that the role of society should be to look after each other? And wouldn’t we acknowledge that if someone’s hungry and someone else has way more than they can ever eat or use, it makes no sense for the other person to be going hungry?
Certainly those are the rules most of us were taught as very young children. “Share your toys. No one gets seconds until everyone has firsts” And perhaps “leaders get the last share, not the first.”
One problem with reviewing Whip’s book is that it’s long. It goes on and on, because Randolph tries to address all the ways our societies have gone wrong, from sexual abuse and authoritarianism, to lack of integrity, to education, to policing, to… (add your issue here, it’s probably covered).
So what we’ve done is hit the highlights: the big picture. But if you’re dubious: read the book, because a lot of the details are dealt with.
This isn’t to say that I agree with everything, and I think there’s a bit of “lack of plan”. Lots of diagnosis, some treatment. But the fundamental diagnosis is correct. The moment we have rulers and hoarding, we’re sunk. And we’re way down that path. There may also be some excessive idealizing of indigenous societies, but a society need not be perfect to be better, even much better.
Whip is also a bit of devolutionist, who wants a controlled reduction in the amount of technology we used. I have a few quibbles with this, but they’re secondary. No one with sense can’t think we need to stop using plastics, for example, or give up almost all use of fossil fuels. I think there’s a role for advanced technology, there just needs to be far more care and deliberation in what we use.
Overall I’m happy to recommend the book. Understand you’re going to get a lot of “personal journey” and lots of hippy vibes, but read carefully and see whether you agree with the diagnosis. Time and time again I did.
The book is “pay what you want” and you can get it here.
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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.
But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.
The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)
Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)
Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.
Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.
Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.
Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”
Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.
While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.
I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.
As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.
Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)
I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.
The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.
At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)
Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.
I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”
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Some years ago I wrote an article about how to run a real left wing government.
Seven Rules for running a real left-wing government
Of course, it was really a guide for how to change the ruling ideology of a society. Because, yes, elites, apparatchniks and what as might be called a deep state state exist. These aren’t all the same thing. There is plenty of private support for whatever the status quo is, especially at the highest levels, since whatever the ideology is, it put them in charge and benefited them. There are also a lot of mid level enforcers, bureaucrats (both private and public) and professionals who benefit from the status quo.
Anyway, two of the seven rules were specific to the problem of running a left wing government in a neoliberal world (it was 2016.) But here are the other five
Control the Media: Now the wording isn’t always the best, but Trump has been on a constant attack against the media. He’s changed who is allowed to be part of the White House press pool and he’s made the media pay blackmail money. He’s now talking about removing NBC and ABC’s licenses. He may, he may not, but the threat makes them change.
Take Control of the Banking Sector: for the first time in its history, a Federal Reserve governor has been fired the President has always had this authority in theory (except over the Chair), but has never used it in practice. Ironically I once advised Obama to use this power to stop the Fed bailouts in 2009. Control over the banking sector is really control over the permission system: whoever is given money or the ability to create money can do things. Once you have your hands on the money-artery, nothing significant can happen without your permission.
Who is Your Administrative class: All systems have a class of people which run the bureaucracies. We have come to know ours as the PMC. Trump is replacing them, firing them in huge piles, and replacing them with right wing, often religious, fanatics. These are people who will give him his military parade (denied in his first term), who will extradite his enemies, who will break laws for him knowing that the Supreme Court (carefully packed during decades of preparation for this moment) will make what they do legal, and that in any case, the enforcer class is under Trump’s control.
Indeed, Trump has been purging the enforcer class and replacing them with people who would not have been considered qualified by the previous system. This is true of the military, the FBI and indeed of all the three letter agencies. Since ICE are his loyal brownshirts, needing no purging, they are being massively enlarged and given far greater powers.
Reduce vulnerability to the World Trade System: Let’s state this simply: the US had been losing the trade game badly for about fifteen years. China was coming on hard, Africa is lost, South America is almost lost, Russia is no longer complacent and America has lost the lead in over 80% of technologies. It can’t build ships, its planes fall out of the sky, most electronics are made elsewhere, it can’t even make magnets. It’s a joke.
So Trump is creating a two bloc system, there’s the US and its vassals (calling them allies amounts to lying) Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Korea. On the other side China, Russia, Iran, and their friends, which includes most of Africa and Asia and a good chunk of South America.
The US has slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and tariffs on almost everyone else. Why? Well, simply enough, the US can’t compete. If there is free trade, or anything approximating it, the US’s economy will be further cannibalized. Since they can’t sell overseas, except for chips, food and a few other goods, it’s time to stop competing. The US can’t win, so it’s not going to play.
The problem, of course, is that unless the US takes this time behind trade barriers to become competitive, it’ll just keep falling behind, and there’s only so much it can cannibalize its vassals. Given the massive slashing of research and universities, with no sign of a new system to replace them, it’s clear that the US has chosen semi-permanent decline.
Trump is Changing the US ruling ideology to Controlled un-development
It’s still about making the rich richer, but Trump’s choice is controlled decline. The US and the West will fall further and further behind, living conditions will get worse and worse, but the rich will become relatively richer in relation to everyone else in society. Think India in the post-war period. Fantastically wealthy elites, everyone else is a peon. Oh, there’s lots of ruin in countries, but this is the direction of the arrow and it only changes if a different ideology takes over.
Competition in the US between all groups will become far more savage, because there is no net. You get you hands on a position which commands resources or you become homeless or techno-peasant.
The vassals, who mostly have social welfare systems, will be forced to liquidate them, buy US military goods (which are useless against the US, given the software driven nature of them) and sell off all their public goods to continue the enrichment of elites. Any who try to avoid this fate will be coerced as necessary, first by their own internal elites.
This is the future in America and its allies. The only way to avoid it is to figure out how to defect.
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