This brief analysis of past evolution points to what is needed to establish a unified, cooperative and sustainable global society.  A system of global governance will be required to continually align the interests of all citizens and organizations with those of the whole.  When this is achieved, nations and multi-national corporations will benefit in proportion to their positive contributions to the global society, and will suffer in proportion to their harmful effects on others.  Corporations driven solely by the profit motive will search for ways to advance the interests of the society. 

Evolution has previously met these challenges successfully by implementing systems of constraint.  These constraints punish or restrain members from free-riding, cheating, or thieving.  They also can reward actions that benefit the organization but are not part of reciprocal exchanges (e.g. the provision of public goods).  In human societies, these constraints are our systems of governance.  They align the interests of individuals with those of the society.  In order to be effective, these systems of constraint need to be more powerful than the members of the organization.  If they are not, members will be able to escape their control, and act contrary to the interests of the organization (e.g. corruption in human societies).  However cooperation can be undermined if these powerful processes are used by some members to advance their interests at the expense of the organization.  Because of this possibility, a major challenge for evolution at all levels of organization has been to prevent power from being used to further the interests of a minority at the expense of the organization.  For these reasons, much of the history of evolution at all levels of organization has been about what humans describe as exploitation, the abuse of power and class struggle.  But past evolution has dealt with these challenges by constraining the interests of the powerful so that they are aligned with the interests of the organization as a whole. 

The role of governance in organizing cooperation 

Significantly, the emergence of cooperatives does not depend upon the surrender of self-interest.  This would be as impossible at all other levels of organization as in human affairs.  As biologists have long known, organisms that take the benefits of cooperation without cooperating in return will generally out-compete those that cooperate.  Cooperation emerges only when evolution discovers a form of organization in which it pays to cooperate.  To an extent, this form of organization can be achieved through reciprocal exchanges between members.  Members will benefit from providing goods and services to others if they receive benefits in exchange.  In human societies these exchange processes take the form of economic markets.  But these processes alone will not align the interests of members with the organization—there is nothing to prevent members from taking benefits without reciprocating.  Those who cheat in this way tend to end up in front.  Cooperation will be undermined.  Furthermore, systems of reciprocal exchange are unable to deal effectively with goods and services whose benefits can be obtained freely by anyone—i.e. where the benefits cannot be restricted to the individuals participating in the exchange (the ‘public goods’ of human economic systems).  In these cases, ‘free riders’ will be able to obtain benefits without giving anything in return, again undermining cooperation. 

As a result, members who pursue their own individual interests will also pursue the interests of the organization, as if guided by an invisible hand.  Cooperation pays.  Members capture the benefits of anything they can do to assist the organization.  Within the group, they therefore treat the other as self. 

Intentional evolutionaries are energized by the knowledge that these outcomes have been achieved time and time again during the past evolution of cooperative organization.  They are not naive ideals.   Repeatedly, evolution driven by blind trial and error has overcome these types of challenges.  The prevention of war between nation states is no more difficult to achieve than the near eradication of conflict between cells that had previously spent millions of years in destructive competition, or between the ancestors of social ants who had been programmed to kill each other whenever they met, or between the members of the United States of America or the members of the European Union, all of whom have a history of conflict and reciprocal destruction.  Evolution has organized warring individuals into harmonious cooperatives by aligning the interests of the individual with the interests of the organization.  This ensures that when a member’s actions advantage the organization, they also advantage the member.  And when the actions harm the organization, the member is harmed.   As a result, members who pursue their own individual interests will also pursue the interests of the organization, as if guided by an invisible hand.  Cooperation pays.  Members capture the benefits of anything they can do to assist the organization.  Within the group, they therefore treat the other as self. 

Should the transaction fees dry up, your UST is now backed by air and you're back to betting the project grows in the future. Looks like it's reached a critical mass though and is continuing to grow and can easily support the current burn rate.

There was no sole beneficiary from the incident besides those who sold TITAN on its all-time-high price.

However, it failed during the second sell-off due to a design flaw: there were no incentive for arbitrageurs when TITAN token price was falling rapidly. I’d like to emphasize this: it wasn’t a code bug, it was a design flaw. The stabilization mechanism based on arbitraging they described on their website and implemented in smart contracts has failed because it couldn’t handle rapid price dropping of TITAN.

-from competition and scarcity-based fear to cooperation and abundance-based trust and sharing

-from ownership and possession to access, use, and relation

Our elders, sages, indigenous, shaman, and anyone who has seriously practiced have come to see that there is only now. So, maybe we should re-orientate around this perspective and live, act, and do in a positive way from here, now, and allow through thoughtful and purposeful experimentation and innovation, the new to emerge through our heart-felt and heart-driven participation.

The German idealist philosophers had a name for this spiral: Bildung. 

Developing individual transformative capacities through inner growth and societal structures which support and nourish inner exploration.   …makes possible…The adaptation of a more holistic worldview. …makes possible…The collective co-creation of a new collective imaginary capable of solving our meta-crises.…which in turn supports even deeper development of individual transformative capacities.

A third example cold be experiments with new organisational forms like ‘TEAL' or self-organising organisations. More and more organisations are finding that the old hierarchical way of organising are just to slow in the fast-moving world of today. Through experiencing with different structures of decentralised decision making, organisations can increase their adaptability and their capacity to transform in rapidly changing markets. 

Another example could be experiments with different forms of crypto currencies. One example of such smart money could be SEEDS, a payment platform and financial ecosystem designed to empower humanity and heal the planet. 

One example of experimenting and prototyping could be UBI: universal basic income.

The growth that matters in twenty years will be our inner growth.

It has nearly become cliché to say

The important thing to remember is to not repeat the mistake after financial crises of 2008 where most help and rescue packages just went into just propping up the old, sick system.

A bit like everyone now becoming familiar with epidemiology and its language and models, we need all to become more familiar with anthropology and sociology and their languages to understand how deep this shift is going to be. 

We need all to become more familiar with anthropology and sociology and their languages to understand how deep this shift is going to be. 

This change is deeper that anything we have seen the last 100 years.

And, third, we see belief and trust, two of the corner stones for healthy functional societies; transform from the command and control leadership style which we’ve had for centuries and morph into something vastly flatter, decentralised/distributed, and perhaps even autonomously self-organising. Perhaps this is a reason for the ‘Disinformation Age' we find ourselves in. The distribution of information has become democratised in the sense that anyone with internet access can create and upload written, audio, or visual content with a click of a button. The problem though is that not all content is equal. Anyone with a YouTube account and a smart phone can suddenly appear as a subject matter expert on just about any topic in ten minutes or less. We have now entered a time of post-experts and post-trusted informers; we find ourselves awash in a war of contradicting narratives vying for the support of the masses as justification of their validity. And many of the new voices are driven by motives other than sense-making.

Second, as we saw above, systemic shifts have emergent properties. Even if we could predict tech - which we can’t - from systems science we understand that these large systemic shifts have emergent properties that cannot by definition be predicted in advance.

The technology that will have the largest impact on our societies in twenty years, is not AI or nano-tech; it is going to be a technological field that has most likely not been invented yet. 

What we perceive to have the greatest value has no tangible value, only abstract representational value. And all things of tangible value are seen as purchasable and replaceable commodities, which decreases their perceived value. So we will harm things of real value to accumulate more tokens of abstract value.

In the modern developed world’s economy where goods and services are always readily available and storage of physical surplus is an unnecessary difficulty, currency is a proxy for all things of value and thus, for choice itself.

Profit is another word for extraction. It is the value taken out of the system minus the value put into the system (revenue minus expenses).

Niles Niami, the mansion developer who built The One, and described his aesthetic, simply, as “badass”, had floated increasingly desperate plans to avoid auctioning it off, the Los Angeles Times reported, including turning it into an events space for boxing matches and holographic appearances of dead celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, and making a cryptocurrency called “The One Coin” backed by the value of the property.

It aims to build a decentralized, scalable cloud-like platform that can store data, perform computation, and support community-driven governance. It’s addressing the issues plaguing traditional internet, such as relatively low data security and an oligopoly consisting of big tech companies.

Don't get me wrong. I am not a fan of centralization. I started building a decentralized, permissionless system almost a quarter-century ago. It would be wonderful if we could figure out how to build a Web that would resist centralization. But all the technical and financial cleverness that's been poured into cryptocurrencies hasn't succeeded in doing that. Why? It is because It Isn't About The Technology.

In June, discussing Permacoin, I returned to the issue of economies of scale: increasing returns to scale (economies of scale) pose a fundamental problem for peer-to-peer networks that do gain significant participation. One necessary design goal for networks such as Bitcoin is that the protocol be incentive-compatible, or as Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer (ES) express it: the best strategy of a rational minority pool is to be honest, and a minority of colluding miners cannot earn disproportionate benefits by deviating from the protocol They show that the Bitcoin protocol was, and still is, not incentive-compatible. Even if the protocol were incentive-compatible, the implementation of each miner would, like almost all technologies, be subject to increasing returns to scale. Since then I've become convinced that this problem is indeed fundamental. The simplistic version of the problem is this: The income to a participant in a P2P network of this kind should be linear in their contribution of resources to the network. The costs a participant incurs by contributing resources to the network will be less than linear in their resource contribution, because of the economies of scale. Thus the proportional profit margin a participant obtains will increase with increasing resource contribution. Thus the effects described in Brian Arthur's Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy will apply, and the network will be dominated by a few, perhaps just one, large participant. The advantages of P2P networks arise from a diverse network of small, roughly equal resource contributors. Thus it seems that P2P networks which have the characteristics needed to succeed (by being widely adopted) also inevitably carry the seeds of their own failure (by becoming effectively centralized).

Witness the hundreds of millions of CPE (customer-premises equipment) boxes with literally too much memory for buffering packets. As Jim Gettys and Dave Taht have been demonstrating in recent years, more is not better when it comes to packet memory.1 Wireless networks in homes and coffee shops and businesses all degrade shockingly when the traffic load increases. Rather than the "fair-share" scheduling we expect, where N network flows will each get roughly 1/Nth of the available bandwidth, network flows end up in quicksand where they each get 1/(N2) of the available bandwidth. This isn't because CPE designers are incompetent; rather, it's because the Internet is a big place with a lot of subtle interactions that depend on every device and software designer having the same—largely undocumented—assumptions.

In conclusion, the fact that stablecoins or Bitcoin itself acquire the aura of saviours in countries hit by inflation, like Turkey, is nothing more than a measure of the desperation of the people: they will clutch at straws. Stablecoins offer Turks no respite from inflation that buying euros or dollars cannot offer. So, why buy Tether instead of dollars or euros? Why rely on the shadowy characters running a private currency board? Only because the latter deploy good marketing to exploit desperate people.

But, and this is a gigantic but, DAO-like tools will not bring about this new society in which DAO-like tools are useful. (Nb. We can already see how DAOs are being usurped by regressives and real estate moguls in the United States.)

To think that Bitcoin can solve the problem of money, or the problem of the state, is to misunderstand what money is or what states do. Every exploitative socio-economic system is predicated on what the minority running it can make the rest do for them (who does what to whom, as Lenin famously put it). Money and the state are epiphenomena of this system. To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated. No smart contract can, for example, subvert the labour contracts that underpin society’s layered patterns of exploitation. No NFT can change an art world where art is a commodity within a universe of commodified people and things. No central bank can serve the interests of the people so long as it is independent of the demos. Yes, blockchain will be useful in societies liberated from the patterned extractive power of the few. However, blockchain will not liberate us. Indeed, any digital service, currency, or good that is built on it within the present system will simply reproduce the present system’s legitimacy.

Our challenge to American philanthropy is twofold. First, it must use its power, influence, and money to dismantle“techno-solutionism”—the idea that technological solutions are the key to strengthening American (or any) democracy. Technology is not and never will be the solution to social and political problems, but the fetishism of technology in the public sector has been extremely lucrative for many private companies. All too often we have seen how technology, adopted in the name of progress, actually exacerbates and entrenches society’s problems.

The Uni­verse is a dark and fore­bod­ing place, sus­pended be­tween alien deities. Cthulhu, Gnon, Moloch, call them what you will.

And if that en­tity shares human val­ues, it can allow human val­ues to flour­ish un­con­strained by nat­ural law. I re­al­ize that sounds like hubris – it cer­tainly did to Hur­lock – but I think it’s the op­po­site of hubris, or at least a hubris-​minimizing po­si­tion. To ex­pect God to care about you or your per­sonal val­ues or the val­ues of your civ­i­liza­tion, that’s hubris. To ex­pect God to bar­gain with you, to allow you to sur­vive and pros­per as long as you sub­mit to Him, that’s hubris. To ex­pect to wall off a gar­den where God can’t get to you and hurt you, that’s hubris. To ex­pect to be able to re­move God from the pic­ture en­tirely… well, at least it’s an ac­tion­able strat­egy. I am a tran­shu­man­ist be­cause I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.

And the whole point of Bostrom’s Su­per­in­tel­li­gence is that this is within our reach. Once hu­mans can de­sign ma­chines that are smarter than we are, by de­f­i­n­i­tion they’ll be able to de­sign ma­chines which are smarter than they are, which can de­sign ma­chines smarter than they are, and so on in a feed­back loop so tiny that it will smash up against the phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions for in­tel­li­gence in a com­par­a­tively lightning-​short amount of time. If mul­ti­ple com­pet­ing en­ti­ties were likely to do that at once, we would be super-​doomed. But the sheer speed of the cycle makes it pos­si­ble that we will end up with one en­tity light-​years ahead of the rest of civ­i­liza­tion, so much so that it can sup­press any com­pe­ti­tion – in­clud­ing com­pe­ti­tion for its title of most pow­er­ful en­tity – per­ma­nently. In the very near fu­ture, we are going to lift some­thing to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be some­thing on our side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.

Sup­pose you make your walled gar­den. You keep out all of the dan­ger­ous memes, you sub­or­di­nate cap­i­tal­ism to human in­ter­ests, you ban stu­pid bioweapons re­search, you def­i­nitely don’t re­search nan­otech­nol­ogy or strong AI. Every­one out­side doesn’t do those things. And so the only ques­tion is whether you’ll be de­stroyed by for­eign dis­eases, for­eign memes, for­eign armies, for­eign eco­nomic com­pe­ti­tion, or for­eign ex­is­ten­tial cat­a­stro­phes. As for­eign­ers com­pete with you – and there’s no wall high enough to block all com­pe­ti­tion – you have a cou­ple of choices. You can get out­com­peted and de­stroyed. You can join in the race to the bot­tom. Or you can in­vest more and more civ­i­liza­tional re­sources into build­ing your wall – what­ever that is in a non-​metaphorical way – and pro­tect­ing your­self.

As tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance in­creases, the rare con­flu­ence will come to an end. New op­por­tu­ni­ties to throw val­ues under the bus for in­creased com­pet­i­tive­ness will arise. New ways of copy­ing agents to in­crease the pop­u­la­tion will soak up our ex­cess re­sources and res­ur­rect Malthus’ un­quiet spirit. Cap­i­tal­ism and democ­racy, pre­vi­ously our pro­tec­tors, will fig­ure out ways to route around their in­con­ve­nient de­pen­dence on human val­ues. And our co­or­di­na­tion power will not be nearly up to the task, as­sum­ing somthing much more pow­er­ful than all of us com­bined doesn’t show up and crush our com­bined ef­forts with a wave of its paw.

Co­or­di­na­tion is what’s left. And tech­nol­ogy has the po­ten­tial to se­ri­ously im­prove co­or­di­na­tion ef­forts. Peo­ple can use the In­ter­net to get in touch with one an­other, launch po­lit­i­cal move­ments, and frac­ture off into sub­com­mu­ni­ties.

Try as we might, we cannot take responsibility for ourselves, come into right relationship with our technology and occupy our proper position as “custodial species” of the whole of the natural world using teams/tribes, institutions or markets.

The other two tools more or less emerge to help us scale coordination: institutions and markets.

Software can’t single-handedly solve for the “completeness” of every contract, but it can help — and through token enabled ownership, it can help communities overcome the bootstrap problem to fostering innovation. 

But if we accept that contracts are simply decision logic — akin to computer programs, then contract theory gives us a framework for thinking about different types of smart contracts and crypto-enabled projects — and how they can scale (including governance of them).

Let’s start by identifying projects that are (mostly) “complete”. These projects aim to specify a system end-to-end, minimizing the need for subjective interpretation, renegotiation, and external governance. In software terminology, the goal of these systems is to be “correct by construction”. Bitcoin’s proof-of-work mining is one such system. Bitcoin’s completeness is a function of its verifiable computation — deterministic hashing algorithms plus hard-coded game-theoretic incentives. Together, these consistently drive the system towards the outcome of producing a correct chain, while minimizing the need for human interpretation or external decision-making.

An aside on tether This shows why in the event where USDT breaks its dollar peg, a near-instantaneous market crash would happen. Because USDT denominates the volatile futures price but not the spot price, an arbitrage gap opens up. However, those bots are wired to assume the dollar parity, and thus are broken in this case. They will be quickly turned offline.The bots turning offline cause a low-liquidity environment in which the USD/USDT price parity correction happens.

We can’t know which orders in this chart are liquidation orders and which are “real” ones – Binance doesn’t provide this data anymore since the April 18th liquidation event.

An aside on NFTs Because they’re “unique” objects, NFTs are a perfect vehicle for wash trading. You can easily ensure you only wash trade to yourself. The common scheme is to wash trade with yourself until some credible dunce buys the NFT from you at your manufactured “fair” value, leaving you to walk away with real money.

Offshore crypto exchanges like Binance offer absurd leverage in the 20-125x range. But the exchange is both a broker offering leveraged products and the clearinghouse of the leveraged trades. This can easily create “failure to deliver” situations from the clearinghouse side. Take this example:

While people think the main innovation of cryptocurrencies are public blockchain ledger transactions, the vast majority of crypto trading happens on private centralized exchanges.

The Uniswap Labs core team keeps a closed Slack for internal coordination and is not active in the Discord. This is not problematic per se, but is representative of how updates to the protocol are shared (or not) with the broader ecosystem. The core protocol roadmap is exempt from oversight of community governance, and updates are designed, built, and released without community input. Occasionally, forthcoming features and other internal updates are shared with the Discord moderator team when relevant, but not to Discord users prior to a formal announcement.

Uniswap's protocol, and the product offerings built on top of it, are widely used in the crypto space, driving a need to provide a high quality user experience on the product and support front. This is compounded by prominent forks such as Sushiswap, which additionally place Uniswap Labs under significant competitive pressure. But treating community members as end-users conflicts with the desire to treat them as stakeholders, discussion participants, or governance leaders. This conflict is visible in the Discord where support crowds out other conversations, but also in the fragmentation of stakeholder types across different platforms, as we address in the next section.

These challenge illustrate a larger problem: the fundamental tension between the pressure faced by Uniswap Labs to have a coherent and competitive product offering, and its aspiration to create a thriving community culture.

Imagine if a portion of that 12+ trillion USD that central banks made went to set up local food systems that sequestered carbon and ended world hunger.

With SEEDS the people become the de-central-ized bank — and instead of creating trillions to subsidize oil and gas (4.7 TRILLION!!!) and other harmful industries (like war ~2 TRILLION!) the people (that’s you) can decide what we as a society direct our shared wealth towards (like solving our climate crises, hunger and inequality for starters).

Now let me just preface this next bit by clarifying that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking really. I’m not an investor and I don’t understand the stock market beyond generally that it’s there to make rich people richer and fuck over poor people.

The prototype elaborated by P2P Models is called “Open.Smart”. Basically, the prototype is designed as a transparent database which serves to collect and order Smart member data. This data is supplemented by other records and documents required for subscription and is saved and encrypted in the blockchain. Open.Smart is an external app that relies on a digital wallet called Metamask that makes it possible to interact with the Smart platform (Figure 3 illustrates the beta version of Open.Smart)

What I learnt from Francesco Nachira and his interest in constructivism and theories of language and cognition is that decentralisation can never be just about decentralising infrastructures. One always needs to have a requisite strategy for decentralising institutions as well.So that’s why we always aimed at the decentralisation of economic and political power as the necessary condition of possibility that was needed to deliver on the true emancipatory potential of decentralising digital infrastructures. When I look at the promises made by the proponents of DAOs and NFTs, they seem to believe that technology itself would somehow do the job: once we code a DAO correctly, it will ensure a new institutional form and that form would have revolutionary effects, etc. This seems to me short-sighted and also very inward-looking.It’s not, of course, only about decentralising power. It’s also about creating new institutions to keep old power – which, by now, has taken on new forms – in check. Where are these new institutions when it comes to crypto and Web3? Everyone seems to believe that big tech platforms and Wall Street and Hollywood will just stand idle as they are being disrupted by “crypto.” Does this really sound plausible to anyone?

Well, first of all, I don’t see how Web3 – focused as it is on the creator economy and tokenisation – would allow us to deal with questions regarding infrastructural power and the industrial policy of the future… things like broadband, 5G, data centres, cloud computing, AI, quantum computing, microchips, the next generation of batteries. It’s not just the advertising business models of Web 2.0 that should concern us. What does Web3 offer us here? Not much. The Web3 discourse accepts today’s status quo as a fact and moves on to discuss all these other aspects.Most of the stuff about DeFi seems to me just a temporary phenomenon – the result of central banks’ inaction and delay in grasping the threats that come from leaving this industry unregulated. In this sense, China seems to be seeing through all the Web3 rhetoric and asking the right strategic questions, both in terms of controlling the whole stack, from batteries to AI, to establishing control over the FinTech sector in a way that would reduce risks to the country’s overall financial system. Europe, of course, doesn’t operate in the same political climate, so acting so resolutely about Web3 might not be an option (also for geopolitical reasons). It’s hard to imagine Chinese policymakers spending any time discussing Dogecoin.

I’m not. What I find so suspicious about DAOs and tokenisation and Web3 is the idea that they want to tie every institution to the logic of the stock exchange: if things work well, the value goes up – and this creates some kind of a disciplining mechanism. Do we really want to “optimise” our healthcare or education this way? Even when it comes to companies, we still have public companies that have a public mission, and even if they have been privatised this doesn’t somehow eliminate that mission.Tokenisation, for me, is the latest manifestation of what we could call the super-financialisation of everything, enabled by the digitisation of physical processes and objects. Now one can attach IP rights to everything; make smart contracts out of everything; enable transactions in everything. We fought that logic early on, with Decode, when people started making arguments about data being an asset class, something that accrues to individuals, to be bought and sold. We always argued that one could also have a much more social and public take on data, and specify collective access and ownership rights; data doesn’t have to be treated as something proprietary, but as something that can create public value and redistribute wealth and rewards.Can blockchains and crypto be of some help here? Maybe, but one would need to change the entire technological system, then. One would need to say that, instead of using blockchains to create smart contracts that enforce property rights, we want blockchains that enforce the “right to informational self-determination” or “the right to knowledge”? Or even the right to inspect the algorithms in order to assess their impact… for example, this is very relevant today when it comes to collective bargaining and platform workers’ rights in the gig economy. This would require transforming quite a lot of jurisprudence and reining in our notion of the public good and then also somehow fitting it onto the blockchain.

What I find so suspicious about DAOs and tokenisation and Web3 is the idea that they want to tie every institution to the logic of the stock exchange: if things work well, the value goes up – and this creates some kind of a disciplining mechanism. How could we deliver on the promises of decentralisation, decarbonisation, the Solidarity Economy, the new welfare state through the companies that will be created and funded? Likewise, when we think about enabling political participation – to help people fight climate change or even solve their own local problems – how do we do it in a way that goes beyond the logic of the market and doesn’t require turning everyone into an economic agent responding to financial incentives of some kind? How do we do that without financialising politics?

There were, of course, failures. While we managed to scale projects like Decidim, we didn’t manage to achieve a common pan-European initiative on technological sovereignty, linking political, economic, and geopolitical dimensions in a coherent way. There’s still no coherent vision of a digital industrial policy that could liberate even half of the stack that Europe needs, not to mention its entirety. In our defense, we also had very little money; 5 million Euro – this was Decode’s budget, spread across many partners in the project – is not so much given the ambitions.

This purely technical effort at decentralisation also falls short in thinking about the political and social institutions that are needed to take full advantage of this decentralisation. The big questions that I – and you – have been raising over the past decade, with regards to the political economy of data and infrastructures, of technological sovereignty, of the geopolitics of the stacks, all seem to have dropped the agenda completely. What is being “decentralised” is the ability to extract value and make money, incentivising even further the financialisation of social behaviours. Worse, it seems that people pushing the Web3 agenda have learned very little from the experiences of all the other movements, from free software to Indymedia to the rise of digital democratic cities, that did try to build a more decentralised and democratic digital sphere.

DAOstack[13] is a platform that aims to tackle the governance scalability problem.Matan Field, co-founder of DAOstack, states that the bigger a DAO is, the harderit is to manage it [44], which mimics the classical issues of governance in groups. Inprinciple, we can specify DAOs where all decisions are taken by voting and a 51%majority is expected for a proposal to pass. Such model is feasible for small DAOcommunities, where the number of proposals does not escalate further than whatthe number of members can study and decide on. However, the higher the number ofmembers, and thus the number of proposals, the more proposals need to be reviewedby each member in order to participate. A naive solution to this matter could beto reduce the required quorum (i.e., pass proposals with a relative majority), butthis introduces new flaws. For example, an attacker could spam requesting the DAOfunds, i.e. send plenty of proposals in a small time frame. Thus, it may overwhelmthe community, making it easier to get the funds using a lower quorum. Thus,increasing the number of DAO members may reduce the DAO resilience.

Because we can codify the ways in which it is possible to cheat, we can also write executable software rules, with deterministic results, that prevent cheating in the protocols we use to define and transfer value.

Kernel conversations are about humility, presence and a genuine attentiveness towards others, not because you stand to benefit from them, but because cultivating these three capacities within yourself is its own reward, which may allow you to see clearly the complete and perfect sacred core of every person you encounter.

There can be no doubt that it represents an incredibly important moment in the movement towards money as a protocol, the development of new means to create or describe value, and new media by which we can relate that to and with one another in an agreeable fashion.

This is a fantastic bounty, and opens the door to a new kind of philanthropism.

Simona Pop at the Bounties Network is doing great work bringing awareness to the human potential of the blockchain. She is behind the first social impact bounty, #BountiesForTheOcean, which is live now on the Bounties Network.

These issues include minimum economy size, optimized curve parameters, identity/reputation, UX/ease of use, herding, free-riding, collusion and more.

The true benefit of a model like this, however, would be opening up the ability to create these movements to absolutely anyone in the world, with permissionless, direct, incentivized global participation.

There is plenty of evidence that we have reached the effective limits of traditional organizational structures.

With the exception of deliberately fraudulent schemes, this is a good thing. Speculation is often the engine of technological adoption [2]. Both aspects of irrational speculation — the boom and the bust — can be very beneficial to technological innovation.

This is a big shift. The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.

Anyone can issue tokens for free in a matter of hours - skipping month-long paperwork and massive costs required to list assets on traditional secondary markets.

Tokenholders can access the rapidly developing set of tools for decentralized organizations and 10X their ability to find each other, create a sense of mission and belonging, and coordinate action across geographies.

Mint tokens by depositing collateral to be used at settlement.

KPI options are synthetic (ERC-20) tokens that will pay out rewards if a KPI reaches predetermined targets before the given expiry date. Every KPI option holder has an incentive to improve that KPI because then their option will be worth more.

Crypto has transformed grassroots-level organizing. For the first time in history, it is possible to economically align networks of strangers into working together by using programmable incentives and providing them with tools to make decisions and govern shared resources in a decentralized manner.

Over time, the gap between the ceiling (buying in) and floor (selling out) will get larger. The value of this, for example, is that if the floor is not mapped 100% to the ceiling, it means that buyers aren’t immediately in a profit as soon as new participants enter. They have to keep the tokens for a certain period to ensure they are in a profit (in case they want to exit).These curves are currently exponential curves in order to incentivize early adopters, but it also doesn’t mean that it has to exponential. They can also be linear if there’s a belief that exponential curves will cause unnecessary churn at critical mass.

This setup means that #projectTokens will form and dissolve as necessary. If everyone leaves, all ETH will be refunded and all #projectTokens will cease to exist. If you buy in early, you will get more tokens for the same price. If you buy in later, you will get less tokens for the same price. If you sell back into the pool, you will get less ETH per token vs selling back into the pool when the outstanding supply is higher.The value derived from curved bonding is that it rewards participants for being early and buying tokens in that project. If they leave at a later point, selling their #projectTokens back into the communal pool will net them a reward. The reason you want separate tokens for separate projects is so that it more easily fits the value being produced from these separate projects. The crypto-economic feedback loops necessary to sustain certain systems will only work if the value being produced is mapped to its own token. For more info, read here:

When I first read this explanation in the OlympusDAO documentation, I laughed and laughed. “Well yes right,” I thought, “the way a Ponzi scheme works is that early ‘investors’ get rich as long as later investors keep buying more.” Sure, (3, 3). “If we all keep buying this thing its price will go up and we will be rich” is absolutely the main financial theme of 2021, but it is an irreducibly silly theme and I would be embarrassed to formalize it with game theory. 

The world experienced a sort of collective delusion around the worth of what is, essentially, a fabric sack of beans. In hindsight, bubbles rarely make sense. “It’s a flaw in the human character,” says Jeremy Grantham, market historian and bubble expert. “No one is immune, no matter how smart you are.”

I don’t think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush. People have made money through cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their investment while offering additional returns, and so that defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth.

Partisans of the blockchain might say that it’s okay if these types of centralized platforms emerge, because the state itself is available on the blockchain, so if these platforms misbehave clients can simply move elsewhere. However, I would suggest that this is a very simplistic view of the dynamics that make platforms what they are.

MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.) All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!

Leeds parlayed YouTubes of herself literally playing video games -- The Sims -- into Roblox content into making games into a 1mm+ YouTube following, $8mm game studio, and a $1mm online store. Her quote in Rex Woodbury’s thread captures the Great Online Game beautifully:There’s nothing I’ve done that anybody else can’t do. It’s about learning—learning the code, learning how the game works, & creating. All you have to do is start.

Last year, the New York Times named Todos Santos one of its top 50 travel destinations thanks, in part, to the impending opening of the hotel, and more recently the retailer Madewell launched a partnership with the property. On the weekend I visited, all 32 rooms were fully booked with blissed-out couples in their 20s and 30s wearing colorful serape kimonos and sipping mezcal margaritas by the long, turquoise-tiled pool.

The Grind — Most investors at hedge funds work at a sociopathic pace, especially relative to the west-coast cultures of most VC firms. It is very hard to regularly compete against a team of people who work ~16 hours a day 6-7 days per week.

History will remember technology's leaders not just for exceptional financial results, but for the values and integrity of the companies they built.

A great board member, Dan, called me to say, “Ryan, I’ve never in my career seen a CEO as worn out as you. Please, you need to take a sabbatical — at least six weeks”. He, and other board members, tried so hard to do the right thing and convince me to take care of myself. But after a lifetime of gritting things out, I told myself I didn’t need to take a break. I think an element of my reaction is what Jerry Colonna calls “false grit” in Reboot.

Why I chose to step down as CEO of CircleUpOver the past year, when I began telling team members, investors, LPs and other stakeholders about my transition, their first question was, inevitably, “Why?” I typically explained that the average founder/CEO of a startup is in the seat for less than five years; I had been with CircleUp for nine, and I was exhausted. But there was so much more to it than that.I don’t remember the first time I told our board that I was exhausted and needed to step down as CEO. I imagine it was around 2016 or 2017, a period defined by stressful business decisions and physical and mental health issues. I later realized that the board interpreted my complaints as “typical founder/CEO exhaustion”. I blame myself for that lack of clarity. For years I did a poor job of communicating the depth of my stress and exhaustion, a problem only compounded by the fact that, at times, I wasn’t even sure of my own feelings. There were stretches of time where I felt horrible — lonely; terrified; depressed. Depression exacerbates exhaustion. But I tried to put on a brave face to make sure the board felt comfortable.

Christopher Plowman: We have a great team. It’s very family oriented. There’s lots of humor and humility, but it’s certainly chaotic. Look, I mean, we cost a million bucks a month. There you go, like it’s not cheap doing what we do. We’ve got 120 staff. We’ve got I think 70 people in Australia, we’ve got 40 people in Manila, we’ve got 40 people in Surat, in Northern India. And I’m sitting in Bali in the middle of all of these three teams. And our job is even harder, John, because we take half of the revenue that we earn and we share that with our teachers, right? So you spend a dollar on Insight Timer — because we do have a subscription product, and less than 1% of our users subscribe to that — but that’s kind of what keeps the furnace running. We’re by no means anywhere close to profitable, but if you spend a dollar with us on a subscription, Apple gets a third, and the teachers get a third, and we get a third. So we get 33 cents. So, we are very fortunate to have a group of investors, I think we have about 25 of them now, who pay the bills. Because there is a belief that if we continue to not sell things, that eventually we will build a big enough community that’s sufficiently large so that the 1% of people who do want to pay for long form courses and for one-on-one time with teachers, that our commission on that revenue will be enough to pay the cost of our company. It’s a constant battle. We’re also very fortunate that our investors know that we have to kind of do this the right way. That there’s a conscious and commercial need to co-exist. I talked to you earlier about some of the concerns I have in the subscription business. So, you’re probably familiar with the 7-day free trial that exists on the App Store. What we do, very deliberately, is if you sign up to a 7-day free trial for our courses package, we will send you four emails I think during that period of time saying, ‘Listen, you’ve got a 7-day free trial here and it’s going to automatically bill you on this date. So if you don’t want to be billed, unsubscribe, click here. Here’s the link.’ We send them a link, we send them the button. The other thing we do is before, if you are a subscriber, before your subscription renews after 12 months, is we also communicate with you, saying, ‘Hey, your subscription is going to renew.’ Because we don’t want people on our platform as subscribers who don’t want to be subscribers. But this is not true for most other subscriptions. 

Mirror is the next big change in the long history of symbolic communication. Through a decentralized, user-owned, crypto-based network, Mirror’s publishing platform revolutionizes the way we express, share and monetize our thoughts.

3. The fish farming story from my Non-Libertarian FAQ 2.0: As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well. But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month. A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum. But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit. Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too. Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.” Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit… A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say that polluting the lake leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a filter might not be such a good idea.

Anyway, I mention all this because there are several senses in which the process and the system around it could be considered to have TMM, or Too Much Money.EA has TMM.SFF had TMM.A lot of people in crypto have TMM.SFF Grants that were too large might cause organizations to have TMM.

In this context, in particular, it seems like delegation is clearly The Way. Thus, if I were to do this again, I would hire assistance to do at least the following:Do a preliminary investigation of every organization, before the recommenders even start looking. Do later deeper dives on the ones that are potentially getting large funding.Assemble key information about the organizations into good and consistent form.Let us ask questions, and attempt to answer them, with or without contacting the organizations for answers as appropriate. Investigate particular questions recommenders are curious about. Summarize papers. Compile histories. Fact checks.Do a sanity check on whatever we write in our notes, and on our evaluations, to look for things that are mistaken, or don’t seem to make sense. Think about what questions we would want to be asking, based on what we’re thinking.Help schedule meetings for us to talk to people at the orgs, as needed.

I know many EAs and consider many of them friends, but I do not centrally view the world in EA terms, or share the EA moral or ethical frameworks. I don’t use what seem to for all practical purposes be their decision theories. I have very large, very deep, very central disagreements with EA and its core components and central organizations and modes of operation. I have deep worries that important things are deeply, deeply wrong, especially epistemically, and results in an increasingly Goodharted and inherently political and insider-biased system. I worry that this does intense psychological, epistemic and life experiential damage to many EAs.

It is also related to the EA movement in that, despite no official relationship between SFF and EA, despite the person who runs SFF not considering himself an Effective Altruist (Although he definitely believes, as I do, in being effective when being an altruist, and also in being effective when not being an altruist), despite SFF not being an EA organization, despite the words ‘altruist’ or ‘effective’ not appearing on the webpage, at least this round of the SFF process and its funds were largely captured by the EA ecosystem. EA reputations, relationships and framings had a large influence on the decisions made. A majority of the money given away was given to organizations with explicit EA branding in their application titles (I am including Lightcone@CFAR in this category). 

Whether or not they would consider themselves EAs as such, the other recommenders effectively thought largely Effective Altruist frameworks, and seemed broadly supportive of EA organizations and the EA ecosystem as a way to do good. One other member shared many of my broad (and often specific) concerns to a large extent, mostly the others did not. While the others were curious and willing to listen, there was some combination of insufficient bandwidth and insufficient communicative skill on our part, which meant that while we did get some messages of this type across on the margin and this did change people’s decisions in impactful ways, I think we mostly failed to get our central points across more broadly.

My interest in psychology intensified, I came across Stanislaw Grof and Ken Wilber. Grof's book 'Realms of the Human Unconscious' opened many doors for me, and Wilber's 'Up from Eden' meant a decisive turning-point in the development of my fundamental worldview. Wilber offered a much more encompassing vision of the evolutionary dynamics of the society than the left. He also provided an alternative utopic vision, focussed on consciousness development rather than on social reforms.

Regular, sustained practice.• This may be one of the most important of all anti-dotes. I have seen some very impressive friends and colleagues fall into traps of stagnation, depression, and addiction. One of the common factors seemed to be that they had given up their daily spiritual practice. Yet continuity of practice is one of the most recurrent refrains across spiritual traditions, as for example, in the advice of the Koran, “Be constant in prayer”

The challenging implication is this: without direct spiritual, transpersonal experience, we may be like the child or ordinary adult looking at the book. We may read about spiritual concepts, we may hear of trans-personal ideas, and we may even appreciate some of the beauty of the higher reaches of the integral model. However, without direct experience of the requisite higher states and stages, their full signifi cance escapes us. And trickiest of all, we will not realize that they are escaping us. Intellectual apprehension alone is not enough in the transpersonal and spiritual domains. Intellectual understanding is important, but is also insuffi cient.Just how important this issue is can be judged from the warnings of both Muhammad and the Buddha. Both of them used animal metaphors to describe religious scholars who do not engage in spiritual disciplines. The Buddha described such people as herders of another person’s cattle, while Muhammad likened a mere scholar to an ass carrying a load of books. So how do we foster direct transpersonal experiences and spiritual insights, and thereby make ourselves better able to appreciate the spiritual heights of Integral Theory? Answer: by engaging in spiritual practices and related practices as fully as we can. This is a key requirement for anyone who aspires to truly understand and communicate the integral vision.

This is a key requirement for anyone who aspires to truly understand and communicate the integral vision.

If one assumes that political reform is long, slow, and painful, hierarchies and centralizing strategies can be productive. After all, they can keep the movement on target and give it some coherent shape. Ideas on their own do not change the world; ideas that are coupled with smart institutions might. “Not by memes alone” would be an apt slogan for any contemporary social movement. Alas, this basic insight—that political reform cannot be reduced to the wars of memes and aesthetics alone, even if the Internet offers an effective platform for waging them—has mostly been lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd.9 Challenging power requires a strategy that in many circumstances might favor centralization. To reject the latter on philosophical grounds rather than strategic grounds—because it is anti-Internet or anti-Wikipedia—borders on the suicidal.

One is to assume that such remodeling rests on a theoretical fantasy about how social movements work in practice. Another is to concede that, whereas some such decentralization might be feasible, absolutely nothing guarantees that, as far as efficacy is concerned, decentralization beats centralization.The first view—that social movements will never be able to transcend hierarchies and replace them with horizontal networks—was cogently expressed by Jo Freeman in 1972 in her landmark essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman argued that hierarchies are bound to emerge anyway, and that pretending that they do not exist simply lets unacknowledged leaders escape accountability. The Internet has not fundamentally altered these dynamics. If anything, it has only complicated them, as the number of communication channels that elite factions can exploit has exploded. Consider how a participant in the Occupy protests put it in a provocative post for The Daily Kos:One of the consequences of just how difficult and time consuming participating in the movement became is that key players stopped showing up. Well not exactly; they still showed up, but mostly for side conversations, informal gatherings, and the meetings that planned what would happen at the public meetings. Using social media ... they formed an invisible guiding hand that simultaneously got shit done, avoided accountability, and engaged in factional battles with each other ... you know what's worse than regular same-old elites? An [sic] barely visible elite that denies it is an elite and can't ever be called to account.But these elites never provided the kind of efficient centralizing machinery that Occupy Wall Street needed to convert millions of people curious about its cause into card-carrying members of the movement. This failure can be partly ascribed to the absence of coherent demands, but it must also be blamed on the movement’s proud lack of organization, which is how decentralization often ends. So, while Occupy Wall Street may have had plenty of unacknowledged leaders, it had no intermediate structures for scaling up; those—unlike shadow elites—do not just emerge on their own. Another participant in the protests put it this way:Systems did emerge to engage newcomers. But those systems.... were not nearly as effective as the moment demanded ... some of the email addresses floated around as a primary point of contact were left unchecked, accumulating more than 11,000 unanswered emails.... Meetings would be announced at a particular location and then held somewhere else. Newcomers would show up for working group meetings, add their name to a list passed around for future contact, and never hear from anyone again. It's nearly four months since the occupation and there still isn't a clearly labeled sign up page. Hell, there isn't even an official public facing website that represents OWS.

But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips. Here is how Accenture, the firm that assisted New York in its switch to the 311 system, describes the origins of that project: “[Before 311], customers looking for government assistance were confronted with more than 4,000 entries on 14 pages of the NYC telephone book, and more than 40 resource-intensive call centers were required to direct inquiries to the right city offices. The Mayor’s vision was that of a high-performance, centralized, all-purpose call facility, accessible through the simple-to-remember 3-1-1 phone number.”Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311. The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.7 Consider Google: when it comes to user data, today Google runs a much more centralized operation than five years ago. Back in 2008, my Google searches were not in any way connected to my favorite YouTube videos or to events on my Google Calendar. Thanks to Google’s new privacy policy, today they are all connected—and Google, having centralized its previously disparate data reservoirs, can show me more precise ads as a result. But don’t count on Internet-centrists to include this trend under that mystical category of “Internet logic.”

Second, we must acknowledge and reform philanthropy’s own dependence on techno-solutionism. The tech sector’s runaway financial success—enabled by a deafening regulatory silence—has propped up the economy, and philanthropy’s endowments, for the last two decades. This has birthed a new class of philanthropists informed directly by the tech-solutionist logic of the tech industry. During this time, philanthropy has spent uncounted millions advancing and funding a narrative that posits new technologies as the solution to our most pressing social problems. Completing the cycle of globalization, American tech companies and philanthropic organizations have come together to export that narrative to much of the rest of the world, driving the agenda of both humanitarian aid agencies and development organizations

First, it must use its power, influence, and money to dismantle“techno-solutionism”—the idea that technological solutions are the key to strengthening American (or any) democracy. Technology is not and never will be the solution to social and political problems, but the fetishism of technology in the public sector has been extremely lucrative for many private companies

One of the obvious challenges of Ecological Economics (in the search for solutions to the ecological crisis) is thus not only to be open to what other disciplines have to say in the natural and social sciences (regarding both the theoretical challenges at play and thedocumenting of alternative worldviews), but to open the space for other forms of knowledgeinorder to createalternative realities (including sustainable alternatives to the modern development project), beyond the current and pervasive dilemma between development and sustainability5–an arguably urgent task in the face of the 21st century’s ecological crisis

his is exactly what the ontological turn does not do; and is consistent with the premises of Ecological Economics which ‘accepts the existence of a reality independent of human cognition’ (Spash, 2015: 36)

ontological turn undertook a necessary shift in wording from ‘culture’ to ‘ontology’,

ontology

If the modern divide is the problem, then worldviews which are not built on a separation between nature and humans surely are of paramount importance in the design of such alternatives.

particular their diagnosis of the current global ecological crisis as a crisis of capitalism, inherently damaging of nature and humans and built on the modern divide nature/culture1

a strong case can be made that the ‘special relationship with nature’ that some indigenous groups have maintained (both in worldviews and practices) should not be understood in terms of an essential ‘difference’ but rather as a fundamental aspect of our common human nature, which has been distorted in some places2and has the potential to be distorted everywhere3

Marxist analysis of Political Economy (see Burkett, 2006; Foster, John, 2015; Foster, John Bellamy, 2000; Saito, 2017; Saroja Sundararajan, 1996)(which both Political Ecology and Ecological Economics are consistent with) and, in particular, considering the capitalist system as a historically situated inversion of the natural unity between humansand nature (Wolff, 2003),

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life.

Overall, between 50 million and 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders or sleep deprivation, according to the Institute of Medicine, which advises public policy. Adults typically need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, but more than a third of adults get less, according to the CDC.In the new report, sleeping pill use started climbing among people in their 40s and 50s, with at least 5 percent resorting to the drugs. It was highest among those with more education -- and among women, with 5 percent reporting taking the pills, compared with 3.1 percent of men, the authors found.That may reflect the strain of modern life, with people, particularly women, trying to juggle the growing demands of work and family, only to find it takes a toll on their sleep patterns, said Dr. Roneil Malkani, an assistant professor of neurology at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.“We know that insomnia is more prevalent among women than men,” he said. “I think that there are people who don’t get enough sleep because they have responsibilities and jobs and expectations.”

Desperate for rest in a frenzied world, at least 8.6 million Americans take prescription sleeping pills to catch some Zzzs, according to the first federal health study to focus on actual use.Between 2005 and 2010, about 4 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and older popped popular prescription drugs such as Lunesta and Ambien in the previous month, say government researchers who tracked 17,000 people to their homes and peered into their medicine cabinets.

Net CO2 emissions can fall below gross CO2 emissions, if CDR is brought into the mix. Studies have looked at mitigation and CDR in combination to identify strategies for limiting warming to 1.5°C (Sanderson et al., 2016; Ricke et al., 2017)204204. CDR, which may include net negative AFOLU CO2 emissions, is deployed by all 1.5°C-consistent pathways available to this assessment, but the scale of deployment and choice of CDR measures varies widely (Section 2.3.4). Furthermore, no CDR technology has been deployed at scale yet, and all come with concerns about their potential (Fuss et al., 2018)205205, feasibility (Nemet et al., 2018)206206 and/or sustainability (Smith et al., 2015; Fuss et al., 2018)207207 (see Sections 2.3.4, 4.3.2 and 4.3.7 and Cross-Chapter Box 7 in Chapter 3 for further discussion).

For example, based on alternative future fertility, mortality, migration and educational assumptions, population projections vary between 8.5 and 10.0 billion people by 2050 and between 6.9 and 12.6 billion people by 2100 across the SSPs. An important factor for these differences is future female educational attainment, with higher attainment leading to lower fertility rates and therefore decreased population growth up to a level of 1 billion people by 2050 (Lutz and KC, 2011; Snopkowski et al., 2016; KC and Lutz, 2017)

All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified and, in most cases, also to achieve net negative emissions to return global warming to 1.5°C following a peak (high confidence). The longer the delay in reducing CO2 emissions towards zero, the larger the likelihood of exceeding 1.5°C, and the heavier the implied reliance on net negative emissions after mid-century to return warming to 1.5°C (high confidence).

Policies reflecting a high price on emissions are necessary in models to achieve cost-effective 1.5°C pathways (high confidence). Other things being equal, modelling studies suggest the global average discounted marginal abatement costs for limiting warming to 1.5°C being about 3–4 times higher compared to 2°C over the 21st century, with large variations across models and socio-economic and policy assumptions. Carbon pricing can be imposed directly or implicitly by regulatory policies. Policy instruments, like technology policies or performance standards, can complement explicit carbon pricing in specific areas.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C implies reaching net zero CO2 emissions globally around 2050 and concurrent deep reductions in emissions of non-CO2 forcers, particularly methane (high confidence). Such mitigation pathways are characterized by energy-demand reductions, decarbonization of electricity and other fuels, electrification of energy end use, deep reductions in agricultural emissions, and some form of CDR with carbon storage on land or sequestration in geological reservoirs.

Pathways that aim for limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2100 after a temporary temperature overshoot rely on large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, which are uncertain and entail clear risks.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C depends on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next decades, where lower GHG emissions in 2030 lead to a higher chance of keeping peak warming to 1.5°C (high confidence). Available pathways that aim for no or limited (less than 0.1°C) overshoot of 1.5°C keep GHG emissions in 2030 to 25–30 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030 (interquartile range). This contrasts with median estimates for current unconditional NDCs of 52–58 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030.

I did not fully appreciate that our minds are embodied, and Awakening is never going to alter that fact, or that these bodies are subject to sickness, injury, aging and death. More importantly, because it may be less obvious, even the most Awakened of embodied minds still possess a primal reflexive component, a hardwired instinctive reptilian component, and an emotional layer that extends into and interacts with every other layer of the mind/brain above and below. There is also a massive accumulation of automatic, conditioned response patternstailored to adaptively fit a huge variety of possible circumstances. All of these deeper layers operate independently of conscious intention, Awakened or otherwise. Therefore, as lay practitioners in the world, we must consciously acknowledge, explore, understand and work with all of these layers

30to unfold as they would. Nancy kept asking for exactly the kind of certainty I so clearly understood could never be possible.I’m sure it was both difficult and exhausting for herto keep up with the continuously shifting process that was me amid the constantly changing circumstances of my life (travel and teaching activities, cancer prognosis and other health issues, etc.).She was trying to make plans for the future, but the situation kept changing around her. I, on the other hand, was just riding the waves of change. This was one more thing at play with Nancy, and may well have been for W, the Board members and others who were around and involved in everything that happened from 2015 through 2020.Dharma practice producesmajorshifts in perception. Thatis its purpose. Shifts in perceptionaffecthow we process complex and interconnected life events as they unfold. In particular, we come to live much more in the present. Living in the present means not dwelling on the past or future. To not be constantly telling ourselves stories about what might and should have been but wasn’t, or what might or should be in the future. In the words of Ram Das, “Be here now.” For years I’dlivedmostlyin the present moment, more in the ongoing awareness of suchness and emptiness than narrative and form. I’d stopped“thinkingabout myself,”creating the“story of me.”I now realize that,while freed of the enormous burdens of “if only” and “what if,” I’d also lost a certain kind of perspective thatcomes withthosenarratives. In consequence, I found myself unableto counter what Nancy and the Boardconfrontedme with by providing my own perspective,“my story” regarding events that had happened so many years before! I’d completely lost theperspective and context that comes out ofthose longer term and larger scale autobiographical narratives. I was also unable to appropriately contextualize Nancy’s increasing pain and frustration, so I simply dealt with it in the moment, as it arose. Months after the last of those painful and frustrating confrontations it struckme that I’d been doing the same thing even during those confrontations.I’dstill been so much in the present, simply meeting events as they unfolded in front of and around me, that it never occurred to me to ask, “Why are we talking about things that happened so many years ago?”“Why are we talking about things that have so little to do with anything that has happened sinceor is happening now?” Instead, lacking anappropriatechronological perspective, I totally failed to recognizethat we were focusing onlong pastevents and missing the very real problems and difficulties thatNancy and I were experiencingin this new present.Itdidn’t occur to methat they believed these to be recent or even current events, and most especially that they knew nothing of the larger context -the state of our marriage,our decision to live separately, and everything else that had happened since.Thus I failed tounderstand the underlying motivations for these accusations.I hadbasically been livingin two different worldsfor years, but more in the now and onlystepping into the world of linear time and narrative when and as needed. Never fully in–just enough to deal with something then gone again. The narratives I did generate were minimal and incomplete, enough for the moment or the hour, and for series of related events that mightspandays, weeks, or even months. But not sufficient for anything like personal autobiography.By embracing the now in the way I had, I can now seehowI’d alsolost sight of not only the value, but the practical necessityofthat other world of linear time and narrative

My inability to respond appropriately when confronted by theDharma Treasure Board made me acutely aware of mylackofpersonal narrative. I was being presented by myaccuserswitha biographical narrativeof mylife that they had created. I knew it was wrong, not even vaguely consistent with my lived experience, but I had no autobiographical narrative of my ownto counter it with. While such narratives may ultimately be mere empty fabrications, they are also indispensable to our ability to function effectively in the realm of conventional realityand interpersonal relationships. All Ihad were the pieces fromwhich thosenarratives are usually constructed. Iwas hopelessly unsuccessful inmy attempts to put them together on the spur of the momentto provide a more accurate counterpart to the distorted narrative Iwas being confronted with.The more limited short-term narratives necessary for day to day functioning came easily and were unavoidable. So,the change that had taken place wasn’t particularly obvious to others, although I think my wife noticed and wastroubled by it. It certainly affected the quality of our communication. I had become completely comfortable with uncertainty and allowing things just

There is a tendency to hold unrealistic expectations regarding “spiritual”leaders and teachers, and likewise for what spiritual practice might eventually do for ourselves. One is that mindfulness and Insightcan somehow magically transcend the causes and conditions that shaped ourlives and personalities. To paraphrase the Buddha, what arises in dependence on causes and conditions onlyceases dueto causes and conditions! Meditation and dharma practice create the specific causes and conditions for certain things to arise and others to pass away–but not everythingwe might wish for. Ihave discovereddeeply embeddedautomatic patterns of respondingin fundamentally unhealthy waysto certain situations. Theseautomatic response patterns are the productof an extreme emotionally, psychologically, and physically traumatic childhood, compounded by coping methods I developed in the decade or so after leaving home at 15. From being a homeless adolescent living on the streets, never attending much less graduating high school, I obtained a PhD andhaveled a successful and rewarding professional and spiritual life. However, those conditioned response patterns and coping strategies that had served me well in a life with such difficult beginningswere ultimately disastrous –in my interactions with my wife,then whenconfronted bythe Board of Dharma Treasure. Within themlies the root of much of my unskillfulness.The personal work and therapy I’m doing now continues to clarify these. Becoming aware of them has allowed me to make progress in overcoming them.What I realized through working with my therapist and a life coach was that, for all my life,I’ve had almost no ability to establish and maintain clearpersonal boundariesin interpersonal interactions. If someone was upset, angry, hurt, disappointed, afraidorwhatever, I tendedtotakepersonal responsibilityfor their mental state. Regardless of the cause, or whether or not I hadanything to do with their being upset.Or even the reasonableness or unreasonableness of their reactions!Iwouldbecome inappropriately over-committed to relieving their distress, and likewise inappropriately over-committed in every other part of my life as well. I havealsobeenextremelyconflictavoidant.When confronted with angerand/or aggression,I woulddo almost anything to placate. Itendedto avoid conflict by beingexcessively compliant, acquiescingtoo quickly, andengaginginvariousconflict avoidance strategies.I too readily acceptedtheviews ofothers,or triedto find waysto side-step issues of conflict, to relieve another’s pain and anger whiledisregarding the cost to myself or future consequences. If attempts to placate failed, and full-blown conflict seemedinevitable, I wouldoften disengage, withdraw, surrender, and even take a beating if necessary.

a monastic or reclusive setting, but can be potential pitfalls for a lay practitioner.Inmy case, aconfluence of uniquely personalpsychological predispositions with one such “developmental plateau” onthe Path created just such a problem. I emphasize the “uniquely personal” aspect, because it holds the key to understandingthe situation I found myself in. Extrapolating from this, the larger truth seems to bethat each of ushas our ownunique, deeply embedded personality characteristics that arepotentially problematic in certain circumstances. The effectsof the practice arenot at all primary in causingthese problems,butcanplay a significant role in compounding them.

Over the past yearand a half, I’ve had an opportunity to learn a lot about myself that I didn’t know before. I’ve also learned to appreciate certain profound depths to this dharma that I knew about, but hadn’t fully understood and applied before. In the process, I’ve also come to understand how certain “plateaus” in the progress of Awakening can create problems. These problems are of a sort that seem far less likely to arise in

Later, in the negotiations between the ministers, stakeholders, lobbyists and citizens, many recommendations were eliminated or watered down. In the end, considering the bill on ‘climate and resilience’ proposed to the Parliament as well as direct executive directives, 10% of the CCC’s recommendations were accepted by the government without modification, 37% were modified or watered down, and 53% were rejected

Like everything to do with climate and ecological justice, we need the politicians to step up to the mark before time runs out. 

What is clear, is that the collective intelligence of a diverse group of people coming together to find solutions for the common good are up to the task

Ultimately, having access to the top political decision makers and using biased studies, the industrial lobbies have managed to sabotage the reforms the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat called for. A context and tactic we are only too familiar with.

“Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.

PG&E’s own records clearly establish wind has long been classified as one of the top causes of structure failure on both transmission and distribution lines. PG&E’s own records also establish the Feather River Canyon is known for high and sometimes extreme winds. Based upon PG&E wind records, the Exponent Report stated “Maximum (or peak) wind speeds in the areas of the chosen lines are generally found to vary between 60 to 100 mph, as measured and reported in “Extreme Wind Speed Estimates Along PG&E Transmission Line Corridors” across one-minute time intervals and at an elevation of 33 feet above ground level, over a 50-year return period.” According to data pulled from the Jarbo Gap RAWS111 by Meteorologist Kris Kuyper the highest number of high wind events occur in the month of October. The inherent weakness of comparative risk analysis is its subjective nature. Data can be manipulated to achieve a desired result. Based upon the evidence the 2014 RIBA process exposes the manipulation of comparative risk analysis by PG&E personnel.

No records were ever located to support The RIBA team member’s conclusion that the Shoe Fly poles would most likely fail due to heavy rain. According to the Manager in Transmission Asset Management, The RIBA team member was an expert on the RIBA process who was assigned to assist “the engineer walk through the process.” Based upon the records the Manager in Transmission Asset Management identified the engineer as the engineer most familiar with the overall project and assigned to do the RIBA scoring for the project. According to an undated PG&E Org Chart, the engineer assigned to score the project was a Senior Engineer assigned to Transmission Asset Development and reported directly to the Manager in Transmission Asset Management. According to the notes on the scoring sheet, as interpreted by the Manager of Transmission Asset Development, “the concern here is the note says that the structures would go down during rainy and wet storm. And what’s not shown here is that the wildfire is not likely, because on the wet ground not likely to have wildfire.” No records in support of Senior Engineer’s conclusion were ever located. On the other hand, the TL Relocate 10 Towers project scored 581. According to the scoring sheet, the Senior Engineer was also the engineer assigned to score this project. Despite the fact that by 2014 the scope of the project was limited to the replacement of insulators so that money spent on the project prior to cancellation could be charged to the Capital Budget, the project scored 18 points out of 10,000 possible points for safety110. Despite the fact that the project involves the same Caribou-Palermo line the Reliability Risk Score is 562. 434 of those points are justified because “WRDI is possible contact with public leading or to other facilities causing potential injuries to few employees” according to the notes on the scoring sheet. The 2014 RIBA scoring is used to highlight the subjective nature of the comparative risk analysis. Because they are subjective the risk scores are easily manipulated. PG&E was highly motivated to complete the TL Relocate 10 Towers project in order to be able to charge the budget overruns, money already spent, to the capital budget. By 2014 the Replace 5 Damaged Towers project was about future spending. The best example of the manipulation is the WRDI justifications. One of the oft-stated justifications for the TL Relocate 10 Towers Project was the fact that the ten towers were located in a remote, inaccessible location. The towers were so inaccessible that PG&E had to use helicopters to fly personnel to the towers. Also, there was no evidence that any of the ten towers was on the verge of collapse according to the 2009 email from the manager who cancelled the project in 2009. On the other hand, the Shoe Fly was built on Camp Creek Road and any, or all of those poles, could reasonably be expected to fall down within a year. Another example of manipulation of facts in the 2014 RIBA was the RIBA team member’sconclusion, apparently based upon the Senior Engineer’s scoring note that “structures would go down only if it is rainy and wet”; and restated several times by the Manager in Transmission Asset Management that the wood Shoe Fly poles would probably only collapse during heavy rain

These metrics do not consider a country’s wisdom as important when ranking and measuring success.

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We have started thinking about a Wise Metrics Project

According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

C.1.3. Limiting global warming requires limiting the total cumulative global anthropogenic emissions of CO2 since the pre-industrial period, that is, staying within a total carbon budget (high confidence).1414By the end of 2017, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the pre-industrial period are estimated to have reduced the total carbon budget for 1.5°C by approximately 2200 ± 320 GtCO2 (medium confidence). The associated remaining budget is being depleted by current emissions of 42 ± 3 GtCO2 per year (high confidence).

Quick Start

Installation

A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’

The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.’’

Behind the attacks on American universities — led by aging white male intellectuals

Writing to van Breda Kolff from Tokyo in his capacity as captain-elect, Bradley advised his coach that they should prepare themselves for “the stern challenge ahead.” Van Breda Kolff doesn’t vibrate to that sort of tune. “Basketball is a game, he says. “It is not an ordeal. I think Bradley’s happiest whenever he can deny himself pleasure.”

Van Breda Kolff says that Bradley is “a great mover,” and points out that the basis of all these maneuvers is footwork. Bradley has spent hundreds of hours merely rehearsing the choreography of the game—shifting his feet in the same patterns again and again, until they have worn into his motor subconscious. “The average basketball player only likes to play basketball,” van Breda Kolff says. “When he’s left to himself, all he wants to do is get a two-on-two or a three-on-three going. Bradley practices techniques, making himself learn and improve instead of merely having fun.”

His jump shot, for example, has had two principal influences. One is Jerry West, who has one of the best jumpers in basketball. At a summer basketball camp in Missouri some years ago, West told Bradley that he always gives an extra hard bounce to the last dribble before a jump shot, since this seems to catapult him to added height. Bradley has been doing that ever since. Terry Dischinger, of the Detroit Pistons, has told Bradley that he always slams his foot to the floor on the last step before a jump shot, because this stops his momentum and thus prevents drift. Drifting while aloft is the mark of a sloppy jump shot. Bradley’s graceful hook shot is a masterpiece of eclecticism. It consists of the high-lifted knee of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Darrall Imhoff, the arms of Bill Russell, of the Boston Celtics, who extends his idle hand far under his shooting arm and thus magically stabilizes the shot, and the general corporeal form of Kentucky’s Cotton Nash, a rookie this year with the Lakers. Bradley carries his analyses of shots further than merely identifying them with pieces of other people. “There arc five parts to the hook shot,” he explains to anyone who asks. As he continues, he picks up a ball and stands about eighteen feet from a basket. “Crouch,” he says, crouching, and goes on to demonstrate the other moves. “Turn your head to look for the basket, step, kick, follow through with your arms.” Once, as he was explaining this to me, the ball curled around the rim and failed to go in.

People thrive in a wide range of climates. The projected climate change is small relative to the diurnal cycle. It is therefore rather peculiar to conclude that climate change will be disastrous. Those who claim so have been unable to explain why. https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1313182006310731776?s=20

These predictions are absurd. A 3°C increase could trigger, and a6°C increase would trigger, every “tipping element” shown in Table 2. The Earth would have a climate unlike anything our species has experienced in its existence, and the Earth would transition to it hundreds of times faster than it has in any previous naturally-driven global warming event (McNeall et al., 2011). The Tropics and much of the globe’s temperate zone would be uninhabitable by humans and most other life forms. And yet Nordhaus thinks it would only reduce the global economy by just 8%?Comically, Nordhaus’s damage function is symmetrical — it predicts the same damages from a fall in temperature as for an equivalent rise. It therefore predicts that a 6°C fall in global temperature would also reduce GGP by just 7.9% (see Figure 3). Unlike global warming, we do know what the world was like when the temperature was 6°C below 20th century levels: that was the average temperature of the planet during the last Ice Age (Tierney et al., 2020), which ended about 20,000 years ago. At the time, all of America north of New York, and of Europe north of Berlin, was beneath a kilometre of ice. The thought that a transition to such a climate in just over a century would cause global production to fall by less than 8% is laughable.Again, I found myself in the position of a forensic detective, trying to work out how on Earth could otherwise intelligent people come to believe that climate change would only affect industries that are directly exposed to the weather, and that the correlation between climate today and economic output today across the globe could be used to predict the impact of global warming on the economy? The only explanation that made sense is that these economists were mistaking the weather for the climate.

If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

Johnson: Earlier I interviewed you about patrilocal residence patterns and how that alters women’s sexual choices. In contrast, matrilocal societies are more likely to be egalitarian. What are the factors that lead to the differences between these two systems?Hrdy: I think in societies where women have more say, and that does tend to be in societies that are matrilocal and with matrilineal descent or where, as it is among many small scale hunter-gatherers, you have porous social boundaries and flexible residence patterns. If I had to say what kind of residence patterns our ancestors had it would have been very flexible, what Frank Marlowe calls multilocal.

As a result, American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.

American exceptionalism was founded on cooperation — between the rich and the poor, between the governors and the governed. From the birth of the nation, the unity across economic classes and different regions was a marvel for European observers, such as St. John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville. This cooperative spirit unraveled in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the first “Age of Discord” in American history. It was reforged during the New Deal as an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers, leading to another age of prosperity and cooperation in postwar America. But since the 1970s, that contract has unraveled, in favor of a contract between government and business that has underfunded public services but generously rewarded capital gains and corporate profits.

Writing in the journal Nature in 2010, we pointed out that such trends were a reliable indicator of looming political instability and that they “look set to peak in the years around 2020.” In Ages of Discord, published early in 2016, we showed that America’s “political stress indicator” had turned up sharply in recent years and was on track to send us into the “Turbulent Twenties.” The Political Stress Index (PSI) combines the three crisis indicators in the Goldstone-Turchin theory: declining living standards, increasing intra-elite competition/conflict and a weakening state. Growing PSI indicates increased likelihood of political violence. The Well-Being Index indicates greater equality, greater elite consensus and a more legitimate state.

But the ideological polarization the American Political Science Association had in mind has, in recent decades, been eclipsed among the public by political sectarianism.

Nonethel ess, scholars have begun to iden-tify procedures that can potentially mitigate political sectarianism. These in clude efforts to help Americans comprehend opposing partisans regardless of their level of agree-ment, such as by focusing on commonalities rather than differences (e.g., “we’re all Amer-icans”; SM) or communicating in the moral language of the other side (e.g., when liberals frame the consequences of climate change in terms of sanctity violations; SM).

INSIGHTS|POLICY FORUM536 30 OCTOBER 2020 • VOL 370 ISSUE 6516sciencemag.orgSCIENCERather, the goal of these interventions is to move toward a system in which the public forcefully debates political ideals and policies while resisting tendencies that undermine democracy and human rights. Gi

Is motivated partisan cognition bipartisan?The extent to which each side exhibits motivated partisan (or biased) cognition is a focus of ongoing debate. Some scholars argue for symmetry (SM). For example, a recent meta-analysis demonstrates equivalent levels of motivated partisan cognition across 51 experiments investigating the tenden cy to evaluate otherwise identical in-formation more favorably when it supports versus challenges one’s political beliefs or allegiances (14). In an illu strative experiment, liberals and conservatives viewed a film clip of a political demonstration in which protestors clashed with police. Despite view-ing the identical clip, liberals rated the protesters as more violent when they believed it was an anti-abortion protest (a conservative cause) rather than a gay-rights protest (a liberal cause), whereas conservatives exhibited the opposite pattern (SM). Other scholars argue for asymmetry. For example, some evidence suggests that, relative to Democrats, Republicans have a higher need for order and greater trust in their gut-level intuitions. Such tendencies appear to motivate them to favor explana-tions that are straightforward and intuitive rather than complex and abstract, even when the latter types of explanation might be more accurate (15) (SM). Such findings are representative of the existing evidence, but conclusions remain tentative.

Third, i n contrast to the equivocal ideo-logical-polarization trends among the pub-lic, politici ans and other political elites have unambiguously polarized recently on ideo-logical grounds, with Republican politicians moving further to the right than Democratic politicians have moved to the left (SM). This ide ological divergence is driven in part by ex-treme economic inequality in America today, especially in conjunction with candidates be-coming increasingly reliant on ideologically extreme donors. As polit icians chase cam-paign dollars, these extreme voices garner disproportionate influence (SM).

In addition, emotional and mor-alized posts—those containing words like “hate,” “shame,” or “greed”—are especially likely to be retweeted within rather than be-tween partisan networks (9). Social-m edia technology employs popularity-based algo-rithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement, increa sing sectarianism within homogeneous networks (SM)

n recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, inten-sifying political sectarianism. Scholars from sociology, political science, economics, psy-chology, and computational social science debate whether such web platforms create polarizing echo chambers (7) (SM). However, a recent field experiment offers intriguing ev-idence that Americans who deactivate their Facebook account become less politically po-larized (8).

The decl ine of the broadcast news era, during which impartiality was prized, began in the 1980s, driven in part by the Reagan admin-istration’s termination of the Federal Com-munications Commission (FCC) “fairness doctrine” in 1987. This doctrine, introduced in 1949, required that broadcasters discuss controversial topics in a manner that the FCC assesses as unbiased. Among th e first media figures to leverage the demise of the fairness doctrine was Rush Limbaugh, whose influen-tial conservative radio program went into na-tional syndication in 1988 (SM).

On American exceptionalism SOCIALSCIENCEPolitical sectarianism in AmericaA poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracyPOLICY FORUMA recent study offers valuable international perspective on political polarization, leveraging data from 1975 through 2017 in nine Western democracies to examine feel-ings toward copartisans and opposing partisans. The study controls statistically for the number of parties and offers a valuable, albeit noncomprehensive, comparison set (13). Four nations—America, Canada, New Zealand, and Switzerland—exhibit increasing sectarianism over time, with the rate steepest in America. By contrast, Australia, Britain, Norway, Sweden, and Germany exhibit decreasing sectarianism over time. The most notable findings pertain to out-party hate [increasingly “frigid” evaluations of opposing partisans, via a “feeling thermometer” (see main text)]. Across the eight other nations, the mean rate of change in out-party hate was 0.004° per year (range: –0.2° to +0.2°) on the 0°-to-100° scale. In the United States, the rate of change was –0.6° per year. By 2017, out-party hate was stronger in America than in any other nation.

Sectarianism, Jacobson continued in an email,feeds on itself; it is exacerbated by the ideologically fragmented media environment. It also reflects real differences in beliefs and values and conceptions of what American is, or should be, all about. Cleavages of race, region, education, religion, occupation, and community type now put people more consistently on one side or the other, feeding the culture wars and aggravating negative partisanship.

The Amish outperform the English on every measured health outcome. 65% of Amish rate their health as excellent or very good, compared to 58% of English. Diabetes rates are 2% vs. 8%, heart attack rates are 1% vs. 6%, high blood pressure is 11% vs. 31%. Amish people go to the hospital about a quarter as often as English people, and this difference is consistent across various categories of illness (the big exception is pregnancy-related issues – most Amish women have five to ten children). This is noticeable enough that lots of health magazines have articles on The Health Secrets of the Amish and Amish Secrets That Will Add Years To Your Life. As far as I can tell, most of the secret is spending your whole life outside doing strenuous agricultural labor, plus being at a tech level two centuries too early for fast food. But Amish people also die earlier. Lots of old studies say the opposite – for example, this one finds Amish people live longer than matched Framingham Heart Study participants. But things have changed since Framingham. The Amish have had a life expectancy in the low 70s since colonial times, when the rest of us were dying at 40 or 50. Since then, Amish life expectancy has stayed the same, and English life expectancy has improved to the high 70s. The most recent Amish estimates I have still say low seventies, so I think we are beating them now. If they’re healthier, why is their life expectancy lower? Possibly they are less interested in prolonging life than we are. R&D write: Amish people are more willing to stop interventions earlier and resist invasive therapies than the general population because, while they long for healing, they also have a profound respect for God’s will. This means taking modest steps toward healing sick bodies, giving preference to natural remedies, setting common-sense limits, and believing that in the end their bodies are in God’s hands. The Amish health care system has an easier job than ours does. It has to take care of people who are generally healthy and less interested in extreme end-of-life care. It also supports a younger population – because Amish families have five to ten children, the demographics are weighted to younger people. All of these make its job a little bit simpler, and we should keep that in mind for the following sections.

Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them?

I’m fascinated by how many of today’s biggest economic problems just mysteriously failed to exist in the past. Our grandparents easily paid for college with summer jobs, raised three or four kids on a single income, and bought houses in their 20s or 30s and never worried about rent or eviction again. And yes, they got medical care without health insurance, and avoided the kind of medical bankruptcies we see too frequently today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today? The Amish are an extreme example of people who try to make traditional systems work in the modern world, which makes them a natural laboratory for this kind of question.

It seems to also highlight how much our governments, banks and big corporations roles play into the state of our planet, how much we need them to change so that our individual choices can actually make a significant difference. Read more

Proponents of so-called green growth—economic growth that uses natural resources in a sustainable manner—must show that it is possible to effectively eliminate carbon emissions from developed economies in the space of little more than a decade with no impact at all on economic expansion. This challenge cannot be answered solely by an appeal to technology. The question is not whether technological measures such as energy efficiency and solar power are possible (they clearly are); nor whether, in the past, countries have managed to harness these technologies sufficiently (they clearly haven't); but rather, whether countries can now achieve sufficient gains in a short enough time to allow the pursuit of economic growth indefinitely, while still remaining within the safe operating space of the planet.In a sense, this once again raises the question of whether economic value is something completely separate from—or at least separable from—physical and material flows. Certainly, in the past, the two things have gone hand in hand. According to economics, monetary value surely has something to do with activity. According to physics, activity is impossible without the expenditure of energy. There may well be efficiencies to be had, but these will ultimately be constrained by thermodynamic limits, as all activity is. Those who believe that this is not a constraint on expansion typically appeal to the massive quantities of solar energy that flood Earth. But it remains true that these flows are diffuse (rather than concentrated, as fossil fuels are) and must be captured using material devices.

After the threat from Google+ had passed,and afteryears of promoting open access to Facebook Platform, Facebook increasingly turned toPlatformas a toolto monitor, leverage, and harm (via rescindingAPI access)apps that Facebook viewed as actual or potential competitive threats.201.In 2013, Facebook amended its Platform policy(described above)to forbid applications that “replicat[e] [Facebook’s] core functionality,” with no explanation as to what Facebook considered its core functionality, or how such policies would apply when Facebook expanded its functionality to a new area.

Facebook was aware that access to its Platform APIs, especially its Find Friends API, was particularly important to potential rivals. In 2011, Facebook adopted a policy aimed at forbidding “competing social platforms,” and any apps that linked or integrated with competing social platforms, from accessing its APIs. Facebook adopted this policy to prevent Google+ from gaining traction:doing sodiscourageddevelopers from creating apps that bridged the two networks, which would have reduced switching costsfor users.

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp thus substantially lessened competition andfurther entrenched Facebook’s monopoly power in the Personal Social Networking Services market. Moreover, Facebook’s subsequent degradation of the acquired firm’s privacy features reduced consumer choice by eliminating a viable, competitive, privacy-focused option.

Although valuations of WhatsApp had varied widely over the years, neitherFacebook’s nor those of industry analysts had approached anywhere close to $19 billion. Two years before the acquisition, Zuckerberg had received word that another company offered to purchase WhatsApp for $100 million. At that time, Zuckerberg wrote to Zoufonoun, “I’d pay $1b for them if we could get them.”Zoufonoun agreed.

In April 2013, Facebook had entered into a licensing agreement with Onavo. During the negotiation of this licensing agreement, Facebook demanded that a provision be included that gaveFacebook the rightto notice and an opportunity to bid in the event Onavo considered being acquired by another company. Onavo founder Guy Rosen told the Onavo board that such a demand “has become [Facebook’s] standard M.O.these days with startups.”

Zuckerberg’s success in convincing Systrom to sell was based in no small part upon Zuckerberg’s growing reputation for wielding Facebook’s power as a sword. After the initial overture by Zuckerberg in February, Systrom contacted Instagram investor Matt Cohler for advice.Systrom asked: “you know him better than I do ....Will he go into destroy mode if I say no.” Cohler’s response was blunt: “probably (and probably also if we just don’t engage at all).” Systrom summed up the futility of trying to fend off Facebook once it had entered “destroy mode” by saying: “bottom line I don’t think we’ll ever escape the wrath of mark... it just depends how long we avoid it....” Because Instagram relied in significant part on Facebook for exposureand distribution,invoking Zuckerberg’s “wrath” would have negative consequences for the company.

inspired our success), [sic] but at a high enough price –like $500m or $1b –they’d have to consider it. (Emphasis added)115.Ebersman reacted to the idea cautiously in light of the high price. He asked for further explanation on the motivation for the proposedacquisition. Specifically, he probed whether Zuckerberg was trying to “1) neutralize a potential competitor?...2) acquire talent? ...3) integrate their products with ours in order to improve our service? ... [or]4) other?” In response, Zuckerberg admitted: “It’s a combination of (1) and (3)” (Emphasis added). He went on to explain that “what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again....[T]hose new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale” (Emphasis added).

On August 10, 2009, FriendFeed accepted Facebook’s offer. As Facebook employees internally discussed via email on the day of the acquisition, “I remember you said to me a long time (6 months ago): ‘we can just buy them’ when I said to you that Friendfeed is the company I fear most. That was prescient! :).”

DealBook: How to Fix AmericaLast Updated Dec. 4, 2020, 6:05 a.m. ET43 minutes ago43 minutes ago

At historical rates of equity returns of 8 percent annually, a $6,750 at-birth retirement account — which would cost the government $26 billion a year based on the average number of children born in the U.S. each year — would provide retirement assets of more than $1 million at age 65, or $2 million at age 74.

Zak Stein, who is a contributor to the aforementioned book Metatheory for the 21st Century, is one of the strongest proponents of post-Integral metamodernism in terms of ‘social justice’ (a term that the IDW has helped nullify). In the Integral conference debate in 2015, the “weak argument” Stein proposes is that Integral should at least become more informed about what capitalism is. The “strong argument” is that Integral should be, at the very least, post-capitalist. Given that Integral was doing neither, the way people used terms like “green meme” and “second tier” became, Stein says, substitutions for actual thought.

On the podcast Emerge, Daniel Thorson interviews Robert MacNaughton on Learnings from the Life and Death of the Integral Center (2019) which survey the history of tensions within the community itself. And in a no holds barred interview, Jamie Wheal vividly discusses The Legacy of Integral (2019), with its ample pros and cons, saying 2nd Tier created far more problems than it solved. People got a “contact high” from reading Wilber, Wheal says, which “resulted in a bunch of dissociated eggheads masquerading as Jedi and thinking they could solve the world from the position of a whiteboard.”

Radicals thus find themselves under fire from opposite directions. If they refuse to debate what kind of cultural policies might flourish under socialism, for example, they are being shifty; if they hand you a thick bunch of documents on the question, they are guilty of blue-printing. Perhaps it is impossible to draw a line between being too agnostic about the future and being too assured about it. The Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin reminds us that the ancient Jews were forbidden to make icons of what was to come, rather as they were forbidden to fashion graven images of Yahweh. The two prohibitions are closely related, since for the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh is the God of the future, whose kingdom of justice and friendship is still to come. Besides, the only image of God for Judaism is human flesh and blood. For Benjamin, seeking to portray the future is a kind of fetishism. Instead, we are driven backwards into this unexplored territory with our eyes fixed steadily on the injustice and exploitation of the past. Knowing exactly where we are going is the surest way of not getting there. In any case, the energies we invest in envisaging a better world might consume the energies we need to create it. Marx had no interest in human perfection. There is nothing in his work to suggest that post-capitalist societies would be magically free of predators, psychopaths, free-loaders, Piers Morgan-types or people who stow their luggage on aircraft with surreal slowness, indifferent to the fact that there are 50 people queuing behind them. The idea that history is moving ever onwards and upwards is an invention of the middle-class Enlightenment, not of the left.

“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems like an exaggeration,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.”

have increasingly become the parties of educated metropolitan elites. As their traditional working-class base has eroded, the influence of globalized professionals, the financial industry, and corporate interests has risen. The problem is not just that these elites often favor economic policies that leave middle and lower-middle classes and lagging regions behind. It is also that their cultural, social, and spatial isolation renders them incapable of understanding and empathizing with the worldviews of the less fortunate.

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.