010225, sources and reads

[degringolade]

Paul Mathiopoulos/ Panepistimiou street

I suppose that “do not disturb” can’t in any way be considered a “right”. But more and more I am beginning to understand why it is so damn important.

I suppose that my recent bout of “wire cutting” stems from my current emphasis of keeping arms length from the ongoing shouting match that constitutes “civic dialog”.

But being aware that the “civic dialog” has some importance even though I can’t do anything about the decisions being made and the deals being cut. But they will end up effecting me, so I think that keeping abreast of current affairs will do nothing but behoove me. Having a view on what is happening will allow me to best assess the options available and the outcomes they will force upon my life.

But I do have to keep this kind of thing under control. I can’t go all the way to being a Stylite monk, ignoring the world around me to allow an ill-considered attempt to buddy up to God for a better retirement plan. But wallowing in the day to day spectacle of politico-military happenings of a declining nation-state just doesn’t seem to be doing me any good whatsoever.

I am trying to write longer pieces in order to better “grok” the world around me and my place in it. I am trying to incorporate and resolve all the contradictions that have presented themselves over the three score and ten (plus one) that I have been gifted. I have been coming to the conclusion that the effort required is approximately equal to that of a full time job. It even kind of splits up in a manner quite similar to my last years in the lab.

I start out by checking email. Usually this part is easier than when I was working, as personal e-mail now involves getting down to the important stuff by ignoring and deleting junk mail. Then I spend a little time answering the emails that I currently deem important (a category that has almost vanished).

Then it is over to Dreamwidth where I keep an eye on folks there that I have found interesting enough to follow, most of the time I just lurk and read, It doesn’t always get a reply, it is just a way to keep up on things. Altogether, the email and Dreamwidth reading takes about an hour and a half/two hours while I lazily sip my coffee/tea.

Next comes reading the news. You will note that I said “reading”. I don’t watch the paid whores on mass media or YouTube, I tend to read Naked Capitalism, The Automatic Earth, and Zerohedge. I try to read Politico regularly, but most of the time it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so it is not a frequent flyer for crossing the pixels on my screen.

Then I go out and try to find essays. I think that Substack provides a good locale, but too many times it is folks talking about what is wrong, rather than discussing options for try to fix things. Luckily, Naked Capitalism does a pretty good job of curating links to stuff that they find interesting and that I usually find interesting as well. Lambert tend to clutch his pearls a lot, but Yves seems solid. There is a new editor, Conor Gallagher, who is still being judged but is looking solid.

Automatic Earth is the next stop, a lot more screechy, a lot more of a self-loathing expatriate angst, but there are nuggets there. Lately Illargi is getting lazy and just surfs the web looking for folks who sound reasonable when they say things contrary to the mainstream POV, but if you dig around you can find constructive pieces.

Finally there is Zerohedge, populated principally by folks who chase the dollar and take offense when anyone say that maybe they can’t have it all. They make no real effort to disguise their Gordon Gecko-esque leanings which I find both refreshing and informative.

Then there is good old Google news, or as I refer to it “all that the powers want you to know”. It is good to know just how wide the Overton window is open on any given day. I really can’t say that I go here frequently, I just check in to see which way the wind is blowing occasionally.

Currently, those sites give me the info that I need to chew on and separate the wheat from the chaff and gives the ranges for the issues that may end up effecting me. I do want to put in a caveat here. I think that a standard long-form essay (Definition: 1000 to 3000 words) posted on the internet for discussion can only discuss, in a substantive manner, one, perhaps two subjects. In the case of multiple subjects, the best that you can do is to make certain the subjects are close enough. I think a good analogy of the problem is Newton’s infamous “three body problem”.

That complexity is why you have to be very wary of the essays and the reasoning that are the meat and potatoes of the essays that seem to provide grist that both educates and edifies. It may very well be possible that they don’t do either. What these essays do is provide you with a mental template that isolates specific variables and tries to explain complex systems in terms of only the specific variable and make predictions from there using the characteristics of a single variable.

That is why I use the “Three Body Problem” as a cautionary tale.

In physics, specifically classical mechanics, the three-body problem is to take the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses that orbit each other in space and calculate their subsequent trajectories using Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation. 

Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no general closed-form solution, meaning there is no equation that always solves it. When three bodies orbit each other, the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions. Because there are no solvable equations for most three-body systems, the only way to predict the motions of the bodies is to estimate them using numerical methods.

From Wikipedia

I am not sneering in any way about numerical methods. They are pretty good at simple things like landing spaceships or modeling airplane engines, but even in a semi-closed subset of humanity there are so many confounding variables that almost all attempts at simplification to a single variable inevitably end up generating clear, logical and wrong answers. 

So I consider essays from even the best essayists to be less than useful for actually solving the issues. But a good, well reasoned essay can provide you with nuance that might allow you to come up with a better approximation of potential futures and allow you a better means of navigating the uncertain.