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   Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:21 JST Patricia Aas

   I started reading “The Unaccountability Machine” which is actually quite interesting. I don’t know what I think about the subject matter, but it touches on a lot of things I’ve thought about over the years. It seems to describe a different economic model, not capitalism and not communism, but a systems theory field called “Cybernetics”. For some reason it’s like I asked someone: explain economics to me like I’m a programmer. And now my brain is slowly reworking itself to understand economics like I would understand a program. It feels very unnatural as a human having grown up in this *waves vaguely at the world* but it is the first time I am starting to feel that it makes sense. It’s still completely wrong, of course. I fundamentally disagree with some extremely axiomic parts of capitalism, but I suddenly might not end up with a parse error.
   https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112626658364328553

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     This scholarship might be progressively more relevant for the rest of the world going forward.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     The US had their hand in pretty much every single military dictatorship in Latin America, this included money (remember Iran-Contras?), military training and supplies (everything to equip your friendly military dictatorship) and running disinformation campaigns.

     Børge repeated this.
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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     And the US is still doing this BS apparently: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:19 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I have been sidetracked into what is a side quest in the book. A strange electronic system set up in Chile under Allende before the dictatorship. I was looking on Wikipedia and found this podcast: https://the-santiago-boys.com/ imagine grafana dashboards and data driven decisions meets socialism and… Star Trek aesthetics.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:19 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     This thing is wild “Project Cybersyn”
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:19 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     Also, even if I kind of grew up in this, I hadn’t really thought about it for years. But one of the big things Latin America saw in this period were dictatorships brought about by large international corporations (often backed by the US) that preferred a “strong leader” so that they could extract the country’s resources in peace without being bothered by the pesky people who lived there. Ref the expression Banana Republic.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:20 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I guess everyone probably needs to get stuff explained in a way that ties in with the things they already know. I’m sure this probably is a whole field in pedagogy.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 02:09:21 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     • Valerie Aurora

     Thanks to @vaurora for pointing me in this direction 🤓

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:16 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     As a programmer, it’s funny to read about people believing in their models. It’s a very junior developer thing to do. Senior folks don’t. They do their best and then they observe. And even more interestingly: if they don’t see unintended consequences of significant changes, they become suspicious.

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     Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: (ryanc@infosec.exchange)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:16 JST Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag:

     in reply to

     @Patricia heck, I'm suspicious of anything that compiles the first time

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:17 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     Basically any field where you have acknowledged that the systems you are concerned with are complex and might never be fully understood, but where you still have stuff to do and you work with the knowledge that these systems are adaptive and might have emergent behavior. And that poking in one place might have unknown consequences. Where the primary tools are around monitoring and feedback to detect and diagnose new behaviors. And to manipulate these complex networks of stuff to do the thing you want, all the while knowing that it might very well also do something completely different and probably not desired.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:17 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     • SiljeLB

     Oh shit, this fits with medicine too, doesn’t it, @siljelb ?

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:17 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I guess the fundamental difference from modeling is that even though you might try on occasion to reduce things to a formal model and reason about things in that formal model, you don’t really believe in it. You know the real thing is “alive” and that the information that is removed to model whatever process you are concerned with, will contain data that is essential and even more importantly: you know that there is essential data that has been removed that you don’t even know is essential.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I think the people for which Cybernetics will make the most sense are people who work in vulnerability research and exploit development. This systems theory fits very well with a lot of their findings and methodology.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     Possibly also folks working in machine learning

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:18 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     And people in distributed systems tbh

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:19 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     He also seems to think that the international tendency to elect populist wannabe dictators is a cry for help. That seems a bit… infantilizing?

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:19 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I think I need to have lunch with an economist. I have questions.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Jun-2024 22:21:20 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     Finished first read, but now I need to reread the beginning. Current impression is that I find the arguments individually interesting. I’m not sure the underlying logical argument they are a part of is logical or if the conclusion is a logical result. But I still found the book very interesting. Especially the first 3/4ths. The basic logical argument he seems to present is that current capitalism has constructed a mechanism that forces managers of publicly traded companies to serve shortterm goals. And that this makes it impossible for companies to adapt sufficiently to accommodate looming crises like climate change. When leadership has to deliver on quarterly numbers they cannot steer according to any other metrics. I think his idea is that if we can somehow break that mechanism then… and this part I’m unclear on and I’m not sure I find it very interesting either.
     Basically I don’t know how I feel about the broader logical argument, but I found the discussion to get there very interesting.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:30:53 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     This world needs a whole lot of intellectuals who are not privileged white men with way too much time on their hands.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:30:54 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I’m sorry, but that’s on level with worshiping kubernetes. That’s fucking mind boggling.

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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:30:54 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     I guess I have to read Piketty’s Capital book now. Because this is blowing my mind.
     https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112644094554478633

     Man of Sand repeated this.
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     Patricia Aas (patricia@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 04:30:55 JST Patricia Aas

     in reply to

     The more I think about this, the more I need an economist to tell me this isn’t how they actually work and what they actually believe. Because that’s just bananas. First let’s “simplify” a complex system into a formal model and then you reason in it, maybe run some simulations and then… you believe it? And this idea of believing in a “market” as some sort of entity that will not only stabilize into a state, but that that state is somehow “good”, or even “optimal”. That’s bananas. That’s a fucking religion.