Swami Sivananda (MD) dedicated a chapter "Miserable Mundane Life" in the book "Practice of Yoga" to the type of people in the article, in a way that should make the issue an obligated part of education on a global scale.
It all started about ~7,000 years ago, with the advent of grain agriculture. For the previous million years, humanoids lived within trophic limits. All the food we had spoiled in less than a turn of the seasons.
With grain, for the first time in a million years, it became possible to store food for multiple years. This enabled hoarding and withholding. It was the first durable medium of exchange. It created capitalism.
When the great unravelling happens, I hope it doesn't stop at more than hunting and gathering. Otherwise, civilization will simply rise up from the ashes again.
"A farm is a contrived ecosystem. It is a greatly simplified plant community. In successional terms it is thus a very early seral stage, and is therefore inherently unstable… Agriculture, ecologically understood, is the continual undoing of succession." — William Catton, Collapse, p 120, 1980
In light of these two pages linked below (and presented before) I've come up with a new metric - to find the approximate sustainable population of your town, island, county, country, continent, simply take the existing population number and knock three zeros off.
The Dunbar number is enlightening, and the evaluation by an AI agent is somewhat chilling.
De-population and dispersion of the cosca might alleviate tensions, but it might be that we are biologically wired to cycle through the scenarios mentioned by Marc Bevis and Jan Steinman ...
Is perhaps "Hari Seldon" somewhere somewhere in the shadows observing all ....?
My Goodness! What a share, Ugo. I feel more educated but I guess that's what professors do, retired or not. This Dunbar number as a root cause of the mafia structure is very thought provoking. But the take away for me was the AI's assessment that if they were in control things may still slide into dysfunction even as the local is more efficiently administered. Many of us doomsters pin what little hope we have on survival of someone at the local level. So I'll highlight your AI's quote, "The interesting question is whether AIs would just recreate the same structural dynamics with different failure modes."
Swami Sivananda (MD) dedicated a chapter "Miserable Mundane Life" in the book "Practice of Yoga" to the type of people in the article, in a way that should make the issue an obligated part of education on a global scale.
https://archive.org/details/KRI185PracticeOfYogaSwamiSivananda/page/3/mode/2up
I just posted something along similar lines: https://open.substack.com/pub/theuaob/p/the-liquidation-of-india-ltd-why?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r7kv8
I also invoked Dunbar to explain India's 'Democratic Deficit'.
Impressive analysis. I restacked this post and I'll follow your blog!
As with everything else, it boils down to overpopulation.
When all you've got is the Dunbar number, there is no need for vertical hierarchies.
Surprised your AI didn't spot that.....
I was just about to bring that up!
It all started about ~7,000 years ago, with the advent of grain agriculture. For the previous million years, humanoids lived within trophic limits. All the food we had spoiled in less than a turn of the seasons.
With grain, for the first time in a million years, it became possible to store food for multiple years. This enabled hoarding and withholding. It was the first durable medium of exchange. It created capitalism.
When the great unravelling happens, I hope it doesn't stop at more than hunting and gathering. Otherwise, civilization will simply rise up from the ashes again.
"A farm is a contrived ecosystem. It is a greatly simplified plant community. In successional terms it is thus a very early seral stage, and is therefore inherently unstable… Agriculture, ecologically understood, is the continual undoing of succession." — William Catton, Collapse, p 120, 1980
Yes, indeed.
In light of these two pages linked below (and presented before) I've come up with a new metric - to find the approximate sustainable population of your town, island, county, country, continent, simply take the existing population number and knock three zeros off.
http://paulchefurka.ca/Sustaina.html (~ 35 million)
https://substack.com/inbox/post/176387797 (6 million?)
Eg UK current population 69,300,000 so a sustainable gatherer-scavanger population for the British Isles should be about 69,000.
People have no idea of the colossal orders of magnitude of overshoot we are in.
Your first link is 404.
Thank you Udo.
The Dunbar number is enlightening, and the evaluation by an AI agent is somewhat chilling.
De-population and dispersion of the cosca might alleviate tensions, but it might be that we are biologically wired to cycle through the scenarios mentioned by Marc Bevis and Jan Steinman ...
Is perhaps "Hari Seldon" somewhere somewhere in the shadows observing all ....?
My Goodness! What a share, Ugo. I feel more educated but I guess that's what professors do, retired or not. This Dunbar number as a root cause of the mafia structure is very thought provoking. But the take away for me was the AI's assessment that if they were in control things may still slide into dysfunction even as the local is more efficiently administered. Many of us doomsters pin what little hope we have on survival of someone at the local level. So I'll highlight your AI's quote, "The interesting question is whether AIs would just recreate the same structural dynamics with different failure modes."