User Is Content – Page 11 – Culture Is Our Business

Nassim Nicholas Taleb – The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

If you want to be a dentist, it's rational to assume that if you go to school, get your degree, and set up a dental practice, you will be able to attain a comfortable standard of living. You may be able to project your probable income range with some degree of accuracy.
But if you want to be a rock star, it's irrational to assume that if you go to rock school, get good at guitar, and start a band, you will become rich and famous.
According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's way of thinking, the dentist and the wannabe rock star fall into two distinct categories with drastically different risk characteristics. The dentist falls into the domain he calls 'Mediocristan', and the rock star, 'Extremistan'. Extremistan is dominated by 'fat tails', or rare but profoundly significant events. Problems arise when we think we're operating in Mediocristan but in fact are operating in Extremistan."Karl Marx wanted to turn knowledge into action, what I want to do is turn our lack of knowledge into action". Taleb suggests that by becoming aware of our own ignorance, we can stop taking action where our action is irrational.
I'm on my second reading of Fooled By Randomness and am very much looking forward to The Black Swan. In the meantime I've been hunting down all the audio I can find on Taleb because his talks are extremely interesting and he is a very engaging speaker. He has a bit of attitude when addressing an audience, in part no doubt because much of what he has to say offends of lot of people, especially anyone whose expertise is related to forecasting. He has obvious disdain for financial forecasters in particular, probably because he sees the impact these 'guys in suits riding around in limousines' have on the lives of 'people taking the subway to work everyday' (i.e.pensions).
What Taleb has to say has resonated with me at a very deep level. Much of the facts and studies he brings to light confirm my long lingering suspicion that something about the way the world sees itself is profoundly inaccurate and weirdly irrational.
I've listened to each of these talks at least a half dozen times and every time I do I take away another profound insight. Be sure to check out Taleb's Home Page as well.
Taleb on EconTalk.org April 30, 2007
LongNow Lecture-The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought Feb. 4, 2007
And from PopTech 2005:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is not afraid to say "I don't know." In fact, he's proud of his ignorance. A mathematician, philosopher and hedge-fund manager all in one iconoclastic package, Taleb demonstrates the wisdom in admitting the limitations of our knowledge.

Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis

A lot of noise on the internet today around a recently published article in a new journal called Time and Mind by cognitive psychology professor Benny Shanon on the subject of Moses and Entheogens.

Abstract:
A speculative hypothesis is presented according to which the ancient Israelite religion was associated with the use of entheogens (mind-altering plants used in sacramental contexts). The hypothesis is based on a new look at texts of the Old Testament pertaining to the life of Moses. The ideas entertained here were primarily based on the fact that in the arid areas of the Sinai peninsula and Southern Israel there grow two plants containing the same psychoactive molecules found in the plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca is prepared. The two plants are species of Acacia tree and the bush Peganum harmala. The hypothesis is corroborated by comparative experiential-phenomenological observations, linguistic considerations, exegesis of old Jewish texts and other ancient Mideastern traditions, anthropological lore, and ethnobotanical data.

The entire 25 page article can be downloaded for free from here (scroll down to bottom of page, if the pdf link stops working let me know in the comments, I have a copy.)

ayahuasca

peyote

magic mushrooms

	Utah High Court OKs Non-Indian Peyote Use New York Newsday – Jun 23 2004
	American Indian church leader sues Utah officials over 2000 peyote raid KATC – Apr 28 2005
	'Medicine man' arrested on peyote charges Centre Daily Times – Jun 24 2005
	Study: Religious peyote use not harmful to American Indians KESQ – Nov 4 2005
	Charges dropped vs. couple in peyote case Macon Telegraph – Feb 23 2006
	Netherlands bans magic mushrooms TREND Information – Oct 12 2007

See Also:
This is an article in two parts. The first part discusses current research in psychoactive preparations of ergot in various religious systems with a particular emphasis on Persian, Greek, Jewish and Islamic sources.
Incense is psychoactive: Scientists identify the biology behind the ceremony.

Squares & Cubicles (Guest Post By Amber)

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=squares

http://images.google.com/images?q=cubicles

Anxiety Culture

Fun, Bob-meets-Discordia web magazine Anxiety Culture. Great graphics too.

The cliché, "never put off until tomorrow..", can be reversed for people who worry about problems. It's always better to postpone worrying. An effective postponement device is the "˜worry sheet', which is a piece of paper for writing down your problem/worry as it occurs – so you can forget it now, and deal with it at some later date. Minor worries can be postponed indefinitely.

Rather than putting off life's pleasures until after you've solved all your problems (ie after you're dead), you postpone all the worrying until after you've finished having a good time.

Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable by Peter Salonius

from Culture Change.org

Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable

Written by Peter Salonius

Editor's note: The following essay by soil scientist Peter Salonius is Part One of his two-part series for Culture Change that bursts the delusion of agriculture's providing for a large human population long-term. If after reading it you have doubt, read the scientific basis for it: the second part in the series, "Unsustainable soil mining, past, present and future." (A version of the second part was published in the May/June,2007 issue of The Forestry Chronicle.) The author lives in New Brunswick, and he published in Culture Change in 2003 "Energy tax made easy: Modifying human excess with international non-renewable energy taxation" (see link at bottom). – JL

I am convinced that we begin unsustainable resource depletion (overshoot) as soon as we use (and become dependent upon) the first unit of any non-renewable resource or renewable resource used unsustainably whose further use becomes essential to the functioning of society, such as:

THE FIRST TONNE OF COAL
THE FIRST LITRE OF OIL
THE FIRST KILOGRAM OF FISSIONABLE URANIUM
THE FIRST BARREL OF FOSSIL WATER FOR IRRIGATION — and
THE FIRST HECTARE OF FORMERLY NUTRIENT CONSERVATIVE NATIVE FOREST or GRASSLAND/PRAIRIE PLOWED

This last category of unsustainable renewable resource depletion (excessive leaching/export of plant nutrients from arable soils associated with most agricultural practice, and more recently also with harvesting of nutrient-rich forest biomass) has been looming over us, unseen, for 10,000 years. We can expect that it will catch up with us shortly because most of us are dependent on foodstuffs produced by unsustainable farming, and fiber produced by unsustainable forestry.

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=154&Itemid=1

Unsustainable soil mining: past, present and future

Written by Peter Salonius

[This is Part Two of Peter Salonius's two-part series. The first part, "Intensive crop culture for high population is unsustainable", can be viewed by using the link at bottom.] ABSTRACTHuman settlement has increased food production by progressively converting complex, self-managing natural ecosystems with tight nutrient cycles into simplified, intensively managed agricultural ecosystems that are subject to nutrient leaching. (Most agriculture is unsustainable in the long term.)

Conventional stem wood forest harvesting is now poised to be replaced by intensive harvesting of biomass to substitute for increasingly scarce non-renewable fossil fuels. Removal of nutrient-rich forest biomass (harvesting of slash) can not be sustained in the long term.

[Key Words: soil nutrient depletion, biomass harvesting, site productivity]

Introduction

A general discussion of the concept of sustainability was presented by Gatto (1995), who suggested that notions of sustainability "reflect different priorities and optimization criteria, which are notoriously subjective"; however, the goal of maintaining soil-productive capacity is not a subjective notion. In this paper I will show that long term sustainable terrestrial carrying capacity depends on the maintenance of self-managing, nutrient-conservative plant communities.

The dynamic cyclical stability of complex ecosystems has been shown, for most animal populations, to depend on the ability of predators to dampen overshoot and runaway consumption dynamics of prey species (Rooney et al, 2006).

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1

Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 4347, Arcata , California 95518 USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax).

Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.

Horizon: Psychedelic science by Bill Eagles

Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain with a view to understanding ourselves a little better and learning a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick. It's by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, and published by O'Reilly.

And from the Mind Hacks Blog: In 1997, BBC science programme Horizon broadcast a legendary edition on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine. Luckily, it's been uploaded to Google Video and you can now watch the whole thing online. Read more…

Six Degrees of Separation/Connection may be in trouble. Why can't 6/degrees find Osama bin laden?

Six Degrees has problems

ScienceFriday.com's version

Chances are you've heard of the 'small world' idea of six degrees of separation. But is it correct?

The idea traces back to an experiment begun in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, in which he tried to trace how many acquaintances it would take to pass a letter between two randomly selected people. The result that entered the public consciousness was that in general it took six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people. But is that result accurate? Judith Kleinfeld,

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801256

tags, 6 degrees, Kevin Bacon Effect, six degrees, Milgram,

The Future of Search? TrueKnowledge.com

Makes Google look like… 'So 90's'.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/IONdWQwcmxA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

2007 Women's Visionary Congress Audio Recordings

The Women's Visionary Congress is a gathering of healers, activists, researchers and artists who are redefining the use of entheogens in contemporary society. This Congress will address the traditional uses of these substances and investigations into their therapeutic applications. Read more…

Favorites:
Annie Sprinkle
Adele Getty
Kat Harrison
Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia

Long Dark night by John Fogerty

jF
George is in the jungle
knockin' on the door
come to get your children
wants to have a war
Long Dark Night Lyrics

Michael Silverblatt, 'Bookworm', Interviews William Gibson

Unfortunately I can't link directly to the audio. You can subscribe to Bookworm in iTunes (and I highly recommend it). You can listen from this KCRW link to the Gibson interview page.

Spook Country (Putnam)
What's happened to William Gibson? Along with the most sophisticated future-predictions, speculations about the sociology of cities, and adventures in virtual post-realities, he has finally learned how to get his characters from one room to another. We explore this accomplishment (in which he takes a good deal of pride)