A Change Has Been Wrought

My blog, complete with new format, has moved to a different location, Thinkerfeller, on Blogger. Thanks for the reads and comments.
John Frazier aka Basil Brylcreem

The Nature of Shifting Paradigms

Let me state clearly, everything in this blog is derivative of Thomas S Kuhn's landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The reader, possessed of reasonable intellectual talent, would easily do as well or better reading it. I suggest you do so.
First, I wish to emphasize the point that paradigm shifts happen in an instrumentalist fashion. One creates a model of significant explanatory power in terms of natural phenomena, however fluid and idiosyncratic their perception, as a general case. In competition with other models, this model proves the better. It is then, over generations as is the human Way, adopted.
One cannot author a paradigm shift. Any attempt to do so will shortcut the proper role of reason and probably do neurological damage to the brain. That is the classic mistake of the pedagogical megalomaniac who believes that the mind is theirs to shape.
Do Well and Be Well.

Coinage versus Cash and Its Instruments

The intent of this blog is to examine the concept of money with an eye to reducing the current confusion about it by simplifying an analysis by making the taxonomy, historical and conceptual, more complex. And more conceptually difficult, be warned.
Coinage is the act of creating a standard value reference which is the essential act of arbitrage. Such a device allows a rough calculation that determines whether a good may be moved from point A to point B at a profit. Coinage makes trade possible and that's all it does.
Cash, on the other hand, and I am using the term as a taxon of the category, money, in order to separate and contrast the economies of coinage and cash, is an accounting device. It is a value reference of vastly more utility than hard money, coinage. It engenders sophisticated derivatives that make a general prosperity possible.
When the great Classical Liberal economist, Marshall speaks of Labor 'having' as the mark of a functioning economy, he is addressing the crux of the great and vicious arguments of the 20th century. He is of his age and speaking in terms of pounds sterling which were found woefully inadequate to the task of a general prosperity even as technology was taking the possibility of that concept to new heights.  Thus we have institutionalized an accounting device and its liquid instruments as the standard for value reference, a value calculus employed in market operations.
Coinage depends on the supply of precious metal for monetary policy. Cash depends on complex calculations made possible by sophisticated accounting procedures and powerful economic paradigms for its management. It is obvious by inspection that the former is doomed to failure while the latter has a real chance of success.
Where do cryptocurrencies fall in this scheme? They fall significantly into the category, coinage. They are avowedly  anti-bank and reject any notion of rational monetary policy. They are, like all coinage, doomed to failure. It is inherent in their conceptual base.
It is wise to remember that magpies are ridiculously attracted to shiny objects. Gold and silver are a priori valuable to the brain but they belong in beautiful adornments, not in coins of general use.
Do Well and Be Well

Moving and Shaking

If the reader has ever been in a learning environment where a class was graded on a curve, it soon becomes obvious that a handful of people set the curve to which everyone else is graded. They are, in my usage, the movers and shakers of that group.
I have found that usage to be valuable when generalized to macro socioeconomic situations. Essentially, when one examines a consensus mover and shaker, one notices, in today's innovation orgy, they are setting a learning curve in concepts and technology necessary to adoption, acculturation. And just as in school, they appear to be really smart. They would. They're setting the curve to their abilities. That is the whole trick to moving and shaking; setting a curve, learning or grading, to yourself.
This society comes up well short of Mandarin standards so it is easily possible for some fairly limited individuals to set a learning curve to themselves and be welcome to do so as it would be well within the average comfort zone. Of course, that would put society behind the adoption curve when such a person is a mover and shaker and that is not necessarily a bad thing given the onslaught of innovation and the plasticity limits of the human brain.
Moving and shaking as setting a curve to yourself, a useful concept in social analysis.
Do Well and Be Well.

Civilization; Some Thoughts

There are a number of attributes that go into making a human being human and even more that go into making that human a legal person, but the absolute sine qua non of humanity is that humans use technology to deal with reality. It is not just a role such as homo factorem, but an essential and defining attribute. Whether a hammer or a microscope, humans have a technological interface with all reality.
Civilization is no more than technological culture but it goes someplace. It moves humankind to the Light of health, sanity, and peace. What describes the wars of the last century better than a failure of culture to contain new and powerful technology? A failure of civilization? A consensus certainty. So, we build a better technological culture that can contain all our new machine friends and humans do consider technology friendly somewhere in their cells. We rebuild our civilization and continue to move to the Light which is always over our heads so we can read a book.
That is truly Man's Fate, to be a technologist, to be civilized, to move out of Darkness and into Light. It is our Way.
Do Well and Be Well.

The Middle Ages; A Revision

Alternatively to the Middle Ages, we know this period as the Dark Ages and even more to the point of the modern ethos, the Age of Faith. A great age of Faith it was, as advertised, but not dark like the Twentieth century. Peasants and their associations, the village council and guilds, replaced slaves. The Byzantine ethos, Greek and Roman culture conserved under Christian administration, became the common culture. Feudalism was itself arguably Byzantine and like Byzantium, not quite civilized.
There were books, a Byzantine invention, and libraries, private and monastic but above all there was trade. Bismarck's famous observation that war was diplomacy by other means easily extends to trade being war by other means and business was discouraged as injurious to Christian values as there is little room for those values in war.
The grand triumph of economics as the centerpiece of the modern ethos comes obviously at the expense of an extraordinary Byzantine exercise in civilizing barbarians. As the United States, singularly well suited to it, has repeatedly had the role of modernist Byzantium thrust upon it, it is interesting that that description, while encompassing a thousand years of the history of civilization, won't quite fly. It describes the role but omits the philosophical differences.
Just some thoughts marking a personal intellectual journey. I am become revisionist.
Do Well and Be Well.

Information, Ideation, Productivity, and Civilization

Civilization is no more than the attempt to remove humankind from the dismal swamp of Nature and its pathological vagaries in order to induce a common condition of sane cognition. Access to information drives civilization. Ideation drives and is driven by information. Productivity increases are driven by ideation and productivity drives material existence, the limit of the possible of civilization. They are all linked.
The quest of the intellectual exercise which is the central element of civilization is perfect information. Game performance and market performance, a related phenomenon, both improve with better information. Assuming perfect information makes Game Theory analysis possible and that describes the motivation for the evolution of civilization, iterative attempts to achieve perfect information in order to improve performance.
This has resulted in digitization of information. Today, we have digital platforms, Google, Amazon, providing access to digital libraries of databases and paradigms in the attempt to create an easily accessed Library of Civilization, all extant written works. In addition to this Database, there are online attempts to make paradigms accessible, MOOC's, a sort of University of Civilization. The net result of this is to realize the limits of the plasticity of the human brain and that is a driving factor in developing artificial intelligence analysis.
Central to the central element of civilization, the intellectual exercise, is ideation, the creation of ideas. There are three aspects to ideation: intellect, the talent of integrating new information into a coherent body of knowledge; intellectual curiosity, an appetite for information, a hunger for the next fact, the next insight; and access to information, as covered above. These aspects describe the process by which ideas are generated, the ideas which define our possibilities.
Productivity, which is the measure of the efficiency of Labor, describes the process, in Western Civilization, under the tenets of Classical Liberal economics, by which ideas are reified into product and process to the end of the greatest good for the greatest number by which we mean Utility.
By simple logic, the greater the productivity of Labor, the greater the Utility of that economy, to which end we have engaged in a vast program of Research and Development and entrepreneurship. We are are now in a position to judge the consequences of such an exercise. They are:
1. The marginalization of Labor as a production input.
2. As Labor becomes more and more inconsequential to the cost of production, markets, which primarily set the price of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, move into focus as bazaars of arbitrage, a significantly different role.
3. Money, which value is tied to the cost of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, becomes of indeterminate value in such conditions and must seek definition elsewhere.
As this exercise in productivity proceeds we are approaching the point of self-reproducing automata, the mathematical model of which was developed by John von Neumann, which undercuts the assumptions of Classical Liberal economics by making the productivity of Labor approach infinity.
I do not know what economic analysis will replace Classical Liberal economics but I suspect it will include AI as an essential element.
Do Well and Be Well.

Brain Pain: Definition, Mechanisms, and Address

What is this phenomenon that I am calling 'brain pain'? It is the patterns of aberrant behavior which indicate some sort of neurological deficit. That is to say, dislocations, decay, and destruction of neural structures from various causes including but not limited to, acquisition and integration of new information, pathological conditions, substance abuse, and environmental factors as they are exhibited in generally considered aberrant behavior but not felt as actual pain.
Substance abuse and nerve toxins are generally conceded to destroy neural tissue, actual trauma which is largely painless, brain pain. Acquisition and integration of new information causes the dislocation of synapses and dendrites, unfelt trauma, brain pain. It is important to note that the dislocation of neural structure due to acquiring and integrating new information, information overload, is as traumatic as a brain injury in its behavioral effects.
Any superficial neural trauma, not destroying the actual neuron, can be dealt with by creating new neural structure by thinking and hypothesizing. The process of integrating new information should be carried through to a logical end, to the degree possible, to diminish brain pain. Similarly, any microtrauma due to nerve antagonists can be dealt with by reading, thinking, and hypothesizing.
The point of the exercise is to characterize specific behavior patterns as the result of brain pain in order to personally better understand ourselves.
Do Well and Be Well.