Many people are aware of something of particular interest to them which conventional wisdom gets badly wrong but assume that one thing is all that really needs to be fixed while the status quo is otherwise fine. Once you escape your silo and start seriously looking around, it becomes obvious that most things you take for granted are pretty much stuffed too. This presentation to CVAF highlights a few of them and argues that adversary systems are no longer fit for purpose.

1. Slaughtering Sacred Cows
most things you take for granted
are pretty much stuffed too
Tony Smith
Central Victorian Atheists & Freethinkers
16 October 2019

2. the land was invaded
and people who weren’t here were killed
Myron Lysenko
Woodend Poet
1 August 2016

3. Beyond Adversarial
Kororoit Institute
Presentation to #NELAugh EES IAC
Cover of two September presentations
Informed Dissentno secrets and no need for secrets

4. We are already in the thrall of a vast, world-spanning
machine that, due to errors in its foundational
programming, has developed a disdain for human
beings, is working to make them irrelevant, and resists all
attempts to bring it back under control. It is not yet
intelligent or autonomous, and it still depends on its
partnership with humans, but it grows more powerful and
more independent every day. We are engaged in a battle for
the soul of this machine, and we are losing. Systems we
have built to serve us no longer do so, and we don’t
know how to stop them.
If you think I’m talking about Google, or Facebook, or some
shadowy program run by the government, you’d be wrong.
I’m talking about something we refer to as “the market.”
To understand how the market, that cornerstone of
capitalism, is on its way to becoming that long-feared rogue
Al, enemy to humanity, we first need to review some things
about artificial intelligence. And then we need to
understand how financial markets (often colloquially, and
inaccurately, referred to simply as “Wall Street”) have
become a machine that its creators no longer fully
understand, and how the goals and operation of that
machine have become radically disconnected from
the market of real goods and services that it was
originally created to support. (my emphases)
Tim O'Reilly's concluding paragraphs to his
introductory section of the final chapter (11) of
setting out the problematic exposed by Occupy.
I've had increasing overlap with O'Reilly's involvements
including internet technologies and open source from
around 2000, though without his continuing immersion
in the high peak of triumphalism that is Silicon Valley.

5. Figure 4 from Alfred Korzybski’s Science and
Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian
Systems and General Semantics [1933], with
Tim O’Reilly’s annotations from 2012 essay
Language is a Map. Korzybski argued that
many psychological and social aberrations
can be seen as problems with language,
observed “the map is not the territory”, and
developed General Semantics, a field O’Reilly
found via George Simon and Easlan Institute.

6. Diary 21st October 2008: B-Heptomino proto spaceship in b3/s023 (…) quick once
over on other Generations CAs which left LOTE as the most interesting (…)
22nd: r-Pentonimo seed reveals (at least) one persistent puffer based on the same
proto spaceship nose, producing a large lozenge overnight in 20K+ gens on Golly
31st: monitoring Golly running my 8 seed each time I call home
1st November: Make initial post to Golly list. (…) Rerun on the MacBook the vital
period I had been asleep through on the iMac. It is beyond amazing.
Some cellular automata “demonstrate creative synergy
between even deterministic chaos and emergent order”
Live presentation featured 5 minute animation of original
emergence of first track-laying engine observed under
Generations 345/3/6, aka LOTE, cellular automata rule,
viewable at: https://vimeo.com/225496441

7. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category
Errors, Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to
Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of
Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of
Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility
SUPERVENIENCEhow emergent minds and money
seize power over matter

8. Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that
consume everything around them and then themselves.
Tyson Yunkaporta
Are we walking
the Ant Road?

9. The Map
is not the
Territory

10. Parasitism by
Language at heart
of the Problem

11. Adversarial
“Justice” or just
Revenge?

12. Is Evolution more
by Deprecation than
by Innovation?
Evidence that deletions are a significant driver of evolution has
been so persuasive that suggestions have even been made that
bacteria and archaea originated as freed eukaryotic organelles.
While that seems likely a bridge too far, a quarter century ago
during masters studies, the early commercial internet focussed
me on thoughts of Metaselection for Evolutionary Innovation.
The central thesis of this essay is that an extended history of variation and
selection will ‘metaselect’ for capacity to innovate. As evidence for this thesis we
include the biochemical evidence for complex dynamics of the eukaryotic genome
and the paleontological evidence for extinction events being the dominant selector
of higher taxa. From that evidence it will be argued that it is useful to describe a
significant portion of the sources of evolutionary variation as ‘innovation’, albeit
with the obligatory disclaimers about teleological implications. Old analogies into
the social and cognitive domains will be reexamined, especially their consequent
implications of optimality, and new ones based on metaselection for innovation
will be explored. To those ends it will be necessary to confront some of the
combinatorial mathematics of possibilities and actualities, as well as to examine
the limits of applicability of evolutionary epistemology. By way of conclusion this
essay will note possible barriers to invoking innovation as a component of recent
speculations on cosmological evolution.

13. Loving
Life to
Death

14. Mythologies
of Leadership and
Governance

15. Gaming
Government
Procurement

16. Masters of
Business
Administration
Governance
Non Government Organisations
Outsourcing
Share Options
Commercial in Confidence
Key Performance Indicators
Chief Executive Officers
Contracts
American Hegemony
Hollywood
Military Industrial Complex
Aerospace Industry
Harvard MBA
Externalities
Creative Accounting
Lawyers Legislating
Make Work
Bankers Financing
Profit Margins
Compound Interest
Consumer Churn/Credit
Minimum Wage
Compulsory Insurance
Accreditation
Level Playing Field

17. National
Broadband
Network
Around 1984 authored a feature article on Networking for
Australian Micro Computerworld which led to invitation to lead
full day professional development event on same subject
While completing a MSc course and Why The Web? involved
in series of consultancies on education technology policy,
one of which was for the Broadband Services Expert Group

18. Money
can’t be
Saved
Why Are Rich People So Mean?
The Spanish word aislar means both “to
insulate” and “to isolate,” which is what most
of us do when we get more money. We buy a
car so we can stop taking the bus. We move
out of the apartment with all those noisy
neighbors into a house behind a wall. We stay
in expensive, quiet hotels rather than the
funky guest houses we used to frequent. We
use money to insulate ourselves from the risk,
noise, inconvenience. But the insulation
comes at the price of isolation. Our comfort
requires that we cut ourselves off from chance
encounters, new music, unfamiliar laughter,
fresh air, and random interaction with
strangers. Researchers have concluded again
and again that the single most reliable
predictor of happiness is feeling embedded in
a community. In the 1920s, around 5 percent
of Americans lived alone. Today, more than a
quarter do—the highest levels ever, according
to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the use of
antidepressants has increased over 400
percent in just the past twenty years and
abuse of pain medication is a growing
epidemic. Correlation doesn’t prove causation,
but those trends aren’t unrelated. Maybe it’s
time to ask some impertinent questions about
formerly unquestionable aspirations, such as
comfort, wealth, and power.
Christopher Ryan, WIRED
26 September 2019
Tim O’Reilly, again: “technology is being used
for cost reduction rather than to empower
people and to reach for the stars not because
that is what technology wants, but because it
is what the legal and financial system we have
built demands.”
“(M)any of the companies in the technology
industry we are part of were playing by very
different rules. They were not getting paid by
exchanging goods and services with
customers, but by persuading investors to give
them money.”
“These companies, often sold for billions of
dollars, are valued not based on some multiple
of their sales, profits, or cash flows, but for
expectations of what they might become,
promoted like fake news in a market of
attention.”
Citing Bill Janeway: “the object of speculation
is the financial representation of one of those
fundamental technological innovations—
canals, railroads, electrification, automobiles,
airplanes, computers, the Internet—
deployment of which at scale transforms the
market economy.”
“George Goodman, a financial writer who
published under the pseudonym Adam Smith,
calls this ‘supermoney.’ (…) Supermoney is at
the heart of today’s growing financial
inequality. Most people exchange their goods
and services for ordinary money; a lucky few
get paid in supermoney.”

19. Nothing is more
Dangerous than
too much Safety

20. Heritage &
Environmental
Protection

21. Attention
Deficit
Disorder

22. Then in the 1990’s the revolution in *non-equilibrium
thermodynamics* began with the development of the fluctuation
theorems, and people realized quickly that electron and proton
transfer reactions weren’t odd exceptions to the thermodynamic/
kinetic divide but instead they were just the only reactions
simple enough that the reaction coordinate in *phase space*
could be identified with a single, 1D distance in *real space,* and
this is basically what allowed (chemistry Nobel laureate Rudy)
Marcus to develop his theory for electron transfer without the
use of the theory of measure spaces. Phase space or configuration
space for a point-particle with no internal structure can be
mapped directly to real space but can’t for systems that have
internal parts that can also change configuration—I think it’s
possible that this same simplification also allowed quantum field
theory to get off the ground in the early days.
Anyway, at least as early as the ’00s there was a community of
researchers in non-equilibrium thermodynamics that understood
that Marcus theory was a simplification of non-equilibrium
thermodynamics that you can get away with in the special limit-
case that the geodesic between initial and final states in the
phase space of the reaction corresponds to a single distance in
real space that can easily be measured and controllably varied
while the reaction rate is simultaneously measured. Extending
Marcus theory to chemistry in general requires that this real
distance be replaced with the path length of the shortest phase-
space trajectory that leads from reactants to products, and if the
phase space has lots of structure, i.e. it is “rugged” with lots of
local extrema, then this can be a huge pain that isn’t at all
practical, but the path-length in phase space is what determines
reaction rates for all reactions in general, and when it happens to
correspond to a physical distance that represents a case where
the non-eq analysis of the reaction is simple and a Marcus-like
expression will accurately predict the rate.
Joseph Brisendine to EDU-talk 11 October 2019
Liquid
Solid
Matter

23. Murray
Darling
Basin
Nature Glenelg Trust
Mark Bachmann

24. Anti–
Toxic Waste
Alliance

25. Disrupting
Recreational
Drug Supply

26. Holocene as
Geological epoch
Anthropocene

27. Child
Protection
Racket

28. Cultural
Guidance before
Fledging

29. Health
& Aged Care
Industries

30. From ABC South West Vic
Key points:
• For the past 30 years, short-tailed shearwaters, known as mutton birds,
have arrived at an island near Port Fairy,Victoria, in late September
• So far, only a handful of the migratory birds have turned up, out of a
usual colony of 40,000
• Climate variability or food availability in the northern hemisphere may
have delayed the birds’ arrival
For the past 30 years, the south-westVictorian population has arrived at
Griffiths Island, near Port Fairy, a day either side of September 22.
Birds, Fish
& the Insect
Apocalypse

31. Housing
in Flammable
Cladding

32. Early August in Melbourne
Meanwhile in Tasmania

33. Colonial v Indigenous
From all directions, the commentariat
still demand singular cause and singular
remedy, refusing to even admit that we
live in an extravagantly multifactorial
world, or that it is humans with a colonial
mentality and our creations which have
assumed disproportionate agency while
minimising our responsibility.
For over thirty years, I’ve been trying to
find what might be “Beyond Democracy:
the prospect of an informed age” but now
we have the imagined transparency in
spades, that colonial mentality either
fears its potential or actively amplifies
those fears in narrow self interest.
Increasingly other species are
communicating an awareness that their
continuance demands working with
humanity, but linguistically-colonised
humanists remain blind to the need to
welcome those others to the conversation.
So we continue to indiscriminately
destroy things far more admirable than
anything we can create in our moment of
“economic” delusion.

34. Having connected exploring the potential of
microcomputers in the early ’80s, Bill Hall
and I linked up again mid noughties after
independently landing in complex systems.
CVAF introduced us to Lynne Kelly whose
thesis answered separate open questions in
significant individual areas of interest.
I’ve long preached “we have more to learn
from them than they have from us” and
now need to generalise “them” to “the
other” to reflect linguistic obscurity.
Fifty plus millennia ago the leading edge of
humanity organised the most ambitious
invasion ever attempted, colonising a land
of marsupials and monotremes that had
also hosted songbird diversification.
Those first people pioneered what Tim
Flannery called “future eating” then soon
enough established a more respectful
relationship with the land and each other.
Government is a protection racket primarily
interested in its own jobs and growth, even
the best intentioned members losing touch
as their diaries take control of their time.

35. Suggestions! Questions?
Bovine eunuchs reflecting on Campaspe
opposite Botanic Gardens
on detour en route Kyneton CVAF
19 November 2014

36. Spelling out the embedded links
Tim O’Reilly’s 2012 essay Language is a Map
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20121029141916-16553-language-is-a-map/
My 1993 essay Metaselection for Evolutionary Innovation
http://www.meme.com.au/theoria/metaselection.html
My 1995 MSc research paper Why The Web?
http://www.meme.com.au/papers/WTW/
Christopher Ryan’s 2019 article Why Are Rich People So Mean?
https://www.wired.com/story/why-are-rich-people-so-mean/
Joseph Brisendine’s 2019 post to EDU-talk re thermodynamics and kinetics
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/edu-talk/IKthfv161Qs/N6GRXV1qAgAJ
Mark Bachmann’s Nature Glenelg Trust
http://natureglenelg.org.au
Tasmanian Jamie Graham-Blair is decolonising environmentalism to save the planet
https://i-d.vice.com/amp/en_au/article/8xzz7g/indigenous-activist-decolonising-
environmentalism