One Year of Medium
I started posting on Medium in December 2022, and this is my 488th offering. My experiment began, however, in 2011 with a website where I posted blog-like articles, though not in chronological order, but more in a book format of main chapters (21) and supportive subchapters (303) and graphics (3,240).
Over the years I did get articles read by those who may know enough to have an opinion (scientists, academics, authors, engineers), but bottom line is that those I know of who have read more than two or three offerings can be counted on one hand, and little constructive criticism has been offered.
This would be understandable if I am not even wrong, as if so, then any attempt to correct my claims would be viewed as a waste of time. This would explain why corrections are not offered. It is easier to dismiss dissonant idiosyncratic claims that fail to accord with consensus narratives no matter what evidence or reasoned claims are offered.
To test other waters, I started answering Quora questions in 2019, and in three years had answered 576 with 60 followers and 262.6K content views, which seems significant enough to draw valid conclusions. I stopped posting a year and a half ago due to Quora moderator canceling. I had enough evidence that one of the followers read most if not all posts based on multiple comments, but no one followed breadcrumbs to give my offerings a careful hearing as evidenced by critical feedback (on Medium one reader has offered critical feedback).
So just because I could, I tried Medium that attracts a different population of readers (Substack is for sending newsletters to subscribers, free or paid, i.e. for writers who have readers, but at some point I may try it just because). In one year I now have 97 followers (top Medium writer has 306K followers) of which 3 get an email notification when I post an offering. Two have opined that I should have more followers. Data is neither good nor bad, but what-is, which is what I value. The only bad is a failure to interpret data, to misread it.
I have also had another source of data, two by-invitation listservs whose members are at the top of multiple fields (I’m guessing most are hyperintelligent pan-dimensional white mice, but I could be wrong) mostly in science (e.g. physics to systems ecology) and the humanities (e.g. philosophy, poetry). In both I have only the distinction of having the least amount of formal education of any member, but none are impressed by mere PhD level types as most learned more after getting a PhD than while getting it (see Gibson’s Law).
Skipping the PhD pathway is unusual, but not disqualifying among white mice. When I am within the consensus narrative, my offerings are appreciated, and when outside, ignored. This is the dynamic I observe at all levels, from Facebook, Quora, Medium, and elite discussion groups. Or as Emily Dickenson noted, “assent and you are sane, demur and you’re straightway dangerous and handled with a chain” if ignoring you doesn’t work. I tend not to make it impossible to be ignored as I foresee no positive outcome by doing so.
To have a worldview/mindset that seems idiosyncratic (e.g. that of H.T. Odum to most other ecologists) is viewed as a threat by our amygdala mediated prefrontal cortex’s tribal or supertribal identity that all political and organized religious animals have. I usually avoid using a word like “all,” but in this case, all belief-based cognition is threatened by abelieving/antibelieving mindsets unable to (through no fault of their own) believe in belief (unable to view belief-based cognition as other than cognitive pathology).
It is as if we products of the expansionist form of society had a gun put to our heads as children (before age 7) and told that everyone (the global society of the right thinking) doesn’t care what we believe, what our deeply held beliefs may be (having and being had by one’s beliefs is a human right to be celebrated), but we’d better have cherished beliefs as holies of holies (to be a real/normal right thinking human). The condition of not having (and thereby being had by) beliefs believed to be certainly true is unthinkable, and therefore worse than death which clearly can happen, and so is thinkable to some at times.
We moderns swim in a belief-based sea of error, ignorance, and illusion that is so ever present as to go unnoticed, unquestioned (as fish are imaged to not be aware of water unless they jump out of it). Consensus narratives vary and individuals self-select into them, but to demur has the same avoidance outcome in all groups with occasional exceptions within non-belief-based groups, e.g. inquiry-based science, scholarship, religion, and the arts (a minority within each as believing minds in all prevail to serve overcomplex society — for a time).
The two worldviews/mindsets/cultures/forms of civilization are the expansionistic, techno-industrial, monetary, belief-based, human-centric, r-culture worldview, and the matter-energy-systems inquiry-based, nature-centric, K-culture worldview. These are two ways of construing reality, life, the universe, and everything. They are incompatible. No planet is big enough for the two worldviews.
“Monetary culture” vs matter-energy system worldview. — M. King Hubbert
‘Li’ is Chinese for the laws — organizing principles — of the cosmos.
Technocracy and ecological economics were/are transitional.
Naturocracy: Technocracy for the 21st century.
Note: our humancentrism renders us incompatible with persisting as a lifeform on this planet.
So all you wannabe Borg, start by moving to Mars to serve Elon Musk in his retirement
where as a transhuman he will live for centuries and as a brain in a vat,
he’ll serve hu-manity as the millennia go by.
No form of civilization can be based on both of them. The current world order is remorselessly human centric. It has recently (post sputnik to win a space race and grow the economy faster) been valued “for the milk and cheese and profit it brings” to the growth hegemon of the monetary culture. An inquiry-based nature-centric form of civilization, inclusive of philosophy, religion and the arts, has yet to emerge, nor has a condition of abelief been remotely normalized.
Could it be? The smallest subunit of a viable society is a band of 20–50 trusted others. To form, individuals who would renormalize will be scattered far and wide. If there are 20-50 worldwide, abelievers would have to “vote with their feet” to relocate to a potentially viable region, guess as to what may work to renormalize, and then test. If 20 to 50 such groups were to relocate to one area, they could learn from one another about what works, and the condition of multiple bands in an area is a long term need as exogamy is a need.
So 20 groups of 20 (400), or as the average band size is 28, then 28 bands of 28 members (784) up to a maximum of 50 bands of 50 members (2500) defines the viable size of a social group (community/village/settlement) per human ecology norms pre-expansion. Are there 784 people on the planet (1 in 10 million) willing and able to vote with their feet? So far, all evidence and indicators are negative.
But when our belief in growth faulters, and our belief in belief can be questioned, change currently unimaginable will be inevitable. Change along a potentially viable pathway will be what is needed to persist long term.
Attempts to Communicate My Idiosyncratic Concerns Summary
- Website: Began posting webpages in 2011. Currently 326 HTML/PHP articles.
- Graphics: 3,240 (.jpg 1920; .gif 1016; .png 304), not including 755 Photoshop files used to construct original or modified graphics, some infographics taking days to weeks to develop.
- Conferences: Seven so far, e.g. biophysical economics, ecological economics, emergy, degrowth, and skeptical inquiry.
- Quora: 576 questions replied to/’answered’, 262.6K reply views, 60 followers, 1 Quora space.
- Medium: 487 posts, 96 followers, 6,564 ‘views’, 4,120 ‘reads’, one Medium Publication, and 12 lists.
- Listservs: Active on two by invitation email groups. About 80 members total, 40 each.
- YouTube channel.
- Other social media: Facebook. Website comments and other interactive media, including face time on the streets, is social media and is limited to consensus narratives. Creating new narratives is resisted (unless they can be Liked and Shared).
- Face time on the streets. As a citizen science project I’ve put in about 1200 hours on the streets of assorted cities protesting unsustainable growth and denial. The experiment will end after 1,742 hours, so another 500 and some hours to go. So far, I’ve interacted with an estimated 14k passersby, of whom 233 paused to read my protest signs, and 98 spoke to me to comment or ask questions, 34 took a small piece of paper with the URL of my website on it, and based on a short conversation, one shares my ecolate concerns.
Apart from protesting on the streets (1–8 above), I’ve made contact with several humans who share my concerns — countable on one hand, and only one who is also focused on doings something (to bring about a viable form of civilization) that could have a long-term outcome of human persistence (Jack Alpert), and his endeavors have, so far, had about the same outcome as mine. His list of those sharing his concerns is longer (countable using both hands and some toes), but he has ‘been at it’ for over 50 years to my mere 12 as a dilettante. He at least has a PhD and has written three books that remain unpublished (but free online). Maybe I’ll write a book (in two volumes, the larger for information cited as no internet nor open libraries can be assumed long term). But I will not expect a different outcome (readers countable on one hand).
Human response to dissonant information (concerns) may have implications for our ability to persist long term
I suspect that consensus belief-based thinking may be the death of us, so better to beg to differ than seek to cancel others (with sometimes extreme prejudice as is increasingly common even within academies and among those who endeavor to listen to Nature, inclusive of scientists and poets). I continue to beg humans to consider the possibility they might be wrong (about everything).
I assume I know nothing, and I’ve never been proved wrong yet. I find myself increasingly being reminded of William Rees’ words that could well be chiseled on a memorial, a headstone for humanity, by the last human as a summing up of modern humanity: ‘too clever by half and not nearly smart enough’.
To Rees’ claim that ‘keeping up the battle for degrowth is a good thing, but there had better be an organization of information for those who make it through the crash so they have a chance to avoid repeating history moving forward’. I would add the same thought from the past, from systems ecologist H.T. Odum (I’m some sort of Odumite, it seems, though I try not to be a mindless follower):
‘If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing…. Seek out the condition now that will come anyway.’
About 60k years ago, the progenitors of almost all of us (genetically if not culturally), may have numbered 1k to 10k breeding pairs of humans in Africa. This does not mean that all humans except these few died off in a near extinction event. A genetic bottleneck could mean that those who became our ancestors were able to persist and displace other humans without significantly interbreeding with them and eventually all other hominins (not saying good or bad) on the planet. The only humans whose ancestors predate the Great Human Expansion are the San, Hadza, and Pygmy.
And about 7k to 5k years ago, there was a significant Y-chromosome bottleneck. There was no die-off of men, but only a few men became progenitors of us. On average, 17 women 5k-7k years ago had children by the same father. Some 64% of modern European males can trace their paternal lineage back to just 3 male progenitors. During the Indo-European expansion, on the leading edge, there were about 10 men to one Indo-European woman (hint, >9/10 were not monogamous). With high-intensity agriculture needed to build empire, slavery became obligatory and male slaves didn’t get to breed the women. The owner had ‘concubines’ perhaps organized to breed as a harem, and would have many sons who had to serve and those who did with enthusiasm knew reproductive success. When expansionist males conquer new domains or fight with other clans to build empire, the winners typically end up killing the adult males and breeding the females (see Old Testament). Oh, but as a political domesticant (and maybe an old school religious or secular consumerist) you probably don’t want to know this kind of stuff, so never mind.
There were humans who were morphologically Homo sapiens sapiens living in and out of Africa over a million years ago who did not become our ancestors. Our ancestors left Africa a bit over 50k years ago to rapidly spread and displace all other humans and hominins on the planet (except San, Hadza, Pygmy). They could have been different in some way that gave them a competitive advantage, but such guesses must remain speculative, though their rapid expansionist behavior is not whether attributable to genetic and/or cultural mutations.
Perhaps they acquired an ability to live successfully in larger groups (so maybe only one change: their Dunbar’s number goes up to 150 while everyone else remains at 75 or less). This change would not show in the fossil record, but in competition or conflict, a larger group could win. Not an extraordinary claim, but speculative as we actually know nothing. Perhaps the change was not entirely genetic, but cultural (memetic).
My point, as if I had one, is that posterity, 50k years from now, may not be able to claim 8 billion humans of today as their genetic/memetic ancestors. They may have knowledge of us (maybe information is not lost but preserved/recovered) and they may be forced to acknowledge that they are genetic/memetic descendants of 2k to 20k humans (or 0.000025% to 0.00025% of today’s human population post bottleneck.
This is not a story anyone tells (or could Like and Share on social media). It is not the solution we seek (we want to double down on Business As Usual or gimme a Green New Deal at least), but as an alternative to extinction, it is a possible future, i.e. a viable future in which humans persist and again become evolvable subsystems of Gaia.
As James Lovelock has guessed, what is implied is that someday, if humans do not go extinct, that ‘someday there will be a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly’. As is increasingly obvious, we modern techno-industrial humans, the 99.9+%, do not understand the planet and cannot live with it in such a way as to persist. The someday human Lovelock envisions may have to be different, at least memetically, from we who are ‘too clever by half and not nearly smart enough’ to persist and get right with Mother (Gaia).
As I also am thinking likely, we are at high risk of seriously (fatally) ‘underestimating the difficulty of avoiding a ghastly future’. The idea to perhaps consider is that we don’t have to envision saving the world (humanity) in any global sense. As few may agree (or none), we are not going to come up with a solutionatique that transitions 8 billion humans (via a prosperous way down a majority can agree to) to seek to rapidly degrow our population (via a managed birth-off to avoid a Malthusian die-off) to perhaps 7 to 35 million whose culture (based on foresight intelligence) would be unthinkable (e.g. no one has a car or smartphone) to 99.999+% of 2023 humans (though a ‘teachable moment’ could rapidly change what is thinkable).
Oh, but what if as many as 0.0001% where not only willing but able to transition to a viable complex society (after voting with their feet to auto-organize within pockets of potentially viable areas) able to persist as the millennia pass, and displace (not necessarily by force as they could merely not ‘go down with the ship’) those who were persisting only for a time by fighting to see who inherits the rubble?
The probability of such change could be greater than coming up with another call to action (the right one, this time, unlike all prior ones) that 4.1 billion humans could vote for, one that could also actually work, and that the 4.1 billion are actually able to nudge the 3.9 billion to foundationally change to become more and more (rapidly of course) like the 4.1 billion who responded to the call to action (to if they can’t beat them, compete, to join them).
Or maybe someone could shift the paradigms of as many as 0.00051% of humans (more likely than 51%?) who come to define a pathway towards a potentially viable future and allow those able to self-select into an endeavor to change, to vote with their feet and…, is a plan that has a more likely chance (by maybe 5–6 orders of magnitude) of having a viable outcome leading to a human who understands the planet and can live properly with it (as distinct from believing that they can).
Have a happy post-Anthropocene, posterity.