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Hello. I enjoyed reading this, but I have a question.

"My theory of information dynamics says that knowledge cannot be maintained without the expense of energy. I'm finding an interesting inefficiency in my gaming lately."

If you do not need to know how to defend the totems are you not being efficient by defeating the game a different way? Perhaps I misunderstand how you use the word inefficiency?

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Jan 15, 2022·edited Jan 15, 2022Author

Glitching is a short-term efficiency. It is a shortcut to winning. It is essentially a cheat. If we teach the cheat and defend that method as a discipline we will always be frustrated by simple maintenance by the world creators, because we will not learn the skills that the world would have us learn. In the end, the glitchers end up on a boat in the ocean thinking they can outsmart the waves without having learned the ropes. It's the difference between a captain and a tourist.

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The habit of calling our Constitutional Republic a Democracy has been developed from many years of referencing the USA as such in the course of conversation and debate, primarily incubated in the political and educational fields. These fields are where most intentional error is incubated. The reason why the founders did not build a Democracy was to avoid the real problem of mob rule. The mob having a monopoly on education, many do not even realize what it is I'm referencing and how this is directly why we have (are supposed to have) an electoral college. We tend to think of a mob rule as the largest group of people ruling over everyone else. This is not the only way. Our biggest problem is comparable to how the mafia accomplished mob rule: a smaller group exercises dominion over a larger group by force and threat of violence and the larger group is stymied by fear., this is mob rule regardless of the size of the mob. Our Constitutional Republic has a Constitution that is the supreme law (not a living thing but laws like the speed limit and not rioting) and representatives voted into office by the citizens. Even wanting democracy is foolishness, that is how dictators and such are developed.

BTW, your haircut is perfect.

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I don't think of America as 'a democracy' per se. I certainly hold disdain and contempt for its populist politics that crowdsources from a national perspective a large number of issues that A: shouldn't be political. B: should be under local control. C: establishes a 'court of public opinion'. One example is the politicization of policing. I too, find mobs to be tyrannical and hysterical.

Philosophically, I support the idea of the open society, and expect there to be cultural solutions to a large number of things many Americans consider to be the domain of government. This expectation reflects a failure of citizenship and self-rule. It is sustained by the narratives of the Culture War and bad media, but also of lowbrow, vulgar culture against a backdrop of materialism.

I hold out some optimism for a more transparent judiciary and expect more Americans to wise up on matter beyond the arrest and street culture. But our tribalism tends toward 'honor culture' which is a very bad idea. (https://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2012/09/honor-killing-the-innocence-of-muslims.html)

I don't care about 'democracy' so much as the range of democratic processes, such as parliamentary procedure, and their place in our improvement of policy in canon and secular law. I care about jurisdictional issues that favor local control and international standards.

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Hi Michael! You missed a step in the ladder of synthesis: data → information → knowledge → understanding → wisdom. And that of course is the civilian version of the ladder, the military version ends in "intelligence" rather than "wisdom", referring to that often mocked but still quite important concept ("military intelligence") of undetermined truths.

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Yeah I thought about going down that rabbithole when I wrote that ladder. I would have had to look at analysis, brainstorming, counterfactuals, known unknowns, consensus methods and that lot. I'm glad you caught that. We must keep our aims in mind. BTW, I once met one of the guys who did polygraphs for new Congressional reps. Very interesting story.

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