The Based Network
We love this German woman.
Her name is Sabine Hossenfelder and she’s got it. You know. The thing. She knows what she’s talking about. She speaks from the gut - the kind of gut you only develop from the life of the mind, where you don’t have to pull your punches to call out nonsense and wishful thinking because you’ve actually done the real thinking. She’s the kind of person who checks herself, and so far even with 1.4 million subscribers, she hasn’t wrecked herself. (ahem Neil, you talk too slow on your videos). No, she’s not a politician.
But hey, I’m just an amateur writer doing this instead of reading, cooking, gardening and spoiling grandchildren which is what I should be doing if I would have been a bit more cynical in my 30s when I had no idea how stupid this country would get. I would have never left the idea of Wall Street Master of the Universe. Yeah, but I thought I could be well-rounded. Meh. I’m not complaining really. I have thousands of subscribers without whom this home office would be very lonely. Yet I am so glad that there are, globally, so many other fans of Sabine. We’re something of a network. A reality based network.
It has been a while since I read Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower. I confess that there is only so much reality based information I can handle, so I tend to read way more history than current events. NF’s history runs graphs around the great man theory of history with a bit of structuralism. Except the structure is a network which is not strictly hierarchical. He notes that about half of all Americans believe that history is controlled by a small networked hierarchies (the towers) and yet they, and many historians underestimated the many in the crowd (the squares). Consider the idea that ‘lost’ in the crowd where the Pope is being announced are James Bond, John Wick, Jack Bauer and Obi Wan Kenobi. They each know something but they’re not inside St. Peter’s and they’re all renegades of a sort loosely associated with other agencies that are not directly connected to anything but ground truth.
It’s not the hierarchical cabal that make everything happen. There are markets. These days, that means information markets, because in lands of infrastructural plenty, it’s about how you navigate. That requires the intelligence. That requires the ability to distinguish the meat from the chicken feed. That’s not to suggest that cabals don’t exist - they do. They make all kinds of attempts to storm the towers, but they do not control the swarm of the square. There are asymmetrical knowledge networks. As the poet said and I often quote. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. If you’re watching CNN, you’re always too late.
These days, people remain focused on expectations of Democrats and Republican party bosses to figure out how to install their figureheads into the Oval Office. That’s a game for last century. Let it continue, but don’t put all of your chips on that table. I like the metaphor of The Devil’s Card Game. The more you have, the longer you can play. I’m not sure the USA has already pulled the devil card, and now have to play until the end. But you see, I’m already using game theory, not party loyalty oaths, to figure out my self-interest.
There’s a time and a place for nationalist sentiment, and for me that revolves around the rule of law, the maintenance of order, and the priorities around public safety, civil liberty, infrastructure and national security. Since I don’t believe our society will lockup, nor will our markets seize up, I’m being too sanguine to consider expatriation. After all, I do live in California. But. I often think of myself as someone who has heard the Boston Symphony and am stuck in Oklahoma in the 19th century. Sometimes you have to get your sense and sensibility imported - not just from nations but from networks. And here is Sabine telling me that Green Germans are just as stupid as our domestic renewable fanatics. Well, I’m rudely clipped about it, but one knows affinity at first sight. We’re in the same network.
Merit
Out here in the square, protocol is our power. Fidelity to high standards and continued study and review are our differentiators. Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes one a practitioner, and practitioners have their advantages by dealing with ground truth. Call me a peasant practitioner. This is my definition of merit. Sabine has got it, that’s the thing.
There will be merit in the square, and merit in the tower. A network of merit is a force to be reckoned with. Merit is the least corrupt form of hierarchy. Merit will triumph in the end over a conspiracy of cabals.
That conspiracy diagram looks a lot like a game of Illuminati I played once, only as a diagram instead of a network of cards.