2020-03-31
2020-03-30
Recent History of US Epidemiological Preparedness
Jonathan Glassner
March 22 at 12:46 PM (from Facebook)
So I thought I would throw up a little history lesson for everyone on both sides of the political divide. I think it’s important that we understand the truth, especially come November when it’s time to vote. Forgive the length. But, hey we all have time on our hands to read, right?
In December 2013, an 18-month-old boy in Guinea was bitten by a bat. Then there were five more fatal cases. When Ebola spread out of the Guinea borders into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone in July 2014, President Obama activated the Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The CDC immediately deployed CDC personnel to West Africa to coordinate a response that included vector tracing, testing, education, logistics and communication.
Altogether, the CDC, under President Obama, trained 24,655 medical workers in West Africa, educating them on how to prevent and control the disease before a single case left Africa or reached the U.S.
Working with the U.N. and the World Health Organization President Obama ordered the re-routing of travelers heading to the U.S. through certain specific airports equipped to handle mass testing.
Back home in America, more than 6,500 people were trained through mock outbreaks and practice scenarios. That was done before a single case hit America.
Three months after President Obama activated this unprecedented response, on September 30, 2014, we got our first case in the U.S.. That man had traveled from West Africa to Dallas, Texas and had somehow slipped through the testing protocol. He was immediately detected and isolated. He died a week later. Two nurses who tended to him contracted Ebola and later recovered. All the protocols had worked. It was contained.
The Ebola epidemic could have easily become a pandemic. But thanks to the actions of our government under Obama, it never did. Those three cases were the ONLY cases of ebola in our country because Obama did what needed to be done three months before the first case.
Ebola is even more contagious than Covid-19. If he Obama not done these things, millions of Americans would have died awful painful deaths like something out of a horror movie (if you’ve ever seen how Ebola kills, it’s horrific).
It’s ironic that BECAUSE President Obama did these things - we forget that he did them, because the disease never reached our shores.
It’s ironic that BECAUSE President Obama did these things - we forget that he did them, because the disease never reached our shores.
Now the story of Covid 19 and Trump’s response that we know about so far:
Before anyone even knew about the disease (even in China) Trump disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place. He cut funding to the CDC. And he cut our contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Trump fired Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the person on the National Security Council in charge of stopping the spread of infectious diseases before they reach our country - a position created by the Obama administration.
When the Outbreak started in China, Trump assumed it was China’s problem and sent no research, supplies or help of any kind. We were in a trade war, why should he help them?
In January he received a briefing from our intelligence organizations that the outbreak was much worse than China was admitting and that it would definitely hit our country if something wasn’t done to prevent it. He ignored the report, not trusting our own intelligence.
When the disease spread to Europe, the World Health Organization offered a boatload of tests to the United States. Trump turned them down, saying private companies here would make the tests “better” if we needed them. But he never ordered U.S. companies to make tests and they had no profit motive to do so on their own.
According to scientists at Yale and several public university medical schools, when they asked for permission to start working on our own testing protocol and potential treatments or vaccines, they were denied by Trump’s FDA.
When Trump knew about the first case in the United States he did nothing. It was just one case and the patient was isolated. When doctors and scientists started screaming in the media that this was a mistake, Trump claimed it was a “liberal hoax” conjured up to try to make him “look bad after impeachment failed.”
The next time Trump spoke of Covid-19, we had 64 confirmed cases but Trump went before microphones and told the America public that we only had 15 cases “and pretty soon that number will be close to zero.” All while the disease was spreading. He took no action to get more tests.
What Trump did do is stop flights from China from coming here. This was too late and accomplished nothing according to scientists and doctors. By then the disease was worldwide and was already spreading exponentially in the U.S. by Americans, not Chinese people as Trump would like you to believe.
As of the moment I’m posting this, the morning of March 22, 2020, we have 15,220 CONFIRMED CASES in the U.S. The actual number is undoubtedly much higher. But we don’t know because we don’t have enough tests. Why don’t we have enough tests? Remember back when Trump turned down the tests from the W.H.O. and prevented our own universities from developing them? Remember back when Trump had cut the funding to the CDC?
Every time Mr. Trump goes on camera and blames the previous administration for the mess we are now in, I scream at the reporters from FOX, CNN and MSNBC - “Why aren’t you reporting the actual historical facts?!” How dare Trump try to blame Covid-19 on Obama. He has no one to blame but himself.
I hear Republican pundits try to put the blame on China. And they are correct - after all, the disease started there. And the Chinese government handled it poorly and dishonestly. So it’s fair to blame the government of China for the EXISTENCE of the Covid-19 virus. BUT THAT MISSES THE POINT. Obama didn’t blame Ebola on Guinea. He helped them stop it. Trump let the disease invade the U.S.
And he is still not doing all he could to save lives. He keeps talking about invoking The Defense Production Act, but hasn’t actually done so. He’s making the same mistake twice - waiting until it’s too late to take action.
Invoking that act would require factories with the right equipment and know-how to start producing life saving ventilators for our hospitals, protective masks and other gear for our front line health workers. And the plus is it would actually employ people to do so. UPDATE: he just invoked it, FINALLY, way late.
Them’s the facts. Take them as you will. I’ll go back to trying to find toilet paper on-line.
2020-03-29
Tracking and Predicting the CoVID-19 Pandemic
On tracking and predicting the CoVID-19 thing. Disease grow exponentially. Exponential growth works like compound interest. You get paid based on how much you have, and then that gets added to what you have and you get paid on that. if you get 10% interest compounded annually, and you keep $10 in the account for five years, you get:
$10 times 1.1 times 1.1 times 1.1 times 1.1 times 1.1 = $10 times 1.61 = $16.10
By the same token, each sick person infects on average some number of other people, and when they get sick, they each infect that same number, and so on. The number of cases on one day is equal to the number of cases on the previous day times the growth rate. The average growth rate I'm seeing from the CDC.gov data since the beginning of March is 22%. Every day, 22% more people are getting sick. If you have some "historical" data, you can predict the growth rate. If you don't have historical data (numbers with dates) you can't predict anything.
The trouble here is that the number of cases (and deaths, by the way) starts to grow so fast that it gets really confusing, and it all starts to sneak up on you. The numbers are sort of trundling along when all of a sudden BOOM! it goes from "bad" to OMFG! That's bad enough, but it's also hard to tell if our prevention measures are doing any good, if it's getting worse, or maybe starting to get better. You can't tell -- it's a bunch of whacky numbers going up and up.
Note also that we can't see a connection between the total cases and deaths. Are people dying at the same rate? Spoiler alert, the death toll is going to take off and shoot up just like the total cases, but I'd sure like to know when and how many. Can't really see that here.
One way to get a grip on this is to look at our numbers in terms of how fast they're growing, instead of their scary, galloping day to day values. This can be done with the logarithm (which is the "inverse function" of the exponential -- it flattens it out). We take the logarithm of the total cases against the logarithm of new cases each day, and that should (we hope) give us some idea of how it's growing.
The numbers on the sides are now powers of ten (2 = 100, 4 = 1,100, 5 = 100,000). The flat line means both new cases and deaths are growing exponentially at the same rate, not slowing down. What we want to see is both lines turn and drop straight down (China and South Korea did this). They aren't doing that, so we are not on top of this yet, so it's going to keep getting worse. Notice how we can start to compare the death rate and the infection rate, by the way, unlike with the first chart.
Okay, we have a clear idea of what's happening, so now it's prediction time.
Back to compound interest. We have an infection (and maybe death) rate of 22%, so that's 1.22 compound interest multiplier.
Idaho Governor Brad Little "locked down" the State of Idaho on March 25 -- stay at home, only essential businesses, etc. Other Governors had already taken that action or did so around the same time. Let's assume that's going to make a difference. Let's also assume that for fourteen days after that, we'll still see new cases from people already infected and so forth, so we don't expect to see the impact until two weeks later, or April 8.
The latest CDC numbers I have are 103,321 cases on March 27, which is twelve days before April 8. So I assume that the epidemic will continue as it has done, and then hopefully start to drop off during the week leading up to Easter. So the growth we'd expect to see based on these assumptions would be:
103,321 times 1.22 (times itself 12 times = 10.9) = 1,120,000 total cases by April 8
Assuming 22% growth rate for deaths, the total could be 14,000 to 18,000
So our health care system will be overwhelmed (no more beds) by then. Another bad thing is that if unslowed, it will be over two million by Good Friday, and deaths could be over thirty thousand by then. Of course, if the disease kills ten percent, then we'll eventually have a hundred thousand more deaths from the infections up to that time.
Anybody can track whether this prediction is correct by just following the CDC numbers as they come out each day. Hopefully we'll see it slow down before Easter, and this is how to tell. This is not difficult math for someone with a BS in engineering or mathematics (or even accounting), and everybody should understand it.
Anyway, that's my two cents
Jay
PS: Please post comments, including if you find anything that looks like an error.
2020-03-28
2020-03-27
Living With Democracy
Dave
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 10:27 AM"King Donald" is about to throw Dr Fauci and the first responders in this whole country UNDER THE BUS to save the free enterprise system.
Critical thinking is tough! Holding a TRAIN OF THOUGHT is frustrating - I remember poorly parenting FIVE 2 year olds.
I am praying for Anthony and for all medical and other first responders, some of whom are making plans to protect themselves because of their increased risk.
November 2d cannot come fast enough......
On Mar 24, 2020, at 10:44 AM,When do you think the turning point was when the US turned away from logic to become the pathetic nation we are today?Financially fraught as our education system is, at least it's granted me with a few useful skills that I hope to bring to a country worthy of development. Due to the imbeciles that inhabit ours, I don't feel compelled to help this place full of people who don't want to hear the truth and instead prefer religion and narcissism.
Dave
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 12:59 PM
I think it has happened in steps E**.Like: after WWII we kinda wanted stability and got it with IKEThen a millionaire's son and faux liberal.Then an ego maniac.Then a criminalThen a Sunday school teacher admiralThe big step: Regan, the model of loss of critical thinking which attracted those who saw their opportunity to firmly grip the economic, the military and the courts, with a little help from Tony.The BIG step was the election of Obama which totally resurrected the still sleeping racial fears amongst white people along with social technology and the Internet which showed how many folks NOT-LIKE-US there were....Trump is simply the manifestation of our primal fears of the other - 60,000,000 qualified voters are ready to do him again to save our State Religion.One possumbility is that this coming few months could sink us or move us quickly to a major step in the Green "Economy" [with bloodshed in the streets]Sorry I probably won't be with you, my friend, except in spiritu.....KEEP UP YOUR GOOD SCIENTIFIC AND ACTIVELY IMAGINED LIFE DEAR E***.DaveRoving [and possibly annoying] Libarian 🤪🦋
Jay
That pretty well sums it up.
An object lesson in personal powerlessness in the face of highly questionable government and the bewildered feeling of looking at the people around you and wondering “who voted for these people?”
Reagan and Papa and Baby Bush, going to a draft information meeting as we pointlessly squared off against the fourth largest standing army in the world to find that a half-million would have to die before my life would be taken away from me, but that my brother would be first in line for the meat grinder.
Why do they make these decisions? Why are they given this power? Why do I have no power to influence matters, not even by voting?
Obama was the first President whom I voted for who won. But I knew it beforehand because I had a vision that he would back in 1993. The first and only time I knew that things were going to turn out non-horribly, that I wasn’t horrified by the election outcome.
You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
— Abbie Hoffman
By that metric, I feel our nation has measured very poorly indeed.
‘Nuf said, I reck’
Jay
2020-03-26
2020-03-25
2020-03-24
2020-03-23
模倣子 Marriage & Circumcision
Index of Memetic Materials
[ unsaved OP-ED (12/14)]
T R A D I T I O N A L (not S A M E - S E X) M A R R I A G E
A N D C I R C U M C I S I O N
These are two institutions which are under fire these days. The Jews and the heterosexuals like to think that they would like to happily continue practicing them, but other groups either want to start alternatively want to start or stop openly practicing them. The Jews have been practicing circumcision for millennia and the heterosexuals have been practicing different-sex marriage for as long or even slightly longer.
It's in their DNA.
You could even make the argument that circumcision is in Jewish DNA, in their book, in the Talmud, and that their long-time faithful practice of copying and recopying that book and exercising its practices is what has kept them together as a people with a shared identity over time spans that have wiped out and dispersed almost all other people who have ever existed and even across and through the oppressions of The Roman Empire's Diaspora and Nazi Germany's Shoab (Holocaust), to name a few. Down to the copying of the DNA, the Hebrew Talmud is not only a story, it is also a code. The Hebrew alphabet (or Alef-Tov) can also be thought of as a number system, so the Old Testament, or Talmud, can also be thought of as a big mathematical expression, or an organized code, and as such, is more resistant to errors in copying than a simple unremarkable text might be. It exists on multiple levels, and if you disturb or corrupt one of those levels, even in a seemingly innocuous way, it will be felt and probably look like nonsense at some other level, and so be easily detected. For instance, for example, supposedly the passage where Adam first meets Eve in the Garden, the words and letters are all also numbers, so a whole verse or passage would add up to a certain value, and that a cross-check with the value of a neighboring related passage, kind of like a checksum in information theory.
By the way, my understanding is that the Q'ran (Koran) is a big long poem in Arabic, so it has similar properties, i.e., change something and it immediately becomes noticeable.
However, if this is truly a description of what the Talmud, the Hebrew language, and the relationship of the Jewish people to them, then you can see how much like natural DNA it is. Layers and layers of systems for catching copying errors. Study the book "religiously", every passage has a literal value and also a numeric value, as well as others. It's an interesting experience to go to The Museum of The Book in Jerusalem and see the original Dead Sea Scrolls version of The Book of Isaiah which are displayed in the original scroll unfurled all the way around the large circular building and to be told that the version of that part of the Talmud was unchanged between what was being read and copied at the time of the discovery of the scrolls and when they were originally written some 3,000 years previously.
That's some good copying.
It's kind of like the experience of being told that cows, green peas, starfish, and human beings all share a certain gene. Like the Book of Isaiah, and like the Jewish people over the millennia, those species "decided" that keeping that one gene, which may have been good for making a certain protein or taking part in making producing some body part, who can guess which, that starfish, green peas, cows, and humans all have in common and all reckon they need and think is really important. And that's why it's still around, and maybe that's why the Jewish people are still around. They kept copying their book, very faithfully, and they kept practicing it and passing it on to the next generation, and here they are, like many, many peoples and cultures and many, man, genes and extinct animal species...aren't.
The Jews also practice different-sex marriage or cis-sex marriage, and some Jewish kings also practiced polygamous, or in this case, polygynous (multiple wives, one husband) marriage. You could wonder how many other people there were in the Garden of Eden before The Fall, and whether they don't feature prominently because they didn't play an important part in the story or because they weren't there at all. Was there some kind of prelapsarian norm of tribal marriage or open marriage that was blessed by G-d, but that since that, after The Fall, that covenant was broken anyway so it didn't matter to us anymore? Who knows? That's a point I'll come back to later.
So, among others, Jewish tradition could be thought to be coming under threat by movements to both abolish circumcision and to establish same-sex marriage. The Jews are a small sect. They are ancient, but small. Their faithfulness to their cultural DNA is perhaps unparalleled, and it is probably the secret to their longevity as a people, but it probably also keeps them small in number, and makes them vulnerable, both because of the fact of that smallness, but also of that will to cleave to their own traditions and not give in to outside pressures, often considerable. The Empires of the West have traditionally not been very friendly over the past couple of millennia, to say the least, but the Jews have weathered it nonetheless. The Empires of the Far East, however, have sometimes been tolerant, even friendly, but that's probably another story. The worlds empires, the United States of America included, has traditionally not been friendly, to say the least. They have used the Jews where it suited them, but have otherwise been at least passive-aggressively and often openly hostile.
Back to marriage and circumcision. These are two things that a lot of peoples, the Jews included, consider to be part of their DNA. Changing them, stopping them, letting other people stop them or change them in some absurd way, is apparently unthinkable. We would have no identity left if we allowed that! For the Jews, perhaps especially, changing things like that, maybe even a little, "does not compute", to take a sci-fi metaphor, or like an accountant, the books simply wouldn't balance, like if somebody suggested adding a third ledger account, turn T-tables into M-tables or something. It doesn't make any sense, it shows that you don't understand my life and my way of doing things and my culture, and you're probably just crazy. Adding an account into some third table? Well, you might as well say that we should let men marry men and women marry women and stop cutting the foreskins off of infants, if you're going to say something like that! Nothing would make any sense at all anymore!
The point I wanted to make is that goyim (gentiles) started cutting their baby boy's penises around 1870 in England and the United States, and they're still doing it today. It is not a religious tradition, it's supposedly a medical tradition, almost like vaccination, endorsed by the government. In fact, the CDC and the American Pediatrics Association have come out endorsing it, so it has official approval, it's not just personal choice. In the same time frame, different-sex marriage has been upgraded from a religious practice to a government institution, too, complete with government payouts and guaranteed benefits and so forth.
In the case of circumcision, a religious practice was adopted en masse as a secular, pseudo-medical social practice by the majority society, and now that society is fighting, through the so-called intactivist and other movements, to end the practice. In Britain they ended it right after World War II (with Public Health -- it didn't make sense to pay for it any more), but things never seem to be so easy in the United States. Here Congress made female circumcision (which was practiced through the 1950s) illegal in Title 19 (1), and they may have to do the same thing with male circumcision if all sides dig in their heels and refuse to budge until Congress or the Supreme Court or, G-d forbid, some kind of social unrest or Second Civil War comes along and forces them to change. None of these outcomes is good for people like the Jews. I can't help thinking that goyim are going to quit circumcising in the rest of the English-speaking world, whether the Jews keep doing it or not, and the best way that I can see is to do like the British did and quietly admit that there was no good reason for it and stop without a big fuss. Like QEII said, Keep Your Foreskin and Carry On. Any other outcome seems to put the Jews at risk. The Jews circumcise their babies to uphold the Covenant between G-d and Abraham, and that is at least a reason.
The reason the goyim do it doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good, and it keeps shifting every decade or so. It's prevents masturbation (which is probably all that it really ever did), you'll go insane if you don't, it's good hygiene, it prevents AIDS, and so on. Whether I'm protecting my baby son from AIDS by cutting or not cutting the hood around the end of his penis off is a question that may be answered by science (and the answer seems to be that I won't be), but no so for the Jews. Whether their Covenant with G-d may be upheld even if they stop circumcising is a question only they themselves can answer. In a country that respects religious freedom, they should be able to answer it for themselves.
For the sake of convenience, religious freedom is destroyed. It's convenience for paper-pushing purposes to give benefits to someone's spouse and children, and it's convenient to sweep religious practices like the Jewish traditions under the rug.
If the goyim can't agree peacefully to stop circumcision and it comes to legal battles, and on a legal, human rights basis, it seems that the intactivists have the high ground (don't try it, Anakin!), the Jews will be swept into the compass of this polemic again as a misunderstood minority religion and the stage will be set. I have heard rabbis say, "Why would you do this? It is painful and horrible! We do it because we have to. Anyone who would otherwise do it should be put into prison!" Maybe they should say that sort of thing more loudly.
This brings us back to different-sex marriage. With circumcision we see an originally purely religious practice being adopted by the secular society and government for widespread general use, and marriage has followed a similar course where government benefits are paid out, government forms all accommodate marriage, if it exists, and the practice is actively supported through tax breaks and other such. And it is defined as between exactly one man and exactly one woman (and cis-gendered man and woman are the only choices). All the forms and data bases and rules and laws are designed around this concept. In effect, the government has legally defined what marriage is, codified it, and taken that away from churches and synagogues.
In a sense, public institutions have usurped and seized control over the definition of this "institution," which was originally overseen by religions (2). Now that they have it, they can change what the definition of it is, i.e., sanction tribal marriage, gay marriage, and the protest goes up that "that's not what marriage is supposed to be like!" That's a bit like saying, "that's not what public transportation is supposed to be like!" Since public transportation is, well, "public," and therefore run by the government or some organization established for that purpose, it's by definition not run by individuals, religions, or whomever. So when marriage becomes run by, licensed by, administered by, policed by (3) the government, it defines what it is.
Maybe it's worth examining how these two things are set up.
__________________________________
(1) I need to fact-check this one.
(2) An interesting example is how the Federal Government of the USA intervened and forced the Mormon people of Utah to break up their polygamous families. Religion versus Government squaring off on marriage, for good or ill.
(3) Collection of child support and so on.
[ unsaved OP-ED (12/14)]
T R A D I T I O N A L (not S A M E - S E X) M A R R I A G E
A N D C I R C U M C I S I O N
These are two institutions which are under fire these days. The Jews and the heterosexuals like to think that they would like to happily continue practicing them, but other groups either want to start alternatively want to start or stop openly practicing them. The Jews have been practicing circumcision for millennia and the heterosexuals have been practicing different-sex marriage for as long or even slightly longer.
It's in their DNA.
You could even make the argument that circumcision is in Jewish DNA, in their book, in the Talmud, and that their long-time faithful practice of copying and recopying that book and exercising its practices is what has kept them together as a people with a shared identity over time spans that have wiped out and dispersed almost all other people who have ever existed and even across and through the oppressions of The Roman Empire's Diaspora and Nazi Germany's Shoab (Holocaust), to name a few. Down to the copying of the DNA, the Hebrew Talmud is not only a story, it is also a code. The Hebrew alphabet (or Alef-Tov) can also be thought of as a number system, so the Old Testament, or Talmud, can also be thought of as a big mathematical expression, or an organized code, and as such, is more resistant to errors in copying than a simple unremarkable text might be. It exists on multiple levels, and if you disturb or corrupt one of those levels, even in a seemingly innocuous way, it will be felt and probably look like nonsense at some other level, and so be easily detected. For instance, for example, supposedly the passage where Adam first meets Eve in the Garden, the words and letters are all also numbers, so a whole verse or passage would add up to a certain value, and that a cross-check with the value of a neighboring related passage, kind of like a checksum in information theory.
By the way, my understanding is that the Q'ran (Koran) is a big long poem in Arabic, so it has similar properties, i.e., change something and it immediately becomes noticeable.
However, if this is truly a description of what the Talmud, the Hebrew language, and the relationship of the Jewish people to them, then you can see how much like natural DNA it is. Layers and layers of systems for catching copying errors. Study the book "religiously", every passage has a literal value and also a numeric value, as well as others. It's an interesting experience to go to The Museum of The Book in Jerusalem and see the original Dead Sea Scrolls version of The Book of Isaiah which are displayed in the original scroll unfurled all the way around the large circular building and to be told that the version of that part of the Talmud was unchanged between what was being read and copied at the time of the discovery of the scrolls and when they were originally written some 3,000 years previously.
That's some good copying.
It's kind of like the experience of being told that cows, green peas, starfish, and human beings all share a certain gene. Like the Book of Isaiah, and like the Jewish people over the millennia, those species "decided" that keeping that one gene, which may have been good for making a certain protein or taking part in making producing some body part, who can guess which, that starfish, green peas, cows, and humans all have in common and all reckon they need and think is really important. And that's why it's still around, and maybe that's why the Jewish people are still around. They kept copying their book, very faithfully, and they kept practicing it and passing it on to the next generation, and here they are, like many, many peoples and cultures and many, man, genes and extinct animal species...aren't.
The Jews also practice different-sex marriage or cis-sex marriage, and some Jewish kings also practiced polygamous, or in this case, polygynous (multiple wives, one husband) marriage. You could wonder how many other people there were in the Garden of Eden before The Fall, and whether they don't feature prominently because they didn't play an important part in the story or because they weren't there at all. Was there some kind of prelapsarian norm of tribal marriage or open marriage that was blessed by G-d, but that since that, after The Fall, that covenant was broken anyway so it didn't matter to us anymore? Who knows? That's a point I'll come back to later.
So, among others, Jewish tradition could be thought to be coming under threat by movements to both abolish circumcision and to establish same-sex marriage. The Jews are a small sect. They are ancient, but small. Their faithfulness to their cultural DNA is perhaps unparalleled, and it is probably the secret to their longevity as a people, but it probably also keeps them small in number, and makes them vulnerable, both because of the fact of that smallness, but also of that will to cleave to their own traditions and not give in to outside pressures, often considerable. The Empires of the West have traditionally not been very friendly over the past couple of millennia, to say the least, but the Jews have weathered it nonetheless. The Empires of the Far East, however, have sometimes been tolerant, even friendly, but that's probably another story. The worlds empires, the United States of America included, has traditionally not been friendly, to say the least. They have used the Jews where it suited them, but have otherwise been at least passive-aggressively and often openly hostile.
Back to marriage and circumcision. These are two things that a lot of peoples, the Jews included, consider to be part of their DNA. Changing them, stopping them, letting other people stop them or change them in some absurd way, is apparently unthinkable. We would have no identity left if we allowed that! For the Jews, perhaps especially, changing things like that, maybe even a little, "does not compute", to take a sci-fi metaphor, or like an accountant, the books simply wouldn't balance, like if somebody suggested adding a third ledger account, turn T-tables into M-tables or something. It doesn't make any sense, it shows that you don't understand my life and my way of doing things and my culture, and you're probably just crazy. Adding an account into some third table? Well, you might as well say that we should let men marry men and women marry women and stop cutting the foreskins off of infants, if you're going to say something like that! Nothing would make any sense at all anymore!
The point I wanted to make is that goyim (gentiles) started cutting their baby boy's penises around 1870 in England and the United States, and they're still doing it today. It is not a religious tradition, it's supposedly a medical tradition, almost like vaccination, endorsed by the government. In fact, the CDC and the American Pediatrics Association have come out endorsing it, so it has official approval, it's not just personal choice. In the same time frame, different-sex marriage has been upgraded from a religious practice to a government institution, too, complete with government payouts and guaranteed benefits and so forth.
In the case of circumcision, a religious practice was adopted en masse as a secular, pseudo-medical social practice by the majority society, and now that society is fighting, through the so-called intactivist and other movements, to end the practice. In Britain they ended it right after World War II (with Public Health -- it didn't make sense to pay for it any more), but things never seem to be so easy in the United States. Here Congress made female circumcision (which was practiced through the 1950s) illegal in Title 19 (1), and they may have to do the same thing with male circumcision if all sides dig in their heels and refuse to budge until Congress or the Supreme Court or, G-d forbid, some kind of social unrest or Second Civil War comes along and forces them to change. None of these outcomes is good for people like the Jews. I can't help thinking that goyim are going to quit circumcising in the rest of the English-speaking world, whether the Jews keep doing it or not, and the best way that I can see is to do like the British did and quietly admit that there was no good reason for it and stop without a big fuss. Like QEII said, Keep Your Foreskin and Carry On. Any other outcome seems to put the Jews at risk. The Jews circumcise their babies to uphold the Covenant between G-d and Abraham, and that is at least a reason.
The reason the goyim do it doesn't seem to be anywhere near as good, and it keeps shifting every decade or so. It's prevents masturbation (which is probably all that it really ever did), you'll go insane if you don't, it's good hygiene, it prevents AIDS, and so on. Whether I'm protecting my baby son from AIDS by cutting or not cutting the hood around the end of his penis off is a question that may be answered by science (and the answer seems to be that I won't be), but no so for the Jews. Whether their Covenant with G-d may be upheld even if they stop circumcising is a question only they themselves can answer. In a country that respects religious freedom, they should be able to answer it for themselves.
For the sake of convenience, religious freedom is destroyed. It's convenience for paper-pushing purposes to give benefits to someone's spouse and children, and it's convenient to sweep religious practices like the Jewish traditions under the rug.
If the goyim can't agree peacefully to stop circumcision and it comes to legal battles, and on a legal, human rights basis, it seems that the intactivists have the high ground (don't try it, Anakin!), the Jews will be swept into the compass of this polemic again as a misunderstood minority religion and the stage will be set. I have heard rabbis say, "Why would you do this? It is painful and horrible! We do it because we have to. Anyone who would otherwise do it should be put into prison!" Maybe they should say that sort of thing more loudly.
This brings us back to different-sex marriage. With circumcision we see an originally purely religious practice being adopted by the secular society and government for widespread general use, and marriage has followed a similar course where government benefits are paid out, government forms all accommodate marriage, if it exists, and the practice is actively supported through tax breaks and other such. And it is defined as between exactly one man and exactly one woman (and cis-gendered man and woman are the only choices). All the forms and data bases and rules and laws are designed around this concept. In effect, the government has legally defined what marriage is, codified it, and taken that away from churches and synagogues.
In a sense, public institutions have usurped and seized control over the definition of this "institution," which was originally overseen by religions (2). Now that they have it, they can change what the definition of it is, i.e., sanction tribal marriage, gay marriage, and the protest goes up that "that's not what marriage is supposed to be like!" That's a bit like saying, "that's not what public transportation is supposed to be like!" Since public transportation is, well, "public," and therefore run by the government or some organization established for that purpose, it's by definition not run by individuals, religions, or whomever. So when marriage becomes run by, licensed by, administered by, policed by (3) the government, it defines what it is.
Maybe it's worth examining how these two things are set up.
__________________________________
(1) I need to fact-check this one.
(2) An interesting example is how the Federal Government of the USA intervened and forced the Mormon people of Utah to break up their polygamous families. Religion versus Government squaring off on marriage, for good or ill.
(3) Collection of child support and so on.
2020-03-22
Corona and Masks Question
2020-03-21
2020-03-20
Great Women - What's on YOUR $20?
Here are some other candidates to be on the $20 bill, or other units of currency (almost all are Americans)
Edith Clarke, mathematician, electric power pioneer
Cecillia Payne, discovered how stars work
Annie Bell, compiled data for Cecillia Payne
Marie Tharp, discovered continental drift
Rosalind Franklin, x-ray crystalography critical to discovery of DNA
Grace Hopper, inventor of COBOL, computer science pioneer
Radia Perlman, RSTP, etc., "The mother of the Internet"
Bella Abzug, Mayor of New York
Golda Meir, 4th prime minister of Israel
Catherine the Great, architect of Modern Russia
Emmy Noether, the most important woman in mathematics (c.f., Einstein, et al), relation between conservation laws and symmetry and oh, so much more
Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity
Lise Meitner, first to explain nuclear fission, 109th element "Meitnerium", director at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Murasaki Shikibu, authoress of the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji
So, for starters, the Internet, the world's most popular computing language (through the 90s anyway), some of the most important phenomena that make our world work which we didn't understand AT ALL before: continental drift, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen, how they work, etc., what radioactivity is, how nuclear fission works, the idea that fields and particles can produce our reality, and what DNA is and how it's structured, and don't let's forget transmitting power over long distances with electricity, among many other things, were ALL the accomplishments of WOMEN.
I wrote another little piece on great women of our time.
Marie Curie, discoverer of radioactivity
Lise Meitner, first to explain nuclear fission, 109th element "Meitnerium", director at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Murasaki Shikibu, authoress of the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji
So, for starters, the Internet, the world's most popular computing language (through the 90s anyway), some of the most important phenomena that make our world work which we didn't understand AT ALL before: continental drift, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen, how they work, etc., what radioactivity is, how nuclear fission works, the idea that fields and particles can produce our reality, and what DNA is and how it's structured, and don't let's forget transmitting power over long distances with electricity, among many other things, were ALL the accomplishments of WOMEN.
I wrote another little piece on great women of our time.
2020-03-19
2020-03-18
2020-03-17
2020-03-16
2020-03-15
2020-03-14
2020-03-13
2020-03-12
2020-03-11
2020-03-10
2020-03-09
模倣子 Dining Philosophers, Contact Memes, Endomemes, and Bullying
Memetic Index - Index of Memetic Materials
Introduction
I wrote about The Dining Philosopher's Problem as a memeplex that suffers from memetic destitution, and that is why philosopher-agents face starvation. I proposed a system whereby philosophers may offer tea to the whole table in order to break deadlocks, effectively giving a new memetic pathway that allows more communication (memetic exchanges) between agents.
I ran up against shortfalls in my state diagram system, namely, how to represent that the deployability of certain memes may be predicated on the disposition of certain MIAOs, e.g., a philosopher must be holding both his chopsticks before he may deploy the eat! meme and transition into the Eating state, as well as how a philosopher-agent reacts to a meme deployed by another, e.g., when someone offers tea.
One thing I touched on in my earlier essay was how each philosopher, aside from new tea-related pathways, ignores the others. Although his state, i.e., Eating, Sleeping, or Thinking, is outwardly visible, no one is looking, at least not in terms of basing one's own decisions on it. This looks like an ideomemeplex, or an endomemeplex, but isn't really. I'd like to explore what a true endo/ideomemeplex might look like, that is, take a look at what lurks beneath the surface of each philosopher's activities, and see how that can effect how immunomemes and other such function.
The Tea Ceremony
Offering tea, typically when on is on the brink of starvation and needs to get everybody else to set down their chopsticks, is a meme deployed to the other philosopher-agents, and so is a chance for them to deploy memes of their own, including immunomemes. One hopes they will set down their chopsticks and offer their tea bowls to be filled. They may decide to ignore! us, or complain! about the tea.
Deployment descriptors handle these possibilities, although it's unclear yet how state diagrams or transition matrices might do the name. The Second Law of Macromemetics states that a meme deployment results in a state change, so in principle this means that a diagram must have states and transition arrows (memes), or state matrices with transition states in them.
Here are some deployment descriptors for tea-related stuff.
Table 1.a. Deployment Descriptors for Tea Service
[ offer-tea! ] proffer-bowl!
[ offer-tea! ] ignore!
[ WEAK_TEA, offer-tea! ] complain!
[WEAK_TEA, complain! ] defend!
Note that in the spirit of bullying, one could complain about the tea even if it were properly steeped, and indeed, defend the tea server regardless of whether the tea were any good. I'm going to explore the idea that Socrates (see below) is bullied when he tries to serve tea, and that Confucius and Plato come to his defense, the former if and only if the tea is good, and Plato regardless.
Table 1.b. Tea Bullying Deployments
Review of the Set-up, and Representing MIAOplexes
Figure 1. The Dining Philosophers' Table
What Lurks Beneath the Surface
Now let's take a look at making the behavior state diagram a bit more endomemetic, and even idiomemetically customize for each of the philosopher-agents. We've already laid out in Table 1.b. some memetic pathways for Socrates getting bullied when he tries to serve tea.
Before I go any further, I want to try to include the ideas of residual memetic debt, memetic loops, and the recognize-react aspects of memetic resonance, as well as endomemetic descriptions of addictive behavior.
To this end, let's say that Descartes has an eating disorder and try to see what this might look like.
So everything is basically the same on the outside, but inside there are a bunch of new states. I haven't put arrows (meme transitions) between these internal states, because they cannot be observed from the outside. It might be useful for the patient or a therapist to try to put together the picture of these internal states and their transitions, or a memetic engineer to use them, maybe, to model the meme deployment behavior of this agent, but it's possible to get it wrong.
Having said that, there is one meme, vomit!, which does suggest that there are other states within the Thinking state (2) which may not be able to be observed from the outside, except for the vomit! meme indicating a transition between them.
Here we see these states, Eating, Thinking, and Sleeping as states generating contact memes, i.e., others see the memes of eat!, think!, and sleep! happening. Descartes tries to hide the vomit! meme, as it does not generate a desirable reaction in others, does not translate to a state they understand.
The joke here is that whatever Descartes is doing beneath the surface, Obsessing, Dozing, not sleeping well, etc., outwardly we see Thinking and Sleeping, and of course, Eating.
Bullying Socrates over Tea
As I covered before, offering tea to the other philosophers is a way to get everybody to stop eating, put down their chopsticks, and thereby eliminate any starvation situations. Deploying the meme of offer-tea! creates what I'm calling a compelled state (1), in which one must stop-eating!, drop-chopsticks!, and proffer-bowl!
In the one case where there is WEAK_TEA, an agent may complain! and in turn another agent may defend! the tea offerer, as we shall see.
Voltaire and Descartes are bullying Socrates by not responding to his tea offerings. The immunomeme looks like:
However, Socrates has allies in Plato and Confucius. When Descartes and Voltaire try to ignore! the soc.offer-tea! or complain! about WEAK_TEA (even if it's notWEAK_TEA), Plato and Confucius can deploy nudge! and defend! to effectively bring the state of the table (memetic fabric) to the same compelled state.
So we can imagine all of these immunometic interactions occurring inside a single large 'state,' with the final result being the same as in Figure 8.
So the output is the same, regardless of what happens inside this containing state. One could imagine an organization, with a lot of internal wrangling, finally producing a consistent output. From the outside, it looks like:
The Effect of Immunomemes
First let's review the Laws of Macromemetics as they currently stand.
We can see how Voltaire's and Descartes' bullying behavior worked to preserve the original state of the Philosophers' Table memeplex, i.e., where everybody ignored everybody else, ate and slept whenever they wanted (3), and sometimes somebody starved because they had no way to tell anybody. In other words, adding the TEA-pot and the offer-tea! meme was a disruption that their ignore! and complain! immunomemes sought to rebalance. Now, perhaps strangely, the nudge! and defend! immunomemes work to "preserve" the new memeplex in which the Tea Ceremony operates to allow communication between philosophers and prevent starvation. This is all in keeping with the Third Law of Immunomemetics.
We could imagine that somebody like Descartes with food issues would be upset by changes to the system such as the addition of a tea ceremony, hence his attraction to immunomemes to go back to the old system. This is a common phenomenon, and the nature of immunomemes, i.e., to preserve the stability of a memetic system.
Compelled States, Loops, and Memetic Debt
This interesting thing has come up, the compelled state (1). Consider an immunomeme like in Figure 7, and how it resembles Figure 10. The structure of the memetic response is 1. recognition, followed by 2. reaction. A memetic agent recognizes that a meme has been deployed, and then they somehow "decide" how to react. If there is no recognition (4), then we are in alienation, or memetic desolation.
I have to ask myself whether the state diagrams should illustrate memetic loops and thereby the memetic debt associated with the transitions. Or possibly even the various choices that could happen, the various possible pathways, rather like Feynman Diagrams. Once upon a time, I had the idea of action memes, where somebody actually did something.
Above we can see the idea of a meme deployment, causing a compelled state, which may be escaped (6) either by deploying the prescribed action meme (proffer-bowl!), or by deploying either of two immunomemes (complain! or ignore!). All of these deployments eventually make it back to the originally meme deployment, closing the memetic loop. At this point we can talk about residual memetic debt.
When an agent deploys a meme, they incur a debt, by taking a risk, if you will. This debt is repaid by the memetic response that comes back, closing the loop. If it is not repaid, e.g., the hoped-for response is not received, or cannot be repaid, as such, e.g., payment in currency must be taken instead, then there is residual memetic debt (5).
Summary and Conclusions
It may be possible to adequately represent memetic loops and residual memetic debt using state diagrams. I have introduced the idea of a 'compelled state'. The idea is something along the lines of the first part of memetic resonance, that is, recognition, and then one deploys the next meme. None of this may be necessary however.
I looked briefly at an example of an agent, Descartes, who has endomemetic states. This ties into the idea of contact memes (perhaps contact states would be a better description), that is, states that are outwardly visible to other agents, but don't fully reflect the agent's 'internal state.' In one example, Descartes, with an eating disorder, has states of Eating and Thinking, and eat! and think!, but also the vomit! meme, which indicates the presence of at least one internal state (2) by the Second Law of Macromemetics.
.
__________________________________________
(1) We'll see how this term works out. It may tie in nicely with the idea of memetic debt. I'm thinking that agents do not "like" compelled states, i.e., that they try to avoid them or escape them.
(2) That is, there is a meme deployment, here, vomit!, which does not appear to cause an external state change, so we thus suppose that an internal state change must be taking place. This could point towards an understanding of the internal workings of mental illness.
(3) One could imagine how somebody like Descartes, whom we've given this eating disorder, might be well-suited to this eat when you want, think when and however long you want, and even not being able to eat when the chopsticks are unavailable, and how the new tea interruption system might actually be quite upsetting.
(4) It's in principle possible to react without recognition, but it's rather ridiculous, perhaps like saying 成程 all night long during a Japanese cocktail party when one doesn't speak Japanese.
(5) This may relate to oppression, i.e., where an agent is a member of an oppressed group, and they have many deployable memes at their disposal, most of which result in oppression. A definition of oppression I'm working on is a state where one has no control over the memes that close the loop when one deploys one. For instance, in Figure 11, if the ignore! and complain! memes get deployed predominantly or exclusively, we could start to talk about the deployer of offer-tea! (presumably a sub-group) being oppressed.
(6) I'm still debating whether all deployment options should originate from the compelled state as in Figure 11, as opposed to Figures 8 and 9, where the compelled state is at the end.
Introduction
I wrote about The Dining Philosopher's Problem as a memeplex that suffers from memetic destitution, and that is why philosopher-agents face starvation. I proposed a system whereby philosophers may offer tea to the whole table in order to break deadlocks, effectively giving a new memetic pathway that allows more communication (memetic exchanges) between agents.
I ran up against shortfalls in my state diagram system, namely, how to represent that the deployability of certain memes may be predicated on the disposition of certain MIAOs, e.g., a philosopher must be holding both his chopsticks before he may deploy the eat! meme and transition into the Eating state, as well as how a philosopher-agent reacts to a meme deployed by another, e.g., when someone offers tea.
One thing I touched on in my earlier essay was how each philosopher, aside from new tea-related pathways, ignores the others. Although his state, i.e., Eating, Sleeping, or Thinking, is outwardly visible, no one is looking, at least not in terms of basing one's own decisions on it. This looks like an ideomemeplex, or an endomemeplex, but isn't really. I'd like to explore what a true endo/ideomemeplex might look like, that is, take a look at what lurks beneath the surface of each philosopher's activities, and see how that can effect how immunomemes and other such function.
The Tea Ceremony
Offering tea, typically when on is on the brink of starvation and needs to get everybody else to set down their chopsticks, is a meme deployed to the other philosopher-agents, and so is a chance for them to deploy memes of their own, including immunomemes. One hopes they will set down their chopsticks and offer their tea bowls to be filled. They may decide to ignore! us, or complain! about the tea.
Deployment descriptors handle these possibilities, although it's unclear yet how state diagrams or transition matrices might do the name. The Second Law of Macromemetics states that a meme deployment results in a state change, so in principle this means that a diagram must have states and transition arrows (memes), or state matrices with transition states in them.
Here are some deployment descriptors for tea-related stuff.
Table 1.a. Deployment Descriptors for Tea Service
[ offer-tea! ] proffer-bowl!
[ offer-tea! ] ignore!
[ WEAK_TEA, offer-tea! ] complain!
[
Note that in the spirit of bullying, one could complain about the tea even if it were properly steeped, and indeed, defend the tea server regardless of whether the tea were any good. I'm going to explore the idea that Socrates (see below) is bullied when he tries to serve tea, and that Confucius and Plato come to his defense, the former if and only if the tea is good, and Plato regardless.
Table 1.b. Tea Bullying Deployments
[ Socrates.offer-tea! ] complain! (Descartes, Voltaire)
[ Socrates.offer-tea! ] ignore! (Descartes, Voltaire)
[ Socrates.offer-tea!, complain! ] defend! (Plato)
[ Socrates.offer-tea!, ignore! ] nudge! (Plato)
[ WEAK_TEA, Socrates.offer-tea!, complain! ] defend! (Conficius)
Of course still to be worked out are the memes of put-left! and put-right!, that is, putting down both one's chopsticks, that are to happen when accepting an offer of tea. The complain! and ignore! memes are effectively immunomemes that short-circuit going to put-left! and put-right!, which is the object of the whole tea service submemeplex, i.e., to interrupt the system so as to avoid starvation.
Hereinafter I shall abbreviate the philosophers' designations by soc, con, pla, vol, and des.
Review of the Set-up, and Representing MIAOplexes
Figure 1. The Dining Philosophers' Table
Again, there are chopsticks on either side of and a bowl of rice in front of each philosopher. Descartes, Voltaire, Socrates, Confucius, and Plato each has the following memes available to deploy: pick-(up-)right!, pick-left!, eat!, done! (eating), think!, sleep!, wake! and to put his chopsticks back down, put-left!, put-right!
To this we add the MIAO of the LEFT and the RIGHT chopstick, which are in the state of, for instance, LEFT.INHAND, if picked up, or LEFT.AVAIL if on the table ready to be picked up, or LEFT.AVAIL if currently picked up by one's left hand neighbor.
Figure 2. Behavior State Diagram
If possible, we need to update our state diagram so that the pick-right! and pick-left! memes only work if the LEFT and RIGHT sticks are .AVAIL, and that the eat! meme only works if both sticks are .INHAND. This is kind of like collections of MIAOs, or MIAOplexes. It's kind of a challenge to my cartoonist's brain to come up with some drawings that convey this collective MIAO of the chopsticks and also the derivative MIAOs of AVAILable and INHAND.
Figure 3. Chopstick MIAOplex
Now let's take a look at making the behavior state diagram a bit more endomemetic, and even idiomemetically customize for each of the philosopher-agents. We've already laid out in Table 1.b. some memetic pathways for Socrates getting bullied when he tries to serve tea.
Before I go any further, I want to try to include the ideas of residual memetic debt, memetic loops, and the recognize-react aspects of memetic resonance, as well as endomemetic descriptions of addictive behavior.
To this end, let's say that Descartes has an eating disorder and try to see what this might look like.
Figure 4. Descartes Endomemetic State Diagram
Having said that, there is one meme, vomit!, which does suggest that there are other states within the Thinking state (2) which may not be able to be observed from the outside, except for the vomit! meme indicating a transition between them.
Figure 5. Descartes Exomemetic State Diagram
Here we see these states, Eating, Thinking, and Sleeping as states generating contact memes, i.e., others see the memes of eat!, think!, and sleep! happening. Descartes tries to hide the vomit! meme, as it does not generate a desirable reaction in others, does not translate to a state they understand.
Joke 1. We See the States We Want to See
Bullying Socrates over Tea
As I covered before, offering tea to the other philosophers is a way to get everybody to stop eating, put down their chopsticks, and thereby eliminate any starvation situations. Deploying the meme of offer-tea! creates what I'm calling a compelled state (1), in which one must stop-eating!, drop-chopsticks!, and proffer-bowl!
Figure 6. Compelled State Resulting from non-Socratic Tea Offerings
Voltaire and Descartes are bullying Socrates by not responding to his tea offerings. The immunomeme looks like:
Figure 7. Immunomeme Against Socratic Tea Offereings
However, Socrates has allies in Plato and Confucius. When Descartes and Voltaire try to ignore! the soc.offer-tea! or complain! about WEAK_TEA (even if it's not
Figure 8. Plato's Immunomeme Counteract Descartes' Immunomemes
So we can imagine all of these immunometic interactions occurring inside a single large 'state,' with the final result being the same as in Figure 8.
Figure 9. 'Contained' Immunomemetic Interactions
So the output is the same, regardless of what happens inside this containing state. One could imagine an organization, with a lot of internal wrangling, finally producing a consistent output. From the outside, it looks like:
Figure 10. Looking Only at External Memetic Deployments
The Effect of Immunomemes
First let's review the Laws of Macromemetics as they currently stand.
| Macromemetics | Immunomemetics | |
|---|---|---|
| First | An agent deploys memes in order to achieve optimal resonance | Any stable memeplex contains an immunomemeplex |
| Second | Deployment of a meme causes transition to a new state | A system of rules or laws translates to a collection of bullying behaviors |
| Third | A mutation is a Modification, Addition, or Deletion of a State, an Agent, or a Meme (MADSAM) | An immunomeme is a meme that works to prevent a mutation to a memeplex |
Table 2. The Laws of Macromemetics
We can see how Voltaire's and Descartes' bullying behavior worked to preserve the original state of the Philosophers' Table memeplex, i.e., where everybody ignored everybody else, ate and slept whenever they wanted (3), and sometimes somebody starved because they had no way to tell anybody. In other words, adding the TEA-pot and the offer-tea! meme was a disruption that their ignore! and complain! immunomemes sought to rebalance. Now, perhaps strangely, the nudge! and defend! immunomemes work to "preserve" the new memeplex in which the Tea Ceremony operates to allow communication between philosophers and prevent starvation. This is all in keeping with the Third Law of Immunomemetics.
We could imagine that somebody like Descartes with food issues would be upset by changes to the system such as the addition of a tea ceremony, hence his attraction to immunomemes to go back to the old system. This is a common phenomenon, and the nature of immunomemes, i.e., to preserve the stability of a memetic system.
Compelled States, Loops, and Memetic Debt
This interesting thing has come up, the compelled state (1). Consider an immunomeme like in Figure 7, and how it resembles Figure 10. The structure of the memetic response is 1. recognition, followed by 2. reaction. A memetic agent recognizes that a meme has been deployed, and then they somehow "decide" how to react. If there is no recognition (4), then we are in alienation, or memetic desolation.
I have to ask myself whether the state diagrams should illustrate memetic loops and thereby the memetic debt associated with the transitions. Or possibly even the various choices that could happen, the various possible pathways, rather like Feynman Diagrams. Once upon a time, I had the idea of action memes, where somebody actually did something.
Figure 11. Memetic Loops
Above we can see the idea of a meme deployment, causing a compelled state, which may be escaped (6) either by deploying the prescribed action meme (proffer-bowl!), or by deploying either of two immunomemes (complain! or ignore!). All of these deployments eventually make it back to the originally meme deployment, closing the memetic loop. At this point we can talk about residual memetic debt.
When an agent deploys a meme, they incur a debt, by taking a risk, if you will. This debt is repaid by the memetic response that comes back, closing the loop. If it is not repaid, e.g., the hoped-for response is not received, or cannot be repaid, as such, e.g., payment in currency must be taken instead, then there is residual memetic debt (5).
Summary and Conclusions
It may be possible to adequately represent memetic loops and residual memetic debt using state diagrams. I have introduced the idea of a 'compelled state'. The idea is something along the lines of the first part of memetic resonance, that is, recognition, and then one deploys the next meme. None of this may be necessary however.
I looked briefly at an example of an agent, Descartes, who has endomemetic states. This ties into the idea of contact memes (perhaps contact states would be a better description), that is, states that are outwardly visible to other agents, but don't fully reflect the agent's 'internal state.' In one example, Descartes, with an eating disorder, has states of Eating and Thinking, and eat! and think!, but also the vomit! meme, which indicates the presence of at least one internal state (2) by the Second Law of Macromemetics.
.
__________________________________________
(1) We'll see how this term works out. It may tie in nicely with the idea of memetic debt. I'm thinking that agents do not "like" compelled states, i.e., that they try to avoid them or escape them.
(2) That is, there is a meme deployment, here, vomit!, which does not appear to cause an external state change, so we thus suppose that an internal state change must be taking place. This could point towards an understanding of the internal workings of mental illness.
(3) One could imagine how somebody like Descartes, whom we've given this eating disorder, might be well-suited to this eat when you want, think when and however long you want, and even not being able to eat when the chopsticks are unavailable, and how the new tea interruption system might actually be quite upsetting.
(4) It's in principle possible to react without recognition, but it's rather ridiculous, perhaps like saying 成程 all night long during a Japanese cocktail party when one doesn't speak Japanese.
(5) This may relate to oppression, i.e., where an agent is a member of an oppressed group, and they have many deployable memes at their disposal, most of which result in oppression. A definition of oppression I'm working on is a state where one has no control over the memes that close the loop when one deploys one. For instance, in Figure 11, if the ignore! and complain! memes get deployed predominantly or exclusively, we could start to talk about the deployer of offer-tea! (presumably a sub-group) being oppressed.
(6) I'm still debating whether all deployment options should originate from the compelled state as in Figure 11, as opposed to Figures 8 and 9, where the compelled state is at the end.
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