Season 5 Recap

A review of the 16 podcast essays, and one interview, from Season 5.  Hopefully you will find some of the short descriptions in the recap sufficiently interesting so that you will listen to them in their entirety.

Have a look at the recently published book by friend of the podcast Eric Moon, titled "Cultivating the Sociome:  Governance Without Governors", now available on Amazon.  

cultivatingthesociome.com

Transcript

Season 5 Recap

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host, Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth is to spread seeds of a way of thinking, a way of thinking based on a deep understanding of natural processes, and on an acknowledgement that all of us, Vulcans and Earthlings alike, are a part of nature and do not have the power to opt out and create our own reality.

 As the sophistication of the average Earthling’s thought processes increases based on the sort of contemplation of nature we are recommending, we believe you will gradually abandon the ineffective, and often counterproductive, programs so many of you now seem to believe are good ideas, all the way from national greatness to a nanny state.  As the popularity of these intelligent design proclivities you have inherited from feudal times wanes and you adopt evolutionary thinking, the functioning of your societies will improve and will take Earthlings in the direction of more prosperous and satisfying lives.

 Before continuing with a recap of the essays (and one interview) during Season 5, I would like to again call you attention to a book authored by friend of the podcast Eric Moon, titled Cultivating the Sociome:  Governance Without Governors, now available on Amazon.  The book summarizes the podcast’s theme of emergent order in nature and in society, and what this means to Earthlings as they continue to shift their thought paradigm from intelligent design to evolution, which will involve a change of focus from a struggle over who gets to be the one giving orders to one of how can Earthlings in general personally behave so as to promote civility and justice.

 As of the date of this writing, Fascinating! podcasts have been downloaded in more than 3,000 cities and 97 countries and territories worldwide, at a rate of more than 1,200 per month.  Not bad at all considering that it’s a somewhat wonkish educational podcast.  I thank you, my listeners, for giving my ideas some consideration; and of course critique is always welcome.

 Season 5 began with a discussion of participatory democracy, pointing out that the prevalence of ecnarongi on your planet, i.e., ignorance in reverse or “knowing” what isn’t so, makes it difficult to participate meaningfully.  When people on all sides of a question are driven by various beliefs and agendas that are nonsensical, voting and many other means of support are futile and a waste of time.

 On the campaign trail, most of those seeking office are either sincere believers in their ecnarongi, or else they are cynically promoting ideas that they know to be ecnarongi as a way to build constituencies.

 As Mark Twain put it, it’s difficult to know whether these office seekers are really smart people who are just putting us on, or whether they are imbeciles who really mean it.

 Educating more and more people in the ways of nature, with an emphasis on inculcating an awareness of natural processes, very likely provides the only hope Earthlings have of creating meaningful politics that do not do more harm than good.

 This essay also reviewed in detail the meaning of “evolving complex dynamical system” as a description of the human sociome, and why it is crucially important to understand the implications of this type of understanding.

 “Evolving” means that the system has an unimaginably complex life of its own and cannot be predicted or controlled, or even successfully modeled, by those who imagine themselves to be intelligent designers.

 “Complex” means that relationships among components of a system frequently exhibit nonlinearity, which means that a response can be out of proportion to a stimulus, metaphorically known as the “butterfly effect”.  

 “Dynamical” means that the system is driven by energy flows, and that it is these energy flows that operate to organize the system.  Nature allows us to exert limited influence over the energy flows; nature does not allow us to dominate, and trips us up if we try.

 Once you understand the implications of evolving, complex, and dynamical, you will recognize proposals to design and create ideal social structures as delusional; and you should understand that the proper focus is on cultivating processes and letting the outcomes take care of themselves.

 If your processes are generally fair and sustainable, you can have no legitimate complaint about outcomes if you wish to think of yourself as a mature adult. And we have every reason to believe that outcomes in a free society will be salutary in any case.

 The second essay in Season 5 harked back to Lewis Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”, and Alice’s encounter with the twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum in the Dark Woods.  

 The twins are an apt metaphor for partisan politics then and now, where the two sides appear to oppose each other but have no meaningful differences, and who are actually in cahoots when it comes to the game of keeping Alice’s attention.  

 Alice asks the twins how to get out of the woods, but they give her nonsense answers, they tell her not to trust her own reality, and they stage a mock battle that they never get around to fighting, because the last thing they want is for Alice, and everyone else, to leave.  That would be the end of their game.

 We think you should pay way less attention to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and get on with your lives like Alice did after the Great Crow scared the twins off.

 The next essay lamented the way that so many Earthlings waste precious time and make themselves unnecessarily miserable by characterizing the options for decisions and choices as “good things” and “bad things”.  

 A more fruitful way to make decisions and choices is to compare values to prices, and to say yes if the value is greater than the price and no if it is not, with both “value” and “price” broadly defined.  We have the marginal revolution in economics to thank for this insight, and for the peace of mind which stems from viewing things this way.

 We then took a hard look at the Federal Reserve System, the “Fed”, which is the central bank of the United States.  From the Vulcan’s-eye view, the federal reserve system is a medievalist intelligent design scheme, where those who believe they dwell on a lofty perch in a place apart from the rest of the human sociome monitor what goes on beneath them and intervene to make things turn out right whenever they believe it is necessary.

 The Fed was created with the ostensible aim of providing a more stable financial order than what had existed prior to 1913.  However, on many occasions the Fed itself, far from containing risk, has become a source of systemic risk.  Its policy mistakes made the Great Depression of the 1930’s far more severe and longer-lasting than it would otherwise have been; and in 1984 they introduced the concept of too-big-to-fail, which undermines natural market discipline and incentivizes risk-taking.  The implementation of this policy was a major contributor to the financial crisis of 2008.

 And any honest assessment of the Fed’s attempts to conduct macroeconomic intervention through monetary policy leads to the conclusion that the hope of ever being able to create good outcomes from such interventions is delusional.  This is because of measurement problems that are unlikely ever to be overcome, and because of the enormous complexity of the real world and its evolved feedback loops, which is unlikely ever to be manageable by means of intelligent design and oversight.

 And beginning in 1933 the Fed was granted limited power to create new money from thin air, a power which was made limitless in 1971 when the Nixon administration removed the last of the constraints.

 The power to create new money is the power to support government spending without explicitly imposing taxation.  If you don’t make it explicit, you can always try with a good chance of success to find someone to blame for the ensuing inflation.

 Except that nature cannot be fooled, and uncontrolled spending by the Treasury leads to inflation, which is just a disguised form of taxation.  If you have $10,000 in the bank and there is 10% inflation, you now have only $9,000 in terms of spending power.  You have just been taxed $1,000.

 Your rulers will not give up the power to conduct this sort of legal counterfeiting easily.

 I hope you will find this topic sufficiently interesting that you will listen to this essay in its entirety.  I promise that you will emerge with deeper and broader understanding of how the system operates, and with an introduction to the role of Keynesian economists within the Fed who see themselves as a sort of priesthood who have magical powers, especially the power to “set” interest rates.

 Earthlings will be better off when central banking comes to an end and when fiat currencies are replaced by money which cannot be counterfeited legally or illegally.  An evolved and evolving market system organized around pricing, especially pricing which accounts for risk, will make the financial sector so smooth and efficient that you will soon forget that it was once the most highly regulated sector in the economy, with the possible exception of health care.

 Let me suggest to Earthlings that you ought to be asking yourself why are the two most regulated sectors of the US economy that ones with the greatest problems?  Is it because they are inherently problematical and thus require all this regulation?  Or are the persistent problems in these sectors the result of pervasive regulation?

 The next installment was a review of the book, “Equality:  What it is and Why it Matters”, co-authored by Michael Sandel, whose book “The Tyranny of Merit” was previously reviewed on this podcast; and Thomas Piketty, famous for his update of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital with his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”.  

 Their book received many favorable reviews from the disciples of Marxianity (and of course eye-rolls from scientific economists), with the New York Times proclaiming these men as two of the world’s leading thinkers.

 If the thinking of these two men represents the best of what Earthlings have to offer, there is indeed much cause for despair.

 Neither man understands much of anything about economics, and most of what they think they know is wrong, i.e., ecnarongi, or ignorance in reverse.

 These two have built their careers by igniting and then fanning the flames of envy by encouraging people to compare themselves to others and to feel resentment if they see others who are richer than they are, even if they themselves are rich by any sane standard.  

 These two view the “economy” as a black box that can be counted on to continue cranking out ever more goods and services, even though their policies of theft and redistribution, if widely implemented, would actually break the economy and send the well-being of most Earthlings plummeting.

 These two believe that the output of the economy, for which they imagine this magical origin, just has to be redistributed more equally if we want to make a better world, because, they say, the less wealthy will feel bad when they compare themselves to those who are richer, even if they themselves are living richer and better lives than they were before income disparities increased.

 And the inescapable fact that both of these men are trying to deny or dismiss is that income naturally tends to flow towards those who are creating value in a fair and competitive market.  This is because production is income and it’s clearly not possible to decouple income from production except by theft; even though Professor Sandel argues that what he is proposing is not really theft, because, he says, the ones who created the value were just lucky to have done so, and therefore we would be rewarding them for something they don’t deserve it if we don’t take their stuff and pass it around.  And even if you argue that obtaining an education and leading a productive life leads to higher income, Sandel will tell you that this is just further evidence of uneven luck distribution!

 Both men pay lip service to democratic processes and personal freedom, but it should be abundantly clear that the policies they propose could only be implemented by totalitarian government.

 If these two, and others who support their ideas, genuinely cared about the poor, they would focus their efforts on helping the poor learn how to create more value, after which more income would automatically flow in their direction, rather than on coaching them on how to become more effective parasites.

 The next essay was an update of research into the astonishing complexity of slime mold, aka Physarum, one of the most fascinating examples in nature of the phenomenon of self-organization and emergent order, and an example that all Earthlings really ought to ponder deeply if they place value on insight into natural processes in general.

 Researchers from Harvard University and Tufts University have been collaborating on efforts to understand the seemingly intelligent behavior of this organism which has neither muscles or nerves, but instead conducts internal communication by means of chemical and mechanical waves rather than by communication between cells; and even without muscles, it creates motion by contracting its outer membrane.

 Physarum forages efficiently by sending out tubes and it then reinforces the tubes that happened to find food and retracts the tubes that did not.

 Physarum can sense an inhospitable environment – too dry, too cold, or not enough food – and then produce spores in response to the stress; behavior which nature has selected for reasons that are obvious to an observer after the fact.

 And physarum in effect approximately solves the famous Traveling Salesman Problem, a problem in network optimization that overwhelms the capabilities of our fastest supercomputers if we try to go beyond a small number of cities, because each additional city creates an enormous number of new pairs.  The Traveling Salesman Problem is to find the shortest route that visits each city on the list exactly once and then returns to the origin, given the distances between each pair of cities.  

 Physarum routinely and quickly solves the TSP with an approximation, and other problems, by employing behaviors that can be described and explained by the term “basal cognition”.  

 The phenomenon of basal cognition is all by itself something that should fill us all with awe as a revelation of nature’s complexity.  Basal cognition is a step above instinctive algorithmic behavior such as what we observe in what are called colonies. 

 Physarum is an agglomeration of individual cells, but when the individual cells come together their nuclei persist but there are no internal cell walls, unlike in a colony.  So the previously individual cells are no longer individuals; what we might think of as individuality has shifted upward and the plasmodium as a whole is the individual after the agglomeration.  And this is where the intelligent behavior emerges as the superorganism finds its place in its environment.  It behaves as a single decision-making system.

 Basal cognition asks what is the minimal biological machinery required for cognition-like functions - such as sensing, memory, decision-making, learning, and goal-directed behavior.  Physarum is the simplest example yet found.  It can do all of these things.

 Basal cognition proposes that many capacities we associate with “mind” are not late, brain-dependent innovations, but early, widely distributed features of life itself.

 Cognition, on this view, is not synonymous with consciousness, nor does it rely on neurons or on representation or language.  Instead, it is adaptive information-processing in a living system, and is tightly coupled through sensate interaction between morphology and environment.

 The implications of what has been learned about basal cognition are seismic, and I urge you to look into it further.  It might even be the subject of a future essay.

 The next podcast essay was penned in response to a guest essay in the New York Time by two professors from the Stern School of Business at NYU in which they advocate the imposition of a “living wage”.  Their argument is that when an employer pays an employee less than a living wage – a problematical concept to put it mildly – the employer is transferring what ought to be their burden to society at large.

 We showed first of all, even though there is at first a superficial plausibility to this notion, that if we were to mandate their definition of a living wage worldwide, the wage bill would be greater by far than global GDP.  So this fact alone reveals that their argument is nonsense.

 But wait, there’s more!

 In order for a business to be sustainable, the wage paid to the worker cannot exceed the value that the employee contributes to the process.  And such a wage emerges from the complex interactions that take place continually in a market economy.  Our two geniuses did not make so much as a nod in the direction of this inescapable fact.

 As business school professors, these two must have realized that they were talking nonsense; but they evidently also realized that the conclusion to their argument (i.e., these people have stolen from you, so let the plundering begin) would be uncritically accepted by a large number of people who are predisposed to believe the message and approve of the remedy.

 Why do Earthlings pay any attention at all to such ideas?  We just don’t get it.  On the bright side, we see more and more people wising up to the relentless agitprop as time goes on.

 Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada then submitted a two-part essay titled “The Tao of Darwin”.

 Prego queried his chatbot to get an answer to a question that had come to him while musing in a botanically enhanced state, and the query was whether there were similarities between ancient Chinese Taoist thinking and modern Darwinian thinking.  

 The bot replied that there were indeed many parallels: 

 Both systems of thought focus on adaptation and the flow of nature, with change as a constant, where order is something that emerges, and with no purpose or direction to be discerned in nature, i.e., that nature is non-teleological.  Taoists teach that letting nature take its course is often wiser than intervening and trying to exert control.

 Further queries grew out of the initial query and the initial response:  how does ancient Confucian philosophy differ from Taoist philosophy; what would be a modern parallel to Confucian philosophy; how the two coexisting philosophies have interacted to shape the evolution of Chinese culture; how has Marxist political ideology influenced Chinese society and governance; and how the effective repeal of Marxist economic principles under Deng Xiaoping and the institution of market reforms led to a period of spectacular economic growth, growth which is now more and more being stifled by reassertion of authoritarian control by the CCP.

 There is much more of interest and enlightenment in these two essays, and I urge you to listen to them in their entirety.

 We next took a look at the valuable contributions to humanity by two heroes of science:  Thomas Huxley and Richard Feynman.

 Thomas Huxley was a contemporary and an early supporter of Charles Darwin and his published work, and earned the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his tireless efforts to promote good science.  

 Shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Oxford University hosted a debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who represented the old guard, and who believed that Darwin’s ideas were scientifically questionable and theologically offensive.  At one point, Wilberforce sarcastically asked Huxley whether he, Huxley, had descended from an ape on his father’s side or his mother’s side.  

 Huxley replied, “If the question is whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature, and possessing great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape”.

 Huxley won over most of the audience on that memorable day, and went on for the rest of his life to promote the science of evolution.  Earthlings owe him gratitude for advancing the cause of scientific inquiry and making Earth a better planet to live on.

 Richard Feynman made major contributions to the science of physics, primarily with his study of quantum electrodynamics (the interactions between photons and electrons) for which he won a share of a Nobel Prize in 1965; and he also made major and timely contributions to the philosophy of science during an era, still ongoing, when philosophy in general was being corrupted by the influence of Marxianity, and true science was being mischaracterized and undermined.

 He emphasized that science is best thought of as a uniquely powerful method for investigating an objective reality that is independent of cultural or linguistic context, while so many others were arguing that there is no such reality and that all ideas must be evaluated within such contexts. 

 Science, he argued, is not “just another story” that we tell ourselves – it is a method for evaluating the believability of stories in general. 

 And he led an interesting personal life, as revealed in such books as “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”; “What do you Care What Other People Think?”; “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”; and “The Meaning of it All”.  All of these are good reads, and if you are interested in finding out more about physics, have a look at his “Six Easy Pieces”, an accessible version of his famous and enduring Feynman Lectures on Physics.

 He was famous for his role in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle explosion, stating bluntly and in defiance of NASA administrators, that to have a successful technology truth must take precedence over public relations, because nature cannot be fooled.

 He also introduced the metaphor of Cargo Cult science, a type of study common in academia, where “scholars” produce work that follows the form of science to a degree, but where something essential is missing. 

 Cargo cults came into being during World War II in the Pacific Islands, where natives who had had no experience of industrial society observed soldiers building runways and control towers, then sitting in the control towers wearing headphones, and then airplanes full of cargo began landing.  The natives concluded that they too could call down cargo from the heavens if they built runways and control towers and then sat in the towers wearing fake headphones as they had seen the soldiers doing.  But something essential was missing.

 And he emphasized the importance in the scientific method of trying to disprove hypotheses as the proper method of testing a theory, pointing out that much work done in the name of science actually consists of trying to marshal evidence to support hypotheses rather than trying to disprove them.

 Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada then weighed in with some thoughts about Leviathan.  Leviathan was the title of a 1651 book by Englishman Thomas Hobbes which he wrote at the time of the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War.  He had witnessed a complete breakdown of social order, and wrote that without an immensely powerful sovereign to protect a country’s citizens the life of the average man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

 People now widely agree that protection of the citizenry is the fundamental job of the modern state.

 But many people today now wish to employ Leviathan for much more than protecting the citizenry, and seem to believe that the power to coerce is the power to correct all social ills.

 As an example of this mindset, Prego discussed the work of Rutger Bregman, who has written several books recently which tell us that with Leviathan’s help we can create Utopia.

 Bregman comes across as good-hearted and reasonably bright, but he has yet to question the idea that society is something that can be constructed by intelligent designers, who will depend on Leviathan to “make it so”.  All we need to do, he believes, is to form the good intentions for Leviathan to implement.

 This is well-intended but shallow-minded blather, with likely tragic consequences for those who sign on.  

 Leviathan is not well-suited for anything other than meeting force with superior force when that is the proper thing to do.  But nature cannot be forced any more than it can be fooled; and you cannot control nature simply by controlling your fellow Earthlings.

 Prego also penned the next essay, which was about Edward O. Wilson, the scientist who originated the term sociobiology.  He published his book, titled “Sociobiology: the New Synthesis”, in 1975.  The book investigated with scientific rigor and wise insight the question of the influence of genes on the behavior of social organisms, including the behavior of human beings.

 Scientists everywhere lauded the work of this brilliant man.  But it turned out that not everyone was interested in good science, and from several different directions Wilson was viciously attacked, and not just by the usual opponents who disagree with any idea connected with evolution for theological reasons.

 From the academic community, mostly from those in the social sciences and the humanities, but even a few natural scientists, came a concerted effort to discredit the work an vilify the man.  They attacked him using straw man arguments than they knew were untrue, such as the accusation that he was preaching genetic determinism and that his work was nothing more than ideological superstructure intended to justify the current societal power arrangements and to keep people in their place.

 The quality of Wilson’s work turned out to be sufficient to survive this scurrilous and disgraceful opposition, and his work lives on and continues to inspire new generations.

 The next essay was submitted by contributing editor Otto Didact, who examined the puzzle of why the modern quasi-religious movement of Marxianity has so many adherents, and why so many Earthlings who would not call themselves Marxians nonetheless cling uncritically to the simple, easy-to-understand wrong answers to complex questions that are promoted by Marxians.

 Chief among these easy-to-understand answers is the labor theory of value, which Marx employed to support his conclusion that what he conceived of as the capitalist system was inherently exploitative.  The gist of Marx’s argument was that all value is created by labor, and that the owners of capital inputs to the productive process are stealing what rightly belongs to the workers when they receive profits.

 The labor theory of value was decisively discredited and replaced by the subjective theory of value by economists working in the late 19th century.  But instead of saying “Oops!” in response to this revelation, the followers of Marx have clung to the conclusion of the argument even though the argument that led to the conclusion had been demonstrated to be invalid.

 This is how Marxism became Marxianity, a quasi-religious movement based on unquestionable dogma and a teleological view of history, with a plentiful dose of invalid zero-sum analysis to go along with it.

 The interesting question is why a theory that is so easy to dismantle intellectually has remained so influential, and Otto suggests that we can gain insight into this question from Michael Shermer’s book, “The Believing Brain”.

 In his book, Shermer pointed out that evolution has sculpted Earthlings so that you try to discern patterns and look for causes.  That’s a good thing to be doing if there actually are patterns and if it enhances your chance of survival to figure out why. 

 But a problem arises from the fact that so many Earthlings “find” patterns where no patterns exist and then attribute agency – a “man behind the curtain”; and this dynamic is what explains such things as belief in the paranormal, conspiracy theories and adherence to religious belief and ideological dogmas, Marxianity included.  And Earthlings seem to find comfort in being part of a community where everybody in the community sees things as they “really are”.

 Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya then penned an essay on the brilliant 19th Century French economist Frederic Bastiat.  Bastiat, who died in 1850, is notable as one of the earliest thinkers who understood the organic nature of an economic system and advocated for limited government and free trade as the path to a brighter and more prosperous future.

 His deep understanding and his unusual ability to explain things simply and often satirically are evident in all of his written work.  His advocacy of limited government was based on his understanding that in spite of the narratives claiming good intentions, in reality the institution of government is more often than not employed to conduct what he call “legal plunder”, and relying on government to create good outcomes is a recipe for eternal conflict as factions compete with one another for the power to conduct the plunder.

 Sound familiar?

 His work-in-progress at the time of his early demise, called “Economic Harmonies”, was laying out a vision of a largely self-organizing socioeconomic system based on human liberty and the protection of the right to property.

 My Earthling friend, and poet, Cary Gray was the guest for the Fascinating! podcast’s first-ever interview.  Cary is a deep and imaginative thinker as well as an adventurer who has already led a quite interesting life and will no doubt continue to do so.  Just out of college he did a long tour on a unicycle of his own design.  And while he was writing his children’s book about a boy who toured on a unicycle, he camped out high in the branches of a redwood tree near Sant Cruz California.  And he does rock climbing.

 Cary and I found a lot of common ground in our discussion, especially on the subject of emergent order, with the chief difference between us being that Cary believes that the emergence of order points to something that suggests something mysteriously creating the order, whereas I do not see any need to go further than the natural selection process by way of explanation.  I think it’s fair to say that Cary sees what he calls “scientism” as limiting whereas I see it as empowering.

 I suppose Cary’s approach to understanding things is part of what make him a poet, and there is room in poetry for magical thinking.  

 Cary continues to work as a street poet in Asheville North Carolina, where he does what he calls “deep dives” with his clients, using his honed listening skills and with focused attention. He has introduced his own podcast, “The Poetic Experience”.  Google “Cary Gray” and you will see what he is all about, including his poetry and his unicycling.

 And ladies:  he is single.

 The final offering of the season was an essay on regulatory theater.  This essay provides yet another example of your “betters” limiting your freedom and dictating your behavior for your own good.

 I was motivated to write it by my experience of buying a late-model car which has some features that were mandated by European Union regulators, and which now apply to all vehicles that are sold in the EU, and which are then applied to vehicles sold worldwide, because it is not feasible for manufacturers to provide different vehicles in different markets.  

 The particular feature I took issue with is the robot-assisted lane tracking, not a bad option to have under some circumstances, but which is not optional – you cannot turn if off.  So whenever you drive such a car, you have a robot tugging on your steering wheel at all times, and your only choice is among different levels of tugging.

 This technology is clearly not-ready-for-prime-time, due to the fact that for every one time it successfully prevents an unintended lane departure, it generates tens of thousands of false positives.

 I get it that preventing an unintended lane departure is a good thing considered in the abstract, although at best the impact of the technology will be minimal, reducing injury and death by a small fraction of 1% of injuries and deaths from all causes involving automobile accidents, simply because lane departure accidents are relatively rare.

 What I do not get is that they are seriously arguing that a technology that compromises the ability of the driver to steer effectively is a safety feature; and I do not get it why these bureaucrats in Brussels have the power to implement this regulation in spite of its nonsensical nature if you look at the forest and not just this tree. 

 Not to mention that it’s just fucking annoying and takes much of the fun out of driving. 

 As is so common with regulators, these regulators have adopted tunnel-vision problem-solving reasoning.  If they had seriously evaluated the technology in terms of tradeoffs, they wouldn’t have mandated it.  Instead they appear to have mandated it because of the commonly-encountered desire of such people to think of themselves in heroic terms and to present themselves in a good light; and they are not the ones who pay the price for being wrong.

 Perhaps most disturbing among the arguments the regulators have advanced is that the robotic intervention from this technology would begin to condition drivers to what they have predicted for your future, which is when automobiles will be totally automated and drivers will have no control over the vehicle.

 I am sure the technology that will be put in place by mandate of your “benefactors” will be every bit as reliable as autocorrect.  I don’t know about you, but I intend to buy an older car which lets me steer and then try to keep it running as long as possible, hoping regulators will eventually come to their senses, or that I will be recalled to Planet Vulcan before the car wears out.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.