The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart, 2009 book by Bill Bishop ISBN:0547237723 http://www.thebigsort.com/ (more)

Assortative mating (also referred to as positive assortative mating or homogamy) is a mating pattern and a form of sexual selection. It means that individuals with similar phenotypes mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating pattern. Some examples of similar phenotypes are body size, skin coloration or pigmentation, and age. Assortative mating can increase genetic relatedness within the family and is the inverse of disassortative mating. (more)

The Islamic Resistance Movement, abbreviated Hamas[c] (the Arabic acronym from Arabic: حركة المقاومة الإسلامية, romanized: Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah),[24][d] is a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist[25] political organisation with a military wing, the Qassam Brigades. It has governed the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007.[26][27] The Hamas movement was founded by Palestinian Islamic scholar Ahmed Yassin in 1987, after the outbreak of the First Intifada against the Israeli occupation. It emerged from his 1973 Mujama al-Islamiya Islamic charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.[28] In the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, Hamas secured a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council by campaigning on promises of a corruption-free government and advocating for resistance as a means to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation.[29][30] In the Battle of Gaza, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip from rival Palestinian faction Fatah,[31][32] and has since governed the territory separately from the Palestinian National Authority. After Hamas's takeover, Israel significantly intensified existing movement restrictions and imposed a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip.[33] Egypt began its blockade of Gaza in 2007. This was followed by multiple wars with Israel, including those in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and an ongoing one since 2023, which began with the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; Arabic: منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية, romanized: Munaẓẓamat at-Taḥrīr al-Filasṭīniyyahⓘ) is a Palestinian nationalist coalition that is internationally recognized as the official representative of the Palestinian people in both the Palestinian territories and the diaspora.[13][14][15] It is currently represented by the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank city of Al-Bireh. Founded in 1964, it initially sought to establish an Arab state over the entire territory of the former Mandatory Palestine, advocating the elimination of Israel. Mediated talks between the Israeli government and the PLO in 1993 (the Oslo I Accord) resulted in the PLO recognizing Israel's legitimacy and accepting United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which mandated Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories, while Israel recognized the PLO as a legitimate authority representing the Palestinian people.[16] Despite the Israel–PLO Letters of Mutual Recognition (1993), in which PLO leader Yasser Arafat renounced violence against Israel, the PLO engaged in militant activities during the Second Intifada (2000–2005). On 29 October 2018, the PLO Central Council suspended the Palestinian recognition of Israel.[17][18] As the officially recognized government of the de jure State of Palestine, it has enjoyed United Nations observer status since 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organization

mo husseini: 50 Completely True Things (specifically about Israel-Palestine) (more)

The two-state solution is a proposed approach to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian (Israel-Palestine) conflict, by creating two states on the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. It is often contrasted with the one-state solution, which is the establishment a single state in former Mandatory Palestine with equal rights for all its inhabitants. The two-state solution is supported by many countries and the Palestinian Authority.[1] Israel currently does not support the idea, though it has in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution (more)

A techno-organic virus (T-O virus) is a fictional virus appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. In the comics, the T-O virus transforms organic material into techno-organic material, which resembles both machinery and living tissue. All techno-organic cells function like independent machines, and carry both the virus and all information on their carriers. This includes memories and appearance, allowing a damaged techno-organic being to rebuild itself from a single cell. Marvel Universe varieties of this virus include the Transmode Virus carried by the Technarchy, and Apocalypse's variant created or discovered by the fictional supervillain Apocalypse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-organic_virus (cf cyborg, AGI)

Robin Sloan: You could extinguish a star. As a reader, I’m skeptical of attempts to pin sensory experience to the page. The “better” the descriptive language, it seems to me, the more it actually obscures the experience (more)

Helen Toner is an Australian researcher, and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. She was a board member of OpenAI when CEO Sam Altman was fired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Toner

Helen Toner: The collapse of 'long' AI timelines. Nothing embodies that acceleration more viscerally than the prospect of human-level AGI arriving not in some distant sci-fi future, but within the span of a few years—or, at most, a couple of decades. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Economics Roundup #5. While we wait for the verdict on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7, today seems like a good day to catch up on the queue and look at various economics-related things. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #104: American State Capacity on the Brink. The Donald Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI. (more)

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson (more)

Anil Dash: Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does (POSIWID). When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed. (more)

The Transition Towns and Green Wizard folks are tossing poo at each other. I think it’s more useful just now to talk about the things Hopkins’ critique got right. Rob Hopkins is a smart guy, and even though he’s garbled a fair number of the details, his post raises useful points regarding some of the core issues I’ve tried to bring up in the Green Wizards posts. The first of those is that one of the motivations behind the Green Wizards project is a recognition of the limitations of the Transition Towns project. I’ve discussed my concerns about that movement on several occasions on this blog, and don’t see any need to repeat those comments just now. The crucial point, though, is one that Hopkins himself cheerfully admits: that neither he nor anyone else in the movement can be sure that it will accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish. That’s a bold statement, and one that’s worthy of respect. Still, it has implications I’m not sure Hopkins has followed as far as they deserve. If the difficult future ahead of us can’t be known well enough to tell in advance what strategies will best deal with it, in particular, it seems to me that it’s a serious mistake to put all our eggs in one basket, whether it’s the one labeled “Transition” or any other. This is the underlying strategy that guides the Green Wizards project. I’ve argued here that the best approach to an unpredictable future is dissensus: that is, the deliberate avoidance of consensus.

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #86: Just Think of the Potential. Dario Amodei is thinking about the potential. The result is a mostly good essay called Machines of Loving Grace, outlining what can be done with ‘powerful AI’ if we had years of what was otherwise relative normality to exploit it in several key domains (more)

John Robb's next book will be The Resilient Community The key to our collective future success (from maximal wealth creation to basic survival), will be in how we mitigate the impact of Black Swans generated by global instability. One of the best approaches I've encountered is to add Resilience to the very fabric of our global system, the Community. Update: Resilient Community writing was going to be a book but instead became website later taken over by Walden Labs. https://waldenlabs.com/author/johnrobb/

John Michael Greer provides a five-part fictional scenario for the Collapse of America at the hands of China. (more)

Preparing to survive/prosper in the Long Emergency/Collapse. Display some personal Resilience. (more)

Technology that can be key Infrastructure either pre-Civilization (Africa) or post-Collapse. (more)