A resonance frequency approach to stopping the motor of the world

Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 11 months ago to Going Galt
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In a prior thread, we considered the possibility of committing sabotage to stop the motor of the world. To stimulate the discussion, I took the role of "devil's advocate" and suggested that Galt might have engaged in sabotage. There was almost universal agreement that Galt would have lost his moral authority to lead the Gulch if he had committed sabotage, rather than only convincing titans to go Galt.

A recent thread entitled "Obama is John Galt" started by jimjamesjames was largely shot down as well, and for good reason.

http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/30...

However, that thread made me reconsider strategy for stopping the motor of the world.

The looters and moochers in real life have taken Cloward and Piven's strategy of overwhelming "the system" with more and more moochers. This is an act of sabotage. This is a moral line that we have decided not to cross. This puts us at a strategic disadvantage.

Add to that disadvantage the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are convincing others (like Larry Ellison of Cisco Systems) to give to charity. I urge you to look at how many billionaires have taken The Giving Pledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_...

Someone here in the Gulch recently suggested that this giving pledge might actually be their way of going Galt. I forget which Gulcher suggested this (Zenphamy? sjatkins?) and apologize to that person.

We all know what Ayn Rand thinks about altruism. I have said previously that the charitable contributions of these billionaires may lengthen the time for the collapse of the looter/moocher era sufficiently that there may not be a time when producers like us would be able to go back into the world. Their charitable contributions delay the inevitable pain for the moochers.

Now switch gears and start thinking about physics and differential equations.

Think back to when you took physics and learned about constructive and destructive interference. If there is a disturbance that causes an object to oscillate at its resonance frequency (or an integer multiplier of it), then the object will break MUCH faster.

For an introductory treatment of resonance frequencies, go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance

For an example, see the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXS...

If we are to stop the motor of the world, an alternate solution would be to do something that reinforces the interference that the looters or those encouraging people to take the Giving Pledge are applying.

Does it make sense to convince MANY producers to go Galt, or will we be more effective by harnessing the momentum of The Giving Pledge to accomplish the goal of depriving the looter/moocher world of producers?

If one takes producers out of the system, how does this change the 2nd order differential equation(s) that would describe the producer-looter-moocher problem?

Please comment on
a) how one would implement such a strategy; and b) whether this would count as sabotage.


All Comments


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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Source of Rand volumes in Spanish? I have discovered a real interest but so far limited to those who have English as a second language.
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  • Posted by term2 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    But reliance on mindless emotion seems to be the driving force behind collectivism . This thread seems to be about ways to speed up the eventual collapse of this approach to life through use of resonance theory, and a return to living a life based on personal responsibility when artificial altruistic support structures are gone. If indeed emotions in this country can be described as a pendulum swinging between socialism and capitalism- but moving more and more towards socialism, the faster we can help it swing more towards socialism and the associated horrors. The better
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  • Posted by term2 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    This is the true problem with life in USA. I want to be productive and creative and it bugs me to be the used as a tool of socialism. I am giving the socialists the guns they need to control me
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  • Posted by $ 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Well said, Michael, even though you picked on two wounds for me that will never fully heal. The ethanol subsidy benefited the competition of my former biofuels business. I had sold my GM bonds a couple of years before the GM bailout, but my parents lost $100 K in GM bonds when Obama rewarded the union moochers at my parents' expense. I have since been forever unwilling to buy bonds as my protest over the violation of bankruptcy law proceedings.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    The Ayn Rand Institute has been doing that for decades. You don't have to crowd fund to start.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 9 years, 11 months ago
    There is one common bond between all those folks and their pledge. Tax Deductions. Ted Turner got a lot of milage out of paying the US share of over due UN payments.In the end his bank account did not suffer.

    Truth telling is a great way to throw sand in the gears. Ethanol (another name for moonshine) is a great example. To run the sitll that makes the ethanol takes about one gallon of fossil fuel for every gallon of ethanol produced. to keep the price down ethanol is subsidized by the tax payer another way of saying you pay for it without getting any. similar to the GMC bailout and how many taxpayers are still owed a Chevy. Ethanol is known to ruin engines even the Calilfornia EPA published a warning. The requirement for ten percent of fuel production must be ethanol was a boon to the fuel and agribusiness industries.who garnered most of the income including the federal subsidies. The workers of the grain belt got lots of jobs and also higher prices at the grocery stores.

    A little sand is still a lot of grains of sand the work is done slowly but eventually it destroys. BOHICA and don't forget to check the lube for sand.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    By the "motor of the world" he means Ayn Rand's meaning of that phrase as the best ideas of the best minds required to establish and implement the proper principles of a social system.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ayn Rand did not advocate trying to bring down society by a strike or any other means as a way to reform society. She knew that it was impractical for a small number of good people to have such an effect by such means, and that collapsing a society would provide nothing on which to rebuild it. She advocated spreading the right ideas required for a proper society. The strike was intended to show the role of the mind in society and what happens when it is withdrawn in a fictional accelerated form of a collapse that was happening anyway, not a political blueprint for reform. Withdrawing to some degree may be (and today often is) proper only for the benefit of your own personal values in how you want to best live your own life versus being punished for it.
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  • Posted by Flootus5 9 years, 11 months ago
    This is an incredibly rich concept that could take a lifetime to explore.

    Or - already has? But that also goes forward as inexorably as does the time that is afforded to our lives.

    I understand what jbrenner is putting forth as resonant frequency. To illustrate, I had a physics professor describe, as an analogy, what happens sometimes when you may be approaching say 55 mph and suddenly your vehicle is vibrating all to hell, and then when you may increase or decease your speed , it goes away. That is a product of harmonizing resonant frequencies inherent in an object.

    I dealt with this phenomenon more specifically when it came to designing blast patterns in mining. The millisecond timing between each explosive loaded blasthole going off is absolutely critical in determining the vibration frequency that is imparted into the adjacent unexploded ground that is intended to serve as a stable highwall. That highwall is made of rock that has an inherent strength property. If you have enough blastholes in your explosive pattern that are going off at the same time or are in an impact wave propagation that has coincident timing - that rock strength is severely damaged. It's ability to stand as a slope is severely compromised.

    jbrenner's point here is that societal/human behavior systems may have similar properties to material properties. As usual, humans have excelled at understanding material real world properties to the benefit of mankind and failed miserably at the same with reality based interactions of humankind. With the exception, I would posit, of Ayn Rand and other rational based thinkers (and founders if I may).

    To extend the concept of resonance frequency as a mechanism to stop the current macro insanity and cognitive dissonance that is gripping our current world situation is a very important idea. A huge amount of exploration in pursuit of this is entirely worthwhile.

    But, I would also agree with some in this post, that the actual motor that needs to be stopped is that of the one deliberately generating this rampant cognitive dissonance. Hence we get into how to circumvent the mainstream media with something else and then you get into the familiar argument of how that option is so far ratcheted down now with net neutrality that we are approaching 1930's Germany.

    But, hey; this concept of resonance has huge merit and power to it. This will be occupying my mind for quite a bit here.

    Thank you jlbrenner!
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    This has nothing to do with political rights. One certainly can say what is morally proper to choose.

    The 'strikers' in Atlas Shrugged recognized that Dagny and Rearden were worthy of helping, but chose not to because it would drag out the effect of the strike and hurt themselves. That they "could not afford". That was a proper moral choice based on objective considerations. It did not involve political rights, was not an irrelevant subjectivist choice, and did not directly concern "moochers" as the potential beneficiaries.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    A moral principle that charity is not a primary virtue and that there is nothing wrong with helping those you think are worthy of it when you can afford to does not impose a duty to either give or not give. It does say that helping those who deserve it can be proper and that helping those who don't is not. Such moral judgment is itself not forcing anyone to do anything. Ayn Rand wrote with objective evaluation, not in duties.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ayn Rand did not advocate giving to moochers. She advocated helping those who deserve it if you can afford to.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ayn Rand's climactic ending was perfect for the novel. It was a work of fiction illustrating the role of man's mind in society and what happens when it is withdrawn -- in a deliberately fictional acclerated fashion -- not a prescription for how to collapse a society and take over. The ending showed fundamental victory and vindication, also highly accelerated, without drawing out the details of how to rebuild a country, which the novel was not about.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    If Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg and a few others had disappeared it would have made no substantial difference. There were many other brilliant minds developing the same ideas. The history of Zuckerberg in particular shows that his amoral pragmatism reached a level of frenzied manipulation and throat cutting because he was well aware that others were developing social media at several universities. He did not invent the idea or its main innovations.

    If someone expects to make a difference on a societal level by going on strike, he had best determine if anyone will notice.
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  • Posted by ewv 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Physics has nothing to do with this. It is a floating abstraction that is at most a strained metaphor. There are no "second order differential equations" describing the moral/political trend.
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  • Posted by Flootus5 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Well said. I know many at this point that actually don't want to make "too much" because it gets taken for the wrong reasons and in the wrong directions.

    But, to also be engaged in something productive, interesting, and rewarding is paramount. Haha! I'm obviously describing my current ventures.
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  • Posted by $ 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    In essence, this thread is about taking a Jujitsu-like approach to using an enemy's own momentum (in this case, the Cloward-Piven approach) against him.
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  • Posted by $ 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Graphene synthesis is something that I have learned quite a bit about in the last couple of years. While it is good for heat transfer, realize that it is only one atomic layer thick. Graphene will be used commercially in the nanoelectronics business soon, but you will never be able to make it cheaply enough for the kinds of heat transfer that you are talking about. Are you more interested in graphene or in heat transfer? If interested in graphene, I can recommend a vendor I trust. If interested in heat transfer across a car radiator, I have an aluminum manufacturing partner who specializes in that.
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  • Posted by $ 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Actually there is a pretty good analogy to societal interactions. Try looking at the mathematical models of Bruce Buena de Mesquita.
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  • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    OK if you want to use this non-human analogy then the resonator is the government and the added energy to the system can counter the harmonic or cancel it. If you support climate change legislation you will damp the productive oscillation and it you vote against it you will accomplish nothing because you remove non of the friction and inefficiency of existing legislation. Keep oscillating guys it uses energy and achieves nothing.

    Remember information is originated and received only by thermodynamic systems. If the systems focus on efficiency then you will find the least energy needed to maintain the system. Its called capitalism.
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  • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 11 months ago
    This is not a resonant phenomena society. There are no physical analogies for a system where all the elements can decide on their own to be come moral and act in a rational way. Boltzmann, Clausius, Newtonian gases all assume that the units of a system are inert and not self sustaining self generated actors with free will. Address the real issue, how to change volitional minds. The answer is by example with explanations available. classical physics and Quantum mechanics do not apply to living organisms nor do verbal analogies. Thermodynamics explains why living things must act but cannot explain which action will produce which results. That is the joy of being a living thing. We can do it but humans are lacking the consistent philosophy of how to do it. Thanks Ayn Rand. for the answer. The best fiction regarding the change of social systems is Asimov's Foundation series.
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  • Posted by $ jlc 9 years, 11 months ago
    I want to say that this is an incredibly intriguing thread. Yes, it is like the psychohistory of Asimov's universe to consider society in terms of resonance frequencies, and that is just great. Have you considered a second profession, jbrenner?

    There are a couple of problems that I see here: One is 'how high is Up' and the other is 'black swan robotics' (not our very own blackswan, you note).

    In the former case we have a variable 'time until dissonance' that is predicated on the affluence and infrastructure of the individual country (how high an Up point we start at). And - as this thread makes clear - the voluntary donation of funds to non-productive members of society figures into how long this affluence lasts.

    The second, which may actually be a derivative of the first, is that when we come up against the threshold of general roboticization of our society, the model changes. From that point on we all, even the poorest, can become aristocrats ethically supported by our non-sentient robotic slaves. The question of 'productivity' in such circumstances is one we have visited before, on other threads.

    So IF we shrug and IF it does not matter because either (a) our country starts at such an affluent point that socialism + charity is taking decades to erode prosperity, and (b) robots revolutionize economics before prosperity is lost, THEN our ethical stance becomes meaningless because the entire basis for productivity has change.

    IF we shrug and prosperity is lost precipitously (war, epidemic, asteroid impact) THEN we can serve as philosophical templates for the reconstruction of a free society.

    So, the conclusion that I come to from reading this thread is that we are a 'back-up on durable media' against catastrophe. (This is not where I thought I was going, but it is where I ended up...)

    Jan
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  • Posted by johnpe1 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    how about graphene? . I bought some, and it's a
    wonderful material for heat transfer. .could it be
    scaled up for homogenizing the temperatures
    across a "radiator" (convector)? -- j
    .
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  • Posted by $ 9 years, 11 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I have already started a motor of the mind. You can see a glimpse of it in the Marketplace.
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