[ExI] mayan forecast

[Kelly Anderson]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 5:54 PM, <ablainey at aol.com> wrote:

> I personally do see cycles in everything including time. However my own
> view of a year isn't a circle like a clock, it is like a spring.
> A helix with future years stacked and hidden behind this year and previous
> years out of sight behind me. Which you could probably say is a perception
> of time that is both cyclic and linear.
> Who's to say that in the reality of things my spring of time isn't
> actually curved around and the ends joined together? our dataset is very
> limited and Im amazed at how well the Myans did with apparently so little
> data.


The raw data they worked off of was likely recorded on long rotted wood,
cloth or some primitive kind of bark paper. I recall a couple of surviving
Mayan books, the Maya Codices, written on Mesoamerican bark cloth, made
from the inner bark of certain trees... There are only three undisputed
books that survived the Spanish invasion or the ravages of humidity and
time to the point that they can be read today... Of course, as others have
said, the main Mayan civilization had collapsed long before the Spanish
arrived, but there were surviving relics, such as these books, that
threatened the God of the Spaniards, and were thus eliminated
systematically.

Fashion comes around, politics is cyclic and we are again looking at
therise of socialism.


I see politics as cyclic in the same sense as a pendulum is cyclic. It's
probably more like a double pendulum in that it is complex, unpredictable
and sensitive to initial conditions... but the basic idea is that we swing
to the right until there is enough wealth (which naturally gets
concentrated in those who best execute the best ideas that benefit the most
customers and have a little luck following an equation that is a power law)
that some enterprising group of leftists can convince the great unwashed
that they should have some of that concentrated wealth. Then the leftists
gain power through manipulation of the larger and poorer populace by appeal
to the innate greed and envy of the rich. In this case, the power law still
holds, but the parameters can change. In the case of Soviet style
communism, the wealth is concentrated even more sharply in the
party apparatus and the poor part of the curve is even flatter than under
the initial conditions (i.e. everybody else is more poor).  In the case of
European style socialism, the power law is flattened slightly at the top,
and is pushed out fatter towards the long tail, which I suppose is the
stated goal of the left when you really look at it. But since such
socialist systems don't produce wealth as efficiently as more free
capitalist systems, the socialist systems get out competed by some other
state(s) that can produce more wealth swinging things back towards the
right globally. So the economic/political oscillator is likely a strange
attractor of this income and wealth distribution power law-like curve. (In
the details, the long tail of income distribution isn't as long as a real
power curve because nobody will work for pennies per day without starving
to death). Perhaps I haven't explained this clearly enough, or established
the right influences on the attractor, but I do think there is something
like this going on.

As to the question of indefinitely enduring growth, I don't believe in
infinite growth per se, but I do believe in exponential growth of
intellectual capital up to the point where the storage of the information
thus gained itself becomes a limiting factor. There are only so many atoms
in a light cone that can be converted to computronium storage after all,
but we aren't even close to those limits.

-Kelly
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