[ExI] need a new word/suffix

[spike]

>… On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
Subject: Re: [ExI] need a new word/suffix

 

On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 9:23 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net> > wrote:

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> ] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes

>…"All we have to fear is phobiphobia." 

>>Controls engineers love the Roosevelt quote “…all we have to feah is feah itself…” 

>…You cite that as humor, but there is a real lesson to be read there, perhaps the one he meant.  Fear can feed on itself in exactly that fashion, leading to ever more extreme reactions that are ultimately traceable back to small or completely absent (perhaps mistaken) original stimuli…

 

Ja.  Consider a new irony leading to a new instability.  Roosevelt was hoping to calm feahs and head off bank runs.  OK that makes sense: he was hoping people would calm down and leave their money in the bank.  But clearly there is a risk that the masses will feah feah itself, and start a bank run.  Those who calmed down and left their money in the failed bank now have something to fear besides fear itself, such as… starvation.

Regardless of the original stimuli, panic is always a real threat.  We are in such a situation now that massive panics could be touched off by something as simple as not even a power failure, but a failure of the email system or internet.  We would become aware that our life savings is not really in the form of piles of US bills in a vault but rather piles of bits on an electronic storage medium.  We would realize that this wealth is not tradeable without electronic communications.  Without it, we cannot use credit cards, cannot use Bitcoin, cannot even use PayPal, cannot trade stocks, we cannot make a withdrawal at the local bank or even use the ATM.   

Conclusions: our entire system has become so brittle that the failure of something we didn’t even have thirty years ago could start a series of bank failures that the government could not bail out.

spike

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