Thinking about broken spells and busted myths today.
When spells break, weird shit happens. We’ve had a lot of broken spells in the last 30 Bush years. 9/11 broke the spell of “terrorism” and Wilsonian “democracy” imperialism. 2008 broke the spell of honest banking. 2020 broke the spell of “public health” as a healing profession and exposed the natural psychopathic sadism of the profession. Now we have the peculiar miniature spell of Biden’s omnipotence and eternal youth, which nobody outside the media ever believed.
What breaks a spell? Ask Wile E. Coyote. Stocks are the clearest example. The boom is omnipotent and eternally young. It’s early! Buy buy buy! As long as you keep buying, the value will keep doubling and you can sell for a profit! At some point the exponential runs off the cliff, with no more fools available to crank it up. Bust.
More broadly, a spell breaks when the sorcerer takes it too far, when he doesn’t notice that there are no more fools available to mutually reinforce belief.
Nature doesn’t do exponential booms and busts. Nature does a log or tanh shape. Whether we’re talking about the life of an individual, the development of a skill, or the life of a tribe or nation or business, the shape is always tanh. Rise fast at first, gradually taper out to a plateau.
ABSTRACTION is the cause of EVERY SINGLE CRASH in business, government, and ordinary lives.
Abstraction has three Ds:
(1) Debt.
(2) Delusions.
(3) Drugs.
All three are unsustainable departures from real value and real work and real measurements. Sooner or later reality crashes you.
What do the three D’s have in common? EXPONENTIAL curves, or at least attempted exponentials. Debt is obvious. Compound interest IS exp by definition. Delusions and drugs both arise from a false anticipation of constant increase in pleasure or holiness or popularity or Share Value.
We EXPect things to be EXPonential. Reality is TANH. The DELTAS between anticipation and reality grow larger as reality departs from our desires.
Happystar illustrates the process. First our EXPonential EXPectation:
Reality goes tanh. Up at first, then reaches saturation or maturity and holds steady. Our heads are in the clouds of EXPectation and our feet are on the ground of tanh.
Now the crucial point. Our anticipations feel like the constant standard, the point we measure from. Our EXPectations are the baseline, the goal for our error-correcting feedback. We are constantly TRYING to achieve the EXPected condition. Thus our perceived reality is DOWNWARD,
Because reality is increasingly disappointing, we have an increasing desire for SOMETHING that will restore us to standard. This is where the sellers of religion or drugs or politics or hair color come in. You’re not misperceiving reality, you’re just NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH. You need more booze, more Eucharist, more voting, more makeup.
= = = = =
How about the inverse question? Does Nature ever USE exponentials?
Well, life can’t do an unending exp, because an unending exp is physically impossible. You can only get an unending exp in math. So the question narrows: Does life create AND POP bubbles intentionally?
Of course. All the time, in an infinite number of ways. Specifically, many types of neurons are pulse oscillators, repeating an exp rise followed by a natural pop. The most common neurons of all, the granule cells in the cerebellum, are pulse code handlers. Most of the action in hearing is done by pulse codes. Toward the output of each system, the pulses are smoothed into analog motions for muscles, or integrated into longer and more complex resonances for memory patterns.
In short, Nature uses all of the PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE combinations of exp and tanh. Nature rejects the only combination we believe in.
= = = = = END 2018 REPRINT.
After the cliff there are always sorcerers starting a new exponential spell. Some try to restart the same exponential, some play the good cop/bad cop game. My spell is the opposite of the old busted spell! It’s different this time! Satoshi started bitcoin in 2009.
The bust is also ripe for a TANH anti-sorcerer. FDR was the anti-sorcerer. He refused to play any of the banker games. No exponential, no globalism, no digital standard. He deployed an army of LOCAL MAINTAINERS, who started developing skills and soil and infrastructure as the basis for a MATURE ASYMPTOTIC FUTURE. And it worked for 35 years until Wall Street Lawyer Nixon restarted the EXP booms.
Polistra's Mill 