It's clear to me that we need to organize.

Corporations and government organize but while we remain divided and separate we are easily pitted against each other and out-maneuvered. It seems to me we need to organize. The 1% govt corporations all organize. While we are all disorganized and at each other's throat about nonsense, we are screwed, totally and basically at their mercy. As a result we have little say in what happens to us.

A number of groups are trying to organize into broader groups, Love-in-action network, March Against Monsanto, which I hope if they are successful will morph into March Against Koch Bros and Wal-mart, occupy, uniteblue and there are many others. There is no point in reinventing the wheel, but it is useful to build alliances between the various groups.

Sometimes these groups are often plagued by internal politics, often hair-line fractures magnified to obscure the continents of common-ground we share. We all want approximately the same thing, to wrest back control of our country from the corporations. While some of us are trying to protect the environment, defend animals, help the homeless, get better pay, we are generally on the same side.

I think we need to set up a kind of alliance of groups and an ambassador who is gregarious and smart and who is wired normally, with the same objectives as the group. Someone who is prepared to work on this in his/her time and not expect to be paid, at least not initially.

Initially if we have a problem, as Will Potter did, or Aaron Swartz, Glenn Greenwald etc etc then we need to band together. Surely they can't arrest us all?

But it has broader applications as well, like I am thinking we need to incorporate the people of America, so we can negotiate better health care services directly, instead of via insurance corporations, and an alternative news service that is verified news and perhaps host debates with non-major candidates for presidential elections. We can lobby back the government... But that's kinda the grander vision of how it could evolve.

People could participate only to use some of these benefits, like healthcare for example, but not participate as much in the political aspects, although the implication would imply their support for the politics.

Its a big job and a job that would probably require many people working on together.

Recently I was having a discussion about understanding. I said probably most of what I know is wrong. The friend asked what did I mean.

Its not that I choose to know things that are wrong, its just most of what makes up my life is based on what I have heard and taken for granted. Its not that I don't examine what I think, but for the most part I believe what I've read about ocean currents and not examined them for myself, for instance.

Reality is mostly by consensus. We seem to be constantly checking each other for a shared understanding of the universe and when there is a dispute we dismiss our misunderstanding as probably tribal, "damn republican", for example. We magnify miniscule differences to the point where they obscure the continents of common ground that we share. Even though the problem is probably perspective or a phrasing of the question.

For example, progressives want unemployment benefits so people won't starve, however people who stay on unemployment benefits for too long tend to get bored, so most conservatives think that the unemployed should find a job very quickly or some alternative employment strategy. Both people are right, in my opinion, but this is the simple version.

I suspect we will never create a perfect model on anything as Godel proved. If mathematics is thought over by the most brilliant of minds, how will we ever develop a perfect model of economics, law or politics? All systems must have the ability to evolve, especially models that involve humans. At the same time, every evolution of a system is not necessarily better and should be prepared to be dismissed.

This is also because our understanding is too limited of human behavior and human behavior can only be modeled to a limited extent. Average human behavior can be only predicted for so long, unless we do something like restrict choice and options with law, superstition and/or social pressure.

Having said that, I think it is still worth a try to model it. I think the important thing is that systems must be allowed to evolve as our understanding improves, so must the system. This is what most models ignore, once cast they tend to be rigid. People are still talking about Keynes, Marx, von Mises... We don't do that in physics and math, this is the equivalent of living in the past. We have learned so much from the failure of the communist states, where is this history written down? Yet people are still looking at Marx.

As soon as you say 'there are as specific group of actions'... you are modelling. Once you build even partial models you can test it for accuracy. Models can be tested to see how well they perform, this is part of the scientific method.

Most of the stuff I learn is wrong. Things like 'boys will never read books written by women' was held to be true by publishers until J K Rowling's Harry Potter books were published and proved the publishers wrong. We learn stereotypes all the time... this is usually labelled as a prejudice but its shorthand for our brains as it is difficult to relearn over and over again and only becomes important when we deal with certain things often. This is not an excuse for prejudice, but more an explanation as to why we know this is a sea-shell rather than having to learn sea-shells all the time unless we, for instance, collect sea-shells for a hobby, then we can categorize sea-shells. The reality is with any class of people there will be some good and some bad, some fat and some thin, some stupid, some caring, some clever... Does anyone think Obama or W represents them? Yet to much of the world Obama or W does represent the USA to the world. Scary thought, huh?

Sometimes we have insights into the nature of the world and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand what that means. I have had those Eureka moments where I realized something but then it took me a long time to fully understand what the eureka moment actually meant. Understanding is not simple and it can take a while for our brain to truly grasp the insight. This concept is encapsulated by Gandhi:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

While this is more relevant to the idea of once you have your idea, and you try telling other people your idea. First of all people have to hear you, then they laugh because of cognitive dissonance - your idea conflicts with their notion of how they see the world as is when they fight you. Once the cognitive dissonance disappears, people have grasped your idea, they will applaud you, presumably. But mostly only people who haven't thought about the subject will adopt and accept your ideas. But that is the corollary of what actually happens in understanding a concept yourself.

New ideas take awhile to be fully understood and to crystallize.

Part of the problem with artificial intelligence has just been merely understanding what it means to learn something by a computer. Mostly we are trying to replicate - or model human learning. I have been amused when I have read articles that then suggest as a eureka moment that computer learning is startlingly like human learning! Um yeah!

Human learning evolved as our understanding of the universe evolved. We know so little about the universe and ourselves. Our models of ourselves and the universe must be able to adapt as our understanding evolves.

Any MBA will tell you that what is important is to own something that people depend on and then make them pay for it so then it will be a revenue stream forever.

The mad rush to owning everything probably started with electricity and making sure people pay to be connected to the grid and then make them stay (by getting such laws passed). Since then there has been a rush to own everything in the commons, whether it is water, land, roads, schools, prisons, the DNA of food crops....

It was stated that owning the commons was the only way to protect it from becoming a tragedy. But Ostrom cites Clark, who asks who can own the oceans for fisheries?

Lin Ostrom studied methods of handling various commons as partial systems. What I mean by partial systems is in life we are part of many systems as we need many things for us to live. For instance, we need food, water, the atmosphere, shelter, clothes, methods of communications... All of these systems are associated with a commons and how we can access the commons is part of the management of it. Lin Ostrom looked at alternative methods of managing the commons sustainably and her answer was very often not private ownership.

Ostrom states:

Institutions are rarely either private or public - "the market" or "the state." Many successful CPR (common pool resources) institutions are rich mixtures of "private-like" and "public-like" institutions defying classification in a sterile dichotomy.

They strive for an equilibrium of management of a commons. Thus leading to stability, yet the management is still open to flexibility.

Many primitive societies had completely sustainable societies thus in complete equilibrium with the environment. However their societies were often very static. Personal choice was limited. There was probably little option to take the day off sick and stay in bed reading a book. I don't know how the very nomadic Australian Aborigines handled it if someone broke their leg, were they doomed to die when they were unable to walk with the other members of their tribe?

There was not a lot of redundancy in tribal societies as we have in our society. By redundancy, I mean somebody else can take your place and there will still be enough leftover for you. For instance, in normal situations (in countries like Europe and Australia) you stay at home and recover from your illness and life goes on without you while you do so, you'll still be paid and getting all the healthcare you need.

In tribal societies although they were often extremely sustainable, there was very little personal freedom. If you were a woman, you would no doubt be a mother. Women couldn't choose to be academics or mechanics although perhaps there were positions available for "healers" (depending on the tribes) or spiritual pursuits, perhaps, depending how the society was set up. If you were a man, your first job is to protect the tribe and hunt food.

Tribal societies may not have unemployment but they didn't have many advances in healthcare. They may not have been homeless but then the whole tribe may have been nomadic. I have no idea about tribal legal systems and it probably varied vastly from tribe to tribe, and probably varied with the need for people.

Mostly though tribal societies lived in sustainable societies in equilibrium with the environment with the one famous exception being Easter Island. And they lived their sustainable lives at the expense of personal freedom and to some extent, technology development.

But in our society we have these things because we have excess. We have an abundance of labor, food, resources, education, skill and one person can fill in for another and all in all, we have a better quality of life with optimal personal freedom. We can chose to be a parent or a doctor or a mechanic... However even this abundance has gone to excess, as our excess has become a wasteful society. Wasteful of people, resources, the environment and community. We are so apt to throw people away that I only see it as a tragedy.

I like Ostrom because she talks about breaking our commons down into sustainable partial systems. But all things we need to support us, are partial systems. There is the mechanisms for fresh water, the use of used or grey water, dealing with the rubbish our society produces, harvesting food, materials to make our clothes, materials for our furnishings, homes, food, paper, computers...

In our new optimal society, we must optimize for personal freedom and abundance while still living sustainably.

We are human beings and we need other human beings in our life. We may belong to several communities
which are commons and managing them can be difficult. We have lost the art of dealing with people, yet our desire to belong remains. Care for one another.