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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Doctor Hammer

Got any good book recommendations on classical antiquity? Given sub-footnote 13, I figured you might....

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Good question. Victor David Hanson has some good books on it (it is his actual field, as opposed to modern politics, so he is quite good). Carnage and Culture is good, but A War Like No Other which focuses on the Peloponnesian war might be just what you are looking for. Come to think of it, I ought to dig that out of the boxes and give that another read myself. The changes in warfare and the general drama of "How the hell do the Athenians not win? Look how much they are winning, how can they.... oh shit... they lost." is really good. Ripples of Battle has some interesting sections, one of which is Delium where Socrates gained notoriety (and a Plato), and Soul of Battle has a really good section on the fall of Sparta at the hands of the Boetians and company.

If you are interested in early republican Rome, the Loeb editions of Livy are really good, and as a bonus reading those means you can make sense of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and actually understand him. (Everyone reads the Prince without getting that Machiavelli is essentially saying "Look of much of an asshole you have to be to be a conquering Prince, so don't do that.")

I will try and think of some more. It's been a bit since I was reading a lot of classical stuff, at least that wasn't Plato or Cicero. I feel like there is a book shaped hole or two in my brain, and I just can't remember what goes there.

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Thanks! I read VDH's book on WW2 and thought it was pretty good. I had a preeminent ancient greek history professor in college who spoke highly of VDH and gave us small readings of his, but I never read his ancient greek books. I was assigned Thucydides in college (by the same prof) but failed to read it. Trying to work up the willpower to get started on it.

Since you gave me these recommendations, I feel obliged to give you some in return:

-Subject to Change podcast episode about the film Gladiator, critiqued by host Russell Hogg and his guests Ed Watts and Bret Devereaux

-Aforementioned Watts's youtube lecture series called The Eternal Decline of Rome (or something similar)

-Josiah Ober, Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (takes a largely economic perspective)

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Nice, thanks! Devereaux's blog is pretty interesting (although like most historians he makes some odd recommendations about modern day affairs).

That Ober books looks especially interesting. I will have to see if the library has a copy.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Doctor Hammer

Loved this one!

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Glad to hear it :)

Have you named the fire any colonies in your yard yet? :P

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No, but much more horrifying - found a bunch of wasps making ant-like mounds in an area, almost stepped on one of them! I'm guessing they wouldn't have liked that, and backed away slowly. Thankfully at work but still!

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Oooh, a bucket of dry ice is great for that. At night (don't want to piss them off while they are awake) you can put the bucket with a hole in the bottom over their mound. CO2 leaks down and fills up all the available space, and no more wasps. I think you could probably do the same thing by pouring some gasoline over the entry of the mound and lighting it up, or just a regular, boring fire. They might not let you do that at work, however :D

Anything that sucks the O2 out and/or replaces it with CO2 (or CO) will do the trick. Dry ice has the fun "better living through chemistry" angle, but then... fire is fire.

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As cool as that sounds, ***I*** will not be doing anything lol, this reminded me and told the maintenance guy at work. I stand the full 20 feet away with my foaming spray when dealing with even normal little wasps... stinging insects have my healthy respect lol. YouTube somehow discerned this about me and is recommending nest removal videos, and I've seen gas used (not sure which)... but yeah, happy to just watch another do that for the moment ;)

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I have also noticed gasoline is extremely toxic to Yellowjackets. If they get close to it they immediately die. We had a colony in the ground near a lawn that became aggressive to anyone sitting on the lawn. I got a small rag and balled it up and dipped it in gasoline and dropped it on the hole they were coming out of. Lights out for the colony. Your bucket-based “carbon footprint” stomping on the the face of Yellowjacketry forever method sounds better though. (Don’t tell Greta!)

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Maybe if you saved the yellowjackets for her to eat later it would make her feel better :D

That is really interesting about gasoline and yellowjackets. It makes sense in a way, since gas has some rather unpleasant fumes and insects can't control their breathing (land based ones, anyway). That would be like sucking in a huge gulp of fumes, then falling down on more fumes while you gasp. That would sound bad, but man, yellowjackets... fuck those guys.

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022Liked by Doctor Hammer

Good stuff, Doc. It may have been freeform jazz, but it was still smooth. Not the Kenny G kind of smooth; more like Coleman Hawkins kind of smooth). Now I really want to try it! Perhaps with some assortment of mild chemicals involved.

Funny enough, I wrote a bit about both ant colonies and markets as higher order gestalt-beings a couple of days ago.

https://markbisone.substack.com/p/the-devil-incarnate-part-1

I think our conclusions are similar. My only fear is that I suspect humans -- as the reigning champions of pattern-finding -- may be emulating the species' success, instead of it being an intrinsic quality, either of ourselves or of holistic (i.e. embodied, fully integrated) living forms in general I do think there is a difference between the hivemind model and the individual model.

But at the same time, I also think that (spiritual? Jungian?) structures of collective being are accessible to some portion of our minds. Highly distributed, loop-dependent egregores like markets are a very good example of that.

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Awesome, I will check that out this morning!

I think markets are an interesting example of how inaccessible, or at least incomprehensible, such higher level processes or beings (process beings?) are to us. We spend so much of our time interacting with markets, such that many people produce almost nothing themselves outside of their labor, but people are largely blind to it. Perhaps that is because markets work so well so that we don't need to think about it (I never give my roof much thought till it leaks) but it still amazes me how difficult it is to get people to think of how it works. Not even just college students, but adults and many economists just can't quite get it. Every time an economist says something like "Oh, the 'market' is just going to magically solve this itself?" my hope for humanity dies a little inside as I point out "Well, maybe not magically, but... yes. That's what markets do, pretty successfully in fact."

I think that... awkward accessibility is what makes talk of demons and spirits both uncomfortable and extremely common. On the one hand, we are not built to really grasp complex dynamic emergent systems. We just can't. On the other hand, we see the patterns, we sense there is something going on, and possibly erroneously and possibly not, we throw a human face on it. That kind of helps, but only in a loose heuristic kind of way. So the talk isn't always useful, and sometimes negatively so, but it is getting towards something real we can't quite grasp.

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The irony of communism is that they thought to emulate ants by trying to turn humans into a eusocial organism, not understanding that humans already are a eusocial organism, and further misunderstanding the distributed nature of decision making that eusociality depends upon.

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Yes, except for the eusocial parts (eusocial implies only a single set of reproducers making all the babies). Communism is all about power and control, and our limited minds need a highly uniform population to actually control, one that doesn't, and probably can't, exist. And as you say, even then, it doesn't work because complex societies can't be controlled from the center, they always break down.

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Ah, I'd seen eusocial used to describe humans before. This:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279739/

Seems to indicate that the term can be used for humans, although they do say 'loosely defined'.

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Considering how few wokies have kids, and how much the left seems to push for people to sterilize themselves, or do it via vaccines, it might not be quite so loose as we hope. A eusocial society might well be the goal, but isn't what humans usually do.

Thanks for that link. It is a little sloppy in the second tier referenced article to call humans eusocial in this case. They are making the case that menopause making women sterile is roughly the same as eusocial behavior. That's a stretch... birthing is very dangerous for humans compared to other animals due to our head to hip sizes, and that is a much better explanation for menopause evolution (you are going to die if you keep having kids, but you can very quite valuable in other contexts for a while) than trying to say we are eusocial in some meaningful way. If one wanted to make a spectrum of eusocial animals and put humans a bit more towards eusocial than say cats, fine, that's all well and good. We still would be way the hell away from ants and naked mole rats, however.

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I'd argue that celibate priesthoods, or even cool childless uncles like myself, are a better argument for eusociality. That said the connection between the human post-reproductive lifespan, which is shockingly long by comparison with most species, and the enormous time and effort it takes to raise human children, is a fascinating topic on its own.

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Aye. And even then, most eusocial animals don't make the choice to not reproduce, but are actually sterile. I think that is a very important element, particularly with species with as much free will as humans. Otherwise, why not call dogs eusocial humans?

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In 'The Once and Future King' TH White use a representation of ant-life as a lesson against collectivism. I expect we know more about ant biology and behaviour now, and so ants were perhaps not the best representation (though you can see the intuition). The contrast to your points on them not being guided, and acting individually to create the wider whole is nice:

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/o/the-once-and-future-king/summary-and-analysis-the-sword-and-the-stone/chapter-13

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That's interesting! I read that... possibly shortly after it was written, it was so long ago, and I don't remember it. I think I have a Kindle copy though and can rectify that.

I wonder how much ants do have individual personality, vs just being little robot like insects. Then again, I don't know how much personality any insect has, or how much we could recognize what they have. That seems to be the trouble of being a higher tier being and looking down at a lower, you can't see at a fine enough level of detail to make out what is going on, just as an ant looking up can't possibly understand why we do the things we do at such macro scale.

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Rupert Sheldrake investigated ants with his brother as children in Africa. There was a colony that built little bridges. The brothers noticed that when they damaged an ant-bridge, a type of road-repair ant would come out from ant-central to fix it. They wondered about how the communication was happening and began timing how long it took repair-ants to get the message that they were needed. They discovered that as soon as any member of the colony encountered the damaged bridge, the repair ants would immediately come out of the anthill 100 yards away and make their way to the damage. They concluded that the colony must be one entity.

Also, I read recently about a fungi that is perfectly lethal to ants. If they contact the spores they know they are doomed and isolate themselves so that they don’t contaminate other ants from the colony. It almost seems like these ants “fall on their swords” heroically to save the others.

Humans seem to admire heroic, self-sacrificing actions. They also recoil when a hero is duped by a selfish villain. I think this is a clue to some kind of a soul-calculus that at least the non-psychopaths among us are “accessing.”

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That's crazy about the repair ants. I'll have to look that up, as this is the first time I have every heard of it.

Another interesting ant tidbit is that they dispose of their dead away from the colony nest, but not in the same place they dispose of other trash; the dead colony members get their own burial ground (pile) away from any refuse. Usually the graveyard and the refuse pile will be far from the nest, both as far as is convenient by ant standards, and will be on opposite sides, to be as far from each other as possible.

Now, the max distance from the nest makes sense; you don't want trash growing bacteria to get the colony sick, and you don't want whatever killed the other ants working its way back to the colony. Maximizing the distance between the trash and the dead kin, though, you can rationalize that by thinking that you don't want to give the bacteria in the trash a chance to develop a taste for ant, as it were, but then you wouldn't have to maximize the distance, just keep it away a bit. What little romance there is in my wizened little heart makes me want to believe that the ants consider themselves sacred, their empty bodies more than just trash.

Of course, there is probably some species of ants that wear the exoskeletons of their dead friends as decoration, or make little exoskeleton mausoleums inside the nest. There's always one.

(There's actually a type of bug, a beetle I think but maybe a true bug, can't remember, that glues the bodies of dead ants to its back. Like, dozens of dead ants at a time. Apparently this makes ants ignore it. I suppose if an animal the size of an elephant with a few dozen dead humans stuck to it wandered past my house, I would pretend I didn't notice it, too. I mean, who would believe you if you told them?)

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Sep 11, 2022·edited Sep 11, 2022

Discretion is the better part of valor they say, but maybe pretty hard not to rubberneck an event like that. I guess if it looked like a T Rex I would have an easy time overcoming that temptation but if it was a giant ground sloth I might chance it.

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Beautiful and thought-provoking. Thank you!

Harrison Kolehi called your work to my attention.

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Thanks so much! Harrison writes some really interesting stuff and there is some great conversation going on there, so I am glad some of you folks are making it over here.

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I guess the tendency for coercion and a seeming need to control other member of the colony, which some individual humans over other humans, is a big difference from ants.

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Very much so! I think that might be our biggest social pathology, although I am worried it has some strong evolutionary benefits as well. Even if we could just remove the will to power and coercion it might not be optimal, but damn, I have a hard time imagining that dialing it way the hell back might not be a good idea.

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Depends on whether we had bonobo like or chimp like ancestors I guess - and that genetic line is extremely thin. But I feel there are enough of us with no interest in coercing others for it feature not a bug (insect pun not intended :-) )

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I've often wondered about bonobos. For as popular as they are, there are very, very few of them. Not that popularity means there should be more (the implications of how that would happen are creepy :P) but more that they get a lot of attention for being the equivalent of a early 20th century religious cult, compared to chimps. People talk about how wonderful they are, but rarely mention they are only found in a teeny tiny area, while their psychotic cousins are all over the damned place. My suspicion is that there were no bonobo like ancestors, and rather bonobos are just an odd offshoot that managed to work out because they got isolated by the Congo river. Sort of like how there isn't exactly an ancestor group for the Aum Shinrikyo cult. (The metaphor is getting a little stretched, but hopefully it still makes a bit of sense.

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Good, but disturbing, point. Here is someone arguing for the bonobo like ancestors, but he doesn't seem to consider your point... https://www.humancondition.com/freedom-essays/fossil-discoveries/

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Sep 13, 2022Liked by Doctor Hammer

Beautiful and elegant! Manipulating prices probably does the same to society as messing with pheromones in an ant colony

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Thank you, and exactly correct! You can dump more "hey, there's food here!" pheromone on the trail, but that doesn't mean there is more food. It just means more ants are going to waste energy looking for it.

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Brilliant essay. I kept looking for something that I could disagree with, but the only thing I could find was the subtitle.

That life is something "built" seems to imply what Hayek et al called 'constructivist' fallacies. Although I doubt that's what you meant.

Otherwise, perfect IMHO.

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I don't see how I can not like that comment, thanks!

I see what you mean about the constructivist fallacy, but I would lean on Hayek again for the notion of "the result of human action, but not of human design" here. Not that humans are always the ones doing it, but things are getting built by the action of their parts, but not their intentional design. Sort of like how ants build a nest: no one ant or set of ants plans and designs the whole thing, but each individual makes tweaks as seems like a good idea at the time, and boom, you have a giant nest with yards of complicated tunnels and chambers, alive with the activities of millions of parts.

In other words, I think the problem the constructivist fallacy addresses is that of a central plan carried out towards a defined end, instead of many plans working in concert to an unknown (and possibly unknowable) end.

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Ok, it's perfect. Word for word perhaps the most thought-provoking thing that I have read in quite some time. More, please.

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