New mirrored blog

This is my new mirrored blog. Anyone can post comments in it so please feel free to do so. Also, if I make references to previous posts and photos, those are elsewhere and I am not linking to that site for reasons of my own. Now, onto the post.

That last post ended rather abruptly as I was under some perverse sense of obligation to post it by midnight for the sake of intellectual honesty. My secret obsessive/compulsive behavior has a lot of influence. Ironically enough, this post is being posted retroactively a day late.

My prior post is a great launching point for essays worth of thought and perhaps some shameless commercialism as well. After all, Asimov parlayed the principle idea into six books. In those books, the predictability of the future was contingent on two main tenets: that the populace whose future was being predicted not be aware of the predictions and that there were a lot of them. In the books it was 25 million inhabited worlds each with an average of 4 billion people which would make for 100 quadrillion people. That's just a wee bit more than we've got right now. Also, a select group did know the predictions and it was their job to make sure they came to fruition. While the future was being generally predicted, they were controlling the key decisions every step of the way. But at least they knew the outcome of their decisions.

This is all fictional anyway. It doesn't speak all that much as to whether or not we would be able to do it. However, one of the main implications of the large numbers of people condition is that individuals become irrelevant. In fact, entire worlds only matter as data points in a model with 25 million of them. With so many people, there is still individual free will (whatever you consider that to be) because it is the averaged out behavior of the masses that is being predicted. Can you conceive of a world where individuals don't matter? Our 20th century history seems to be filled with iconic individuals, especially those surrounding World War II. Just as important, do you want to live in a world where individuals don't matter, where they can't be world changers. And what would that imply about the socio-political environment? After thinking about it a little bit, I get a terrible sense that such a world would bear too striking a resemblance to Orwell's 1984 or some similarly ultra state-controlled existence. There, individuals would not matter not as a mathematical consequence, but because they were made to not matter.

What of our past great individuals. If you're actually here reading this, I'd like to assume you have the capacity to consider the idea on your own for each person and ask yourself if that person's rise was truly a great individual setting forth a strikingly bold and original vision. Or was his rise a matter of properly sensing the pulse of the people and then riding a movement that he was able to feed and in turn feed off of. What came first, the chicken or the egg? When you consider the situation, it's somewhat analogous to that. Does significance stem from individuals who inspire and lead people or do people find and carry prominent individuals?

Interestingly enough, we may find our very love of individuality is what makes us impossible to truly predict, from a political standpoint. However, we are becomingly increasingly more capable of modeling and predicting certain things, especially when it comes to where technology will be in 1, 5, 10, 50 years. Same goes for certain aspects of economic forecasting and even larger social trends like population growth.

In a totally unrelated note, Amazon.com keeps putting this item in my Gold Box. I'm not sure what in my past purchases makes their system think I want such an item. Does anyone else think such an items is an incredibly tacky upper-middle class piece of kitsch that represents the total lack of class and style that people who don't know how to handle money buy? Just wondering.