Time to go read Hoppe, I guess.

But if I can make something of a partial save here, I’ll say that people grasp toward far-off places or times to make the temporal and spatial present meaningful, whether the time is future or past. The idea of delayed satisfaction before a desired end creates an intrinsic purpose for the present. Hence, there’s no real “preference” for one thing or the other, just a submission to a sort of broad structure.

If we take the principle and apply it spatially, this is why someone like Yukio Mishima read a bunch of Western philosophers to establish his identity as an anti-cosmopolitan Japanese traditionalist, which I’m sure we might call a form of “provincialism” even if it goes a bit past the more commonly accepted definition.

In political terms, low time preference and cosmopolitanism can be strong in a given individual and yet lend themselves to a sort of extreme identitarianism. Yet some prole can have high time-preference, extreme cultural myopia, and yet follow suit with precisely the same ideology as the first guy with no internal contradictions whatsoever.

exactly.

But, for the sake of being explicit, the way to teach history to kids is to start near the present and work backwards.

What’s the reason for me to be this way?
I’m lying on the floor
I’ve broken through some door
I don’t know how I came to this
There is blood lust in my eyes
And someone in my mind saying

I have forced you here
I’m hiding, right here inside you
Trapped in here so long
You’ll find me growing in every man

Who is this that speaks to me?
Tearing down my mind
My reality
This must certainly be the one
What will I pay for this?
This evil synthesis!

For reference:
[1] – http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2011.00075/full
[2] – http://www.caida.org/research/topology/hiddenmetricspaces/

Also strongly recommend taking a gander at this.

The salient points;

From [1]:

“However, it is not simply the case that brain and market networks are identical. It is interesting to note that, at least for this dataset, the financial network did show subtle but significant differences from the fMRI data. In particular, the market was significantly more clustered, more modular, and more efficient than the brain networks; but the market was also significantly less robust than the brain networks to targeted attack on high-degree nodes or hubs. Bearing in mind the prior data and theory suggesting that modularity favors adaptivity of processing, clustering favors specialized segregation of processing, and efficiency favors integrated processing and is positively correlated with IQ and executive functions in human brain networks (Bassett et al., 2009; Li et al., 2009; van den Heuvel et al., 2009), the intuitive interpretation is that the market network is overall a more highly optimized information processing system than the human brain networks. It also seems intuitive, but will need further testing, that there may be a trade-off between informational optimization and robustness of these systems. The human brain may be less smart than the market but it is also less prone to systemic disintegration as a result of removing key nodes or hubs from the networks. It is imaginable that this hypothetical interplay between informational optimization and robustness to hub deletion could be useful in assessing or controlling a market’s risk of systemic collapse.”

This is beyond hilarious because an alternative interpretation is that the market has already intellectually outgrown its objects of study and is overfitting. Present a more complex world and it might fall into robustness correspondingly.

From [2]:

“Social experiments have demonstrated that humans can efficiently route through the global acquaintance network topology knowing only some meta-information about their immediate neighbors and the final destination, but lacking the global topology knowledge. In the sociological domain, the network of global acquaintances is a complex network that is both scale-free and strongly clustered. Other networks of social and biological nature, as well as communication networks such as the Internet, exhibit similar characteristics.”

[…]

“The interpretation of the HMS-based “geometry-under-topology” model applied to real networks is straightforward: the topology of a real network, i.e., the structure of connections between nodes, is closely coupled with the intrinsic similarities between nodes. The more similar the two nodes, the more likely they are connected. Thus, the geometry underlying a real network is the geometry induced by node similarities.

If this similarity space is taxonomic, i.e., if it allows for a hierarchical classification of nodes, then the hidden geometry is hyperbolic. Hierarchies are (approximately) trees, which embed “almost” isometrically in hyperbolic spaces.

We found that hidden hyperbolic metric spaces explain, simultaneously, the scale-free degree distributions and strong clustering in complex networks. More precisely, the assumption that real networks have some forms of hidden hierarchical organization naturally explains their observed topologies.

Greedy routing mechanisms are efficient in these settings and may offer virtually infinitely scalable routing algorithms for future communication networks. Figure 6 presents illustrations of negative curvature of hyperbolic planes and their similarity to successful and unsuccessful paths in a visualization of a modeled network.”

“On the assumption that most reactionary-types will want to refuse the idea of an integrated ‘salience preference’ — what is the counter-argument? ”

Assortativity over time, I would guess. Spatial distances are much more pliable than temporal ones (you can think of intelligence as minimizing temporal distance to some omega-point of state accessibility). I can bring an object near me and minimize future costs of interaction.

There’s also a subtler difficulty here that I think most didn’t really quite note. Both localists and globalists can claim they’re future-oriented but no one can determine who’s right because no one has access to the objective evolutions of both strategies. Ironically, the best globalists can do is try to demonstrate that the optimal strategy must be greedy since that justifies the conquest of the rural by the urban otherwise localists could claim something to the effect of their strategy incurring exponential returns in a more distant future as opposed to constant gains by cosmopolitan options. For example, the reactionary perspective on cosmopolitanism is that it’s responsible for a social analogue of the Kessler syndrome (as in “It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.”) and that their own method would avoid such threats. Then there’d be a cosmopolitan retort, counter-retort and so on. Core of the matter being that if your strategy is simple enough to calculate in advance and have a bullet-proof theoretical justification it’s probably not complex enough to be king of the hill so it’s difficult to non-arbitrarily rank candidates, best you can do is patchwork-like disentangle them, provide exit and see what works best in the long run but then you’re avoiding the question of how they interact with each other so it’s only a partial solution at best.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine this year was awarded to a work on the neurophisiology (don’t let kantbot see this) of spatial navigation and the discovery of place and grid cells which constitute a spatial positioning system in the brain. Place cells encode memory for specific places while grid cells seem to provide a tiling for the available environment. Geology as an underlying geometry of several types of networks (airports,railroads, logistics and transportation in general) is obvious but I think there are more interesting things going with different domains due to peculiarities of the brain’s computational architecture. Somewhat further corroborated by things like this] and this if you squint really hard. Another thing that’s interesting is that this stuff is heavily involved with the hippocampus which in conjunction with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex biases behavior towards being far-sighted somehow and both are key regions related to temporal discounting. It’s complicated.

Depends on what exactly you mean by “integrated salience preference”, though. It just sounds like a roundabout way of saying someone is in a local optimum and might benefit by considering alternatives. But that’s an instance of cognitive provincialism itself, ha! A stupid or otherwise resourceless person won’t get much return from global considerations because for whatever reason they can’t relocate to another optimum. However, a hierarchical arrangement might alleviate that situation. It’s parochial in another sense in that it mainly considers individual (local/punctual) returns instead of ecological (global/topical/spatial) interactions and co-dependencies. Not every city can be an IQ shredder. Not every cell in the body can be a neuron. Actually, that’s precisely what’s false in a social context but there are neurons and then there are neurons. The competition is more between ecologies of strategies than between strategies.

The difference might not be that localists are immediate and globalists not, but that they have different priorities and both of them are trying to reach theirs as soon as possible. Cutting that knot would be some objective method of hierarchizing priorities (which I don’t think is possible in general but you might be capable of pointing out internal inconsistencies and defeat particular systems).

“The reactionary is not upset by certain things, but by anything out of place.”

Central to whatever semantic space we’re (or maybe it’s just me) in right now is the notion of metric and I can’t help but notice that admin (and possibly a good portion of NRx) is very very interested in quasimetrics (it’s actually a very natural concept but it’s not what people usually think of distance), consider left-ratchets and hyperstitions and gravity. The thing is here is how to understand the variations in personal metrics relating to intertemporal choice, how these manifest in social arrangements (there are quite a few candidates) and what is the objective underlying geometry common to these structures.

God damn it, I can feel something important lurking just beyond the distance but can’t quite make it out. It’s interesting how several human institutions seem to mirror our biological function in very deep ways. Or it’s our biological functions which mirror submerged realities and through living we make them concrete and perceptible.

“It was a circuit, locking him out. To access the name he needed to know who to call. Incense-clouded blackness and strange drugs broke upon a sea-wall of silence.” HEH.

I will create in my own image
If God can then why can’t I?
No thought of the consequences
I’ve got to know the meaning of life

Lightning strikes, it’s the witching hour
The monstrosity comes alive
A victim of man’s vanity
Born in delirium, a deranged child
He turns his back on his own creation
Chaos ensues, the innocent die
Who’s the monster?
Who’s the victim?

Crucify!!! Crucify!!!

I’m gonna go do something else before my mind melts from combinatorially explosive inference.