Jan '25 (edited) • General discussion
Revolutions inside each other
Comments from Hal Morris, about learning how to use Steve’s Ravel/Minsky software toolkit, triggered these thoughts. Lots of new members, with a broad range of backgrounds, have recently joined Skool. Therefore background issues of experience, around and about today's trend towards a widespread, non-specialist use of intricately-powerful kinds of software, might be more widely relevant. So I make my comment to Hal Morris as a more-visible top-level Post.
It’s likely obvious from what follows that, even though I find intricate details fascinating at times, my underlying preference is to situate details in a ‘big-picture’ context. So my viewpoint here stands way back, trying to tackle how difficult it can be to see revolutions when you’re enmeshed in the very midst of them. I’d say three revolutions are involved, one inside the other.
The innermost revolution is the potential for both substantial and substantive change, in economics, business, the media and in politics, through the widespread understanding and use of the Ravel/Minsky software toolkit. This kind of numerical-method, self-adaptive, complex-systems technology has largely swept the board in many parts of engineering and even some parts of science. Steve has applied it, in appropriately modified form, to economics and finance. However, this revolution is still much impeded by burdensome matters of user-skill and software-design usability - as encountered by many Skool members, including me, in getting a grasp on the software. Strangely, like a snake eating its own tail, these user-related matters of skill and familiarity arise because of, and can only be resolved within the territory of, the outermost revolution.
The middle revolution is surely obvious to Skool members, since it’s why we’re all here. It’s the replacement of the fundamentally erroneous ideas of orthodox economics by truthful and realistic ones.
The outermost revolution is the hardest one to see because it’s slow-acting - a slow-burn revolution, somewhat similar to that engendered by mechanical printing. In 1450, to own a few books as a private citizen was a mark of great wealth or high prestige. About two generations after Caxton's Press of 1476, there were more books in Europe than people. Subsequently, mechanically-printed books became a kind of mind-amplifier, a memory magnifier, a crowd multiplier and a distance annihilator all rolled into one.
When I was a child, analogue electronics was almost all there was, dealing with sound, pictures and the control of machinery.. Even as a young adult, of course I had no idea of what digital electronics would achieve or could become. It’s a revolution that surely is far surpassing that of mechanical printing. All books, even in Kindle form, are much the same kind of thing. That’s not true of digital technology, touching every kind of communication, computation, motion, measurement, transaction, archiving and more.
So the outermost revolution is a house with many rooms. Computation in particular is still a young industry, able to make mistakes, forget the past, live in the present and keep a keen eye on the future. The sheer number of programming languages, and the quantity of defunct hardware, is testament to that, I’d say. So computers, both personal and corporate, are still something of a work in progress, lacking fully-refined, stable and consistent styles and embodiments. They’re no knife-and-fork, used with ease. Ravel/Minsky software, even more particularly, is a work in progression and is somewhat taxing to explore. Yet gain will surely exceed loss in the longer term. That makes Skool unusual - an exciting, disturbing, not necessarily comfortable and often anomalous place to be. I’d say that’s the price of being close to a cutting edge in the space of future possibility.
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Revolutions inside each other
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