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DUNE: FUTURE PRESENT

In Herbert’s masterpiece, the Mentat (human computer) has replaced mechanical computers because, after their ‘singularity’ event, computers became as dangerous as the clones in star wars or the hordes of zombies that are the current narrative equivalent. Or for us libertarians, the organs of the bureaucratic state.

Working in my chapter on solutions to institutional problems in calculative fields (the politics of investment in the commons and the distribution of proceeds, the common law, the organization of jurisprudence, accounting and banking), and reading a bit of English and Roman law, it seems to me that we have already passed through our first singularity (scientism, socialism, positivism, postmodernism, statistics, dynamic stochastic equilibria, legislative law, and the concentration of banking made possible by computers and the hubris of statistical risk measurement. ) Most of this calculative bureaucracy made possible by the computerization of recordkeeping, accounting, actuarial and statistical data.

The fact that numbers, in the form of priced and promises, cannot represent the values we attribute to them once ownership of the priced instrument changed, is overshadowed by the ability of nation states and their fiat money to act as an insurer of all this accumulated disinformation.

But like any problem of measurement under high causal density, its what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, what we cannot anticipate that we need to measure, and the inability of contrarians to insulate themselves from the accumulate risk, that creates fragility in the entire system.

Norms, in particular are an asset that can only be measured by aggregate comparison to those with different norms.

Trust can be priced. It can. And it makes health care look trivial by comparison. It is an absurdly expensive norm.

My analysis, which is supported by what we are finally seeing in the data, is that we have already hit one singularity. And the way to correct it is not more computing, which by the process of aggregation launders all future-value information from any price or promise, but by more professionalization of calculative fields alpng the responsibilities of lawyers, doctors, and cpa’s. (albeit privately insured rather than certified.) And the weakening of limited liability protections.

While i agree that government concentration of capital can create certain institutions, all such institutions can be privatized once economically viable.

But taxes, laws, our current primitive accounting methods, banking, credit and dent instruments sll launder causal relations.

This not only creates disinformation but prohibits the population from learning.

The keynesian might argue that the good that results in the short term is more important than the harm in the long term. And that we can fix those problems when we get there. ( That is, in fact, their argument. )

The truth is that the problem is approaching more rapidly, and we are nearly powerless to fix it by incremental means. Conversely, we could achieve all the same ends, and prosper even more so, by using known solutions to institutional problems of cooperation, and adapt to guture circumstances.

But that program of action would require that the progressive program acknowledge that its postmodern failure is as great as its socialist failure was.

And that cannot happen. Not the least of which is because it is tied too closely now with feminism. And numerically, policy change isn’t possible for that reason.