Podcast with Ben Boyce

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I’ve done a fair number of podcasts this last year and a half. Usually when I listen to them I cringe a bit (common phenomena for the podcast class). However when I was listening to this to remind myself what we talked about I’m pleased to share I barely cringed at all! Possibly means it’s a banger.

I was honored when preeminent gentleman

Benjamin A Boyce

invited me on his show Calmversations (97k subs on YouTube). We talked about the meaning of financial and national sovereigns, disequilibrium in trade and morality, the nature of soft power, crypto’s role in the financial system, what “free trade” really means, the limits of the rational, and the pitfalls of hyper-optimization. He asked a lot of insightful personal questions too. This podcast occurred two months ago, you can find it on Ben’s YouTube here.

Note: it sounds like I said “didactic” a couple times, I was saying “dyadic”, meaning of a dyad.

A clarifying comment on the "do you believe in God?" question, which caught me off guard (quite the segue by Ben there). This is how I perceive it:

Everyone believes in God; it's part of the human condition. What varies is not the belief in God, but rather how he manifests.

God is what you view as greater than you. What you submit to. What you look to for guidance. What you pray to in need. What you worship. What inspires the good within you.

For many, this is the classic manifestation: the Christian/religious depiction, also known as theism.

For the atheist, I believe they see God as themselves; God lives within their own minds, because they worship the output of their minds. I find this implicit when science or "reason" is what you reach out to when in need and what guides your sense of truth. You think what's greater than you resides within your head, in your “logic” and your belief that reasoning can be applied to everything equally.

I believe this class of person cannot distinguish between the Linear and the Complex; this inability causes them to believe everything can be modeled.

The way I understand God is as nature.

A Complex System that communicates to you via emergent phenomena and feedback loops. That which cannot be capably managed, predicted, or controlled. The Complex dictates to us, we don't dictate to the Complex. You could describe me as a deist in this way. I allude to it in this essay.

"Etymologically, complexity comes from the Latin plexus, which could be translated as ‘entwined’.

We can say that complex systems are those where interactions make it difficult to separate the components and study them in isolation, because of their interdependence.

These interactions can generate novel information that preclude predictability in an inherent way, as it is not present in initial nor boundary conditions. In other words, there is no shortcut to the future, but we have to go through all intermediate steps, as interactions partially determine the future states of the system…

Complex systems can be confused with Complicated or Chaotic systems. Perhaps they will be easier to distinguish considering their opposites.

Complicated are the opposite of simple, Chaotic (sensitive to initial conditions) are the opposite of robust, while Complex are the opposite of separable."

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Here are some essays that were discussed during the conversation:

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