i am reginald reagan aka RAGIN' RAYGUNS

human-caused

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945) is an American cognitive and computer scientist whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world,[3][4]consciousness, analogy-making, strange loops, ambigrams,[5][6]artificial intelligence, and discovery in mathematics and physics.

David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃɑːmərz/;[1] born 20 April 1966)[2] is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.

Marvin Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016)[5] was an American mathematician who did research in cognitive and computer science aspects of artificial intelligence (AI).

George A. Miller discovered the 7±2 limit of short-term memory. Herbert A. Simon got a nobel prize for studying decision-making in organizations. Noam Chomsky reinvented linguistics.

George Armitage Miller (February 3, 1920 – July 22, 2012)[1] was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. 

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology.  ... His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.[9]

Avram Noam Chomsky[a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics",[b] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

In the Wittgensteinian era, philosophy has been about language - about trying to give precise meaning to terms. The kind of work that I try to do is not about language. It is about reducing mentalistic models to purely causal models, about opening up black boxes to find complicated algorithms inside, about dissolving mysteries - in a word, about cognitive science. That's what I think post-Wittgensteinian philosophy should be about - cognitive science. But this kind of reductionism is hard work. Ideally, you're looking for insights on the order of Julian Barbour's Machianism, to reduce time to non-time; insights on the order of Judea Pearl's conditional independence, to give a mathematical structure to causality that isn't just finding a new way to say "because"; insights on the order of Bayesianism, to show that there is a unique structure to uncertainty expressed quantitatively.

Julian Barbour and Judea Pearl? Not the examples I would have thought of. If we're including a physicist like Barbour, how about Boltzmann for a less controversial example? For reducing directional time to reversible physics?