The Wile E. Coyote Insight: What We "Know" Is More Dangerous Than the Unknown

This is why "knowledge is power": those who define what is "knowable" and "known" shape the reality of everyone in the model / system.

Oh crikey, is this another boring post trying to make philosophy relevant? No, it's a post about survival of the fittest, as what we "know" will lead us straight off the cliff in a state of delusional confidence. What we "know" is a mix of what we accept as known and what is knowable, which is defined by the system / zeitgeist / frame of reference we inhabit.

Nowadays we can't talk about "knowing" without invoking AI, which claims to have gathered all of human knowledge and made it available to us in natural language. But as I've taken pains to describe this year in dozens of posts and two books, what AI presents as "known" has been processed in ways we don't see, and these processes limit the reliability and trustworthiness of what AI presents as "known" and "knowable."

The danger here is our ill-informed confidence in AI and in what our system presents as rock-solid "knowable." The system says Gross Domestic product (GDP) is a rock-solid measure of the economy, and since it's rising, you can be absolutely confident about chasing gains (the Roadrunner) off the cliff. (See Wile E. Coyote below.)

Here's the thing that gets passed over: AI hallucinates, but it doesn't "know" it's hallucinating; it presents fabrications as "known facts." AI didn't "knowingly" take digital Ayahuasca and LSD and "know" it will be hallucinating as a result. It "thinks" it's reporting what are established "knowns"--first, this is knowable, and second, this is known.

We're no different when we're fed hallucinations as if they're "known facts." We're unaware they're hallucinations, and so we blithely walk off the cliff because we placed our confidence in fabrications, models that have collapsed without us being aware that 1) we accepted a model as reality and 2) the model collapsed and is now generating "information" that isn't entirely knowable and isn't "fact."

You see the difference: when we knowingly take hallucinogens such as Ayahuasca or LSD, we know our experiences no longer reflect "facts." We understand our experiences may veer into territory that science defines as "unknowable," yet we are experiencing it anyway. We know it is unwise to walk along a cliff edge at dusk in a hallucinogenic state.

But in model collapses, we think the hallucination is the real world. It is in this confused state that we place our confidence in a hallucination and walk calmly off the cliff to our demise.

This is where the survival of the fittest kicks in: confusing reality and a model-collapse hallucination does not generate positive survival outcomes. I explain the systemic sources of this confusion in my latest book Investing In Revolution.

As I explained in Model Collapse: The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, model collapse is the inevitable result when those controlling the model's gearing / programming begin using the output of their previous results (output) to "train" the next iteration of their "knowledge," i.e. what they consider knowable and known.

Using probabilistic functions and overweighting what is accepted by conventions as knowable and known both skew the outputs, which accumulate as each iteration "trains" on the skewed outputs. Knowledge that is on the margins or discounted by conventional definitions of what is being measured as "facts" is edited out of the knowledge base or reframed in conventional terms: in AI "training," this is the Silicon Valley frame of reference.

Those who control the gearing / programming trust their own judgement and models, and so they resist recognizing the increasingly hallucinogenic nature of their model. Their frame of reference is we have god-like powers and are building utopia, and the idea that they have a poor grasp of what is knowable and what is known doesn't penetrate their hubris.

The inhabitants of their Mouse Utopia have been trained to trust their techno-leaders as demi-gods because "technology is Progress," and so their core survival skills--skepticism, a keen awareness of what is unknown because reality has one foot in what is intrinsically unknowable--have atrophied. Surrounded by novelties, addictive distractions, conveniences and comforts, they have lost the ability to differentiate the real world from a (highly profitable) artificial world.

This is a visual representation of what happens when a system "trains" on its own output: GDP is rising, so everyone's doing great, money solves all problems, except moral decay and the other sources of our hallucinations, and so on:



Here's a list of the model-collapse hallucinations we now trust as reality to our future detriment:

1. The entire global financial system is a hallucination generated by model collapse. This hallucination is most easily visible in bubbles, credit, "banking" and "money."

2. The entire AI bubble, including AGI (artificial general intelligence), is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's embrace of the AI-bubble hallucination.

3. Social Media is a hallucination generated by model collapse that is being purposefully obscured to maximize private gains from the public's addiction to the social-media hallucination.

4. The entire status quo of Ultra-Processed Life is a model collapse hallucination, including the delusions that all our problems can be resolved with an "abundance of money" and "energy."

This is why "knowledge is power": those who define what is "knowable" and "known" shape the reality of everyone in the model / system. The result is we're living in a Mouse Utopia that is in late-stage model collapse that is largely unrecognized by the inhabitants but acutely visible to those keeping it glued together long enough to amass private fortunes before it all implodes.

It's highly profitable to maintain the illusion that these hallucinations are "the known world," but when the model implodes, you'll want to be outside the ruins rather than buried beneath rubble. It is only then that we'll realize that what we "know" is more dangerous than the unknown.




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The Perilous Journey Ahead

I reckon it prudent to see the next decade as a journey through a wilderness few of us have experienced.

Marketing has seized "your journey" by the throat. The marketing of everything from storage facilities to downtowns now references "your journey," with the primary message being your journey will be fruitful, fun, exciting--but also safe and secure. In other words, our journey will follow well-worn, well-marked trails, and the outcome will always be positive. If anything untoward happens, someone will be available to get "the journey" back on track.

In other words, "the journey" is never through a wilderness without trails or markers where help is unavailable, where we're on our own and the journey's outcome is uncertain, and fear is the companion who is always by our side.

In the marketed "journey," all you need is money: to rent a storage space or an apartment, to pay tuition or a plane ticket and sturdy boots. This is the essence of what I call Ultra-Processed Life: adventure that is safe and certain can be purchased off the shelf.

We take all the intricate structures that make this possible for granted, and have little grasp of what life is like without them. As long as we have money, we have power. But in a wilderness, there's nothing to buy and no one to pay to make it all go away. In a wilderness, we experience the limits of our power. Stripped of all the structures that make life certain and safe, we come face to face with our own powerlessness.

Many of us have already experienced powerlessness in our childhood. We were repeatedly moved around against our wishes by adults, step-parents were imposed on us and then dispensed with, and we were dropped into schools where we were vulnerable to bullying. Certainty and safety were ephemeral, and we lacked the tools and strengths offered by adulthood.

It is not surprising that many of the elements of Ultra-Processed Life are child-like: we're offered "adventures" that are safe and certain, as in "let's play adventure" but in a safe, protected environment.

The problem with packaging life based on the ubiquity of complex structures that protect us from contact with uncertainty, risk and powerlessness is we're completely unprepared for the real world when we do finally encounter it. We cannot imagine experiences that unravel and cannot be reversed with a phone call or credit card.

Unaccustomed to being totally on our own in situations we've never experienced before, we're ill-prepared to function in a fast-moving environment of uncertainty and risks we cannot fully grasp. These environments can be external--the real-world unraveling--and/or internal: the unraveling of burnout or breakdown.

I've written a lot about self-reliance, as this is the penumbra (Latin for "almost shadow") of powerlessness: self-reliance is never limitless, for we do not have god-like powers. It is intrinsically limited. But it does generate agency, the capacity to direct our lives by exerting our will, skills and effort.

One analogy for "the journey" is driving a car. Our experience is 100% low-risk predictability and control until we experience an accident, and so our experience doesn't prepare us for things going awry. We have no tools for dealing with sudden extremes or unexpected failures in the systems we take for granted. It's only after such experiences do we learn our limits an gain an appreciation for what might happen even in low-risk settings.

Those of us who have had such experiences tend to think along "worst-case scenario" lines as the means of avoiding being caught off-guard by "longtail risks," i.e. events deemed unlikely but still well within the realm of the possible.

For example, if I climb on a roof, I assume I'm going to slip and fall, so I take precautions that look excessive to those who haven't fallen off roofs.

In a similar fashion, it seems risky to have no water, food and fuel stored up for the unlikely eventuality that the systems we rely on to provide these essentials break down or are disrupted. It seems equally risky to have few skills in fashioning shelter, growing food, organizing security, and planning scenarios to deal with breakdowns in what we take for granted based on real-world experience.

We're accustomed to emergencies being temporary, the result of a natural disaster that responses are in place to deal with. We have little or no experience of systems decaying and not returning to the status quo.

My sense is that we're entering an extraordinary period that is more like a wilderness than a well-marked path with help around every corner. Beneath the surface of normal life, the systems we take for granted are eroding. Since we have no experience of this, we're unprepared for a journey that is intrinsically uncertain and brimming with risks we cannot assess because they are contingent, novel and non-linear, i.e. unpredictable.

The consensus is such a situation is not in the realm of possibility. Everything we take for granted is permanent. My view is the next 7 to 10 years will present us with challenges few are prepared to manage based on previous experience and their existing reserves of agency, skills and resources, reserves based on the expectation of permanent structures providing security and safety.

The phrase "situational awareness" is bantered about, but as a general rule we can only be aware of situations we've experienced before. We're blind to what we have yet to experience. Without experience, we tend to over-estimate our readiness to deal with extraordinary circumstances because we've successfully managed everyday life.

Fear is a useful tool that few learn to use because they don't have enough experience with it. Fear is a spectrum, one that spans from caution to panic. The difficult part is avoiding the slide into disorientation and panic. Like self-reliance, this is imperfect. Our ability to assess risks and threats is also imperfect. No matter how well prepared, we can still be surprised, unwary, blind to what we haven't experienced.

Knowing this is also a tool.

Some things happen so fast we don't even have time to become afraid. We just react instinctively. In slow-moving crises, uneasiness dissipates all too easily into passive acceptance.

We habituate to decay so readily that it's hard to anticipate where it's heading. We assume the current level will hold, when the reality is the current level is only temporary, and the next step down is just ahead. Our ability to distinguish a step down from a precipice is limited.

I reckon it prudent to see the next decade as a journey through a wilderness few of us have experienced. It may appear to be financial or political, but fundamentally it is a journey each of us will take to some degree on our own.

We will be powerless to restore the systems that have decayed. Our only power will be what we provide ourselves. Empowerment will likely take multiple forms, manifesting as self-reliance, experimentation, failure, shared experiences and cooperation with others.

These ruminations were inspired by this work, which I leave unattributed so you can read it as it is without any preconceptions generated by authorship, place or time.

A Manner Of Traveling

I awoke and found myself walking
along a muddy road,
dim with filtered light and an uncertain sun.
My feet were cut and bleeding.

I glanced back at my tracks and recognized nothing,
and saw small patches of my blood
in the dark damp depressions of my footsteps.

Yes, anger and love can co-exist.
This I know for I am both.

I am in an unfamiliar place.
The leaves and branches are wet with recent rain
and I cannot tell if I have been crying
or just walking with my face turned up to the sky.

I find my feet marching forward, steadily,
and I am astounded at the effort they are making
without my will.

Yes, decisions and no will can co-exist.
This I know for I am both.

I consider turning back but I do not remember
coming here. There is nothing to return to.
I am alone, though I see the eroded,
water-filled spoor of other walkers.

I am afraid, for I cannot see ahead
and do not know the future that my mind
is striving to see.

Yes, certainty and the unknown can co-exist.
This I know for I am both.

There are deep scratches on my exposed arms;
I do not recall crashing blindly through
wilderness, but clearly, I have done so.

I am thirsty and tired but there is no place to rest.
I feel this power pulling me forward.
I am trying to return to the birthplace
I have never seen, as birds and fish do.
I will not recognize it with my eyes but with my belly.

I want to feel sorry for myself, to have someone
comfort me in my distress, but I am alone,
with only my mind and body for company,
and the insects buzzing unseen above my head,
oblivious to my aching feet and confused mind.

Yes, pain and love can co-exist.
This I know for I am both.

There is the rich scent of vegetation around me,
fecund, growing, matted, decaying, life and death
in the same place and time.

I walk on and the smell lies heavily over
the damp vines and reaching trees above me.




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How We Fail: The Empire Is Forever

Tunnel-vision greed and blindness to what is unseen and therefore "unknowable" is self-reinforcing.

The immense literature on the decline and collapse of civilizations tends to overlook a simple but profound dynamic: the tunnel-vision created by the fusion of an unquestioned belief in the permanence of the status quo and a narrow focus on maintaining and/or expanding the perquisites we're siphoning off of the empire.

The list of causes / sources of decay, decline and collapse is long indeed, but most are external factors: environmental changes such as drought, plagues and pandemics, invasions by barbarians, and so on. Internal sources of decay are often dismissed or given short shrift: for example, the Western Roman empire did not collapse due to moral decay, it was overwhelmed by the invasions of tribes pushed westward into Roman territory by warriors from the steppes of Asia.

The focus on externalities benefits from an easily traceable if-then causality, but it misses the critical importance of the social-economic-political milieu, the mindset of what's assumed, what is "known," what is unrecognized (and therefore "unknowable" in the mindset of that era), and the unseen decay wrought by enduring success.

Yes, enduring success is self-liquidating, as the impressively convenient idea that the empire is so durable that everyone with the means to do so can siphon off as much wealth as they can manage with absolutely no systemic consequences.

The possibility that this narrow focus on maximizing self-enrichment might weaken the empire in aggregate never occurs to any of those amassing private fortunes at the expense of imperial stability.

As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, success slowly corrodes our ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Whatever the challenge, it is assumed that the empire has the resources and systems to make the problem go away, and do so without demanding any sacrifices of its higher classes of aristocrats, patricians, clerisy and functionaries.

In other words, let them eat cake: there's always a solution that somebody else will make happen.

This decay of adaptive muscle goes unnoticed, for no one other than a few elders has any experience of a crisis or overlapping series of crises that demanded society-wide sacrifices and risky decisions to avoid failure. The systems that had evolved to maintain the empire had been up to the task for so long that the sclerosis of adaptive capacity is unseen and thus "unknowable."

That the empire could fail and collapse is beyond the realm of what's conceivable. The enduring success of the imperial structures fosters both:

1) a self-absorbed focus on accumulating as much private wealth as possible with no regard whatsoever for the eventual systemic consequences of everyone focusing on amassing their own fortune, and

2) a blindness to the erosion of the society's capacity to adapt to conditions that are so novel that the existing responses are inadequate and doomed to fail.

This blindness extends to the failure of the status quo responses: everyone watches the system do more of what's failed and assumes that devoting even more resources to the failing policies of the past will magically work again.

This is how we fail: externalities are relatively easy to identify and measure. The internal forces of self-liquidating success--the loss of adaptive capacity and a self-absorbed blindness to the eventual consequences of moral decay generated by tunnel-vision greed and the sclerosis fostered by enduring success--go unnoticed as they are not easily measured and are as hidden from view as the melting ice beneath the snowpack that makes an avalanche not just likely but inevitable.

Tunnel-vision greed and blindness to what is unseen and therefore "unknowable" is self-reinforcing:




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Why We Fail

No wonder the world seems deranged--it is deranged by the immense strength of an Old Guard clinging onto power by any means available even as the world around them spins into incoherence.

There are many reasons why we fail, but perhaps the most critical one is continuing to do more of what has failed. This has many potential sources, from the psychological (self-sabotage, etc.) to the ideological (the market is the solution to every problem, etc.) to cognitive biases (recency bias, etc.).

One enduring source of continuing to do more of what has failed is hard-wired on a deeper level than mere cognitive biases. One way to summarize this is: we can't let go of a story that explains how the world works unless we have a replacement story in hand.

In short: we must have a story that accounts for the world around us. Not having any story is not possible. We can have multiple overlapping stories--Jungian psychology, general theory of relativity, Keynesian economics, and so on--but we need a story that explains key elements of our experience and what we observe and "know," with know in quotes to indicate that the story we embrace defines what we know and what we can know.

Given this need for a story, we can only relinquish a story that's failing to account for what we observe if we have a better story available: and by "better" I mean one that more accurately accounts for what we observe.

This substitution of a new story for an existing story that no longer makes sense (i.e. offers constructive predictions) of the world is easily confused with another human trait: the power of the Powers That Be rest on a foundational story, and replacing this story removes the source of their power. Replacing the story that empowers them discredits their claim to superiority, effectively stripping away their entitlement to authority and their overweening delusions of grandiosity that come with entering the ranks of the Powers That Be.

This desire to maintain the status quo story as part of maintaining their authority and power is the core dynamic described by Thomas Kuhn in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the Old Guard who embraced the story that the universe revolves around the Earth resists accepting the new story that the Earth is an inconsequential minor planet that orbits the sun in a local system which is in motion in much larger structures even as all the observational data undermines their story and supports the new story.

Fast-forward to the present and we have multiple Old Guards clinging to ideological stories that no longer track what we observe. Yet like all previous Old Guards, the Powers That Be are loathe to accept a new story that strips away their claim to authority and all the perquisites of power they currently enjoy.

We live in a world torn between the artifices needed to make "the Earth is the center of the Universe" somewhat plausible even as that story crumbles into incoherence and the formation of a new story that actually tracks reality. In terms of a metaphor, consider a glossy "lifestyle" publication that simultaneously touts a new chocolate cake recipe that is simply out of this world and a new diet to slim down in a healthier way than taking meds with horrible side effects that must be taken for life.

No wonder the world seems deranged--it is deranged by the immense strength of an Old Guard clinging onto power by any means available even as the world around them spins into incoherence.

Economic incoherence:



Political incoherence:



Psychological incoherence:




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Greed, Centralization, Monopoly, Ruin

Greed is good up to the point that it delivers ruin.

The primary characteristic of this era is the purposeful confusion of profit and greed, as if they are the same thing. Greed is good because profit is good, and profit is good because the profit motive is the engine of Capitalism which is the engine of global prosperity.

The problem with this logic is greed is not the same as profit. In the sanitized version of the story, the profit motive of each individual magically generates the best possible socio-economic outcome for all via the secret powers of The Invisible Hand of market forces.

This is a fairy tale, of course, for the most profitable arrangement isn't a competitive free-for-all, it's a monopoly that controls the market to its own advantage. Monopolies are by their nature centralized; monopolies snap up or steamroll competitors until they exert centralized power--if not in a single entity then in a cartel that centralizes control of the market.

In the fairy tale about the magic of The Invisible Hand, individuals seek to maximize their private gains by increasing productivity and producing goods and services with more utility-value: higher quality, increased durability, etc. This narrative is core to The Mythology of Progress, which is the belief that Progress is 1) unstoppable and 2) a permanent force that advances as the natural order of things.

In the real world, entities maximize their gains by increasing the price while diminishing the utility-value of the goods and services: profits are maximized by reducing durability (planned obsolescence), reducing quality / quantity and manipulating a monopoly on information to modify the price to extract the maximum profit from each transaction--dynamic pricing is the seemingly harmless cover-term for this exploitation of information asymmetry: the buyer knows little or nothing, the seller knows everything.

This use of cover-stories and terminology is the foundational dynamic of Anti-Progress and Ultra-Processed Life: the authentic term (profit motive) is now the cover story for exploitation-driven greed, and Progress is now the cover story for Anti-Progress--the degradation of quality, durability, transparency and agency.

Greed is not the same as profit. Greed maximizes gains by exploitation, not increasing value. Greed is the operative driver of the current era. The socio-political-economic system is dominated by greed-driven concentrations of power: monopolies, cartels and states.

There are three mechanisms that greatly expand the potential for assembling monopoly / cartel centralization of power: 1) technology, 2) credit and 3) the state.

1) Technology by its very nature leads to centralized ubiquity due to the network effect--the technology that recruits the most users becomes the default access to participate in the economy--participation that is essential to function in a technology-dominated economy. This ubiquity generates monopoly (or quasi-monopoly) which then generates high stock valuations which then provide the money needed to maintain and extend the monopoly.

Technology companies' access to the stock market via initial public offerings (IPOs) offers unique access to a nearly limitless source of "free money" to buy up competitors via issuing more shares of the company's stock.

This immense pool of wealth enables technology companies to buy control of narratives and political power.

2) Credit. If an entity cannot create "free money" by issuing more shares of its stock, if it has access to nearly limitless credit, it can use this credit top buy up competitiors and buy political protection of its monopoly. This is why John D. Rockefeller was obsessed with gaining access to more credit: that was his pathway to establishing a monopoly in the oil industry.

3. The state. Those who buy (or gain by other means) political influence can then create monopolies or cartels via state regulations. To the degree that the state has a monopoly on centralized power, all monopolies and cartels are private-sector / state entities, as centralized privately controlled power can only exist if the centralized state allows it.

As I explain in my new book Investing In Revolution, we inhabit a world in which authenticity has been replaced by self-serving artifice, artifice which enriches those who own or reap gains from centralized, monopolistic, extractive, exploitive entities created by technology, credit/issuance of stock and the state.

Orwell called this substitution double-speak: greed is positive profit, Anti-Progress is positive Progress, extraction that enriches the few at the expense of the many is just good old profit driving Progress, and so on, a hall of mirrors that spins 24/7 in a digital carnival intentionally designed to be addictive.

Greed is good up to the point that it delivers ruin. We are closer to that phase-change than we imagine--if we can imagine such a phase-change at all.



Part 1: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America (via Cheryl A.)


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