Monthly Archives: June 2023

Anarchy, Instinct and Intelligence

by in Boundary Behavior, Cambodia, Culture, Fear, Hmmm..., Identity, Philosophy, Politics | 29 Comments

“Inside every working anarchy, there’s an old-boy network.”
– Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory.

Traffic in 2002 Phnom Penh was a sort of functional anarchy. Signage served as little more than a suggestion, and main intersections were usually chaotic. As a motorcyclist, crossing bigger intersections in the inner city generally involved merging into a large enough pack of two-wheeled vehicles until the crowd-as-a-whole could push its way across en-mass.

What precipitated that tipping-point when the flock would move together, I can’t say. But somehow, it worked remarkably well for for the vast majority of those who participated in the swarm. It’s always fascinated me how functional patterns emerge from apparent chaos.

 

In 1989, Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang at the University of California in Riverside proposed the idea of “Swarm Intelligence”. Both researchers were studying ways to find the best solutions to problems with regard to interacting robots.

In a swarm intelligence, each individual in the group is independent of others and responsible only for its own limited set of simple behaviors with regard to solving a problem, regardless of what others are doing. The concept is an approach to explaining how complicated, social problem-solving behaviors can emerge from a collective of relatively simple, individual actions.

You can think of this as the mass-intelligence of something like a beehive, where no single bee has the ability to make or to enforce judgments about the overall actions of the beehive as a whole. Instead, the colony’s collective behaviors emerge from just a few fundamental rules, simple enough to be encoded into the brain of an individual bee. With regard to robotic communication, interaction and artificial-intelligence systems, this algorithmic approach to emergent social behaviors is known as “computational swarm intelligence”.

Of course, emergent patterns of collective social interaction aren’t anything new. Humans have been engaging in them since… probably before we were even “humans”. But the profoundly complex social and physical structures that have emerged from massive groups of humans is something relatively new. Our oldest significant physically created structure, the Göbekli Tepe, dates back at most 10,000 years as what was probably a gathering place for trade and the sharing between tribes of some socially binding neolithic religious practices. But genuine crowds are a far more recent occurrence.

At the age of thirty, the brilliant French polymath, Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon, witnessed the Paris Commune of 1871. Watching as mobs of Parisians burned and destroyed their own city’s irreplaceable works of architectural history, the event would deeply affect his world-view.

Le Bon observed that the behavioral boundaries of people in crowds regressed, and that they became easily hypnotized by and swept up in the moods and messages of the overall group.  In 1895, he would write a culminating, Psychologie des Foules (Psychology of Crowds). In his work, Le Bon identified several emergent characteristics of crowd psychology, which he broadly categorized as: impulsiveness, influence by suggestion, exaggeration of sentiment, intolerance, and lack of morality.

“The Force has power over weak minds.”
– Obi-Wan Kenobi

Le Bon also proposed that the emergence of crowd politics in great cities at the centers of nations was resulting in the replacement of old systems of fealty to sovereigns. But this also meant that political movements would become, “...more and more swayed by the impulse of changeable crowds, who are uninfluenced by reason and can only be guided by sentiment,” something he referred to as, “intellectual anarchy”.

The Paris Commune may have collapsed under the weight of its own collective mismanagement. But Le Bon’s thesis appealed to the French social and political theorist and socialist-anarchist, Georges Sorel. If crowds were the new political movers, and crowds could also be easily led by emotion, then a centralized leadership could be established by those who could convey some grand and moving narrative.

For his part, Sorel attempted, if unsuccessfully, to advance the myths of French nationalism and the “general strike” as a way to gain authority over an ethically unrestrained mass-movement of working-class crowds. In his 1908, Reflections on Violence (p.108), “…there has been no hesitation in urging the workers not to refrain from brutality when this might do them service.”  It was a philosophy that directly foreshadowed the nationalist mythologies and violence of emerging fascist and communist movements and cults-of-personality in both Europe and Asia.

 

An amplified, if not emergent impetus can arise from the communal interactions of large numbers of people. Moving within a massive, 1:00AM crowd departing a fireworks display at San Francisco’s “Embarcadero”, the assemblage had been primed by two shootings in the area earlier that night.  A firecracker would have resulted in the collective dysfunction of a stampede; but I would have been compelled to participate if I was to survive.

When it comes down to the basic rules that govern human behaviors, we’re not really all that much more complicated than those bees that comprise the hive. Natural selection has equipped our fundamental responses to our environment such that they’re governed by just a few underlying rules to best guarantee our long-term survival: fear, a drive for social connection, and a compulsion to sense and to interact.

In that regard, both the hormones and the pharmaceuticals of a society are emotional rhetoric, mythologies, and the subliminal urgings of enabled crowds.  As individuals, we define what emerges collectively in belief systems and social or tribal customs, nationalism, “civilization”, and warfare. Kevin Kelly, in his book, What Technology Wants, even takes this a step farther, asserting that technologies physically represent that emergent intelligence.

Regardless, we don’t usually sense the underlying forces that tip a crowd’s collective behavior one way or another. In very large crowds, this greater impetus can emerge suddenly as the extreme magnification of untethered base drives, resulting in swarm behaviors ranging from concert “mosh pits” and hoarding toilet-paper to soccer riots and looting… or even mass-murder. But that’s not always the case.

Indeed, the collective impetus can also be to move en-mass across an intersection, to form a human stadium-wave, or even to come to the aid of others.  So whatever underlying seed of emotional suggestion causes a crowd’s behavior to tip in any particular direction represents a massively non-linear force.

References:

Beni, G., & Wang, J. (1993). Swarm Intelligence in Cellular Robotic Systems. In Springer eBooks (pp. 703–712). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-58069-7_38

Giddings, F. H. (1897). The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind . By Gustave Le Bon. The Macmillan Co. Science, 5(123), 734–735. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.5.123.734

Kelly, K. (2011). What Technology Wants. Penguin.

Silverberg, J. L., Bierbaum, M., Sethna, J. P., & Cohen, I. (2013). Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts. Physical Review Letters, 110(22). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.110.228701

Sorel, G. (2022). Reflections on Violence.

Sorel, G., & Jennings, J. (1999). Georges Sorel Reflections on Violence. In Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511815614

The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon. (1996, February 1). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/445

Old Gear, New Gear

by in Altitude, Hmmm..., Snow | 9 Comments

“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

A few weeks back, I went up Mount Whitney via the “Mountaineers Route”, and then skied part of the way back down.  Since then, the road up to the parking at the “Portal” has apparently been re-opened, shaving at least a couple of miles and probably 1,000 vertical feet off the trip.  And Danny at “Mediocre Amateur”  has posted a video of the same route.

Despite his mellow demeanor, Danny’s rather more “bad ass” than me.  We did the trip up as an overnighter, where he just took advantage of his extra lung and heart chambers and plowed his way straight up and back down in a day.  He also skied down the chute from the “notch”… something I didn’t even attempt.  And we had noticeably better snow conditions.

Since that trip, I’ve been sifting through and tossing out some of my old gear.  And it’s made me appreciate a few of the newer pieces of mountain equipment that have become available in the years since my youth.  Cutting up two pairs of old skis so that they’d fit into the trash reminded me that it’s mostly just a whole lot less weight to have to carry.  But some of the climbing/mountaineering equipment is also far more reliable.

Crampons (boot spikes) and an ice axe are among the most basic pieces of equipment when traveling on snow.  Both have changed in my years in the mountains, and even more so when I look back to the time of my dad’s youth in the mountains of Japan. The five ice axes in the photo go back three generations, with the first belonging to my grandfather, and the next to my dad.  The last three are all mine, with each separated by about fifteen years.  Nowadays, I’d only consider carrying the last two to the right due to weight alone.

My dad taught me to ski in leather boots attached to “three-pin” bindings.  These are an old standard for back-country skis, or skis intended to cover horizontal ground.  Nowadays, these have been adapted for more mountainous terrain, with shorter and wider skis, and heavier boots.

My current back-country ski boots bear little resemblance to those old leather monstrosities.  They’re plastic with warm inserts, rigid enough to drive a pair of skis through a serious turn.  Even the bindings, while still clipping the boots at the toes with a set of three pins, are much heavier.  And they include a spring-tensioned cable that clamps around the back of the boot.  In my case, the bindings are also able to release from the skis if I decide to demonstrate my ragdoll technique.

Sometimes, routes require at least carrying a rope, and there’s a whole trip into the weeds I could take on the topic.  But my current go-to is a 60-meter (165-feet), water-repellent Sterling, 9.2-millimeter.  At a little over seven pounds, it shaves more than four pounds off my first 150-foot, 11-millimeter rope, which probably weighed twenty pounds when wet.  And yet, newer ropes perform as well if not better.

Gear associated with using a rope covers a lot of territory.  However, just about everything associates in some way with “carabiners”.  These are small metal loops with an openable “gate” for attaching them to various pieces of equipment. When lead climbing, a climber’s rope can be run through carabiners attached to some sort of fixed protection.  In theory, at least, this will serve to reduce the distance of a fall.

While I still have several that I’ll use, the old, “oval” carabiner to the far right is probably collectible.  It’s a “Chouinard” from the Great Pacific Iron Works, dating back to the 1980s.  As a mountaineering equipment supplier, liability lawsuits would bankrupt GPIW in 1989.  Its remains would become today’s, Black Diamond, the maker of the far lighter, but somewhat stronger carabiner on the left.  Yvon Chouinard went on to found Patagonia, and remains an interesting character

Safely descending on a rope, or “rappelling”, is something of an art.  While it’s possible to lower one’s self on a rope without the use of any equipment, its a pretty sketchy technique.  So most mountaineers will employ some kind of a device that can be hooked to a harness and used to add friction.  Many of these devices can also be used for “belaying” another climber.

This is another area where I could go into a discussion worthy of an entire article.  But the three devices to the left are all things I like.  The old “figure eight” on the far left is a simple and traditional device, still commonly used by Japanese mountaineers.  However, the middle, Black Diamond “ATC” is what’s hooked to my harness.  And the Climbing Technologies “Alpine Up” on the right is probably the safest rappelling device I’ve ever encountered.

Ascending an already placed rope can actually be done with little more than a couple of loops of cord… even bootlaces, if you’re desperate enough.  But mechanical “ascenders” can make it a lot easier.  These are devices that can be slid up a rope and then lock in place.  These are commonly used in “big wall” and “aid” climbing, as well as for mountaineering along routes established with fixed ropes. 

The old CMI ascender to the left was a brutal piece of equipment.  While it worked reasonably well, it was painful hanging on to it.  So at some point, I made a “handle” with some pieces of rope wrapped under grip tape.  Eventually, they were deemed “unsafe” for use with newer, smaller-diameter ropes.  I picked up the Grivel “Up-and-Down” on the right while in Taiwan about eight years back.  It’s an incomparably better piece of equipment, and it’ll work with ropes down to 8.3-millimeters.

Pedantic, perhaps.  But with the nice weather, I haven’t been too inspired to sit in front of the computer.  Maybe go scratch up some of that newer gear.