304 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin
We're probably drawn to thinking in cycles because it's the laziest way to predict the future. Cycles have even more lazy powers than plain old historical determinism because the predictions extend to infinity.
Agreed. There have to exist natural games whose final state is nearly the initial state. Fiat money certainly seems to play out this way.
And there really are cycles that act on the world with inexorable force. Since the dawn of time the seasons have induced rhythms that cannot be resisted that everyone in a giant geography deals with simultaneously. The consequences propagate like falling dominoes. Higher frequency tidal and waking / sleeping cycles are so real and powerful that we don't even think about them.
But what if you added them all together? Of course that's going to manifest in a bunch of ways, at every level. I don't think it's impossible to get at some of the principal components, even if you can't parse out their emergent consequences. But, as you say, most thinking about it is too lazy to bother.
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But what if you added them all together?
Yes! The 2D version of this is really simple, but when you're predicting things like cultural norms there are so many more dimensions.
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