∞ Actual human intelligence… looks … a bit like this.

A useful excerpt from a talk Zak Stein gave at the Integral Theory Conference this year. As he introduced his share of this talk: “some of our most important institutions and infrastructures are built around measures that fundamentally distort and misrepresent reality. Bad measures create collective illusions. This is worse than ‘flying blind’ –this is flying blind thinking you are seeing clearly.”

And a few excerpts from the video:

“We’re increasingly invading the life world by turning it into things that can have a price tag. The tragedy of capitalism in one way is the idea that we have to put a price on things that are priceless.”

“When you take certain things, for example childcare, and put a price on them, it becomes a different kind of thing. Because you’ve quantified something that is typically understood to be not quantifiable.”

“One of the things that money does is homogenize the measurement of value. The neoliberal consensus is that there is one way to measure value and it is money.”

“You’re never going to have a health care industry that actually cures people and is for profit. It’s simple. As soon as you cure someone, they don’t come back to give you more money. To make money in medicine you need to create chronic dependence. Or, drugs that create side effects that you can cure with other drugs.”

“Right now we have a form of politics which is spectatorship, and voting. And it models precisely advertising and consuming. And it’s a very tight relationship.”

His website is linked below in the first comment…