I looked up the David Buss evolutionary psychology reference you supplied (TMND) and saw he has one about women specifically, where a key point in the book is that there are many reasons women do what they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Buss

That makes sense when you think about it, because historically, like with some Native Americans, there were sometimes matriarchies where women controlled the land, and in hunter/gatherer societies that was a big deal. Selection for other attributes of men may then have been important.

It turns out I made a slashdot post about a year ago that touches on this issue too:
"Re:Helping the NSA transcend to abundance thinking (Score:3)"
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2773253&cid=39629001
"To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality. ..."

I then mention some men/women issues related to the themes you raised. Also, I make a point that relates to yours, that men tend to move from high testosterone competition patterns in their teens and twenties to lower testosterone cooperative patterns in their forties and fifties.

Regarding "The Selfish Gene", see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
http://www.amazon.com/The-Difference-Diversity-Creates-Societies/dp/0691138540
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift

Evolution selects for all possible combinations at all possible levels, even if our simple brains may have trouble following that or turning it into math...

Also, regarding being short -- when food or air is in short supply, being smaller can be an advantage sometimes. Being short also helps in Judo, Life is full of tradeoffs, where our characteristics and preferences can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the situation. That is one reason the world is so diverse.

Good point about how standards change over time, too.

Hope to have time to see those Adam Curtis documentaries someday! Thanks for the recommendations.

"A lot of us saw the dawn of the information age as the potential for a second Enlightenment, when a universally free flow of ideas and wisdom would lift mankind as a whole into an era of freedom and prosperity. Universal education and information was going to save humanity. Silly us. All we really did was give the despots more tools."

A lot of bad stuff is probably going to go down, true. But, we can remain hopeful good things will happen too. See Howard Zinn, for example:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

I watched that great video on "In the Year 2525" and am writing this on a US$250 Chromebook. Maybe it is not the best tool for covert browsing or communications like, say, "Freedombox" aspires to (for what that might be worth), but this cheap Chromebook is a great tool for learning. It would have been (almost) unbelievable in the 1950s. Ask yourself, as far as content learning goes, if you are a curious intellectually-inclined young person today, would you rather have had an expensive 1980s Princeton education with access to Firestone library (as I got), or just one year with a $250 Chromebook with acess to the 2013 internet for effortlessly following link after link and reading endless discussions on any topic you find interesting? If I was young again, I'd pick the Chromebook. An Ivy league education may have other benefits, as do face-to-face communities, but cheap access to endless information for those inclined to soak it up is now a reality -- and it is affordable for more and more people on the planet (including through discarded last generation smartphones). Another example, from India:
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

I followed your link. Now, please humor me and read "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (a sci-fi short story from the 1950s) to see what the internet and cheap mobile computing may still make possible. That story may help rekindle your optimism for what broad global education may make possible. It is available online here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51

Even stuff like more people learning about the idea of a basic income may make a huge difference over the next ten years...
http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1gd0q7/krugman_endorses_universal_basic_income/

Yes, the USA may be relatively fading (including from thirty years of Neo-Liberalism and stuff like creeping surveillance and fearful self-destructive paranoia).
"Neoliberalism as a Water Balloon"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIUWZnnHz2g
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

But, the Earth overall is potentially brightening, and beyond that await the asteroids and the stars:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

My own efforts to prevent the future depicted in "Elysium":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

Still, as Bucky Fuller said: whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.

As much as I might like to disagree broadly with what you have written, I can't, because there is clearly a lot of truth to it from an evolutionary perspective. It's quite true that young people (teens, and twenties, especially, but also later as you point to) do try to show off in various ways to impress the opposite sex as part of human mating rituals. But, let me try to at least surround that truth would some additional options and nuances as a ramble.

First, as an example of a way to deal with this. In James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear" about a post-scarcity society, he addresses this by the notion that people compete to demonstrate excellence in their chosen skills. Showing excellence in helping the community become a form of "Wealth". Material goods are given away freely, including to those who make no contributions to society, in part because, if someone is "poor" (not contributing, so socially disrespected), why heap additional problems on them by not letting them have material goods? So, while you have outlined a truth, how society chooses to deal with that truth, how these urges are directed, is an aspect of culture and circumstance.

From another direction, life on this plane of existence seems to consist of both cooperation and competition, arrayed across a mix of both meshworks and hierarchies. As E. O. Wilson points out, organisms often cooperate within some defined social boundary (like an ant colony) and then compete outside of the boundary (like ant wars). Humans historically have cooperated within tribes, even as they fought other tribes to define essentially property line boundaries between tribes. Many people enjoy team sports where you cooperate in your team but compete against other teams. Even Genghis Khan's command organization must have had some sense of internal cooperation even as it may have attacked other communities. So, the healthy human brain is able to navigate this social landscape (at least withing historic boundaries and the "Dunbar's" number of 100 - 230 tribe members). So, again the issue becomes, how does society direct these impulses within the limits of human potential?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Freud had some keen insights, but he also overgeneralized and was a bit nutty. (People might say that about me, too? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html
"Freud may have been bad. But can he really have been bad in so many contradictory ways? A sampling of recent books suggests that after a century of Freud flogging, the critics still haven't finished with him."

G. William Domhoff goes into detail about differences between the left and right:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.htm

One aspect not there is perhaps that the left tends to emphasize the cooperative aspect of society -- that we are all in this together, and if we all cooperate, we will all be better off, and that included caring for all children. While it may be rarely stated this extremely, the right tends to emphasize that people should succeed on their own merits, and part of success is being able to afford to raise children -- where if people can't afford children personally, they should not have them, and if they do have children, it is only right if the children suffer and die, because failure should not be propagated in order to maintain the health of the population.

There actually is quite a bit of sense to that sort of "Social Darwinism" from an individualist perspective -- except that it ignores both how much of success is collective, how sexual recombination crosses social rules about inherited wealth, and that the marketplace can be pretty fickle about choosing what "success" means (as opposed to when success as a hunter or gatherer was more obviously a sign of health).

Yet, undeniably, the process of evolution through selection every generation is, to a large extent, about constantly repurifying the genes of the population for what works (usually what worked in the past) and what doesn't work (usually mutations, with very rare exceptions). Note, by this purification, I don't mean anything like "Aryanism" or such ideology about "blood"; I am talking in terms of population genetics as someone who has been in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time, where "good" genes might, say, be ones diverse enough to resist parasites, and where "racial" boundaries across humans are essentially vague and arbitrary.

However, historically, a tribe that had overly lazy members ("free riders") who had too many children for the circumstances would not do well, so there are evolutionary problems with them left too. Our basic emotional brain wiring seems to reflect all that, even as different people may be tuned more towards one side or another. Even as most people can be generous and cooperative, most people also have an innate sense of fairness and also a sense of willingness to sacrifice or take risks to punish perceives slackers. Those are tendencies that have served tribes well in the past.

However, that does not mean those tendencies may be adaptive in a post-scarcity high-tech society. In such, it may cost more to ration things then to give them freely. Just one creative idea from one of a billion "free riders" will enhance the commons. Even one disgruntled person disenfranchised with nothing to lose might make a plague might kill everyone on a small planet (see the Elysium movie mentioned below for a variant on that). So, the whole social dynamics of the system may shift...

Apparently, historically, nasty uncooperative people have also been killed off every generation fairly regularly (with speculations of like 10% of the population each generation I read somewhere?). Things seem to have improved recently related to violence:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-and-the-decline-of-human-violence

One theory is that in recent centuries under capitalistic-ish systems, less impulsive wealthy people could afford more children, and that lead to a spread of more self-control throughout the population over a span of many generations (related to the "right" argument above). Plausible, but not sure it is that significant?

As conservatives put it:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/marxism-of-the-right/
"This is no surprise, as [Propertarian] libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function."

Humans may be half-way between war-like Chimps and peace-loving Bonobos as to behavior:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/05/07/152197388/do-bonobos-and-chimpanzees-offer-a-path-to-understanding-human-behavior

Anyway, so I can't disagree with your fundamental point about human inclinations -- but I can say that culture affects how those inclinations are expressed and amplified.

In one analysis I read about why people like Clinton or Blair have affairs that may risk their political power, the point is made that historically the whole point of political power was, evolutionary, to have affairs (whatever legal or social principles may operate today). Which is essentially your point.

A couple other tangential points.

If someone like Ghengis Khan was so successful as to have 100% of males being his descendants (not the case, but consider), then suddenly there is nothing special about having his genes. So, suddenly cooperation would make more sense across all those copies of the same genes. Those common genes might even provide a new platform for evolution of diversity (see Manuel De Landa's "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"). So, there may be self-limiting aspects of a "selfish gene" idea. Sort of like, after rogue nanotech makes the wold into grey goo, or after the 1% wipe out the rest of humanity, then everything goes back to square one and evolution again.

Lorenz may have been brilliant as understanding animal behavior, but people do have many unusual characteristics, given the idea of culture, that go beyond genes (and Lornez's notions of genetics may have been biased by Nazi politics).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Lorenz
"I was frightened -- as I still am -- by the thought that analogous genetical processes of deterioration may be at work with civilized humanity. Moved by this fear, I did a very ill-advised thing soon after the Germans had invaded Austria: I wrote about the dangers of domestication and, in order to be understood, I couched my writing in the worst of nazi terminology. I do not want to extenuate this action. I did, indeed, believe that some good might come of the new rulers."

Also, there are many evolutionary strategies to reproductive fitness. Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneaky_Fucker_Strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_selection

Diversity tends to be useful in survival. And female selectiveness in mate choice is one of those variables.

Anyway, so there is a lot of complexity to this once you start poking at it.

On "pushing people down", contrast being told "you're smart" with being told "the brain is like a muscle":
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/blogs/nurture-shock/2009/12/11/is-the-brain-like-a-muscle-really.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113347007
"It didn't take long. The teachers who hadn't known which students had been assigned to which workshop could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students' longtime trend of decreasing math grades. ... While we might imagine that overpraised kids grow up to be unmotivated softies, the researchers are reporting the opposite consequence. Dweck and others have found that frequently-praised children get more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. Image-maintenance becomes their primary concern. A raft of very alarming studies -- again by Dweck -- illustrates this."

By the way, on 1%/99% conflicts, a new movie coming out called "Elysium" (although it glorifies the way of the warrior not the peacemaker):
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/

Natural selection is a very limited idea which doesn't address the idea of souls, (which can essentially, last forever, or at least incarnate over the course of hundreds of lifetimes).

This idea, of course, is unavailable to those who have not researched the concept far enough to recognize its validity, or who have not been able to conquer their internal programming far enough to even allow the processing of such taboo subjects.

Taking it into account requires the modification of such rational theories as Natural Selection, which is still a force to be certain, but one complicated by dozens of other factors which essentially render much conventional wisdom on the subject, as it applies to humans and their continued species evolution, meaningless.

Added to that is the idea that humans are farmed creatures at this point; our evolution directed by others, not ourselves or any brute natural forces, all for entirely different goals than basic survivability. If we look at how we manage cow, chicken and pig livestocks, we can see that natural selection is no longer an arbitrary natural process, and the same is true of us. Survivability is now just another factor in the food production equation, taking a back seat to other concerns. It is safe to say that few of the managed life forms we consume could survive on their own outside the industrial farming system.

Those with older souls have a somewhat higher chance of putting up resistance to the desired results of this process. As you observe, will-power (combined with knowledge) allow a person to avoid the traps of addiction. Included in this, I would add, the eating of real foods and the behaving in ways which provide real power. That process, however, comes at the tail end of having lived many lives as slaves and managed animals, of falling into those traps in order to know them inside and out. This means being a slave animal can be seen as a required experience in order to achieve the insight and instincts necessary to accrue real power in the end. There is value in being a mindless addict, as so many are today, and such lives will be lived by a given soul until it no longer needs to extract wisdom from the experience and can move on to whatever further lessons needed that ground work. You burn yourself until you respect fire.

There will be life forms of one kind or another which dominate their position on the food chain, and then after a time, they will go extinct, as will their farmers, and those above them. Humans are just a passing phase, and their survivability and the great public concern for it is a null point in the big picture. The souls they contain are the important thing, and the only thing which determines whether they 'survive' is whether or not they choose to either continue to absorb knowledge or reject the creation.

Some undeniable truths and meta-truths mixed with some (probably) speculation and mysticism on reincarnation. Love it! :-)

And I loved "What Dreams May Come".too, which I quote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

And I wonder what spin the "simulation argument" idea would put on your suggestions?
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Ultimately, what you are pointing towards is the mystery of consciousness...

"Or you keep throwing things at it until it gets better by itself and the psychiatrist takes credit for it."

Yeah, it is ironic how homeopaths are villified but psychiatrists are celebrated, when the placebo effect is strong in both... Must have a better PR firm?
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Quoting Marcia Angell:
        http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)

Bruce Levine's book goes into detail on this:
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711

Also:
"Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why."
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
"Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol."

The mind/brain/body/spirit/etc. indeed is amazing...

"Society has been pretty much unbearable since more than one person has been in a group. Before that, loneliness was unbearable. And yet, most people aren't clinically depressed."

While this is true, and a good point, there can be positive forms of stress, too, called "eustress": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress
"Eustress was originally explored in a stress model by Richard Lazarus, it is the positive cognitive response to stress that is healthy, or gives one a feeling of fulfillment or other positive feelings."

Stresses can be distress or eustress depending on how we are prepared to deal with them. The average person may smartly run from a house fire, whereas a trained and experienced fire fighter is expected to approach one calmly and deliberately (and may even feel some excitement and camaraderie putting his or her extensive training into use). There is also the notion of "flow" when the challenge matches our current level of skill. Game designers understand this -- so levels start off easy and get harder as your skills increase. And you would not expect someone who is an expert at playing a video game like, say, Halo, to be able to immediately win at face-to-face poker games, because they require different skill sets and interests (or vice versa).

Humans are adapted to a certain type of environment, which includes certain types of average stressors. Historically,
* humans lived in tribal groups that included extended families,
* they walked several miles a day,
* they got plenty of sunlight,
* they had regular exposure to the sights and sounds of nature,
* they ate organic food with lots of phytonutrients and fiber,
* they did a variety of hands-on tasks involving both the mind and body working together, and
* the stories and songs of every-day life were told by relatives for the purposes of education.

There may have been downsides to that life (high infant mortality, lack of antibiotics or trauma surgery for accidents, etc.) but there were many good things about it too in the sense that we were adapted to that mix (even if we have also partially adapted some to changes since). Humans need sunlight for health. We need exercise. We need a certain level of dirt to challenge the immune system. We need phytonutrients to build a healthy body. We need daily mental stimulation to some degree. And so on. The same sunlight might kill certain bacteria, and the same phytonutrients may poison certain insects, the same physical exercise might not be possible for a slug, and the same social challenges might drive a bear crazy, but for humans, we have adapted to make the best of those challenges -- and to be stronger as individuals and groups because of them.

Nowadays, humans in developed societies live a very differnt life in many ways:
* humans tend to live in isolated houses or apartments as singles or couples (and when they leave that home physically or virtually have experiences around a lot of strangers in cities or on the internet),
* they usually drive or take mass transit instead of walk,
* they spend much of their time indoors with no direct sunlight,
* they mainly hear synthetic sounds and see synthetic ("supernormal") images,
* they eat processed foods low in phytonutrients and fiber and high in chemical additives,
* they do tasks that are either very abstract or very physically repetitive but rarely use the mind and body together (see "The Case For Working with Your Hands" by Crawford), and
* the stories and songs of every day life are told by strangers who often want to convince someone to do something so the stranger can profit from it (often something unhealthy for the person or the planet in the long term, though it may feel good in the short term, like drinking sugar water).

A movie like "The Emerald Forest" explores a bit of this contrast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emerald_Forest

Nonetheless, very few people have the skills, interests, experiences, or extended relations that could let them thrive in the woods for any length of time the way our ancestors could. Nor is the land available as it has been enclosed physically or legally.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

So, we are not in the sort of environment we are (mostly) adapted for. This causes a lot of bad stress for many people in all sorts of ways (regardless of whether people reliably get enough calories to survive for a time). Thus I agree with Hatta's point that our society is in that sense dysfunctional (for whatever other merits is might have, like on average people live that distressed life longer). And it is indeed hard to tease out what parts of the distress are due to nutrition vs. all the other changes. A rational response to this, including the scale of all of it, and all the needless suffering might seem to be depression . It coudl even be a depression made worse when aware of our potential to do so much better (e.g.. "BlueZones", "Ecocity Berkeley", "Voyage From Yesteryear", etc.) and how we collectively have fallen so far short of what we could have as a global society (inclduing one reaching out to space). Is it any wonder many humans might turn to using drugs or electric currents to try to alter their mood or gain some advantage in the rat race? Or to try to escape this society mentally via games, books, or other media even if they are still stuck here physically?

Nonetheless, you are also right, in that humans are very adaptable. Most people have managed to find a way to survive and even thrive in what by old standards is a crazy world. Thy look at the possibilities and try to step up to the challenge of marking things a little better or encouraging others to keep trying. That is a tribute to the human spirit.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/fix-things-never-force-it-lessons-from-grandpa/276873/
"Grandfather was a builder and he was a fixer. He believed in the labor of his hands -- that what you create with them is meaningful. It's popular these days to relegate men like my grandfather to the past. We passively opine the passing of a dying breed -- victims of progress and changing values -- and move on with our (mostly digital) lives. I don't think we should let that happen. Our world is in desperate need of men and women of action. People who always find a way to get things done. People who believe that what's broken can always be fixed."

Here is another perspective on this, to show how different that life was:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2009/04/christian-missionary-deconverted-by-tribe/
"When he [the missionary] told them he had âoefound Jesusâ after his step-mother committed suicide, the tribe burst into laughter. "She killed herself, how stupid," they replied. Instead of his experience causing them to accept his god, they found it amusing."

Suicide in particular seems to be much rarer in functional older aboriginal cultures. It may take the kind of mechanized society of the west to create broad suicidal despair, like the disaster that Columbus brought to to the Arawaks in Haiti:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"But too many of the [Arawak] slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead."

Such begins the destruction of American societies by Western means, starting about five centuries ago. In that sense, the Nazi-bureaucracy-administered Holocaust was nothing new -- even if it was different in its own way, such as selectively using IBM punched cards to identify those to become slaves or exterminees (from census records), or to perhaps instead receive the material spoils of the war and the concentration camps.

Here is a thought to help keep depression about this at bay, even when stuck in the midst of all this dysfunction:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
"n this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

A "basic income" might be one step forward:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5882422

Like your idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

And for related ironic humor in the news: :-)
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/14/rep-stockman-requests-nsa-logs-for-phone-traffic-between-white-house-irs/

An example in fiction of a Transparent Society is in Marshall Brain's "Manna" at the end:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

My suggestion a couple years ago to a public call for ideas by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

And I also wrote:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"So, with all the billions of dollars a years spent on âoeintelligenceâ, why not at least try to produce some freely-available âoedual useâ intelligence tools to help civilian American citizens make sense of the real things that are killing most real Americans by the hundreds of thousands every year?"

My wife and I have worked on some software used by the intelligence community in different countries. But our focus had been to try to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. Note the Snowden here is a different Snowden from the leaker:
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/4318/un-wired/
"There had been two DARPA projects, working off two very different philosophies. One (TIA) sought to obtain and search all possible data to detect the possibility of terrorist events. That raised civil liberties concerns and much controversy in the USA leading to resignations and programme closure. A parallel program Genoa II took a very different philosophy, based on understanding nuanced narrative supporting the cognitive processes of decision makers and increasing the number of cultural and political perspectives available to policy makers. I was a part of that program, and proud to be so. It also forms the basis of our work for RAHS and contains neither the approach, not the philosophy of TIA."

We tried to get the related company to open source the software, but not much luck. My wife does have some rights to some of the work, plus the core ideas are available in the public literature (which is what my wife based her research on).

We all may well benefit from an expectation of privacy, and a healthy government may well have an obligation to defend privacy the same way it might defend our physical infrastructure. I don't want to argue against those things (even if in practice in the communal extended-family villages that hunter/gatherer humans had historically, privacy may have been rare). But in practice right now, I doubt we can stop the spying, because it is too seductive, and it is getting so cheap to do, and everyone (not just governments) is doing it. Perhaps the best we can do, like in Aikido, is redirect the energy in healthier ways. And that way might be, as you or Brin suggest, towards some balance of power for now.

We ran out of money to keep working towards thatt as open source projects (like with Rakontu or the Pointrel System), so I've been doing unrelated stuff recently. But I can hope to get back to that kind of stuff someday. In the meanwhile, I hope others pick up the ideas and run with them in their own way.
http://www.rakontu.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20130202
https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623

I put together a couple of Kickstarter proposals I thought of running, but never did, since open source is not really a great match for Kickstarter (where people generally invest to get premiums). Plus, it is hard to get most people to see the general issue of working incrementally and transcendently towards a better world through sensemaking from shared data rather than focus on trying to hide stuff to plot some sudden overthrow of the current order:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/2011-February/000401.html
"But in short, is FreedomBox going to build into or onto our walls the old ad-hoc standards that soak up so much of our time already? Perhaps dealing with those semantic problems in an adhoc way through email and regular wikis and discussion boards and such is just going to make us digital slaves to lots of classic time leaches of dealing with lost metadata and so on? Instead, could FreedomBox, by adopting a semantic desktop focus, ideally using existing tools somehow, help our culture transition to an entirely new and potentially liberating semantic desktop paradigm?"

But ultimately, the biggest part of all this is still the issue in my sig. We could use these technologies of abundance to make the world a better place for all. Or we could use them to make the world a worse place for all. Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons
"The allegory of the long spoons is a parable that shows the difference between heaven and hell by means of people eating with long spoons where on the hell side they are starving and on the heaven side they are sated.[1] The story can encourage people to be kind to each other.{2} ... We have the opportunity to use what we are given (the long spoons in this allegory) to help nourish each other, but the problem, as Rabbi Haim astutely points out, lies in how we treat each other. Given the same level playing field one group of people who treat each other well will create a blissful and pleasant environment. Whereas another group of people, given exactly the same tools to work with, can create a living hell simply by how they treat each other. It's a simple truth, but easy to forget when you're lonely, when you can't see what's in front of you. The way to turn things around is through reaching out to others.[4]"

Still, someone like Langdon Winner might disagree, in the sense that the decisions about what technologies we choose to invent and deploy often are bigger shaping forces than how we actually use the infrastructure once we have it. As Lawrence Lessig wrote in "Code 2.0", there are (at least) four big shapers of human behavior: rules, norms, prices, and architecture. So, we need to be careful what architecture we choose to surround ourselves with. "The Skills of Xanadu" is a great short story from the 1950s by Theodore Sturgeon related to this.
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51

And that story mentions "privacy" as one of the highest values. Perhaps privacy is a luxury that only strong confident cultures can support? And since the USA has become weak and confused by thirty years of crazy narrowly selfish NeoLiberal economic and political dogma, the USA can no longer "afford" privacy, because the social strength to accept the consequences of occasional bad actions are no longer there? Still, as I pointed out in my open letter to IARPA, it is also the case that, as Einstein said, our thinking needs to adjust to the exponentially increasing powers of modern technology that make the Earth seem smaller and smaller relative to our powers (one reason to expand into space, BTW, even as we should do our best to make Earth a healthier and happier place to live, too).

I was heartened to hear Paul Krugman essentially calling for a basic income yesterday, where a absic income might be one step towards a better balance of economic power in our society, which would then probably lead to a better balance of political power eventually:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html
" Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).
    So what is the answer? If the picture Iâ(TM)ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society â" a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules â" would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.
    I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of âoeredistribution.â But what, exactly, would they propose instead? "

So, anyway, despite my limited progress in making better software tools for sensemaking as a software developers, the world is still using what tools it has -- much the same ones I used to come to similar conclusions such as the internet and Google -- to muddle through to some conclusions. So, that is a great thing. And I think we should not discount that as the upside of things like the internet and Google. As I said in that first linked essay of mine:
"While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

You're welcome. Yes, "for self-defined values of reasonable and interesting" is part of some deep deep question...

By the way, on DVT and nutrition and lifestyle from Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Weil:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-pregnancy-coumadin-vitamin-k-and-a-plantbased-diet.html
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03146/Phlebitis.html

See also my other posts on this article, like:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&cid=44008655

I started using a treadmill workstation in part to try to reduce the risk of things like DVT and similar issues from working a lot with computers (and a treadmill is better than a standing desk in that sense).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2011216/How-sitting-desk-long-deadly-blood-clot.html

But once there are clots, dealing with them is more problematical.

It's true that a stressful environment can indeed contribute to the risk of depression, and also that for most people, modern life is indeed stressful in a lot of new ways. To support your point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
""Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.""

I'd agree there are many factors involved in depression, including all the factors that may stand in the way of eating better (including lack of money for healthier food, misinformation, initial lack of motivation, peers, time, negative self-talk, misinformed professionals, chemical dependencies, bad relationships, difficult working or living conditions, no access to nature, social status, etc.). So, yes, even when you know you should eat better, there can still be a lot of hurdles in the way. A related film including a truck driver trying to get out of a downward spiral:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

You could think of nutrition as like your car's tires, which are the interface between the car and the reality of the road. If your tires are bald, you are most likely going to have an accident on slippery roads, no matter how good the rest of the car is. But if your tires are bald, maybe you spend so much time paying for car repairs that you don't have money or time to go to the tire shop for new ones? And it is hard to think about investing in new tires when all the mechanics at car repair places that you go to (which don't sell tires for some reason) are telling you (based on years of their own training) that the reason you are having so many accidents is because you need an oil change, or a new transmission, or need to install all wheel drive, or remove the roof to make the car into a convertible. Still, it is true you'd probably have less accidents even with bald tires if, say, the roads were not so windy or made of slippery glass due to bad public policy... So, yes, depression is multi-factored in that sort of way (and more, since, following the analogy, how grippy your bald tires are might still be some function of exactly how you turn the steering wheel perhaps to make the most of some remaining patches of tread near the edges perhaps).

Still, please do your own research on diet and mood and you may be surprised. A starting point: https://www.google.com/search?q=diet+and+mood

From the first result:
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/food-to-balance-your-mood
"In a study of 200 people done in England for the mental health group known as Mind, participants were told to cut down on mood "stressors" they ate, while increasing the amount of mood "supporters." Stressors included sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and chocolate (more of that coming up). Supporters were water, vegetables, fruit, and oil-rich fish. Eighty-eight percent of the people who tried this reported improved mental health. Specifically, 26% said they had fewer mood swings, 26% had fewer panic attacks and anxiety, and 24% said they experienced less depression."

I know, one can quibble about whether they had a control group, whether that was "double blind" experiment, and so on.

Or another:
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01/28/healthy-diet-can-improve-mood/50908.html
"The results showed a strong day-to-day relationship between more positive mood and higher fruit and vegetable consumption, but not other foods."

Consider, if someone cruel were to take a rat and feed it nothing but sugar water, the poor abused rat is going to sicken and die, and probably be pretty cranky throughout the process of dying. Rats need a variety of nutrients. Why expect anything different about people?
"Man Dies From Drinking Too Much Coca-Cola, Rules British Coroner"
http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/man-dies-drinking-coca-cola/2013/05/29/id/506922

I have collected more health advice here:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Including a link to this, which you might like (although I find it incomplete because it ignores diet):
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy"
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C
"Surviving America's Depression Epidemic delves into the roots of depression and links our increasingly consumer-based culture and standard-practice psychiatric treatments to worsening depression, instead of solving it. In an easy-to-understand narrative style, Dr. Levine prescribes antidotes to depression including the keys to building morale and selfhealing. Unlike short-term, drug-based solutions, these antidotes foster a long-term cycle where people rediscover passion and purpose, and find meaning in acting on their societal concerns."

Dr. Andrew Weil covers more of those types of concerns though in a holistic and integrative approach to health.
http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/articles/an-interview-with-dr-andrew-weil-about-depression/
"It's the common cold of modern emotional life. And he thinks we're thinking about it all wrong. Yes, an imbalance of brain chemicals can trigger depression, but it goes the other way, too: An imbalance of thoughts and habits can change your brain to make depression more likely -- or less likely. Dr. Weil believes an approach that integrates healthy habits of the body, mind and spirit can play a key role in preventing and alleviating mild to moderate depression. It can foster emotional well-being -- and happiness."

Yes, Dr. Weil says body, mind, and spirit. All three are connected and related to depression, as is environment. But there is so much self-help stuff out there about thinking good thoughts; the link about nutrition and mood is what is more lacking in the public awareness -- followed then by having a better environment to address the issue you raise. Groups like BlueZones try to put it all together:
http://www.bluezones.com/

Basically, our brains readjust to higher levels of stimulation and then we feel about the same, except we may be ruining our health; see: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

So, people may not be getting as much happiness in the long term out of drugs or junk food as they think they might. It's just the way the brain seems to be wired.

That said, you are mixing in some other interesting ideas like:
* "sexual selection" (a technical term in evolutionary biology) like for the otherwise disadvantageous and wasteful peacock's tail (or profligate showy spending) because it appeals for whatever reason to the opposite sex,,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
* the potential problems of following other people's rules written to their own benefit, and
* time sense -- see Phillip Zimbardo's "The Time Paradox" RSA Animate video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg

BTW, if you feel you normally have a consistent low level of mood otherwise, look hard at what you eat (artificial colors, sugar, refined starch, caffeine?) and what you don't eat (vegetables, omega 3s and other healthy fats, B complex, vitamin D, etc.). See Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman as places to start with that.

See also my other comments here on "Supernormal Stimuli" and "The Acceleration of Addiction".

But ultimately, as you suggest, we all make choices based on our preferences, ability, history, situation, and priorities etc..So, from a metaphysical point of view, it can be hard to argue with assumptions about the meaning of life to different people -- even if some approaches to life may seem to some to be less adaptive. And certainly those who are too abstentious, and leave no progeny as a result, are evolutionary problems on the other side of (excessive) moderation. Thus "Moderation in all things, including moderation".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TekWar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droud

But there are probably other stories, as this technology has been used in various ways for decades. Although this is interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center
"More recent research has shown that the so-called pleasure electrodes lead only a form of wanting or motivation to obtain the stimulation, rather than pleasure."

See also my comment below:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3862853&cid=44004193

In a book reference there, "The Pleasure Trap", the authors talk about multiple brain systems for pleasure that work in different ways to different ends (dopamine vs. serotonin).
http://www.livestrong.com/article/175158-dopamine-vs-serotonin/

There are so many situations human need to navigate where you could start down a slippery slope... Part of the problem is that it takes time for society to adjust as people learn about each new one technology is making possible...

http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
" Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
"In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, a wirehead is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant (called a "droud" in the stories) to stimulate the pleasure centres of their brain. In the Known Space universe, wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting themselves in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of Known Space humanity without self-control. Wireheading need not use an actual brain implant; the pleasure centre can be remotely activated by a small device called a "tasp" (important in the Ringworld novels)."

Also related about "Supernormal Stimuli":
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
"Our instincts -- for food, sex, or territorial protection -- evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today's world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons -- that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term "supernormal stimuli" to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today's most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization."

And on overcoming "The Pleasure Trap":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Like moths to the flame... Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. That said, people will do this. Not sure what the outcome will ultimately be, but the "natural selection" point above, to select for people who do not do this, may well come into play. And that may also be part of the adaptive evolutionary value of religion, to scare us away from some unhealthy things and attract us to some healthy things (whatever else one can say about specific dogmas):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions

So, maybe the only people who will survive being overstimulated by electrical thunderbolts will be those with a deep abiding religious feeling that such a life is wrongly lived?

Thanks!

I've been meaning to put up the comments I had on Ray Dalio's principles somewhere for a long time. I finally just put them up here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sent-to-Bridgewater-on-Ray-Dalio-Principles.html

As I note there, obviously, writing stuff like that must not be the way to get a high paying (>$200K annual) job programming in the financial industry. :-) But this may be of interest to others looking at Ray Dalio's "Principles" or in Bridgewater Associates (the world's biggest hedge fund in 2011) as a place of employment. Or perhaps it may be of interest in trying to understand, from a psychological perspective, some of the potential limits of Bridgewater's financial models if they reflect only that version of "Principles"?

From what I sent:
----
I guess one might say that from the outside, with this cover letter I'm trying to upgrade Bridgewater in my own way, even as Bridgewater would probably upgrade me in some sense if I worked there. :-) I'm supplying some of the results of my having read widely for many years on a variety of topics related to evolution, technology, psychology, and social change. Maybe someone at Bridgewater will read this, maybe not, but it was also interesting to write it and try to get a message through the filters all organizations have. It's a first draft, and it could be a lot better, a lot shorter, and so on were I to spend a lot more time on it, or were I to have better tools with which to communicate it (which I can aspire to create someday, like supplying a semantic web to your inbox).

The key points here are that:
* "Evolution" does not mean "progress" as humans normally think of it (this from someone who was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time),
* All reasoning depends on emotions (which give us reason to reason),
* Bridgewater has reached the size where it has a significant effect on the exchange economy that supports it and needs to consider the broader issues in its modeling and responsibilities to stakeholders;
* There can be many overlapping senses of "self" (body, family, philosophy, company, state, etc.) and models (including financial models) may need to take that in account, but that is not reflected in "Principles";
* There is a pressing need for sensemaking tools and I feel I can help create them (and have helped create some in the past);
* such tools might, through the FOSS gift economy, even be a way to take aspects of Bridgewater's self-improvement culture (like through structured arguments) and make that available to the general public, as if things like openness and rationality are true for Bridgewater, they must be true for the rest of the world, and maybe Bridgewater try to help the rest of the world achieve those things too (while also increasing its potential employee pool of people learning such tools);
* Bridgewater can probably better promote health among its community in terms of vitamin D, eating more vegetables, understanding the "Pleasure Trap", and having treadmill workstations; ...

---

Realistically, I'd have probably been a better match for the Dalio Family Foundation perhaps, directing time and money to open source sensemaking software efforts? :-)

Anyway, thankfully I found some other way to earn ration units (fiat dollars) that I can exchange for food and shelter, in the absence of a "basic income" and given pretty much all the land is enclosed and privatized, and even if it was not, it takes a village and lots of specific skills to live well in the wilderness...
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

As I've written before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1847578&cid=34100224

The circle of knowledge, a poem by Paul D. Fernhout

        All philosophy is anthropology;
        All anthropology is psychology;
        All psychology is biology;
        All biology is chemistry;
        All chemistry is physics;
        All physics is math;
        All math is philosophy. :-)

See my website for lots about the future of economics. I passed on my change to work on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan Chase doing Smalltalk around 2000. Back then I didn't think it worth the commute there (which my wife had hated earlier), as well as the risk for a Japanese-style subway gassing. Little did I imagine someone attacking the WTC, but I guess otherwise it is possible I might have been at a meeting in the WTC as the group met over there sometimes.

Still, as imaginary as fiat dollars are, if enough people believe in the idea, that gives it a sort of reality. And, like most US Americans, I have to deal with that collective fantasy as a way to ration the fruits of production. But it is hard also to look past how the abstractions related to the fantasy of money often hurt so many people. "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips is great down-to-Earth book on money by a creator of MasterCard, and reading it around age 15 was a formative experience in my life -- helping me avoid an early pursuit of fiat dollars and instead working towards ideals I cared about (with what limited success I've had).

But really, almost all financial engineering is pointless zero-sum gambling work, as interesting as it may still be as an abstract game. As it was explained to me by a friendly mathematician at IBM Research over lunch when I was in the speech group there (which was a group constantly being poached by Wall Street), it rally is picking up nickels before a streamroller (Buffet's analogy). You bet other people's money in such a way as you have a high chance at getting a small percentage increase on a big sum, and you (legally) skim some money off the top as a fee (or reward), while cleverly "managing" the risks, including those black swan events that most everyone ignores and you probably will too. If you are lucky, you do this for a bunch of years and then retire. If you are unlucky, you have a bad year (either badly managed risk or a black swan?) and maybe even lose your job as the company folds, but you don't generally have to give back previous years profits -- plus you get to learn "How to Speak Hedgie": :-)
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/08/how_to_speak_hedgie.html
"In these days of market volatility, hedge-fund managers and executives at all types of money management firms have been forced to explain why their funds are shutting down, losing money hand over fist, and freezing investors' funds. When they do so, however, they frequently lapse into a strange euphemistic dialect. And so we thought it would be helpful to provide a handy Hedgie-English glossary. ...
Hedge-Fund Phrase: Unprecedented, unique circumstances
Translation: Stuff happens. But we had no clue. ..."

But, and I only realized this much later, by indirectly raising issues about systemic risk in the 1980s around the Princeton University Operations Research group, I pretty much ensured I would not get a PhD, at least there. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html

But, like hedge fund managers, do those professors have to give back decades of salary because they were in some sense deeply wrong about financial risks that lead to the great suffering of tens of millions of US Americans dues to the ideology they embraced and promoted about financial risks? Nope. Even now they are still the sought-after experts about risk management.
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged. This situation reflects the institutional power that the unconditional proponents of main-stream thought continue to exert on university teaching and research. This domination, propagated by the so-called top universities, dates back at least a quarter of a century and is effectively global. However, the very fact that this paradigm persists despite the current crisis, highlights the extent of its power and the dangerousness of its dogmatic character. Teachers and researchers, the signatories of the appeal, assert that this situation restricts the fecundity of research and teaching in economics, finance and management, diverting them as it does from issues critical to society."

Actually, I might find it interesting to work at Bridgewater because of the transparency and other cultural ideas:
http://www.leadersmag.com/issues/2010.3_Jul/Shaping%20The%20Future/Ray-Dalio-Bridgewater-Associates-Interview-Principles.html

But I think that someone there may not have liked my email a few years back critiquing Ray Dalio's principles essay? :-)
http://www.bwater.com/home/culture--principles.aspx

A key point of my (20 page?) critique: one fundamental problem with the pursuit of "excellence" is that you have to choose what to be excellent in -- and that is a hard choice to make and remake, since decision making rests on both reason and emotions..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

And that is one reason math in practice is never value-neutral. And getting lost in pure math is a decision not to be engaged with hard choices about conflict and cooperation and about meshwork and hierarchy that life presents us regularly. Thus I'd agree with the "alt" tag, but the circle poem takes it even further.

Anyway, my current thinking on economic models is on the main page of my website (in a presentation on five interwoven economies: subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and in the long version of "Post-Scarcity Princeton".

These days, I'd say the better question than, how can a programmer earn $200K a year is, how can we get a basic income of US$2000 per person per month for all, so that anyone who wants to can afford to write free software full-time? For a family of three or four, that would be about as much money as most millionaires have per month living off their investments,
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html

Sometimes asking the right question is much more important than knowing how to get the right answer.