To my mind, butterfly economy means lightweight solutions where a wealth of information gives us wings we did not have when this world had a caterpillar economy and was crawling around gobbling up all the resources it could in preparation for what I would like to believe is a better way, a more sustainable way, if we can only embrace being a butterfly now and put the past behind us.
The lightweight solutions that are POSSIBLE today which were NOT possible even a year or two ago, much less a decade ago, face barriers to ever being dreamed up and born in the form of the mental models we all carry within us for "how things WORK" and "what makes sense." Those are obstacles to a better answer coming along because those mental models are OUT OF DATE.
Even when we do come up with better answers, we are likely still leaving a LOT of "money on the table" -- an expression for failing to get the full value out of a thing, though I don't personally mean necessarily just financial value per se.
I am deeply disappointed that the ENTIRE world apparently failed to do what seemed very obvious to me at the start of the pandemic: Use the internet to put out reliable home self care to reduce the burden on our medical facilities.
During the pandemic, going to the hospital was one of the best ways to pick up Covid, which annoyed me because what I have heard some Americans call "ignorant savages" in Africa aren't that stupid and stopped an ebola epidemic years ago in part by telling their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital."
But people with PhDs and important spiffy titles the world over could not go "One plus one equals two" and decide to use the internet as a germ-free means to educate people so they had useful information that would make them less likely to NEED to see a doctor during a contagious global "plague" and also tell their people "Do not go to the hospital during the epidemic if at all possible and here is how to reduce the odds of needing it."
I'm in rural America, an area I have dubbed Coastal Washington and it's an area with some small towns and a bunch of state and national parks and the Quinault reservation. So it's unlikely to ever have any really big cities spring up, and yet more than half a million people already live here and it is an area that is expected to be a safe haven from climate change to some degree, so odds are good more people will live here in the future.
I am interested in trying to foster regional development goals for this area and I keep my eye out for GOOD articles about innovative stuff happening in Africa in hopes of BORROWING from their successes. My understanding is that a company called Zipline has been doing drone delivery of blood (and later other medical supplies) in Africa for some years and drone delivery of blood eventually also came to the US, but seems to have STARTED in Africa where "rural" can be writ larger than it is in the US, with larger distances, bigger environmental and infrastructure challenges, etc.
I think the Star Trek medical tricorder was kind of a vision of improved diagnostics using fancy tech which FIT INTO the existing cultural medical paradigms. It was envisioned as enhancing existing "country doctor with a little black bag visiting YOU in most cases" paradigms.
Unfortunately, actual reality has been that shiny tech and advanced diagnostics didn't fit into that. Instead, you get MRIs or whatever that take up an entire room at the hospital and we whored out our entire medical system and medical culture to putting tech first and I believe we lost a lot of valuable and important pieces of the previous system and this fosters a lot of our current problems.
We are starting to get diagnostic apps on our pocket-sized smartphones and maybe someday the tricorder will be a reality. But I worry that the cultural bits of western medicine which are already lost may never come back, much to our detriment.
This post is not REALLY intended to be "advice" for people in Africa. I look to THEM for hope for solutions for my SHIT COUNTRY where we have endless problems in rural and small town America and NO PLANS to fix it. If you are a rural American, you are expected to accept a second-class citizenship and encouraged to visit civilization in the expensive big city once in a while.
But maybe less developed countries have some HOPE of getting the "tricorder solution" -- finding tech that enhances their existing stuff instead of displacing it and throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the process of displacing it.
What we need in the world today is the opposite of Cargo Cult Science. Instead of an exact replica of physical parts -- the runway, the tower -- and hoping the gods magically bless us with free cargo, we need to focus on understanding the more essential invisible pieces -- how and why does cargo sometimes get delivered to the middle of nowhere and when does it make sense to replicate that?
They do it in Alaska where there are few roads and where the environmental conditions make it nonsensical to try to pave over their paradise and put up a parking lot. So they have small runways at every podunk village of a hundred people or more and six times as many pilots as other US states.
A hospital in Idaho, which is the state next door for me, stopped delivering babies, most likely due to lack of adequate demand, though an article about it spun it as due to a hot button political issue in the US: Abortion being banned in the state.
The US has overly medicalized a LOT of things, childbirth being just one of them. There is a midwife in that area and that is possibly a more appropriate way to serve local need than a full-blown hospital department dedicated to childbirth, but Americans have grown accustomed to the idea that "babies MUST be born at a HOSPITAL," and never mind that a generation or two back, this was NOT the norm.
We have a bad habit of cramming "western" solutions down the throats of a lot of countries and I worry that many of the things we "gift" in the name of charity may do more harm than good or may be less valuable for them than westerners trying to play hero want to believe. OUR western solutions were born of our landscapes and our demographic and cultural realities and may be a poor fit for their needs, such as with the known phenomenon that western architecture is making the heat issue worse in India where their traditional architecture is more suited to the local hot, humid climate.
But I look to places like Africa for innovative solutions that work in rural areas, small towns, wilderness and the like because once in a while they demand that someone develop a technical solution that actually works within the constraints they have and not just assume that what works for us will be a clear and obvious improvement for them.
I imagine you still see a lot of home births and midwifery in places like Africa and maybe we can borrow from them to improve our rural places instead of taking the position that you can EITHER move to an expensive big city OR just accept a less civilized life.
I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my Father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
The lightweight solutions that are POSSIBLE today which were NOT possible even a year or two ago, much less a decade ago, face barriers to ever being dreamed up and born in the form of the mental models we all carry within us for "how things WORK" and "what makes sense." Those are obstacles to a better answer coming along because those mental models are OUT OF DATE.
Even when we do come up with better answers, we are likely still leaving a LOT of "money on the table" -- an expression for failing to get the full value out of a thing, though I don't personally mean necessarily just financial value per se.
So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It's the bitterness that lasts
I am deeply disappointed that the ENTIRE world apparently failed to do what seemed very obvious to me at the start of the pandemic: Use the internet to put out reliable home self care to reduce the burden on our medical facilities.
During the pandemic, going to the hospital was one of the best ways to pick up Covid, which annoyed me because what I have heard some Americans call "ignorant savages" in Africa aren't that stupid and stopped an ebola epidemic years ago in part by telling their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital."
But people with PhDs and important spiffy titles the world over could not go "One plus one equals two" and decide to use the internet as a germ-free means to educate people so they had useful information that would make them less likely to NEED to see a doctor during a contagious global "plague" and also tell their people "Do not go to the hospital during the epidemic if at all possible and here is how to reduce the odds of needing it."
I'm in rural America, an area I have dubbed Coastal Washington and it's an area with some small towns and a bunch of state and national parks and the Quinault reservation. So it's unlikely to ever have any really big cities spring up, and yet more than half a million people already live here and it is an area that is expected to be a safe haven from climate change to some degree, so odds are good more people will live here in the future.
I am interested in trying to foster regional development goals for this area and I keep my eye out for GOOD articles about innovative stuff happening in Africa in hopes of BORROWING from their successes. My understanding is that a company called Zipline has been doing drone delivery of blood (and later other medical supplies) in Africa for some years and drone delivery of blood eventually also came to the US, but seems to have STARTED in Africa where "rural" can be writ larger than it is in the US, with larger distances, bigger environmental and infrastructure challenges, etc.
I think the Star Trek medical tricorder was kind of a vision of improved diagnostics using fancy tech which FIT INTO the existing cultural medical paradigms. It was envisioned as enhancing existing "country doctor with a little black bag visiting YOU in most cases" paradigms.
Unfortunately, actual reality has been that shiny tech and advanced diagnostics didn't fit into that. Instead, you get MRIs or whatever that take up an entire room at the hospital and we whored out our entire medical system and medical culture to putting tech first and I believe we lost a lot of valuable and important pieces of the previous system and this fosters a lot of our current problems.
We are starting to get diagnostic apps on our pocket-sized smartphones and maybe someday the tricorder will be a reality. But I worry that the cultural bits of western medicine which are already lost may never come back, much to our detriment.
This post is not REALLY intended to be "advice" for people in Africa. I look to THEM for hope for solutions for my SHIT COUNTRY where we have endless problems in rural and small town America and NO PLANS to fix it. If you are a rural American, you are expected to accept a second-class citizenship and encouraged to visit civilization in the expensive big city once in a while.
But maybe less developed countries have some HOPE of getting the "tricorder solution" -- finding tech that enhances their existing stuff instead of displacing it and throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the process of displacing it.
What we need in the world today is the opposite of Cargo Cult Science. Instead of an exact replica of physical parts -- the runway, the tower -- and hoping the gods magically bless us with free cargo, we need to focus on understanding the more essential invisible pieces -- how and why does cargo sometimes get delivered to the middle of nowhere and when does it make sense to replicate that?
They do it in Alaska where there are few roads and where the environmental conditions make it nonsensical to try to pave over their paradise and put up a parking lot. So they have small runways at every podunk village of a hundred people or more and six times as many pilots as other US states.
A hospital in Idaho, which is the state next door for me, stopped delivering babies, most likely due to lack of adequate demand, though an article about it spun it as due to a hot button political issue in the US: Abortion being banned in the state.
The US has overly medicalized a LOT of things, childbirth being just one of them. There is a midwife in that area and that is possibly a more appropriate way to serve local need than a full-blown hospital department dedicated to childbirth, but Americans have grown accustomed to the idea that "babies MUST be born at a HOSPITAL," and never mind that a generation or two back, this was NOT the norm.
We have a bad habit of cramming "western" solutions down the throats of a lot of countries and I worry that many of the things we "gift" in the name of charity may do more harm than good or may be less valuable for them than westerners trying to play hero want to believe. OUR western solutions were born of our landscapes and our demographic and cultural realities and may be a poor fit for their needs, such as with the known phenomenon that western architecture is making the heat issue worse in India where their traditional architecture is more suited to the local hot, humid climate.
But I look to places like Africa for innovative solutions that work in rural areas, small towns, wilderness and the like because once in a while they demand that someone develop a technical solution that actually works within the constraints they have and not just assume that what works for us will be a clear and obvious improvement for them.
I imagine you still see a lot of home births and midwifery in places like Africa and maybe we can borrow from them to improve our rural places instead of taking the position that you can EITHER move to an expensive big city OR just accept a less civilized life.
So don't yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don't give up, and don't give in
You may just be okay