God Log of suffering

 

It's hard for someone who believes in a Western type of god, active in history and filled with love, actually exists, for sure. There are other gods people have thought up. A King Log kind of god would allow suffering, not being motivated to do anything about it. Or maybe suffering is just necessary for there to be good. Without it we would take all the good that happens for granted and not give god proper thanks when he give us a little relief now and then. That one really is a bit much when you think about it, and it is good Voltaire took Leibniz to task for it. The deist would tell us God made the world so perfect he doesn't need to do anything more and just go away, hence he "rested" when creation was done and had been resting ever since.

You’re circling around what philosophers have wrestled with for centuries—the tension between a loving, active God and a world that very obviously contains suffering. That tension doesn’t go away just by refining definitions; it presses on the whole structure.

When you mention a “King Log” sort of god, you’re close to what many people intuitively drift toward when they try to preserve God’s existence without attributing moral responsibility—something like a passive or indifferent creator. It avoids the problem of evil, but at a cost: such a god becomes religiously thin. There’s not much reason to worship or trust a being that simply lets the world run.

Your discomfort with the “suffering makes good meaningful” idea is well placed. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz tried to argue this is “the best of all possible worlds,” but as Voltaire famously skewered in Candide, that can sound grotesque when faced with real suffering. It risks turning pain into a kind of accounting device—useful for contrast—which feels morally off.

The deist position you describe—God as a kind of perfect clockmaker who steps back—is in some ways intellectually cleaner. It removes the expectation of intervention, so suffering isn’t a failure of divine love so much as a feature of a lawful system. But again, the cost is existential: it gives you a universe that may be intelligible, but not one that responds, cares, or redeems. It explains order better than it explains meaning.

What’s interesting is that each of these views seems to preserve one attribute by weakening another:

• Preserve goodness → struggle with power or presence

• Preserve power → struggle with goodness

• Preserve both → struggle with the observable world

The classical Western (especially Christian) response tries to hold all three—goodness, power, and involvement—by shifting the explanation to human freedom, moral growth, or a larger story not fully visible. But that move always risks sounding like a deferral rather than an answer.

Given your own sympathy for Buddhist ideas, you might notice how differently the problem is framed there. Instead of asking “Why does a good God allow suffering?”, it asks something closer to “Given that suffering exists, what are its causes, and how can it be reduced?” That sidesteps the need to justify a creator at all. It’s less satisfying if you want a cosmic moral author, but more practical if your concern is what to do next.

If I may push you a bit: do you find yourself rejecting the Western-style God mainly on logical grounds (the problem doesn’t cohere), or on moral grounds (the picture of God that results isn’t acceptable)? Those are slightly different objections, and they tend to lead people in different directions.

I don't believe because there is no convincing reason to believe, no credible evidence, just claims. The suffering problem is the cherry on top.

That’s a clean position, and it has a long pedigree. What you’re really doing is setting an evidentiary bar: claims about reality—especially big, consequential ones—should be backed by something more than assertion or tradition. On that standard, many classical arguments for God don’t compel.

Even the more sophisticated ones—like Thomas Aquinas’s “first cause” or William Paley’s design argument—tend to get you, at best, to some sort of originating principle or ordering intelligence. They don’t get you all the way to a loving, intervening, morally engaged deity of the Western type. There’s a gap between “something explains the universe” and “that something cares about us.”

And as you say, the problem of suffering doesn’t just add a minor complication—it sharpens the question. If the evidence for a benevolent, active God is already thin, then a world with pervasive, often indiscriminate suffering pushes the balance further away from belief. It’s not merely an emotional objection; it’s evidential in its own way: the world looks less like what you’d expect under that hypothesis.

People who do believe often aren’t actually persuaded by arguments in the strict sense. It’s more a mix of upbringing, personal experience they interpret as meaningful, or a sense that belief answers existential needs—belonging, purpose, moral structure. From the outside, though, those don’t function as public evidence; they don’t transfer well from one mind to another.

Your stance, then, isn’t so much “anti-religious” as it is empiricist: no sufficient evidence, no assent. That’s basically the line taken by David Hume, who was skeptical not because he could disprove God, but because the case never rose to the level of convincing demonstration.

If anything, the interesting question becomes not “why don’t you believe?” but “what would count as enough?” Not in a vague sense, but concretely—what kind of evidence would actually move the needle for you? Most people have never really specified that, and without it, the discussion can drift into trading intuitions rather than testing claims.

Niche specialization in evolution and in business

 

In evolution, we see the phenomenon of "niche division" by age and by species, where the young don't compete with the mature and each species specializes in its part of the environment. This reduces competition but leads to more and more specialization. Sometimes that specialization is detrimental or even disastrous if whatever it is a species has specialized on disappears. Black markets generally (I would say never, but can't really be sure of that) are not free. They come under the control of criminal organizations, who set prices and quotas and all that. To get and preserve a really free market takes government oversight preventing cartels and monopolies and price-setting conspiracies. The businessman will always seek to avoid competition by whatever means possible: political power, strong-arm tactics, conspiracy, sometimes just sending price signals. They can also avoid competition the way species do by specializing, with the same risk.

You’re drawing a very sharp parallel, and it mostly holds up—though there are a couple of places where it’s worth tightening the analogy so it doesn’t overreach.

In biology, what you’re calling “niche division” is often framed as resource partitioning. Species (and even age classes within a species) end up using different slices of the environment because direct competition is costly. Natural selection favors those that can avoid head-to-head conflict. Over time, that produces specialization—sometimes extraordinarily fine-tuned. And yes, that creates fragility: when the environment shifts, the specialist can be in real trouble. The classic examples are things like the giant panda relying heavily on bamboo, or highly specialized island birds that vanish when a new predator appears.

Your economic analogy tracks that dynamic surprisingly well. Firms, like species, don’t actually want competition—they endure it. Given the chance, they differentiate (branding, product niches, geographic focus) or they eliminate competition (cartels, mergers, regulatory capture). In that sense, “specialization as avoidance of competition” is common to both systems.

Where you’re particularly right is about black markets. They are often less competitive than legal markets, not more. Without enforceable contracts or transparent information, power tends to concentrate in organizations willing to use coercion. That’s why you see cartelization—not just metaphorically but literally, as with groups like the Sinaloa Cartel. In those environments, “price” is not just a market signal; it’s enforced.

But here’s where I’d push back slightly on your framing:

A truly “free market” in the textbook sense (many buyers and sellers, perfect information, no barriers to entry) almost never exists in nature or in human systems. What we actually get are managed markets, where institutions—laws, courts, regulators—try to keep competition from collapsing. Without that scaffolding, markets don’t become freer; they often become more dominated.

Now, the specialization risk you mention is very real in economics too, but it plays out a bit differently than in biology. A species can go extinct; a firm usually just goes bankrupt and gets replaced. The system as a whole is more resilient than any individual participant. Think of companies like Kodak, which specialized brilliantly in film and then suffered when digital photography displaced it. The niche disappeared—but the broader market adapted and moved on.

So the analogy works best at this level:

• Both systems reward avoiding direct competition

• Both drift toward specialization over time

• Both accumulate hidden fragilities as a result

But they diverge in consequences:

• Biological systems can lose entire lineages permanently

• Economic systems tend to reconfigure, with failure being localized rather than terminal

There’s an almost ironic twist: evolution has no regulator, so it produces robustness at the ecosystem level but brutality at the species level. Markets, left alone, tend toward concentration—but with regulation, they can preserve competition while still allowing specialization.

Your instinct that “freedom” in markets often requires constraint is exactly right—and a bit counterintuitive. It’s one of those places where reality refuses to behave like a slogan.

A species goes extinct, a firm goes bankrupt or otherwise dissolves or redefines itself. Parallels.

Yes—there is a real parallel there, and it’s a good instinct. But it’s a “family resemblance,” not a one-to-one equivalence, and the differences matter.

At the surface level, you’re quite right: extinction and bankruptcy both remove a competitor that failed to cope with changing conditions. The environment shifts, the niche disappears or is taken, and the entity can’t adapt quickly enough. In that sense, the fall of a firm like Blockbuster LLC after streaming rose does look a lot like a specialized species losing its habitat.

But here’s where I’d gently push you to refine the analogy.

When a species goes extinct, that’s a hard stop. The genetic lineage is gone; evolution cannot “reuse” it except indirectly through distant relatives. If something like the dodo disappears, that exact evolutionary experiment is finished forever.

A firm, on the other hand, almost never vanishes that completely. Its assets, ideas, and people get redistributed. Competitors absorb pieces of it; former employees start new ventures; technologies get repurposed. Even in failure, there’s a kind of recombination that biology doesn’t permit on the same timescale. When Kodak declined, digital imaging didn’t die with it—quite the opposite.

So the deeper distinction might be put this way:

• In biology, failure deletes information (a lineage is gone).

• In markets, failure redistributes information (knowledge and capital move elsewhere).

That leads to a second difference. Evolution is blind and slow; it can’t anticipate change. Markets, imperfect as they are, contain actors who try to anticipate and hedge. Firms can diversify, pivot, or hedge against their own specialization. Species can only adapt across generations, and sometimes not fast enough.

Where your analogy really shines is in the pressure toward specialization and the risk that comes with it. Both systems reward efficiency in a stable environment—and punish it when the environment shifts. That structural tension is genuinely shared.

So I’d keep your parallel, but sharpen it like this: extinction and bankruptcy play similar roles (removing the unfit), but they operate on very different substrates—one erases, the other recycles.

Enterprises can combine, species can't.

That’s a crisp way of putting one of the biggest breaks in the analogy—and you’re essentially right.

Firms can merge, acquire, spin off pieces, or recombine in all sorts of deliberate ways. When two companies combine, they can pool capital, technology, staff, and market position almost overnight. Biology has no real counterpart to that kind of intentional, large-scale fusion.

The closest nature comes is things like hybridization or symbiosis, but those are much more constrained and rarely produce a clean “combination” of two established lineages. A mule, for example, doesn’t found a new enduring lineage, and long-term stable mergers are rare. The famous exception often cited is the deep evolutionary event behind endosymbiosis—when ancestral cells incorporated bacteria that eventually became mitochondria. But that’s less like a corporate merger and more like one entity permanently internalizing another over immense time.

By contrast, in markets, recombination is constant and intentional. Think of something like the merger that formed ExxonMobil—two large, mature entities combining into one, preserving and integrating both lineages in a way biology simply doesn’t allow.

So your point lands well:

• Enterprises can recombine directly and strategically

• Species can only branch, not merge (with rare, limited exceptions)

And that difference has consequences. It makes economic systems much more modular and reversible. If a firm is too specialized, it can sometimes “buy” its way out of that trap by merging or diversifying. A species doesn’t get that option; it’s stuck evolving from what it already is.

In a way, that makes evolution more elegant—but also far more unforgiving.

If a given species normal food disappears, the individuals will be hungry and may try something else. It all depends on how far the specialization has gone.

Exactly—and that “how far the specialization has gone” is the whole game.

In biology, most organisms aren’t perfectly locked into a single food source; they have what’s called a fundamental niche (what they could use) versus a realized niche (what they usually do use). When the usual food disappears, individuals often do try alternatives. The question is whether they still have the physiology, behavior, and even the gut microbes to make that switch work.

Generalists—think of animals like raccoons—have a wide margin for improvisation. Specialists are another matter. The giant panda, for instance, can digest other foods in principle (it’s taxonomically a carnivore), but it has become so behaviorally and physiologically tuned to bamboo that switching is difficult and inefficient. So when bamboo fails locally, pandas don’t smoothly pivot; they struggle.

There’s also a subtle trap: specialization often removes unused capabilities over time. If a lineage hasn’t needed a certain enzyme, behavior, or foraging strategy for many generations, selection tends to let it decay. So when the crisis comes, the organism isn’t just out of practice—it may lack the underlying machinery altogether.

Your parallel to firms holds here too, but again with a twist. A business that’s overly specialized can find itself in the same bind—its skills, supply chains, and brand identity are all tuned to one niche. When that niche collapses, it may try to pivot, but the capability isn’t really there. The difference is that firms can sometimes import missing capabilities (hire new people, acquire another company), whereas a species can only work with what evolution has already built into it.

So yes: individuals often “try something else,” but success depends on how much latent flexibility remains. Specialization buys efficiency in stable times—and quietly sells off your options for when things change.

I would summarize it as short term, specialize; long term, generalize.

That’s a neat, memorable way to put it—but I’d nudge it a bit so it doesn’t oversimplify the dynamics.

In the short term, you’re absolutely right: specialization tends to win. It’s efficient, it exploits a niche better than competitors, and it often gives a decisive edge while conditions are stable.

In the long term, though, systems don’t simply “generalize.” What they tend to do is maintain a mix of specialists and generalists, or preserve optionality in some way. Evolution doesn’t steer toward generalization as a goal; it keeps generating both, and the environment decides which survives at any given moment.

You can see this balance in nature. A highly specialized feeder like the giant panda coexists (uneasily) with much more flexible animals that can switch diets. When conditions are stable, the specialist thrives. When conditions shift, the generalist—or the less-specialized competitor—often has the advantage.

Economics behaves similarly. A firm may specialize to dominate a niche, but over the long run it either:

• builds in some flexibility (diversification, adaptable capabilities), or

• gets replaced by others that can adapt better.

So a slightly sharper version of your maxim might be:

“Short term: specialize to compete.
Long term: survive by retaining the capacity to adapt.”

That preserves your insight while avoiding the implication that systems inevitably drift toward generalism. In both biology and markets, the tension never really resolves—it just keeps playing out as conditions change.

Well, what you say is simplified too. Any understanding is always simplification and whether it is oversimplification is a judgment call.

Quite right—and that’s a fair correction.

Any model or maxim is a compression of reality. The question isn’t whether it simplifies (it must), but whether it simplifies in a way that still tracks the structure of what’s going on. Your version—“short term, specialize; long term, generalize”—does capture something real: the tension between efficiency now and resilience later.

Where I was pushing back a bit is only that “generalize” can sound like a destination, when in practice neither evolution nor markets settle there. They keep generating both strategies, and the environment keeps reshuffling which one pays off. But as a rule of thumb—a kind of compass, as you nicely distinguished earlier—it’s perfectly serviceable.

In fact, one could say your formulation has the virtue of being operational. It warns against overcommitting to a narrow path when conditions might change. That’s often more useful than a more precise but less memorable statement.

So yes, it is a judgment call. The art lies in knowing when the simplification is guiding your thinking—and when it’s quietly misleading it.

Flint vs bamboo artifacts in SE Asia

 

I'm told that flint or obsidian artifacts are not found in SE Asia from the period of Homo Erectus on, explained by the availability of bamboo. Is this absence correct and if so is this explanation either true or reasonable?

The claim, as stated, is a bit too absolute. It contains a grain of truth, but both parts—the absence of stone tools and the bamboo explanation—need some careful trimming.

First, the archaeological record. In Southeast Asia (especially places like Java and mainland areas such as Vietnam and Thailand), sites associated with Homo erectus do indeed show a relative scarcity of finely worked stone tools compared to Africa or Europe. You don’t see the classic, symmetrical handaxes of the Acheulean tradition nearly as often. This led early researchers to call the region the “Movius Line” zone, after Hallam Movius, who noticed this east–west divide.

However, “absence” is too strong. There are stone tools—just generally simpler ones (flakes, choppers, and expedient tools), and often made from locally available materials rather than high-quality flint. So the record is more accurately described as low elaboration, not no stone tools.

Now, the bamboo hypothesis. This idea—sometimes called the “bamboo culture hypothesis”—suggests that because bamboo is abundant, strong, and easy to shape, early humans in the region relied heavily on it instead of stone. Since bamboo doesn’t preserve well archaeologically, this would leave behind a misleadingly sparse record.

Is that reasonable? Yes, to a point. Bamboo is actually an excellent material: it can be split into sharp edges, used for cutting, containers, even structural elements. Ethnographic examples show it can substitute for many stone-tool functions. So it’s plausible that it reduced the need for sophisticated stone industries.

But most archaeologists today don’t think bamboo alone explains the pattern. A few other factors matter:

• Raw material constraints: High-quality knappable stone like flint is genuinely less common in parts of Southeast Asia than in, say, East Africa or Europe.

• Functional sufficiency: Simple tools may have been “good enough” for the ecological niche—dense forests, different prey, different plant processing needs.

• Cultural/technological traditions: Tool complexity isn’t just about resources; it’s also about learned behavior passed down through generations.

• Preservation bias: Organic tools (bamboo, wood) vanish, while stone survives—skewing what we see.

So the modern view is more balanced:

• There is no true absence of stone tools.

• There is a relative simplicity in many assemblages.

• Bamboo is a plausible contributing factor, but not a complete explanation.

If you like tidy formulations: the old idea was “no stone because bamboo.” The current one is closer to “some stone, often simple—because of a mix of ecology, materials, and culture, with bamboo possibly playing a supporting role.”

And as you might appreciate, this is one of those cases where the archaeological record is less a clean narrative and more a set of stubborn silences we try not to over-interpret.

I take it an absence of quality flint and no obsidian.

That’s closer to the mark, but still needs a bit of qualification.

High-quality flint (or flint-like chert) is indeed relatively scarce across much of mainland Southeast Asia and parts of Indonesia. You don’t get those large, predictable nodules that made the classic Acheulean handaxe industries so feasible in Africa or Europe. So yes—a shortage of ideal knappable stone is a real constraint, and it likely helped push toolkits toward simpler flake-and-chopper technologies.

Obsidian, however, is a different story. It is present in Southeast Asia, because it’s tied to volcanic activity. Places in Indonesia—think of regions around Sumatra or Java—do have obsidian sources. But for the period of Homo erectus, there’s little to no clear evidence of systematic obsidian use.

That absence is generally not explained by a lack of obsidian in the landscape. Rather, it’s thought to reflect:

• Technological habits: Obsidian requires controlled flaking to take full advantage of its properties. If a tradition never develops that skill set, the material may be ignored even if available.

• Mobility and access: Obsidian sources are often localized. If populations weren’t ranging in ways that intersected those sources, they wouldn’t exploit them.

• Functional sufficiency: Again, if simpler tools (stone, bamboo, wood) did the job, there may have been no pressure to adopt a more specialized material.

So your revised formulation could be sharpened slightly:

• Flint-like materials: often limited → real constraint

• Obsidian: present in the region but largely unused in the Homo erectus period

• Conclusion: material availability matters, but cultural/technological choices matter just as much

If I were to push back gently: it’s tempting to reduce this to “they lacked good stone,” but that doesn’t fully hold, because even where excellent material existed (like obsidian), it wasn’t necessarily taken up. That suggests we’re looking at a combination of opportunity, habit, and need, rather than simple environmental determinism.

What aspects of the environment would be different from elsewhere to reduce the need for finely flaked tools?

What you’re really asking is: what kind of world makes crude tools “good enough”? Southeast Asia during the time of Homo erectus was, in several important ways, a very different working environment from the open savannas where the classic Acheulean toolkit flourished.

Start with vegetation and raw materials. Much of the region was (and is) dense tropical or subtropical forest. That gives you abundant bamboo, rattan, and hardwoods—materials that can be split, sharpened, and replaced quickly. A split bamboo edge can be quite sharp, and if it dulls, you simply make another. In that setting, the advantage of a carefully retouched stone edge—durable but labor-intensive—shrinks considerably.

Then there’s the nature of prey and food processing. In African savannas, large game and carcass processing reward long-lasting, sharp cutting edges—hence the utility of handaxes and bifaces. In Southeast Asia, subsistence likely leaned more toward:

• smaller animals,

• fish and aquatic resources,

• plant foods that don’t require heavy butchery.

Those tasks don’t demand the same kind of robust, finely flaked tools. A simple flake—or a sharpened stick or bamboo sliver—often suffices.

Mobility and landscape matter too. Dense forests limit long-distance visibility and movement. You’re not ranging across wide plains tracking herds; you’re operating in a more localized, patchy environment. That tends to favor expedient tools made on the spot rather than carefully crafted, curated tools meant to last and travel.

There’s also a subtler factor: risk and reliability. In environments where materials like bamboo are everywhere, you can afford to be casual—tools are disposable. In harsher or more open environments, where suitable material might be scarce or encounters with large prey are high-stakes, investing effort in durable, multipurpose tools makes more sense.

Finally, preservation bias plays tricks on us. If a large portion of the toolkit was organic—bamboo knives, wooden digging sticks—we simply don’t see it. What survives (simple stone flakes) may underrepresent the actual technological sophistication.

So if you put it together, the environment differs in ways that:

• provide abundant, easily worked organic materials,

• reduce reliance on heavy-duty butchery,

• encourage localized, flexible tool use,

• and allow for disposable rather than curated technology.

That combination doesn’t force simplicity, but it makes elaborate stoneworking less advantageous. The interesting part—and where I’d nudge back against overly tidy explanations—is that humans elsewhere sometimes still produced complex tools under less “demanding” conditions. So environment sets the stage, but it doesn’t write the whole script; tradition and learned behavior still have a large say in what people actually do.

Anyone who has ever tried to make a flint hand axe knows full well that one must know what one is doing (be taught by others with training and experience) and it is still a difficult and time-consuming affair.

Exactly—that’s the crux of it. Flintknapping, especially for bifaces or handaxes, isn’t just “hit rocks together and hope for a shape.” You’re dealing with a material that fractures predictably only if you understand conchoidal fracture, platform angles, striking force, and how the stone’s internal flaws will behave. Even an experienced knapper spends hours or days producing a single well-formed handaxe, and novices can spend far longer just breaking chunks without producing anything usable.

Now imagine doing that in a dense tropical forest where bamboo and wood are everywhere, and most daily tasks—cutting small animals, plants, or splitting bamboo—don’t require a durable, sharp stone tool. The payoff for mastering flintknapping diminishes drastically: why invest huge effort in making something that a quick bamboo knife could replace in minutes?

This ties directly into the archaeological pattern we see: in Southeast Asia, you get simpler stone flakes and choppers, often made from whatever small stones are at hand, rather than carefully prepared, labor-intensive tools. It’s a combination of ecology, task demands, and cultural transmission. Flintknapping isn’t just optional; it’s a technological investment, and if the environment allows you to get by without it, it may never take root.

If you like, I can outline a few scenarios where even small mistakes in stone preparation would completely ruin a handaxe attempt—just to make it clear why it’s such a demanding skill. Do you want me to do that?

Oh let me assure you I know.

Ha, then you already appreciate why the “just make a handaxe” argument is so naïve! It really underscores that stone-tool traditions aren’t just about what materials are available—they’re also about the learning, practice, and transmission of skill. In a forest full of bamboo, the incentive to go through that painful apprenticeship basically vanishes.

It also helps explain why the traditions were so stubborn for so long a time.

Exactly—once a tradition is established, especially one that’s “good enough” for survival, there’s little pressure to change it. If bamboo and simple flakes accomplish everything you need, why spend generations teaching a slow, risky skill like handaxe-making?

Cultural inertia is strong in these contexts. Stone-tool technology isn’t just a set of recipes; it’s embedded knowledge, passed carefully from person to person. A misstrike could ruin days of work, so mastery is hard-won. Without strong selective pressure to innovate—say, a sudden need to process large animals or tougher plant materials—there’s every reason the simple, expedient strategies persist.

In other words, the combination of environmental opportunity and skill investment cost locks in the tradition for a long stretch, which is exactly what we see in Southeast Asia. The tools are “stubborn” because there’s no payoff for making them more complex.

Actually I was thinking of the long term consistency of the flint traditions elsewhere. A peak was reached and taught generation after generation.

Ah, I see what you mean—you’re talking about the stability of Acheulean and similar flint traditions in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, not Southeast Asia. Yes, that’s a fascinating contrast.

Once a flint-handaxe tradition reached a “peak” form—a reliably functional design—it could persist for hundreds of thousands of years. That long-term consistency reflects several factors: the skill investment was already justified by environmental and subsistence pressures, and the learning process was formalized: elders or experienced knappers would teach precise techniques to the next generation. The social and survival value of producing a properly shaped handaxe was high, so the knowledge was carefully preserved.

This is also why we see remarkable morphological consistency across vast regions and long timespans. Once mastered, the design doesn’t need constant innovation—the cost of experimentation might outweigh the benefit, especially if the tool is already highly effective. In other words, the tradition becomes self-reinforcing: the skill is hard to learn, but the payoff is reliably high, so it’s transmitted meticulously.

It’s a nice mirror to the Southeast Asian case: in one region, the payoff drives long-term refinement and conservatism; in the other, low payoff and abundant alternatives drive simplicity and expediency. The same human cognitive and social machinery, applied in very different ecological contexts, produces completely different patterns.

If you like, I could sketch a quick comparison chart of these “stubborn traditions” versus “expedient traditions” showing why each persisted.