Self-replying because I thought of something else after thinking about it more (it’s a pretty deep essay): My thesis advisor once gave me a bad grade on a pape

Self-replying because I thought of something else after thinking about it more (it’s a pretty deep essay): My thesis advisor once gave me a bad grade on a paper about the Gaia Hypothesis about 15 years ago, and I never really knew why. The answer I get from reading this article is that I wasn’t thinking about the steady state system as an actor in its own right. And that might be because I am inside the system so it just looks chaotic to me. I think I got hung up on the animist implications of the theory, rather than ignoring the simple but powerful insight that any complex steady state is in some way analogous to a living organism. As I learned in SSC’s Meditations on Moloch, treating something as an actor can help reveal deeper truths.