From today's Wall Street Journal: how the top 0.1% can live.

Information that might be useful for people living in poverty in the Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti neighborhoods of Miami who wonder where they should show up if they ever feel like picking up their pitchforks and axes! ...Here are few clips from the article by Arian Campo-Flores, "The Ultrarich Pay Big For Extreme Privacy":

The ultrawealthy are wielding their growing fortunes
to glide through a rarefied realm unencumbered by the
inconveniences of ordinary life. They don’t wait in
lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle
unnecessarily in traffic.

Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs,
resorts and other service providers delivers them
customized and exquisite experiences as fast as
possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private,
carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.

The acquisitive power of the very rich is soaring. The
net worth held by the top 0.1% of households in the
U.S. reached $23.3 trillion in the second quarter of this
year, up from $10.7 trillion a decade earlier, according
to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The amount
held by the bottom 50% increased to $4.2 trillion from
$900 billion over that period.

The Miami area provides a window into this world.
Long a destination for wealthy elites from the
Northeast, Europe and Latin America, it has become
an even stronger magnet for the affluent in recent
years, fostered by pandemic-era migration and the
region’s emergence as a technology and finance hub.

“There’s been an explosion of wealth creators,” said
Patrick Dwyer, a managing director at NewEdge
Wealth, a wealth-management firm, in Miami. “Now
they have enough money to live exactly how they want
to live.”

A new service economy enables them to avoid
everybody else if they want to. In the Bentley
Residences condo tower under construction in Sunny
Isles Beach, north of Miami, car elevators will deliver
residents straight up to their homes and deposit
vehicles in adjoining “sky garages,” avoiding the need
to deal with parking valets and reception areas.

Units, whose prices start at about $6 million, will each
feature a private pool perched on an expansive terrace.
The building’s restaurant, available only to owners,
will feature Cshaped booths arranged in a way to keep
guests out of each other’s view. “The ultimate luxury is
privacy,” said Gil Dezer, the 50-year-old president of
Dezer Development, who patented the car lift.

Dezer knows from experience. Several years ago, he
traveled to Belize aboard his Gulfstream jet and took a
helicopter to a private island resort with only seven
villas, each set off from the others and equipped with
its own plunge pool and dock. He spent his days
lounging and swimming, occasionally ringing a butler
to bring him a whisky.

At his 50th birthday party earlier this year, Dezer hired
artists including rappers Fat Joe and El Alfa to perform
on the beach in front of his home—effectively turning
a concert experience that is usually public into a
private bash.

Those who can afford it sometimes rent an entire
facility to have exclusive use of it. At Centner
Wellness, a highend holistic healing center in Miami
that offers a host of treatments employing the latest
technology, rich clients occasionally book the whole
place for several days, said founder Leila Centner.

When the ultrawealthy choose to socialize, they often
seek circles that are meticulously selected, said
Gregory Pool, a managing director with NewEdge
Wealth in Miami.

Faena Rose is a private social club in Miami Beach
focused on art and culture, whose members are vetted
by a committee and pay $15,000 initially and another
$15,000 annually. They get VIP access to the beach
club, spa and other amenities at the Faena Miami
Beach hotel, and admission to roughly 80 cultural
events a year, held in intimate settings for members
only.

Those include dance performances by Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater and recitals by the
Metropolitan Opera.

“That level of access is really, really compelling,” said
Pablo De Ritis, president of Faena Rose.

A newer variant: private dinner clubs, where members
get haute cuisine, personalized service and the ability
to secure a table whenever they want. ZZ’s Club in
Miami— where Dezer is a member—features a
Japanese restaurant, a sports bar and a cigar terrace. A
“culinary concierge” can, with 48 hours’ notice,
arrange any kind of dining experience members want,
from a 12course caviar feast to a re-creation of a
memorable meal from a honeymoon.

“The more personalized and the more seamless, and
the less things you have to ask for…that’s what great
service is,” said Jeff Zalaznick, cofounder of Major
Food Group, which owns ZZ’s.

Masoud and Stephanie Shojaee frequent the
membersonly MILA MM—where they can enjoy each
other’s company or that of friends without the
distraction of crowds—and other curated social spaces.
Last month, she sat in the front row for the Schiaparelli
show at Paris Fashion Week, she said, and struck up a
conversation with a woman next to her who was from
one of the wealthiest families in Monaco. They hit it
off and a week later met at a sushi place in Paris
together with their husbands.

In these settings, “the conversations for some reason,
they just feel safer, and they feel deeper,” said
Stephanie, 41, president of Shoma Group and a cast
member of “The Real Housewives of Miami” show
this year. “You hang out with people that are like-
minded.”

The curation extends to the couple’s clothes shopping.
They no longer go to high-end malls. Instead, Masoud
gets a large suitcase of items from NB44, a members-
only apparel brand, shipped to him every quarter, while
Stephanie regularly receives racks of new collections
from brands like Valentino and Christian Dior along
with an alterationist to make any adjustments.

Travel has always been a key feature of wealthy
people’s lives, and more than ever they prioritize
privacy, efficiency and customization, industry
specialists say.

Lauren Beall, owner of Travel Couture in Miami
Beach, specializes in arranging custom travel
experiences for the ultrawealthy. She has booked
private islands for clients and flown in Michelinstarred
chefs, yoga instructors and performers.

One coveted offering is a suite above the Christian
Dior flagship store in Paris that can be rented, and
includes an after- hours shopping excursion and a
private dinner at Monsieur Dior restaurant. An estate
Beall has reserved in Scotland comes with private
chefs, horses to explore the countryside and a
helicopter to visit towns for the day.

“We’re into that exclusive access right now—things
that other people can’t get,” Beall said. “There’s a huge
price tag that goes with it.” 

 

Dangerous Ideas.......

Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original post are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, before the appearance of the iPhone, social media, and contracting attention spans.  The Edge.org link that once took you to the essays supporting the 'dangerous ideas' now takes you to their published version on Amazon. The "Reality Club" and John Brockman's "Third Culture" cohort of intellectuals has largely dispersed, although you will note many names still quite prominent today.   Here is the 2006 post:

***************

Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

Welcome to the Polycene

On reading articles like Tom Friedman’s recent piece in the NYTimes, I realize what a cozy small world this contented retired professor lives in, becoming ever more cognizant of the irrelevance of creatures like himself as vastly more integrative intelligences emerge.   Here are a few clips from his article, which I recommend you read in its entirety: 

Friedman mulls over the question of what is the best label that:


“captures the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.”

As a description of our epoch Friedman, in an conversation with Craig Mundie (the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft., settles on Mundie’s neologism, “The Epocene”:

“…a word made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale.”

Mundies also pointed out that: 

“that the holy grail of the A.I. revolution was creating a machine capable of “polymathic artificial general intelligence.” This would be a machine that was able to master physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, philosophy, Mozart, Shakespeare and baseball better than any human could, and then reason across all of those disciplines at a high dimensional level, higher than a human ever could, to produce breakthrough insights that no human ever could.

While some skeptics believe that we will never be able to build a machine with truly polymathic A.G.I., many others, including Mundie, believe it is a matter of when, not if.

This is a remarkable phase change in cognition that we are going through: We are moving from programmable computing — where a computer could only ever reflect the insight and intelligence of the human who programmed it — toward polymathic A.G.I. That is where you basically describe the outcome you want, and the A.I. melds insight, creativity and broad knowledge to figure out the rest. We are shifting the boundary of cognition, Mundie argues, from what humans can imagine and program to what computers can discover, imagine and design on their own. It is the mother of all computing phase changes — and a species-level turning point."

How nature nurtures

MindBlog has passed on a number of articles on how exposure to nature reduces stress (see a sample list below). Here is a further contribution from Sudimac et al., who show amygdala activity decreases as the result of a one-hour walk in nature:

Since living in cities is associated with an increased risk for mental disorders such as anxiety disorders, depression, and schizophrenia, it is essential to understand how exposure to urban and natural environments affects mental health and the brain. It has been shown that the amygdala is more activated during a stress task in urban compared to rural dwellers. However, no study so far has examined the causal effects of natural and urban environments on stress-related brain mechanisms. To address this question, we conducted an intervention study to investigate changes in stress-related brain regions as an effect of a one-hour walk in an urban (busy street) vs. natural environment (forest). Brain activation was measured in 63 healthy participants, before and after the walk, using a fearful faces task and a social stress task. Our findings reveal that amygdala activation decreases after the walk in nature, whereas it remains stable after the walk in an urban environment. These results suggest that going for a walk in nature can have salutogenic effects on stress-related brain regions, and consequently, it may act as a preventive measure against mental strain and potentially disease. Given rapidly increasing urbanization, the present results may influence urban planning to create more accessible green areas and to adapt urban environments in a way that will be beneficial for citizens’ mental health.

A few previous MindBlog posts on this topic:

Blue Mind - looking at water improves your health and calm 

Pictures of green spaces make you happier. 

More green space in childhood, fewer psychiatric disorders in adulthood.

 ...

 (The above is a repost of MindBlog's 9/26/2022 post)

 

Inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems

DeDeo and Hobson do a commentary on a model developed by Kawakatsu et al. (open source) that explains the emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement dynamics. I pass on a few clips from both, and after that list titles with links to a number of previous MindBlog posts that have presented explanations of why inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems. First, from DeDeo and Hobson:

As an old Scottish proverb says, “give a Dog an ill Name, and he’ll soon be hanged.” Even when the signal has little to do with underlying reality, endorsement—or contempt—can produce lasting consequences for a person’s social position. The ease with which such pieces of folk wisdom translate across both time and species suggests that there is a general, and even perhaps universal, logic to hierarchies and how they form. Kawakatsu et al. make an important advance in the quest for this kind of understanding, providing a general model for how subtle differences in individual-level decision-making can lead to hard-to-miss consequences for society as a whole...Their work reveals two distinct regimes—one egalitarian, one hierarchical—that emerge from shifts in individual-level judgment. These lead to statistical methods that researchers can use to reverse engineer observed hierarchies, and understand how signaling systems work when prestige and power are in play. The results make a singular contribution at the intersection of two distinct traditions of research into social power: the mechanistic (how hierarchies get made) and the functional (the adaptive roles they can play in society).

Kawakatsu et al.'s abstract:

Many social and biological systems are characterized by enduring hierarchies, including those organized around prestige in academia, dominance in animal groups, and desirability in online dating. Despite their ubiquity, the general mechanisms that explain the creation and endurance of such hierarchies are not well understood. We introduce a generative model for the dynamics of hierarchies using time-varying networks, in which new links are formed based on the preferences of nodes in the current network and old links are forgotten over time. The model produces a range of hierarchical structures, ranging from egalitarianism to bistable hierarchies, and we derive critical points that separate these regimes in the limit of long system memory. Importantly, our model supports statistical inference, allowing for a principled comparison of generative mechanisms using data. We apply the model to study hierarchical structures in empirical data on hiring patterns among mathematicians, dominance relations among parakeets, and friendships among members of a fraternity, observing several persistent patterns as well as interpretable differences in the generative mechanisms favored by each. Our work contributes to the growing literature on statistically grounded models of time-varying networks.

And, I list a few relevant past MindBlog posts:

Wealth inequality as a law of nature.

The science of inequality.

The Pareto Principle - unfairness is a law.

Simple mechanisms can generate wealth inequality.

A choice mind-set perpetuates acceptance of wealth inequality.

 

(the above is a re-post of my 6/4/2021 MindBlog post).