Welcome to Rogue Systems Recon!
Like about 2% of the general population, I’m on the autism spectrum, and like many autistics I have always had special interests that I study and think about day and night.
One of mine is figuring out why human societies work the way they do.
This lifetime quest led me into academia, and because I’ve always been good at school - despite being barely tolerated by many of my teachers - I wound up simultaneously enrolled in and completing all the course requirements for two doctoral programs, one in geography, the other environmental sciences.
I chose to leave without writing either of my planned dissertations for several reasons, chief among them the fact that academia is where good ideas go to die. Most of the cool stuff that is published is locked behind paywalls, and the rest is filtered through disciplinary lenses to the point it can’t talk to work coming from other fields.
I hold two masters degrees - one in water resources management and the other in public policy - on top of my bachelors from UC Berkeley, and before I left academia i had the fantastic experience of publishing a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious journal World Development. I also developed a rather well-reviewed National Science Foundation research proposal focused on sustainable energy landscapes, which was considered non-fundable by reviewers primarily because I applied for the grant through a non-profit I set up for that purpose instead of my home university.
At this point, I finally called ten years in higher education enough. Having seen just how little most tenured faculty, who control who gets to succeed and get promoted in higher education, actually care about advancing science, I abandoned this new priesthood to strike out on my own.
Since leaving grad school I’ve devoted my time to writing publicly accessible work deeply influenced by my career as a researcher. I’m a top writer in Science, Future, and History on Medium and my science fiction sagas- Bringing Ragnarok and Bivrost Nine have attracted thousands of readers with more discovering them every day.
Rogue Systems Recon is a new step I have decided to take on the long road to building an organization capable of effecting real world change. Now that I’ve proven my capabilities as a writer and started building an audience, it’s time to begin publishing parts of the unique Systems Theory Framework I have developed.
If you hadn’t noticed already, an anti-authority streak runs strong in my worldview. I consider myself a pro-science, anti-authority True Neutral, and my writing reflects this stance. I like to give people tools to use as they see fit, not control what they believe.
True Neutral is term taken from role-playing games, where designers often use a classic template for thinking about how characters act and behave. Defined by two dimensions, Good-Evil and Lawful-Chaotic, True Neutrals are the ones who don’t consistently agree with any pole.
This doesn’t mean they don’t fight for what they believe is right - only that they’re not going to fight for what anyone else insists is true without a good reason. In a hyper-partisan world that systematically politicizes issues for power and profit, True Neutrals fight to stay as free and impartial as they can where others press their side’s case to the bitter end.
I’m this way because I’ve been on both sides. I grew up in a deeply conservative, Christian household in a rural part of California. I grew up hunting and fishing and later enlisted in the United States Army - after graduating from Berkeley - serving as a scout on active duty for a year (stateside only, thank goodness) before being selected to go officer. A knee injury soon ended that ambition, but the experience was profoundly shaping all the same.
I’ve seen what life is literally like in trenches - ok, mostly armored vehicles, but sometimes there were trenches in training - and sat in the offices occupied by the kinds of privileged people who write lengthy articles about why it is necessary for others to fight and die in faraway places.
I don’t take anything for granted and focus on two overriding objectives above all others: take care of the people around me, and complete the mission.
Just like my drill sergeants taught me. Hope you guys made it through the War on Terror mostly intact, wherever you are now.
I’m not, however, politically conservative or adjacent. I am in fact quite often accused by acolytes of the global alt-right of being a “woke lefty Pacific Northwest secessionist.” I’ve demonstrated alongside my brilliant spouse for Black Lives Matter, and if you threaten LGBTQ+ rights in earshot I’m more than happy to whip out a shotgun and order you off my lawn - which I hold to be wherever anyone being bullied happens to be standing.
Self-defense covers third parties, and don’t you forget it!
That being said, I’m not part of the activist left by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t need to virtue signal with every breath to prove my commitment to equal rights and equal treatment under the law. I can use empirical, quantitative arguments to prove how bad bigotry is for everybody and the need to fight it wherever it rises without resorting to preachy moralization.
My odd perspective makes Rogue Systems Recon the perfect name for what this Substack is all about.
I’m not going to spam you with jargon or complicated diagrams to prove I belong to some scientific club. Instead my goal is to present the outlines of a science-based alternative way of looking at problems accessible to everybody.
If you choose to become a paying subscriber, you’ll have access to all the more in-depth, wonky posts I write. The core of the analytical content I’ll post for free, including stuff originally posted on Medium.
A long-term dream of mine is to build a global modeling, simulation, and decision support system capable of predicting major social trends.
A forecasting system for social systems, in short.
Games, business, policy, education - the potential applications for a robust and comprehensive system with wide public interaction are pretty much limitless.
A thousand paying subscribers would be amazing. Ten thousand would allow me to start paying other people to do cool stuff i know needs to be done.
Obviously, a hundred thousand or a million paying $1/month can fund even more :)
The way Substack works, this can function as a channel for anyone who likes my work published anywhere or also support what I hope to accomplish to back the effort, so why not give it a try? Who knows where this road might lead.
That’s my welcome to Rogue Systems Recon. Your independent, neutral scout passing on the news from the horizon of the coming revolution in the social sciences that’s set to reshape the way we think about our world - then let us fix it.
Peace, and stay safe out there!