I want to be frank, I don't really know Bear Braumoeller, I can't spell his name without doing some kind of search. Usually these days on Mastodon, because we've been chatting there a lot, but just now on Google.
I knew of him because Will Lowe met him at Harvard and often mentioned what a great guy Bear was.
A couple of years ago, towards the tail end of COVID, through a chain of events I no longer remember, but probably also involving social media, Bear asked me to talk about my polarisation models at a workshop he was throwing at Ohio. He'd actually expected to fly me out, but believe it or not I am trying to avoid travel and did the keynote remotely. We then subsequently ran an online workshop with some of his programmers about my models and understanding of dominance patterns in non human primates: basically these tend to be very egalitarian unless there's something to defend (even a safe space if there are predators around) in which case species invest more heavily in fighting over dominance ranks.
I'm always happy to help, but recently through Hertie School I became aware of Great Powers theory of international relations (IR). I had been hoping to have Bear (who was visiting Oslo on sabbatical this semester, with his family) and also Fiona Hill (whom I'd happened to have met at a German Marshall Fund event celebrating 75 years of the Marshall Fund, and who is on sabbatical in Berlin) discuss the impact of digital technology on IR and whether it was causing a shift to a multipolar or even nonpolar world. I was also hoping to have Bear talk at Will's new Data Science brown bag seminar about his book Only the Dead, and again then work through ideas about how AI was impacting warfare and whether AI could lead to an end or at least mitigation of war. (I've blogged about that before.)
I've been facing organisational challenges I might have overcome, but Bear died suddenly of Sepsis yesterday.
I lost my elderly stepmother a few months ago, and the nature of how our brains and lives work means that this is still having lasting effect on me individually. The missed opportunity of talking about my random intuitions with Bear–and trying to both get a better grip on our academic subjects–means more to me intellectually, but feels less.
When I was young, I thought I would understand things cleanly when I got older, at least the things I focussed on. Now I realise that understanding is always relative, never complete, and comes in waves across disciplines and populations. I wish I'd gotten to understand more with Bear the easy and fun way, but now I will just have to work harder to do so, since the problems still matter.
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