Commenters

Another variant of the "end of time" has been explored by J.G.Ballard who made references to Dalís surrealist …

This is all great and so, but wouldn't it be nice at some point to come to terms and restart conceptual thinki…

I wonder if we realize the failure of legibility not so much through a failure of representation - the world o…

Thanks for the clarification. Asymmetric legibility seems to be a relevant concept and one could possibly writ…

Not sure Google would agree with you but at least in business terms we see where some of the most hyped innov…

There is possibly a synthesis. Last year I worked at home and made a two hour break for a walk at 2pm - ever…

Understanding normal behaviour which is in the blind spot of convenience in the medium of its pathological ext…

The difference lies in the complexity of the interaction. The complexity of interaction doesn't recover indiv…

It's somewhat strange that two of the most obvious examples of peripheral figures which form the center are mi…

How could one test your hypothesis? It's interesting but at this point it is purely social fiction to me.

And social problems are likely to have been some of the most persistent ones during our evolutionary formative…

I've always been a little confused by terms like "attention economy" since I don't see what is the property, t…

I do in fact like your historicist story telling and the first part of your grand narrative ( 1600 - 1800 ) wa…

So a disciplinary boundary is very useful if it provides that kind of predictability. I call this behavioral b…

The idea of a "scientific method" originated in a philosophical debate about the separation of science from sp…

My reaction to technology is "that the human is the horizon". I call this the "technical condition" in analogy…

Yes, but probably with a somewhat different optic. Among the most popular and persistent fantasies of the mode…

The correct spelling is "Gemeinschaft" and "Gesellschaft". Otherwise an outstanding article.

No, it is not. It is the former life of the dead which is meaningful and as such it has been appropriated by a…

Ultimately I think this question will be resolved by science, not philosophy Philosophy never "resolves" any…

I don't like the use of the term "unconscious" either but not only because it mystifies manifest interests, wh…

Self Taylorization ... hmm. I see the behavioral therapy value you mentioned but suppose you make a break afte…

I used that example to illustrate a point that has nothing to do with software quality or context-free compari…

The middle class is something of a myth: it’s always been a population of folks trying to Trade Up. If there…

While he does use a few conceptual arguments. For example, he counters the “global homogenization” criticism w…

When you strip linear evolutionist ideology aside, what is the major argument then to go local or regional T…

In Munich there is bi-annual festival having a green/alternative touch I visited in the week before X-mas with…

Consider this thought experiment: what if you were only allowed 2000 words with which to understand the world?…

I wonder how your various models integrate with each other. Is there a specific way losers, clueless and socio…

We try to teach teenagers what we think are the right kinds of cautious lessons: it boils down to be careful w…

Well, refactored perceptions is the quixotic tagline of this blog, and I’ve come to realize that the main way …

Moving from plural to singular and from a distributed system to an organic whole is the anthropocentric move p…

O.K. I'm somewhat shocked that a Nietzschean can exist without music but maybe that's a natural progression. F…

Right now, software development is too expensive (and complex) of a process to capitalize on the effects of Ha…

At least hydra ate Saddam Hussein and having many clones and being illegible didn't help him in the end. Wasn…

To my mind there’s also a strong link with Hayek-esque “competitive markets only” attitude to politics, in tha…

Addendum. I just read the Financial Crisis article by Taleb and although his picture is quite differentiated…

R like Ribbonfarm. It is said that a diaspora folks like the Jews invented the mobile home by turning the book…

Narratives specially link people together. It's not particularly clear that why they should be vectors of indi…

Fixing a bug is harder than writing the code. — not sure who first said this. It was Brian Kernighan : "Eve…

While I would generally agree with the notion that hacking is fundamental to life itself and “everything is a …

What you’re talking about seems to be the meaning of “critical thinking.” But the cringeworthy fact is that th…

Now, we pay lawyers like my confreres to obfuscate (with jargon) or clarify in very precise ways in service of…

The condensation in the from of a short aphorism is processed beyond the preservation of information. It is no…

In fact the concept of “manufactured normalcy” is tautologous by Sartrean standards. We manufacture the “norma…

Ah, now I understand the group-thinking lament in your article. Too bad we can’t believe that individual fre…

We cannot make sense of the modern human condition until we begin to understand that interchangeable parts for…

Just for the fun of the human classification drive : Religion ( nostalgia, god -> human -> god ) Man is a…

I think I understood something about money for the first time in my life with this post, in 2010, at age 36. I…

I think there are only two “minimum necessary tools” for all pure business thinking: written language and book…

I was, perhaps mistakenly, reading into your earlier writings an extreme disdain for modern skilled labor and …

Game theory as another example of the "Ludic Fallacy" ( Taleb ) - or maybe even the prime example, the nerdy p…

Venkat, the Internet, as a technology, does you no justice. I had a strange impression when reading his lat…

The Gollumnization of Mrs. Sirot lies not in an intense and time consuming dedication and care to her hands bu…

Suppose someone picks Beauty + Sense and is successful in both s.t. he can also make money from his artifacts …

I think the reason that so many people are bothered by wealth inequality per se is that being products of civi…

Same thing with Big Data, sensors, maker revolution, etc. New politico-economic classes aren’t yet clear aroun…

I'm somewhat dissatisfied with the closing "Clash of Experiences" section. Most (6 - 8)-ers will also be acade…

You need a place to work, a place to shop and a place to sleep (and store a few non-digital material necessiti…

There is a new dominant material abundance in town. And this one is special because it is the first material a…

Since you mentioned your "military veteran" status you might be interested in the following piece about milit…

In essence, I am asking, precisely where is the predictive (“refractive”?) power suggested? Or, is there no pr…

My process is basically 90% unconscious/on autopilot. Yes, exactly! When some authors like R.Barthes proc…

There is a certain limit to 3rd culture positivism, I guess. Our "tribe membership" with respect to a company …

There is an obvious omission in your discussion and that is the life of Socrates itself which was ( according …

Isn't "world reader" another word for "philosopher" - or is this identity too contentious because "philosopher…

Hmm... a new version of Actors Network Theory. I wonder if each author who goes towards "fundamental sociolo…

Lots more to say/think about here, but I’ll stop here. This is basically a book-length topic. Pity it falls ri…

1. I didn’t quite follow that but my intuition is that randomness can’t serve as any explanation for free will…

If the current research in that direction is to be believed, we may have found (by accident, more or less) the…

I wonder why not everyone leaves the town, waits for the home destruction of the demon and returns with a 50/5…

In addition, to use Taleb’s words (assuming you’ve gotten around to Antifragile), I’d say that synchronization…

Instead of big and little P-purposes we have self-referential trends and fashions which are generated from a s…

Isn't the idea of a "dead" economy closely related to the idea of money as a prize for a good which reflective…

Sorry, for my overly terse brain dump! I've been grown up in a time which has gone through a tough economizat…

I wonder how your remarks about amateurization fit into the greater theme of "rediscovering literacy" where yo…

A comment on your Lift talk which I want to leave here. There was a strange lack in your talk which also cor…

I'd try out the axes "legibility" and "power". Hedgehogs see like the state, whereas lions remain invisible an…

Yes and community conferences are the sort of hybrids where professionals meet students meet enthusiasts meet …

You are taking me out of context, I was responding to Nancy about the internet... I was responding to Nancy…

I'd say a recursive theory of solidarity somehow needs a bottom, but I suspect there is none. One might build …

I thought it was the exact opposite and rituals were destroyed precisely because of the form, hiding the truth…

O.K. Goblin, I do now better see what you mean by "functional frameworks". I would like to add that a crowd c…

What is good about a camera is that it actually enables to stay perceptive in a sort of a hunter-gatherer mode…

I think the gods can still feel joy due to their ability of metamorphosis, whereas our own narratives revolve …

Authority as an eye which "freezes" behavior because it is somehow threatening. I admit I didn't like the arti…

It looks like the prosthetic, digital world becomes easily subject to a critic of naive empiricism. It would b…

Beautiful. I could comment a lot on the final piece of your tragic theory of The Office but I better leave it …

Not sure how turning the world into a global App Store where everyone leaves payment traces would be a cultura…

Lord Zuckerberg, yes, this sounds disgusting ... Whenever a social phenomenon makes a turn into an unpleasan…

I don’t know enough details about these things you pointed out to give valuable analysis. What’s the prisoner’…

"Broken beyond repair" - that's how I would summarize states 4-7. However collapsing them into a single state …

She (he?) writes a lot about narcissism, pointing out that it’s about prioritizing identity broadcasting and p…

No Anthony, our economy is really driven by capital, not by working class desires for status and turning hobbi…

I think Verkat’s position is predicated on the idea that human and computer intelligence are fundamentally dif…

Marx category of "alienation" had little to do with the distinction between sexy work and schlep work which is…

Hasn't the startup business in the last couple of years being mostly about services being moved from the profe…

Since this has become a lively discussion, I have a question to the audience: Does anyone expect that the qu…

I agree, there is such an undercurrent in Marxism, but it is ambivalent and the asexual Organization Man with …

G, all of this exists mostly on the level of pop-science and pop-philosophy and I guess its impact is much sma…

Yes, Venkat weaved together lots of themes in the Aeon article, which were presented here before in greater le…

Meaning = altruism = good = healthy. Happiness = egoism = bad = sick. I only wonder what was the intention …

I have enjoyed the article as well. One short note about a positive idea of collectivity. An example of a sh…

Megatrend spotting ... A short note about that. Just yesterday I was engaged in a brief conversation with so…

Even more quality of life you'll gain from glossing over those maps which explain the world in seemingly int…

Just a brief note in this complex dispute. I spot a little over-eagerness in the quasi mystical ambition of br…

Economics is the field of emotional manipulation and rational calculus, whereas politics is the sphere of emot…

You’re a most interesting writer and thinker, but I have trouble telling what this is about. Psychoanalysis …

As an expert contractor, I saw plenty of “expertise is inversely proportional to distance,” and as I stayed on…

If natural language encompasses “mathematics and other general symbolic representation systems,” why doesn’t i…

Some questions. What is so specific about 2013 that it justifies the intersection between the time lines of …

Formally speaking, the interruption the article is talking about can be expressed as an arrow {B2B, B2C, C2B…

Luckily, I don’t think we’re far enough into computer-mediated relationships to seriously begin to make this r…

All of this has nothing to do with machines and logic and the typical pop-intellectual AI trash. Just perform …

Isn’t manufactured normalcy for us and by us? Yes, sure. It is a form of self-care but it is also mostly sub…

This was my initial thought as well while still reading the article but I'm not sure I still like the idea of …

So if I understand it correctly, "Lifestyle Design" is a badly stated combinatorial optimization problem and c…

I believe it is FAR easier to learn new behaviors around money than to attempt to solve the lifestyle problems…

bhuddi then steps in and says ”you” have a bad throat, so avoid. and thats the end of that. In my experience…

Not sure about the generalist vs particularist divide. First of all I'm definitely anti-particularist. For e…

When you have a disdain for pattern thinking how would you characterize the diagrammatic techniques which have…

Interesting. I have seen the formal techniques mostly as something which allow to dispense subjectivity. Not f…

Sterling mentions at one point the politics of transformation of Eastern European countries as a transformatio…

Why would "beating the competition" make a difference for anyone but the concerned companies? I always thought…

You are in a good position to target higher than the economy, Venkat. Economic competition, the mighty fetish …

I liked the "American Cloud" article better. This one felt a bit like a keynote-speech for executives. As I …

"... since little evidence has suggested that humans will stop clustering and start spreading out uniformly ac…

IBM Zurich Research Laboratory was also such a place. The raster tunnel microscope was invented there and high…

The hedgehog gets a bit of a bad press lately. Instead of knowing a single big thing he only seems to know a s…

Cthulhus from the 5th dimension. I depend on the public traffic system in Munich, one of the richest German …

They rebuild the legacy system within the new system. I attended a team in 2000 that programmed COBOL in Java.…

I feel some dissatisfaction with the mechanism / organism dichotomy as it is introduced. It just looks like th…

A certain obsession with the excrements of bulls is all over the place in this dictionary, an anal repulsive i…

Does "hipster" still means anything, specifically? Sometimes a hipster channels what is new and hot in pop c…

Will fashion ever (please) die? A friend of mine was once business manager of a fashion store. I asked her b…

Software construction ideas and wording might flourish because there has been so much discourse about developm…

It won’t happen until the knowledge spreads, until we all understand how things work. If we narrow down any …

The major difference between foxy style "generality" and hedgehog style is the lack of belief on the foxes sid…

If there is anything which comes close in human pragmatics to an unbound meta-cognitive hyperactivity we see i…

Technical tools like a contacts list, calendar, and GPS definitely help, in providing habitual crutches for an…

For hedgehogs, their epistemic criteria and axioms ground a few core beliefs which then ground most of their o…

We will tulpa force Venkat and feed him with our braincells, because he is our consultant and he makes us unst…

Larry Ellison becomes an immortal Oracle database which commands its company until it busts. After that it is …

No one here who wants to be a cactus or a weasel. An instance of Dunning-Kruger or is the self selected reader…

Maybe a modernist 20th century intellectual might believe that there is no outer world at all and therefore ne…

Elon Musk rationalizes his actions because doing R&D with a passion is a bipolar experience, something you go …

I wonder why #1 and #9 are so opposed in temper? #9 expresses sympathy for civilization despite all its flaws …

#8. The idea that reading human life is a way of enhancing it is not as old as it might seem. On the contrary …

There the obcession with wierd norms of “production” has turned the study of “how things in general, broadly d…

I liked the articles as well. However I'm skeptic about the success of getting AI out that mode while still …

That we are seeing a gradual process of absolutely increasing consumer empowerment is unquestionable. I don…

I have this idea of building a Reddit-killer that’s based around emergent blogging communities. It's intere…

Hmm…from where I stand, people have been changing pretty steadily. For the scale of changes induced by all t…

Sure, but you don't need any revolutionary action for moral clothing. One might ask why, for example, a social…

s/may/my

Why do you think the text is uneven? After reading the text and also a bit into breakthrough.org which is on…

No place for unkown knowns, Venkat, for what you know but don't know that?

I wouldn't go to the extremes so easily precisely because of capital. Money as a pain killer also reliefs from…

I had to think of Zizek as well and his criticism of Buddhism which resembles that of the flow state in Venkat…

Your ideal manager is a champion of self-improvement, which might be the ultimate prowess game: the one which …

How can one discern Deleuze's writings from bullshit? After Venkat wrote his information age glossary he men…

Nice lifestyle design article but what will possibly stick is that baristas should use Facebook and Glass and …

When you've gone so far to deny certain rationalist ideas such as off or zero states for human life or organiz…

Uber Manager, Taste Manager, Turtle Conservation Manager, Operations Director, Cave Angel, All round superstar…

Getting rid of earwax or other merits implies to listen better, no? I'd assume that the trader is basically …

Make us your Tempo app, Venkat. If you'd launch a kickstarter project I'd contribute to your funding.

Isn't capitalist economy the name for the grey zone, the space without existential enemies?

I could imagine that being a monk/priest who only has to maintain the expectations of the believers and lives …

Triangular models ( K.Popper also made one ) are pragmatic whereas monistic models are more "philosophical" ma…

Which means that in them, a female character has the opportunity to be immediately exempt from having to prove…

Ritual is fundamentally social Bad news for Venkat's "grounding rituals". Now that you have grabbed back the…

There are at least 3 possibilities. First, new kinds of IRs [Interaction Rituals] may be created, with new for…

I sense a strong drag towards classicism, concrete forms and human proportions: the projection of the idea of …

Kay — who was that “drag towards classicism” comment directed at? To Ryan - the comment is properly nested, …

When "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and "Gödel, Escher,Bach" were our youth books, "Wit, Play, Insight…

Yes, it looks like the woman in your examples are well anchored in mundane practices or in faith, without any …

Some alternative suggestion in order to pin down "self-actualization" which seems to be a problematic concept …

So many words for basically nothing but I sense it is a satire on the consultant and business literature jargo…

You have always been humorous since I follow your blog and only be occasionally pathetic when it comes to tech…

Related: http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

Awesome! I hope you are going to win the battle about Thought Leadership against the imperial stormtroopers …

The stories of D.Adams and J.Scott are not as radical. The secret sauce is to embed the meta-narrative, the in…

I'm somewhat disappointed by the plot. The MacGuffin data scientist Cassandra Hadoop was just introduced to av…

Not sure a novel would help. You would possibly begin to write a Trilogy or more, until you are getting bore…

The rationalist tradition launched by Descartes introduces a transition from cogitamus, ergo sum (we think, th…

OT. I liked Sarah's blog article about Koons' ballon dog although I'm not much interested in beauty in art. …

The only difference is that the Marxists *don’t stop* murdering people when the war is over. Why is that? Pe…

Maybe it is important to note that for Baudrillard there were only simulacra of various orders, not an underly…

Wow, ribbonfarm goes occultism. Will there be spirits and table turning in next years ribbonfarm camp? What h…

It’s one thing to accept all that phenomenology. It’s quite another to take the constructs on top of that seri…

In the eyes of its detractors (including those from the “old” New Age), the ultimate sin of the Newer Age move…

Worshiping endurance and robustness is a direct reflection of our death-fear. We are fragile so we want to ove…

In the future, I suppose layoffs will become bleed-offs. Reorgs will become reroutings of flows. I just imag…

Technology isn't a subject that claims anything, nor is it an entity which does anything. Like magics, it is a…

Hm, I see you and Sarah are into some violent related disagreement which I don’t quite understand. Isn't it …

No matter how you argue, smartphones make beautiful woman look like idiots with a tick. This is not true for w…

I would say we never fully left the Garden of Eden and only a vicious voice over once told us that it has been…

I believe the narrators were mocking scholars by letting them finally state simple folksy wisdom, while not ev…

Software has already eaten the world, which is why Breaking Smart 1 reads a bit like a defense of the status q…

Are there also forces of an a-sociology? Not even the neutrino escapes brand attraction according to the mod…

There is a whole bunch of other patterns, and if you read the business press with these mental models in mind,…

That's crass. Thanks for linking the article as an illustration.

It's a terrific/terrifying piece of 21st century steam punk. Being morally disgusting doesn't preclude intelle…

Not as old-school as opera and $300 bottles of wine... I would try it if you can afford it. But I sense this…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Z%C3%BCrau_Aphorisms

If only I’d learned X in time that one time; thank god I learned quickly enough that other time; will I still …

Using Venkat's narrative scheme I'd say that our market capitalism has been a civilization built around the an…

Sure, one can approach economical relations through options, preferences, the anarchy of the market etc. but o…

Another note. You can endlessly multiply clans and packs trading with each other without ever reaching the ind…

Like many, including presumably Bill Gates, I hope the climate war will be fought with agile, open processes, …

I'd like to respond to the Nietzsche quote. It might be a little far fetched to assume that Nietzsche had much…

( Oh, Venkat still blogs on ribbonfarm! ) The mind expands like the universe, but the body does not ( yet ). …

"Divergentism" in Baudrillard's prose ( from 'The pataphysics of the year 2000' ): Once beyond this gravita…

What about making pimples through scattershot? Each hit a world enhancing meaning. Alternatively, one can be …

Humor/mockery ( not science, which is deeply engaged with establishing order and truth ) is probably the great…

This is all beautiful, but where do you get to the point of the states "weirdness"? Wasn't a weird state a sta…

"The growth of transnational sovereign entities, multinational corporations and digital technology platforms, …

Isn't the wall an objet petit a, rather than a master-signifier?

I believe Trump and the ‘alt-right’ have created metaphysical rift in ‘objective reality’. Isn't it rather t…

The age of irony was declared dead already in this millenium short after 9/11 but got a small revival at place…

Coincidentally, BrickerBot made it into the news, which is described as "malware" by several authors but could…

Looks like the "rationalist community" [1] is dedicated to play the role of the Steppenwolf or Tonio Kröger, b…

As a long term reader I feel somewhat innocent in not knowing when I began to read your blog and also when I d…

We’ll be discussing the root causes — perhaps it is inequality, perhaps it is finally dealing with the legacy …

I would expect there are also issues with trading bots finding spoofing strategies whose application is prohib…

To some people — myself included — it is the most obvious, even banal idea in the world Sure, that's why phi…

Though we own a mask, the idea of wearing it and standing out made me not wear it, so I came home the other da…

The classical form of valuation without price which has become vulgar today is ordinal: the ranking. We can cr…

Is it by chance that "stories" and "narratives" are hot in the humanities right now? Are they their last and o…

When we think about the adaptive fit of a species to its environment, we think about size, speed, coloration, …

The charges of the force fields can be named "resentment" and "contempt". In the west contempt has mostly been…

Of course, you have to be in the right place for the world to conspire to make you a winner despite your medio…

Sometimes interesting cognitive effects come from slowing down and cultivating it. Mathematics has created a c…

So in a couple of years from now all political pundits will be conspiracy theorists?

The article, which reads like a pamphlet, hasn't a clear delineation of its ontology. At times the author spea…

Stack luck is knowable, computable, and manipulable. It is just not reasonable. Yeah, but it seems you never…

The resurgent pre-neoliberal reactionary tribes on the left and right have succeeded in bringing out tribe dow…

Now as Zizek supports Bernie and Alexandria we would like to know ( also in Europe ) how to manage a welfare s…

The word "weirding" already implies a sinister kind of fun for people with my sensibilities. Like a freakish a…

Not sure what is mediocre about Caius Pusilanimus, a legionary doing slave work and becomes - if I remember c…

And Howard Schultz is running for President. If there is a political legacy of Donald Trump than it is a pec…

"one of the consequences of writing a shit ton is that you often can’t recognize your own words if they’re quo…

Maleness as a sick and evil, a male-volent force which can be fooled and distracted with toys and surrogates. …

A somewhat rhetorical question: do you believe that young, middle class, de-carbonized, white, protestant, fem…

O.K. but people seem to like adventures, even culinary ones, at distant places and sometimes even at home. We …

A year ago you gave the optimistic prognosis that the culture wars will end in the early 2020s. Does that stil…

What does it even mean to short society? In the case of university admissions scandals, I suspect it means, “u…

After the Alabama abortion law decision I'd expect an even stronger segregation into red and blue states. Like…

New Age comes q-bit by q-bit in no time. Once the classical world is gone it becomes obvious that passing from…

If doing it well is what counts, it’s craft, production for sale, and therefore subject to the taste of the bu…

J.G.Ballards 'The Enormous Space' might be its psychotic version. I wonder the story hasn't something to say a…

Ah, all those Zen masters together couldn't just draw a circle like Giotto did. So they had to invent excuses …

I would like to ask a simple semantic question: why do you use "prediction" instead of "expectation"? Both pre…

One that trades both glamor and premium mediocrity for a sort of inward focused, domestic-cozy culture of inte…

Aprés moi, le deluge? The old cemetery in Munich . It is much like a memorial of Munichs societty of the 19…

I realize my own complicity with a recession ( if not a crisis ) as a potential clearing process, even if it p…

About Europe's kindergarten. Every attempt to resurrect the ancient Greeks from the dead ends up in some sex s…

From your cited Twitter thread: "Writing is just not a powerful enough medium to be *the* foundation of commu…

It is somewhat odd to just consider this but you lacked a sense of time and timing. Sometimes you like you wou…

"Sometimes you like you would resign ..." -> "Sometimes you sound like you would resign ..."

"... my mediocre stroke-of-genius invention, the blogchain ..." When I search for "blogchain" the great Googl…

It's all difficult. A collection of aphorisms lumped together with comments about Baby Yoda ( according to a b…

Maybe you enjoy the show, but I suspect most observers are with me in concluding that the Internet of Beefs is…

Well, there are as many context specific rational systems as there are people. So you have ~7.7 billion domain…

Let's face it. History ended with the Big Bang. Since then there are still events but they are meaningless dro…

The farce of Hegelian history. The Girondists won one round against the Jacobins and their regimes in 1989. Th…

I never quite understood why people want to be other people. I understand, to some extent, the desire for a co…

Just realized that since we started this conversation the usage of masks has made a quite different turn. Not …

How we get from the Dark Ages to Renaissance, I wish I knew. Through the grand cathedrals.

Can you imagine how liberating the IoB must feel to all of them? There is some grain of truth in your fictio…

Can you tell much about a person from the fact that they’re a Microsoftie? The post-structuralist corporatio…

...now they are doing it using emotionally charged ideas, which are supplementary to their own being This do…

It's much easier to talk about "predictable identities" in socio-economic contexts when one moves out of moder…

It’s a turbulent world where some things make some sense locally in time and space, but the pieces don’t fit t…

Yeah, hypertext and websites is exactly what we hadn't in our long dark age. Only through conservationist libr…

As you see, without a preview function the lazy writer just scraps his own text which contains the mighty ...

Academy is basically a high medieval institution, a guild. Guilds served education and quality control and the…

The dotcom bust and the 2007 crash don’t make my list for instance, and neither do previous recent epidemics l…

PS. The Berlin wall fell in 1989, not in 1991. The cold war era practically ended in 1991 with the dissolution…

I’m reminded of british second world war propaganda, which particularly focused on showing people how much the…

"Virtual Culture" = South Korea?

I think we’re headed, in the Post-Corona era, into a period of deep civilizational reconstruction, at every le…

Are those behaviors social realities or are they simulacra? I don't understand the ontological distinction whi…

Is there a "reconstitution"? Is there still a temporal architecture or are there just ruins?

"These ebooks are never going to amount to more than a half-assed archaeological record." Before that happens…

When this period gives way to a more secure period where we all feel comfortable and secure enough in everyday…

Mansions have a difficult stand, so to speak. It is not only that greens, socialists, syndicalists and other s…

Modern idea that economics is a religion is false. Traditional religion when seriously believed and practiced …

Aside: if you like this format, let me know. I have a bunch of threads on Twitter that are probably suitable f…

In a sense this fits neatly into the 14th century stuff, Venkat reviewed recently. For a sunken aristocracy …

There was never such an agreement, not even in philosophical faculties practicing philosophy as language analy…

The agreement had been developed between the social roles of “layperson” and “authoritative expert” How can …

A "language game" for Wittgenstein has a more precise layout than a "narrative". As an example W. discusses th…

Seriously, yes, Americans particularly need to start building unity and shared context Project 1619? Maybe…

Thakur = kulak? Seems like the universally hated figure of modernity, in all of its instantiations, from the F…

So if you are a writer or other sort of creative producer, you have to pivot with the times, and establish a n…

I’d certainly sign up to help develop a small ragtag band of diverse, underdog rovers to do something interest…

Too bad that Mars as the Abode of Life wasn't true. So we have to show enthusiasm for each H2O molecule whic…

Addendum: There have been annoying and abstract debates about applying such terms [colony] loosely to space,…

So go ahead: believe in ghosts, psychics, conspiracy theories, UFOs, aliens, cryptids, astrology, and the like…

There is little as modern as "creativity" as a heavy duty of the cultural worker. I perceive Venkats praise of…

I just meant that creativity had been just as overrated after the mid of the 20th century as a technique / exe…

A better new year! In your overview you omitted the "Pandemic Dashboard" - the kind of stuff which should hav…

Was it because the 80s were the glamorous stage of liberalism? In the 90s "political correctness" was invent…

Go Search Find Take Return o.k. this might be a skeleton of a "journey". Otherwise it looks just like a con…

Fox in the trap: everyone should be a hedgehog mumbling their 8 magic words - except indie consultants who man…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_in_Luck

A weakness in philosophical discussions is that they rely too much on familiar human experiences, with regular…

On the first sight 'Capital' is a decent proposal for naming 'abstract potential'. It could mean that the uppe…

I was also under the impression that God = Jesus was an "ally" and Satan was the adversary but for the modern …

The workbench-as-a-REPL is an interesting metaphor. Lots of re-centration flows through the discussion, which …

Sounds like a manifesto, though not born from youthful energy which shouldn't be wasted but funneled into grea…

More explosively weird, o.k. but also more properly violent and cause of serious instabilities? In past ages, …

Desiring to have cancer or to be among the first to tap on a lifeless, dusty and boring planet. Peak nerdy ble…

I do like the idea of a mystery novel where the mystery prevails despite everyone has witnessed, archived and …

During my student years I sometimes discussed the paranormal with friends and we shared the opinion that it ha…

"Every weekend, review the past week’s work, what category(/ies) they fall into, and add the page numbers to a…

Crypto ultimate Klaus Schwab snowclone: You will all be ghosts and be happy

How will Ethereum slay Moloch? On each "coordination day" a smart contract will spam you with instructions o…

... but a single, concrete, practical use case of something you can’t do, or that’s hard to do, with web 2.0? …

I don't know what "indefinite pessimist" means and I'm reluctant to look it up at Thiel. What I see in Web3 …

This review has some burnout vibes. Even the brief enthusiasm for the "text renaissance" seems long gone. Sure…

@Kamren, if you found my response to the roundup too harsh, maybe I should give a little praise instead. Ven…

I had a conversation a while ago about Monty Python. She said. she couldn't laugh, and didn't find it funny. I…

Why is kindness a commodity and where can you buy it?

When this gets really interesting is when the tool under analysis is a programming language, because as these …

There is a certain melancholy to the idea of divergence, which lacks the hopeful aspects of escape. But maybe …

Do you believe engineers somehow understand their own brains because of Venkats progessivist shtick?

Twitter is the very epitome of the attention economy, which is why all of our journalists and politicians rush…

If you throw a word like "metamodernism" at me and I have no idea what it means ( I still don't have - I haven…

I suspect human sacrifice had to be added to the character because otherwise people might have actually liked …

Fusing the waking life with a dream in a peaceful way would be daydreaming: daydream yourself into existence. …

I just read "The Map" for the first time and found it unnerving with this ghostly narrator voice from nowhere.…

Given that the American Dream is a cultural trait which sets the US apart, it is somewhat doubtful that it was…

As you mentioned Le Corbusier: he always appears to me as the prototypical business consultant. His personal a…

Or perhaps the monarchist cycle is beginning rather than ending. I could argue either case. That’s the problem…

As I understood the concept of "inner space" in Ballard, it is a regressive psyche which has been pulled out a…

Addendum / correction. If there is a "higher game level" and some kind of salvation and happiness in Ballard i…

If an AI can translate all the world’s information into a more idiosyncratic and solipsistic private language …

That would mean WYC was not actually as worldly as it thought it was. It was a blissful false consciousness th…

"There’s a reason the palace was called Sanssoucci!" For the Old Fritz the choice of the name was more plain …

From the quoted John Salvatier article: This [that reality has a surprising amount of detail] turns out to e…

Everyone hates platformism, with the possible exception of advertisers, some Reaganite trickle-down conservati…

Platform enshittification: initially they present a comfort zone and innovation and it seems deserved when com…

Maybe your scavenger robots should literally plunder corpses or rip out organs from random people on the stree…

From WP: The Presger are a dangerous alien race; nevertheless, they respect other sentient species. Presgers …

They hunt us in our dreams. Fortunately we use to wake up, right after they killed us. What are they? Evil cr…

I liked 'escaped realities' better than 'unkown knowns' TBH. This whole allusion to psychoanalysis and the s…

As the origin story of the BDFL goes on, the BDFL retired, Python-Dev voted for a PEP which instituted a new l…

The collectivism is the critical element here and for socialist societies as a whole there is no way around ab…

https://www.amazon.de/Craftsman-Richard-Sennett/dp/0300151195

Isn't the establishment of a digital commons a license problem? The GPL was the most remarkable invention of R…

Wouldn't it be a stable strategy under the Harberger tax system to push for aggressive devaluation? Let's say …

Maybe Steve Jobs was the LGM ( Last Great Man ) and hagiographies are an extinct genre anyway? The Zeitgeist s…

This intense drive for leveling strangely corresponds with a media prosumer narcissism. What really matters ar…

I believe the distinction is simpler: there is a naive realism to the supernatural in Fantasy. The reason why …

I think it’s because Dicks specializes in telling personal stories from his own real life. Don't know about…

Is that properly male coded or do the authors use the male form because they think SoS is bad? What about the …

Nature can heal. "Another aspect that may not be as universal but is a huge turn off for me personally is ano…

Interesting! One thing you might be interested in is the "triage" model by Stafford Beer, which is similar to …

"keep your psychology complex, but your morality simple. Otherwise you’ll never get anything done." That's pr…

So the "don't care" people add no value to making decisions based on a distinction, whether they see it or not…

Are you going to tie all your positive attributes to that one name? Replace "fulfilled, creative, questioning,…

I think there are three parts here; avoiding the "tragedy", the more nebulous concept of sharing compensation …

Ok I exaggerate, de-localisation/simultaneous non-exclusive use is not the only difference, but it is a big on…

I presume then that inter-clueless posture-talk must be directed outside, or be in small competitive bouts, wi…

This reminds me of this song: http://www.last.fm/music/Imogen+Heap/_/Hide+and+Seek mainly for the reaction to…

The velben triangle reminds me of Conan! I wanted to add an important feature of the clueless that hasn't bee…

Yeah, I know I simplified, I cut out all the cybernetics because I couldn't express it cleanly! "Stabalising c…

I really appreciated this! This kind of description of a world of thought encourages me to make something cre…

I'd agree with the first bit in america, but I know some really dull atheists in the UK! In our country you do…

On the tracer/storylines thing, it reminds me of some more complex variant on the method of characteristics: h…

That section about the reality distortion field is a point I tried to make before. My impression is that those…

The problem of volatility actually applies to small businesses too, there are many that clapped out during the…

Hmm, in that case, perhaps we will be able to hope instead for negatively correlated variations. But I think l…

Mysteries worth showing... I have nothing to say in responce, (not yet) but I am affected.

Wow, looking back that seems so pretentious, but the problem of talking about things you don't have words for …

Here's one way to feel a little better about it if you want to: There is an extent to which the purpose of co…

I've been trying to decide if the fact that our version contains modelling of modelling changes the assumption…

The way I look at it is that each of them is in the "real world" up to the point that the phenomena they use t…

I'd love you to go into this at some point, I've got very fond of the old-school cybernetics stuff, and one of…

I love the idea of the past being in front of you, because of course you can see it better than the future. It…

Or conversely, perhaps the winner takes all element makes copying better? The archetypal example of this being…

Really? I think there's a difference in Venkats system between "power talk" and effective verbal communication…

Venkat, I notice that you focus on alphas and omegas, but I'm sure you've seen situations where there are mult…

If this is true, it sounds like an explanation for why microsoft broke; they put in personalisation and featur…

I've met people who are basically someone else, and even long after having got to know them, they are still 50…

This is so true, in an interesting way; from a very different angle I have seen people do things "for me" whe…

I wonder if I knicked Mark Twains definition then! I can't remember if I said this here before, but coming in …

I agree on the text/illustration issue. You might actually be better off playing with the alignment, font size…

The funny thing about history is that whatever stuff you learn seems to be what has been known by everyone for…

Wild and practical? Open source coding! Instructables! Or more generally, building tools for no known solution…

It's absurd to me when I see posts like this; full of links to previous work, how little I have been able to c…

I thought the Chinese didn't have a cyclical view of history; in confucianism at least, there is the sense of …

I found that description of animist thought strange; surely fuzzy logic can handle indistinct and mixed object…

Although that translation may be a bit of a murmalising of the original, I can't tell as they are all radicall…

I think you miss out an important part of the civilization/pastoral nomadism thing: Preperation vs flight. Y…

The power of the analogy when related to current life is in it's historical accuracy and emotional punch. If i…

I propose "pendie" instead, as "codie" sounds too much like "codey" which I've heard being used to describe pe…

Best way to get a name for the other side of the spectrum would probably be to look for self-depricating self-…

That pair of models look like they are compatible, and could refer to not just to different mechanisms in the …

Venkat, you make a rubbish priest. That thing about disintermediation is really good, I've noticed it loads o…

I think it's mostly that concepts tend to get out better when phrased in those terms, for example concepts lik…

I suggest two options; either Venkat really believes in being evil to suit a malevolent universe that will alw…

Ooh, I detect a failure in my humour-detector. Scratch that!

"Following your bliss" to me, is a mixing directed and random steps and seeing if the changes make you feel be…

I think in some ways what you say here is diametrically opposed to the stance of the post: By choosing a furn…

Can you also describe what current purposes they fulfil in your life? I ask this because you can hide functio…

This strikes a cord with me, as only last week I was thinking through my friendships with different people, an…

Note, that last section is a reply to Betty above, I half-converted this from a specific reply.

When introduced like this, please wear sunglasses and fold your arms.

It strikes me too that this is dependent on abstract categories to work; citizen, library user, hotel user etc…

Internal referencing is a very legible form of self-reliance; it is that situation when you find that you have…

Your war analogy actually does apply to a changing game: If a game is constructed so that those who cheat win…

I think Aldric is on more solid ground than you actually Venkat; the reason it's more valuable to analyse scie…

Woops, did not mean to say "valuable" there. It may actually be more valuable to consider a sensibility, than …

I don't think you need to go all extrinsic/intrinsic about the way that metric s-curves overlap; I think there…

Relevant typo - weaknesses of a human batsman . I also notice you're using a different definition of grit he…

Well there's a big difference between cutting down the last trees and the last-but-hundred. In other words the…

Well there's a big difference between cutting down the last trees and the last-but-hundred. In other words the…

That is brilliant! I'd love to see how the actual way that people live in Brazilia compares to the way they we…

This is a goldmine. Not only is the basic idea valuable; "focus your effort on the places that will have the …

Someone once argued that as services become better designed they tend to evaporate customers, because as they …

I take it you don't like the new facebook layout Venkat. I'm not sure I buy your idea yet, but over the next …

That's not the only one, "calender management" and "next-action identification" both straddle the divide at va…

Fascinating, I’m guessing the primary difference between the two graphs is about where the pressure driving a …

Once upon a time I had an excellent reply about this, but somehow it never posted. How ironic: Whenever you t…

I notice a darker view of sociopaths in this post than in previous ones. No hint of the concept in the origina…

Then I can only hope that you pull off "ending with a mythologization of the previous ending pattern of the in…

Hmm talking too stridently here. In one sense it makes sense to define skills in a person-independent manner,…

Reminds me of the phenomena of "depth" in games design. Shallow games take very little modelling; they are les…

What would happen if you applied your same method of judgement to your own writing?

Hmm, that was phrased uncharitably. I mean that even if ideas are based on empirical evidence, practical expe…

Actually, collective unconsciousness is more plausible than you think; if the various distributed mind theorie…

Well done Venkat, I feel like one of those fishermen who sees a big fish go past their boat, assumes they've g…

I believe that tends to be called the problem of monetising! Or to put it another way, these things tend to h…

Hmm, I think some elements of this are plausible, and definately fit a marketer's approach to social groupings…

Because the startups have no resources, and have to balance between making do with the little they have and li…

Perhaps readiness involves preparing yourself for this sudden outburst of energy; soldiers are the only ones n…

That thing about particular tidying places occurred to me too, there are often ways to improve these tasks by …

I've been pondering this for a bit, which is no suprise, as this hydra perspective seems a pretty straightforw…

I was actually making a pun! In that attention is a constructive mental activity, not passively receiving know…

"Where do you come in birth order in your family?" or "What number eldest child are you?" Note that "eldest" …

That's interesting, so at first blush the judge mind is about seeking objectivity by stepping outside of your …

My gut impression of this is that smart hacks (the ones we need) are enlightened, in the sense of embodying …

This is a blinder! I love it because of how it encourages and integrates my biases.. But still, good work! I…

Oops, got the relation between centuries and years backwards, was thinking roughly of the 6th century, the 500…

Are you using two dissonant versions of Borgian in that last phrase? That suggests a very close battle with wh…

Ah cool, I was like Borges? But he's a lovely guy! Where does she live where people are turning that kind of i…

You're probably thinking of openness in terms of possible state state space? As in comparing a game with multi…

I meant to reply here, but "session restore" kept the content and lost the comment placement. The content is b…

I seem to remember you put a bit of work a one point into threading through multiple comments with trailmeme, …

I love how these summary-narrative meta-posts seem to encourage an even higher level of abstraction in comment…

I'd definitely agree with the observation about learning vs success: If these moves primary advantage is to r…

When dealing with "ribbonfarm sociopathy", I find it best to deal with it as a sort of semiotic corruption; li…

Anyway putting the l/c/s rubric over this suggests how the tradeoff might work; holding on to a little bit of …

Thats true to an extent, but there is a reason that meditation is not marked as the distinguishing quality of …

"Shut up and take my money"? Or "I know how much I want this, don't make it any worse". If you look at the at…

Come on man, your arguments are contradictory: If "the normalcy field" is nothing more than the universal fun…

You can probably take that both ways actually; as you master the conditions governing something, it can tick o…

Curiosity + Adventurism = Tribalism? To my eyes that looks totally broken, but I'm sure there are some nice i…

Interesting, that almost makes "tribalism" equivalent to "student"; someone who wishes to explore, but in the …

Synchronisation does have this magical relationship to encryption though; the one time pad is a kind of synchr…

It occurs to me that this doesn't actually need to be a form of redistribution at all. The first bit of it is…

It occurs to me that I might not have the full analogy here; rather than considering the innovators purely as …

There's some good stuff here! It makes me wonder about how much solidarity forms by direct conversation, and …

I wasn't actually talking about whether political manifestos or actions are inherently politically effective, …

Hmm, not really planning to get into a big discussion about OWS, but I'd recommend you give them another look;…

That point about startups helping each other makes me think of swarm defences: If eating is assumed to be not…

Or perhaps that communities consider as ends in themselves! (This may be another way to say the same thing) T…

Public transport has a great relationship to urban complexity, when it works: Take the bus to the gym and back…

Hmm, it seems interesting to me that the buy me a coffee plugin is no longer working, that an income source in…

That's an interesting idea, you could say they are the lowest income group equiped to make large long term bet…

Some nice interesting stuff to go through here, but I have an early criticism/development: The loser sociopat…

With a bit more detail, I think the “absolving sins” is a slight over-reach of a natural progression of the mo…

I've been thinking for a little while on dissimilar but compatible states of consciousness, relating to divisi…

Oh first paragraph, missing a reasonably important phrase; "and their associated problematics, affectivities a…

It also occurs to me that the value in working from home is not in the environment of the home per say, but in…

I think when people talk about creative work, they are talking about work that is responsive to human values. …

Lovely imagery, hadn't come across Victor Hugo on architecture before. Just to pull out some subtext here, it…

There's a certain fascinating engineering thinking that goes on when people try to consider the minimum standa…

Hmm, the thing is though that things like autonomism or communism form practical ideals; ideas that depend for…

I think there are ways to move from a very asperg-ish state of mind to a very holistic one, here's an example,…

Good stuff! The association of ordered pattern of social knowledge and categorisation with is something that's…

The marginal cases are important though, although they form a small percentage of employees, they will probabl…

Actually, NLP is a great example of creating portals from existing ideas: Rhetoric already exists, as does st…

Did you know you linked to a 3,388 word post to argue that a 2,391 word one was too wordy? The first one is pr…

I never seem to have enough time to post nowadays, so I'll try compressing things down: Technopaganism strike…

There's a paradox in this definition of community which I find quite interesting; although you talk about the …

The last point about paranoia makes me wonder whether systems that seek efficiency over discerning commitment …

There isn't much difference in one sense, as these are pretty well established ideas, tied to both sides of th…

Thinking again, I've realised an obvious problem of people seeking efficiency as a way to avoid having to work…

Very interesting, I've been thinking about this for a bit, particularly the observation that computer games dr…

Fascinating, I was not aware of that, it makes a huge amount of sense to enact nationalist roles if those are …

Wow, that's pretty pure semiotics, without any Hofstadter in sight! Here's something that occurs to me; if wa…

The comparison of chronic vs acute symptoms is very appropriate, interestingly, I seem to remember (though I c…

I think part of the problem of emotion comes from emotional inertia, specifically the capacity for judgements …

That's cute, reminds me of a final stage of sales; purchase justification/packaging of signification. Classica…

There's a little irony in the use of Taleb and Thiel here; another way that standard patterns of discourse dev…

Ah "Jared Diamon", famous anthopologis. Also I hope my post doesn't seem too unappreciative while being critic…

It strikes me that a good early example of a process that produces parallel lines is plowing; if you have an a…

Dielectic is a very good word for that. I occasionally reread old german philosophy in these terms, trying to …

A shortcut description of boat stories; a hero experiences, orients, gathers, returns to equilibrium. The sto…

I don't know if you're noticed, but cringe is one of the latest weapon words being used in young online discou…

I haven't read the book, just google book skimming here, but it strikes me that the Kavanaugh quote might be i…

It's possibly worth bringing in the psychology of gaming, if the considering it in terms of the psychology of …

Opposition to the police is a sensible position insofar as police are doing things that go beyond their duty a…

As someone who got caught up in it just a few seconds ago, it amuses me to observe that you have managed to cr…

There's a lot more that can be said there I think, about both the conditions for this to work, and what is bei…

Hmm, Bergson, Berger and Boyd. None of those exactly fit any of those thinkers, but you could make useful com…

A good counter-example is human belief; consciously held human beliefs seem to be most naturally explained as …

It's be very interesting if that wasn't true though; if we discover that p-zombies are for peculiar informatio…

Another complexity is the hedonic treadmill, and the related psuedo-buddhist or perhaps anti-buddhist definiti…

Eternal return may have been conceptualised in contradiction to eternal life, but it also provides a counter t…

Modern industrial career thinking is really good at lowering that birth rate, probably too good to be honest. …

Suppose your state space has an entropy of 10, and you increase the entropy of your peaceful state subset to 6…

This is pretty good, I think the key point is an interesting one; that increasing the robustness of society ca…

I'm not sure I agree that late style represents a finite game, I haven't read that book specifically, but if w…

You can probably look at it in two ways, in one sense, voids, in the sense of sensory deprivation or the absen…

I think Dave Rubin fits well in a category of "reactionaries" for exactly the reasons that Ezra Klein said, an…

I think this article shows a weakness of the blogchain approach, or at least isn't very compatible with it; ho…

More I think about this, more I think there's something really off about it; systems can't leave local maxima …

I think it is worth analysing the logic of this in terms of the ages of the people involved, and the developme…

Yeah I was thinking about this, that there's a desire for both heterogeneity and familiarity; we don't want to…

Ok irreversibility in terms of the unconstructed unknown, the expansion of memory. Makes me think of the clas…

I'm not sure there is much qualitative difference between a "helicopter" and "snowplow" parent, there might be…

Interesting idea there, that the zeal of converts, particularly recent converts, serves a useful function in d…

Wait, anti-Semitism is the apex of life's meaning?

Another possibility, that could shortcut the wealth dichotomy slightly, is the "charitable emulsion" that sili…

I'm not getting the quantum physics connection here, but I also thought of a software analogy, this kind of se…

You are correct that a customer wants their expectations exceeded, everyone does, they want you to exceed thei…

*compress down to your cost structure

*and substitute oxymoronic for tautological, I really should write these slower.

An archetypal example would be the current President of the United States, where his appearance of performance…

I had a massive comment attached to the last one, which I never got around to posting but I was fascinated to …

I should probably just have posted this link from the start, fascinating discussion of the connection betwee…

The idea of the opposite of pleasure being dissociation rings surprisingly true for me, I'll have to think abo…

I think there's a counterpoint there, if we in our ideology are insufficiently flexible, the question remains …

Watching the talk too, very interesting connection there; if emotions are interpretations of bodily processes,…

Sarah Perry's been talking about this stuff for a while now, and I commented something before about more com…

Here's a point on Carse; I think he's fundamentally wrong on finite games, even in his own terms; he says that…

Does this project spark joy?

I've been thinking there's something really wrong with this diagram for a bit, but I can't articulate it prope…

I wrote a comment a month or two ago about this post in terms of Deleuze's distinction between the clear-confu…

Those pots remind me of a mix of 1960s and 1930s design, intuitively, and that kind of value aesthetic, the ra…

Seen as I always seem to respond with critique lately, this is good. To add an observation I'm sure I've made…

I think self labelling could be made into a consistent position, at the risk of making you very gullible, wher…

It amuses me to think that the death of the author is represented by an immortal author function. Although ac…

You mentioned the concept of the social construction of reality, I can't recall if this is their thesis, or my…

Interesting, until recently, (as Carhart-Harris and co mention briefly in that paper) the default mode network…

It's not where your parents are from, it's how many steps people have to climb to reach you. (Also, as this mi…

I think it's a pretty good representation of how things operate within a particular bubble though, if you aren…

Seems good fun, I like the idea of people lane pushing and picking people off as their health gets low. For th…

: Strategy-less combat has a certain amount of antipathy for strategic synthesis.

I would caution assuming that all of those categories are the same; sometimes these masks are ones people take…

A corporate persona actually has tremendous predictive value, because people will perform that persona or risk…

That's a pretty interesting paper! On agency, I'm reminded of british second world war propaganda, which part…

I think stillness is a problem, at least so far as our society is currently organised; the world will likely, …

OK. I am going to have to get used to some loose use of linguistic approximation here. Precritical as equivale…

Very interesting set of connections coming off this. Whistler's paintings seem an interesting example of fail…

I think in this time of constant experimentation, it's a great time for generating hypotheses; see if particul…

I think people like this don't want to dethrone gods, after all, who would properly watch over their eternal p…

But it's not to retrieve a cap, it's to develop a systematic response to dropped objects such that you can ret…

Well, I think I'm going to have to be boring today. Science doesn't hold all knowledge as tentative and uncer…

Thinking about this more, I think your proposal for the three overlapping elements that develop a fact is not …

To give another contrasting but similar example, soviet science fiction flourished between the first world war…

I'm a big fan of this kind of thing; so many philosophers who talk about experiences that are obvious would do…

Reply to an earlier comment failed.

I’m a big fan of this kind of thing; so many philosophers who talk about experiences that are obvious would do…

One way to compare sober and stoned realities is that sober people can solve physical problems that stoned peo…

I think this whole thing would have worked better with a "swamp thing" metaphor. I also suspect that coming o…

It's always interesting to me when people start driving theories "off road", a lot of neural network results t…

I may have mentioned this before, but [Ashby's notebooks](http://www.rossashby.info/index.html) are a wonderfu…

I tend to split what you call infinite horizon into two parts: - extravagant extrapolation, which is the brav…

My guess is that this definitely-interesting-to-Idea-people post is more true (as in authentic, autobiographic…

Very interesting thoughts. Just to put across a possible counterpoint, there are ways in which strategy is "h…

I, too, find it incredibly limiting that one has to either buy one of those two specific books or engage Gallu…

A few observations: 1. Despite the barrage of books on innovation and creativity in the past 3-5 years, and C…

Your musings on the concept of game-break and genuine connections reminded me of Richard Bach's statements (in…

A few thoughts: The Slash Effect is probably a permanent feature of the Age of Information/Knowledge/Creativi…

Reminiscing on connections and journeys, here are a couple of powerful lines from old Hindi movie songs: Kadm…

Sample these gems from Charles Handy (years ago!) in his Gods of Management : People will move jobs more oft…

Great start to a topic that needs a critical review. Short post--by ribbonfarm standards? I was surprised to …

Yes, Gartner is essentially selling their view of a set of vendors but the decision to base their matrix on th…

Wow, your yet another shortsized but bang-on-target post. Some thoughts that occur are: 1. I see your main po…

Tufte's two books, Envisioning Information and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, published in th…

Venkat, Your first three questions are easy to respond to. Short replies to those with a summary note below. …

You are welcome, Venkat. Next time you wish to bump up the comments/posts ratio, ask readers for criticism on…

We should probably look at mechanical machines and information machines separately. Better mechanical machine…

Responses in haiku: ---- You dropped the pebble Water molecules stayed still Awaiting wave flow. ---- Three-c…

Venkat, You leave me speechless (almost*) with a brilliant exposition on a fundamental of business, starting …

One angle to think about is that managers and leaders are influencers at one level but workers at another leve…

Methinks this (back-to-longish?) post of yours deserved one of your cutely effective Paintbrush diagrams for l…

Hyperlinked text could also be seen as a minefield--in two senses. -A benevolent guru expounding on a useful …

Two observations: ---- Yes, good sparks sprinkled Amidst epic posts at times Ribbon-esque enough. And at oth…

1. I am OK with "frame of reference" and "benchmark" but not sure about "metaphor". You are essentially wonder…

Thanks for the clarifying remarks. Another problem, especially seen in financial reporting, is the use of tre…

So, it's raining cats and dogs of posts at ribbonfarm! Well I can cat-egorically assert that you have dog-ged…

A couple of (not humorous?!) quotes on humor: There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, yo…

Your post aptly ends with Doubt. Higher level of expertise makes us aware of and aspire to even higher levels.…

Trees falling in the woods reminded me of Sir Ken Robinson's wisecrack: If a man speaks his mind in the fores…

Of course, the alluring zero management work (ZMW) point is when one has to think of the big-picture, game-cha…

In case you have not seen it already, Dan Pink's TED video on motivation talks of a FedEx day experiment a…

Hey, your post kept throwing up my evil twin candidates right from school to co-workers to, of course, many au…

Cute but not acute By ribbonfarm standards, a Quickie, not tricky. Having said that, another usual thought ex…

Many aspects of the nature and impact of money are entertainingly covered in The Ascent of Money by Niall Fe…

You're being a bit harsh on the pioneers of positive psychology. After decades or more of "negative" psycholog…

Brutal and brilliant statement: "They... hope to die before their money runs out." Using terms from your prev…

What about the applicability of these S-C-L phenomena to the org that makes the TV series? I witnessed somethi…

I meant team when I sloppily said "org". Long-running serials are more susceptible than movie project teams as…

Since we are anyway gently quibbling, there are unmodified uses of "cat" in negative to mildly insulting idiom…

When, after my late-in-life driving lessons, I acquired my first car (an oh-so-cute Daewoo Matiz, a model now …

Wo-ow. I suspect the flu somehow adds to the depth and intensity of your ongoing analysis :-) Some thoughts t…

Fictional movie scenes seem to be a rich source for such analysis, probably because they lie between books (to…

Annual rerun is a good idea. This crisp thought-provoker is worth re-reading especially around New Year when w…

Joining this thread late... just watched the movie last night at Pune where most of the young couples in the a…

I used to think that those who don't have or "get" real religion have to make do with such experiences from tr…

"Understand beyond-human complexity by becoming a tracer yourself and living a story through the system" sound…

A friend working in an NGO once mentioned how the shoe polishing kids on the streets preferred not to save any…

You are hereby awarded the 2010 Moniker Maniac award for provocatively pertinent phraseology :-) Hat doff to …

Maybe a future ribbonfarmesque post is hidden in the following: The three domains chosen as examples, viz., p…

This time, it is truly speechless with admiration :-) The web is credited to have led to blurring of bounda…

@gregory, three of my recent reads may be of interest to you. The slim volume of "Bitten by the Black Snake" b…

With this post, I detect a tilt of scale in this series from a tongue-in-cheek, interesting intellectual explo…

Almost all of the useful foundational knowledge of humanity could not have been discovered if we posed a "real…

Whether it is Einstein's quote or Anthony De Mello's "The fellow reads so much I don't see how he could ever f…

Pondering on whether there is a different approach we could take, I was reminded of Toffler's statement in Po…

Beautiful metaphor for positions, flexible but not too much, stretchable springs connected to a bead, moving i…

The fact that whether somebody is really, truly happy or not cannot be completely established by external rule…

@Grv The lines starting with, "The old proverb..." are a separate paragraph and not an interpretation of the M…

Am pecking away, pondering on the edge of whatever is legible to me in this post: -Given the brain's need for…

It is fairly common for housemaids and drivers in Mumbai to request the employer to withhold a small portion o…

So far, I have mostly found the fundamental ideas in your post solid and tried to discuss views or extensions …

This type of survey-of-the-landscape-and-evolution articles with bold trend extrapolations is your forte! Good…

I quote from Toffler's 40 for the Next 40 ( free download ) that lists drivers of change between now and 2050:…

Your cutting-corner-to-floor "metaphor-mosis" reminds me of a few related things: -When thinking of creative …

@Bill: yes, conventional advice tends to overemphasize purpose, vision etc. but too many of our noble intentio…

This post should perhaps have begun with the warning: Be scared. Be very scared. As indicated by Stefan K an…

The GPS versus Need for Spatial Intelligence is a theme that can be explored in different ways, with and witho…

Ditto para 1 of of otoburb's comment. The no. of such posts I seem to have missed out makes me wonder if you a…

Welcome, Surio, where have you been! @venkat: Methinks "be slightly loopy" is too tame at this stage, the rea…

@surio sorry for misleading phrase, it wasn't meant to indicate familiarity (am pretty sure we haven't encount…

Models and theories inherently seek to explain and predict the normal data set, the periphery periodically ove…

The answer to the interestingness/cash flow conflict is Macleod's sex and cash theory. I wouldn't hazard a gue…

Continuing the ribbonfarm tradition, the labels are carefully mischosen to mislead the casual newcomer. Barbar…

So the link leads to an early ribbonfarm post that is thought-provoking but short. It is tubelite who is enric…

VGR, this is one of those bizarre coincidences... you seem to have posted this on May 4 second half US time, p…

Looking back, it was a riskier and more difficult endeavor to break group boundaries. It was met with frostine…

This snippet from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming" seems to me to be connected to the circles and edg…

Of course, "timepass" was definitely a multi-hued word that was very much part of the official lexicon in Bomb…

Of the two concepts I detect here, one seems to align with experience and the other doesn't. Too much exertio…

What I glean is that scientific method worshippers are not having or demonstrating a true scientific sensibili…

I loved the introductory imagined conference due to a personal reason from long ago. Once when I was about 18…

"You'll never be really ready. But as a continuously-changing state, your readiness may cross a minimum thresh…

Anything I thought of saying or asking has been made redundant by the rich comments and responses. Glad that …

Surprised to see no mention of Richard Rumelt's writings on strategy. Am reading his latest book, Good Stra…

Ah, a slightly different style and tone. Many short sentences. Sound profound. Luckily, not appearing to try…

Ahem, so we have leapfrogged from MS Paint to Inkscape ;-) And how! The visual is entrancing. I am strugglin…

Your writing has changed a bit (all positive) in the past year. Meatier themes, fleshed out and structured... …

First of all, a prediction: the core idea of this post will form a part of your third book (if not second). S…

Incidentally that recital is part of a series of audio CDs titled 'Sacred Chants' from Kosmic Music. Most of t…

Somehow I always thought the rise in online education with the accompanying explosion of freely available reso…

Philip Zimbardo's short TED video at http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_tim…

Vais happens inevitably (at least as we perceive time) but wise also seems to be aagu-fying :-)

Notwithstanding the (R) symbol affixed to this famous quadrant, it certainly was a popular time management con…

This starts off like a medium-to-advanced time management piece and ends like a deep spiritual one (very Allen…

As soon as I started reading I was expecting to see Dawkins mentioned as an example somewhere, curious to know…

I cracked the "need enough content (fodder)" theme years ago, literally in my teens. Though the question of ba…

Oh, so many statements that give shape to some of my partly formed thoughts... I wonder how much of all this …

I vote this for the best short story (business fable) of the year award. One vague fear I have is: if you chu…

Ha ha, "I am never big on prescription..." may be true on the basis of style but what you prescribe is usually…

I find that these "small optimizations of daily routine" is something more common in the big city dwellers. As…

I loved the many original quotables sprinkled throughout. I am curious why there was an elaborate refutation …

I don't believe paperwork/form-filling aversion is linked to I (versus E). That may be an additional factor bu…

I guess most of the Es and Is would relate to this and agree largely. Perhaps we could train ourselves to real…

This does look like a fertile analogy and a line of thought you should expand. While it is the N (as opposed t…

Going back to the first few comments, perhaps "computing has disrupted thought" is worth analyzing. In that se…

This is a very refreshingly different post than one of those you say you do once in a while. Not too many refe…

I think I want to be useful and thoughtful and effective and insightful. When are you starting your writing fo…

I am the 3rd case so don't be surprised if you hear more people mentioning that this article seems to directly…

Delightful. We want mo mo mo. There, a reasonably loyal reader of your NaN fiction is also liking your suppose…

The phrases, "the opposite of play is not serious" and "...is not work" appear so often that I googled to see …

Wondering if there was ever a "damsel in distress" male character rescued by a female hero or female antihero.

I fully agree with loosening the exhortations about truth and objectivity, and especially the suggestion to sh…

Wow. This after the culture wars map (which was refreshingly serious for the important stuff discussed). Your…

IIUC this seems to map in some way to a totally different situation--the picnic bus antakshari (different from…

Many scientific breakthroughs and creative combinations in the arts have come about by replacing or supplement…

Yay, feels like the old style ribbonfarm posts are back. But that is an ill-informed view, considering that I …

But is the universe inside our heads entirely Platonic? Platonic to me implies pure reductions--we have those…

I don't like making Predictions but I don't think moral nihilism could ever truly happen. We have emotions, a…

I couldn't agree more--the stagnation of a narrative (or ecosystem of narratives, whichever you prefer) is the…

I suppose most things are "thermodynamically open" to an extent, but you seem to have hit the more practical p…

A couple notes: In "Antifragility", Taleb talks about "oral tradition" as being anti-fragile (with its fragil…

Oops, forgot something on that "analytic philosophy" paragraph: In essence, analytic philosophy tries to filt…

I cannot deny that. On the other hand, I think there is a fundamental skill of not automatically responding t…

What about the rise of prescription drugs? How do Prozac and Adderall fit into the picture? I just can't res…

This is an amazing conversation, but the one flaw I'm seeing is that we're talking about this as if we have to…

I live in NYC so refactor camp has not been much of an option for me. That said, I have a strange aversion to…

I think we're actually on the exact same page and you might just be confused by some of my terms. That's prob…

The one that got my attention was "disequilibrium." I've been trying to understand equilibrium for a while, n…

I think there's a corollary: you can gain some trust in yourself by going against your gut feeling and followi…

Well as you implied in Tempo, "it's narratives all the way down." A bit of a wild conjecture but I think of e…

Also putting in this second part of my comment that I took out because it's a tangent: I'll tie this up with …

Have you ever read Ramit Sethi of "I Will Teach You To Be Rich"? Yes, I know that that makes it sound like 4-…

Cliched guesses, but since I have a tendency to overthink I'll try them on for size: 1) The Gervais Principle…

It seems to me like Barbarians have not been dying out at all. The equivalent to me seems to be multinational…

Off the topic of this post, but I've been re-reading Tempo and getting addicted to playing with archetypes. …

A few ones that I'd put down: 1) For those who have trouble with their sex life--doing what it takes to becom…

Actually, change (5) to "crossing the rubicon". Easier to just frame that whole thing in terms of saying "the…

Kyle, that's a great one. It's actually in many ways generalizable to the strategy of pumping up a single var…

Very true, makes me think of something a lot of intelligent critics have said: that school's #1 task it to tea…

This seems to map to your 2x2 grid for thinking styles. NI/NU is opportunistic (and in that sense has a place…

My rationale came from this question that dominated the post: "Why should we do things that are NI/NU?" The…

I had a nasty split with a co-founder from an old startup; one of the threads came from when I asked him why h…

I always luckily had the instinct of feeling squeamish about overly-legible organization schemes. The sounds …

I wholeheartedly agree. Jensen's Inequality seems to be the driving factor here: the benefits of a "workout" …

Now that I think about it, that oft-repeated aphorism by Goethe best sums up what you're saying: “Until one i…

I agree. I came up with my own aphorism for that one: "You can do just about anything if you set your mind t…

Also, on another note, this makes me realize that I believe in a slightly benevolent universe. Even though th…

On second look, the Hawthorne effect just seems to be a manifestation of dialectic--that is, if you believe th…

In that sense, it sounds like you're talking about attention "exergy". We need concentrations of low-entropy …

You're talking about raw physical force, but what of martial artists? A world-champion in push-hands Tai-Chi …

The part about romantic vs. classical thinking grabbed my attention much more than detente, though it goes wit…

Also, I'd like to thank you for being adventurous in your thinking about futurism. It's become stuck in a ver…

I don't see why this is an XOR question. After all, reproducing is both a pleasure-seeking behavior pattern a…

Wait a second, I thought the Lewis Black routine used a spoon and some other body part that I'm not going to m…

This is a convenient coincidence, because I just had a thought about rich moves. I finally got around to read…

Maybe this cartoon by Hugh MacLeod sheds some light on this topic? http://lateralaction.com/base/media/post-i…

I had a similar thought, but it's now been greatly enriched by this post: Keynesian economics (at least as it…

Also one other tie-in. I was going to say that sometimes constraints are important for productivity--and the …

A question came to mind just now about the whole truth-happiness tension (which seems to be reflected in this …

I came up with a similar diagram a while back, though I don't know entirely how I feel about it. I went throu…

Questions was meant to represent "existence as flux"--the idea that things don't exist outside of some dialect…

The question I have to address your last paragraph is "how much of our current pain is of our own making?" To…

Reminds me of how people are so short sighted in trying to figure out whether it's nuclear or solar or gas tha…

On atom-transport vs. bit-transport I thought to myself "energy and information are interchangeable--they're b…

Extremely dense post that will leave me thinking, but wondering about two connotations: 1) Talking about the …

I finally got to reading this article in full, though I realized that this was (subconsciously) why I asked el…

I just got a weird idea for an alternative based on your "pick three" model. Your model had some truth to it …

There may be writers and readers, but it seems that the one constant that links them all together is that ever…

At this rate, it sounds like you're going to become the Jaron Lanier of startup culture (they need one!)

I have yet to finish this post, but I wanted to put down this comment in case I forgot: Whether machines (in…

A couple of thoughts on the random part about religion: On religion: what you're saying makes sense in the li…

Are we necessarily assuming agency is arbitrary? There are a couple of books out that seem to refute this by …

I'm just going to add in that while randomness on its own might not be enough to establish a sense of "agency"…

Oddly enough, there's a corollary that came to mind because I misread your title: Near-successes are extremel…

Ah, I found an easier one for women (and put it down to "people" so that girls could participate in the fun): …

Going back to this, isn't the fertile variable really another way of talking about the schwerpunkt? It also s…

I remember reading the same thing about Boyd--maybe it was in Hammond's bio. I think about a biological organ…

I'm not following about interchangeability. Sure, on some micro-level, people aren't "interchangeable", but o…

Before this post I always took stone soup to being Keynesian economics before Keynesian economics (in the vers…

Not sure if I agree about Nassim Nicholas Taleb--his explicit philosophy is that you should have the strategy …

Using a trinary (meta-learning, learning, performance) seems to clear up a lot of the ambiguities and contradi…

The Hedgehog simplification definitely makes sense to me, and I'm guessing that the Fox simplification is larg…

That is a good way of seeing it--though I hypothesize that once that happens, the loop can become corrupted, a…

"This moment — and the opportunity to experience it more intensely through binoculars — will be gone immediate…

I don’t think that Taleb has an issue with curiosity or with innovation. It might seem so at first because he …

Also, regarding machine-learning: By my analysis, machine learning is a case of naive "doer-ism" (I think y…

Well, technically cognition actually produces a net surplus of noise. The negentropy is local/temporary (Maxw…

Venkat, I think you're missing a fundamental point about what is "useless". "Useless" knowledge is arguably t…

gwern, I paused before responding to give what you said some thought. I think that I did jump the gun and I s…

There's another potential way in which the authoritarian eye could hold the seeds of its own destruction. If …

Interestingly, there is always a need for constraints, and one could easily equate [i]power[/i] with the abili…

Sorry, messed up the tagging on the last post (some forums have square brackets instead of carrots): Interest…

I see what you're saying about vague use of the word "convexity", but isn't the word perfectly useful/acceptab…

This dichotomy is leaving me a lot to chew on. It's not the same thing as that between fields that are largel…

I definitely agree with your outlook; the problem with deliberate practice people is that they think their own…

On the first technical point: I communicated badly. I didn't mean to suggest that you should always use stati…

What I'm still wondering is where that organizational dark matter went. I assumed that what you were getting …

Jaron Lanier's new book has a very very similar thesis. I haven't gotten that far in it, but his main argumen…

I also forgot, his own example with data-mining and recommendation algorithms also works by the same logic: if…

Not sure how turning the world into a global App Store where everyone leaves payment traces would be a cultura…

I think you may have read too much into my "Lord Zuckerberg" phrase. You were just mentioning feudalism and I…

I think this may cover *exactly* the same theme as Rader's post on "The Dual Mind Problem." (I mean that in a …

Personally I'd assume that Lagrangians are manic-depressive due to swings between the thrill of possibility (e…

The bits on narcissism and identity broadcasting really struck a chord with me, as I've been reading a lot by …

A lot of things to answer in that question. For one thing, class mobility does not seem all that prevalent in…

I might just second what Markus said, if only because the artisans seem like the clueless and the schleppers s…

The Oatmeal seems to have it right about artisinal coffee: http://en.ilovecoffee.jp/posts/view/71

Venkat, would you say then that machines generally widen income gaps?

This most recent post has shifted how I've been thinking about my own work. The feeling of having few explici…

The lack of creative-destruction in digitally-based narratives has bothered me for quite a while as well. I t…

Leaving a comment while in the middle of this article so I don't forget: What I'm seeing in the four criteria…

Also noting that the Gollum effect may be the opposite of this process of freedom, with total gollumization po…

This is a very deep and thought-provoking approach that I will have to re-read. But given both my interest in…

I also am a bit dissatisfied with the simple answer of "get rich", but I think that it's definitely a shot in …

There is one thing you indirectly touched on briefly, but I think is of huge importance in moving to the organ…

I've never heard that aphorism, but I actually did have a thought that, if I'm correct, was along the same lin…

Still in the middle, so I apologize if I say something you address but I would hate to lose the thought: Arti…

This seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't be spelled out, but I feel compelled to attempt to unpack how…

After re-reading this, I have a new view informed by a book on complexity theory I was reading: The fundament…

There's one simple example of crash-only behaviors in life that I think describes them perfectly: with very ra…

Also, here is the evil twin version of your line of thinking: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schu…

Plenty to think about, but your piece led me to one particularly disturbing conclusion: the heroine's journey …

This is certainly consistent with the extremely popular analogy of projects being babies/children that must be…

That said, I'm not consigned to a gender-based analysis of this yet: it seems to me that this whole process is…

In fact, my last bit can be generalized to a 1-1 mapping of classes of regressive behavior and levels of the M…

There's a strange paradox here if we juxtapose these two excerpts: "For a while, I was inhabiting an escaped …

This bit about civilization-as-laboratory is eye-opening, and in the same sense you'd have to extend that idea…

Without this group dynamic, Hitler would have been a random local psycho, perhaps serial-killing a dozen peopl…

But I think Bell labs mythology should be taken with a grain of salt. What about Xerox Parc then? They weren…

Yeah! Entropy Rules! So the point isn't what to do about "end of times" but what to do before YOU turn int…

@JM I had a quick glance at "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect” , monkey dreams again, no matter how imagin…

However, everybody else here seems to understand that what you mean by the World is human civilization. Yes,…

@ricky_elias The definitive answer about complexity has been brought forth long ago: For every complex probl…

@tubelite Why should one be worried more about the "death" of civilization or the death of your children or g…

Often it’s faster just to do the work, minimum or not. ROFLMAO Yes indeed! Reminds me of days of yore (1980'…

Mmmmmm... Yet another incredibly insightful post. In a few (rares) cases I went so much "uber-turpentine" that…

But at some point, developers have to realize that just because they enjoy developing a sledgehammer to swat a…

Amazing, Venkat, amazing, thanks for collecting all these gems for us.

An interesting blog to browse about finance is Michael Stastny's , a young austrian trader who got ousted by …

@Dorian Taylor Cool down, all this philosophy is useless. As a 63 old retired software engineer I can tell yo…

Every single project I’ve ever worked on, the main challenge has been to establish exactly that. Yes, your …

the delivery of a generator of useful material which uses its own produce as fuel Turpentine?

The "real world" isn't that much fun , most especially after reading the Wikipedia entry on Albert Speer men…

Off topic question: Why isn't the last issue of Be Slightly Evil (Status 101) archived at https://www.ribbonf…

One of the engineer-hacker-thinker-millionaire types. Well... just as Paul Graham these guys sound to me to…

Transcendental calm, by definition, doesn’t reconcile truth and happiness but… um… transcends that dichotomy. …

Maybe there is an uncertainty principle here. If the concept of ‘truth’ is very clear to you, ‘happiness’ WILL…

Im surprised that happiness is defined by the people around you. Not the people "around me" at any given mo…

Logically, it is not at all obvious that truth-seeking leads to depressive thoughts without further human moti…

Truth and depression are most definitely linked and certainly have evolutionary fitness benefits: The bright …

Too bad for you you have it backward with August, because it stops other people mucking around and brings so…

I think the problem is even much more general than that, it is the (quasi?) religious belief in the "one right…

Stumbling upon this thread while checking some material about a more recent post I want to add a very releva…

It optimizes for the survivability of the autocatalytic loop rather than the humans within it Except for the…

I think, for instance, that democracy is better than autocracy, and individual liberty better than slavery. Ev…

You can easily work you out to the losers class. :-) Even psychopaths can do that when they turn really nuts.

These are NOT the key to success, only the pitfalls to be avoided. You can screw any good opportunity by being…

In the end what matters is selecting the best tool as per circumstances Sure, sure, and... WHAT is the met…

Some already successful people strive to still be open to micro opportunities , i.e. not dumbing down to the …

Paste screwed the link .

Being a sociopath wannabe doesn't seem to fit. What about cultivating some http://calnewport.com/blog/">cluel…

I just stumbled on an interesting discussion about status (power games) in mathematics . I think the relevant…

I second this, Venkat when do you plan to use this kind of insights for your own benefit? ;-)

You are right, everybody is "missing something" about AI for the very simple reason that the definition of in…

The problem with all inductive reasoning, is that you often can’t KNOW if your theory is right. There is no…

Off topic but I think the blog readers may enjoy this . (dunno where he picked the original otherwise I would…

Creating a complex piece of code can be more challenging than working for a client but it is done with no requ…

But it’s only a matter of time before neuroscience figures it out. Maybe even in our lifetime. Most probably…

Off topic, the latest release of "Be Slightly Evil", On Dodging Decisions, failed to show up in the list archi…

LOL, Yeah, consumerism sucks but the end of consumerism doesn't taste that good either. It could be that "c…

Venkat would disappear, and only “Venkat” would remain This has already happened, and on purpose, the major …

vegan chef with a blog and all that Uh! Oh! Beware, veganism is a highly noxious, demented ideology , nothi…

Sorry Venkat, even when not demented and even if some are friends of yours, vegetarianism is a fraud, read a…

Interesting, now you’ve rescoped from veganism to vegetarianism To mean that since veganism is included in…

Once the civilization becomes ossified ... Much more generally it's decreasing marginal returns on complexit…

You are getting some traction Venkat! ;-)

The context from which I picked the above the link is also worth a read .

the ontological 0 was born into the human psyche where previously only 1 had ever existed. What the HECK doe…

Venkat’s right, that’s what I meant. Whether it’s the rapture or the singularity, the basic mythos is the same…

Paula ; historicism is the difference between what? Between having or not a "progressive" mythos. (almost a…

Could you elaborate a little bit more... I don't think she can, the remedy to the "evilness" of logic is not…

If I were an animal and not at all aware of death, that is one mode of being. This is the mode of "civiliza…

My view is that without an understanding of this shift, there can be no evolution beyond the devouring, predat…

The best I can suggest is that formal logic will need to adapt to new environmental conditions. No, logic i…

I’m not sure confusion is the same as spirituality. Well... Give me some "spiritual" statement and prove t…

what would constitute infinite progress? Whaaaaaaat?!?! Don't you feel that you are falling for the same kin…

If logic is ultimately turtles all the way down, how does one flip that process and what does it look like ups…

There is no one and only right world view. LOL, though I do share this opinion I don't think that anyone can…

Stone cold psychopaths I think are naturally materialists. Do not disparage materialists by such an associat…

@Paula It seems to me that the thing sticking in your craw is the suggestion that Western science/logic might…

Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! This is a very incorrect comment, not caring for the sensibilities of the do-gooders nor the…

Forgive me if I sound like a dirty hippie, but have you looked into Taoism? Mentioning Taoism does not make …

but he’s an interesting read, in general How do you think I am aware of JMG? ;-) I will have a look at Car…

Cursory review of Carol Deppe book: silly, not worth the trouble. Not even close to anything resembling the t…

Josh, not to dash your enthusiasm but the meaning of the word "barbarian" here at ribbonfarm may be a bit diff…

If you ever do get a hint of what spirituality is about Why would "spirituality" be anything else than neur…

This, though, does not mean anyone has shown that spirituality ‘is’ neurophysiology I think such statements …

it also doesn’t affect the points I was making. No contest here, I think Paula's views are romantic rubbish…

pressures and competition haven’t disappeared entirely Of course not, thanks to "democracy" the selection p…

Paglia's book is interesting but heavy, heavy on academic references and digressions I got bored to death read…

Why would people need an antidote to female power? .../... Woman are naturally more powerful. Logic isn't yo…

So you comment BEFORE you read? Nice!

Yeah! Sloppiness is great, it's my favorite strategy since I was a child and my main methodology. Of course at…

Wow! Deep analysis, the interesting question is to whom could you *sell* this expertise?

Ah! Ah! Thanks for the overview, that'll spare me the chore of reading them :-)

Huh? This is "The Internet" isn't it? Why should anyone think that you are the real David Graeber?

Hummm... Yeah! Matlab is probably not the best example you could choose. Instead of trying to whip up somethin…

Apologies to the anti-spam, it outsmarted my truncated links instead of screwing them. :-)

Ouch! So Venkat did not actually escape middle class status (I had no idea of the license rates, not intereste…

Sorry to keep bothering you Venkat but did you notice that nobody came in defense of Matlab?

You shouldn't confuse Mathlab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATHLAB and Matlab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAT…

LOL, I missed that one by a narrow time margin, beats Matlab by a factors 1.5 to 600 (on speed, on cost it's &…

I meant ∞

This is why picked the pseudo Kevembuangga but it has not lived up to its mythology (yet?)

Well done! A very old meme but an useful one. http://scimaps.org/maps/map/carte_du_tendre_map__65/ http://stra…

If some of these ideas stick you'll definitely become a guru, what will you do with this?

Hmmmm... No, I don't think you can beat entropy by hacking, most hacks come at a cost in complexity and this…

That sounds very close to Gerd Gigerenzer: http://www-abc.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/shtmus/ A more intricate model is…

"Moving to an English-speaking country is a rich move. Or used to be." LOL, I'd like you elaborate on that (…

"If we want to prevent the Singularity from happening, ..." Ha! Ha! So you are intent on derailing the Singu…

Le Corbusier "living machines" didn't work AT ALL, many of his hideous raw concrete buildings have been demoli…

"Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: when your boss says, “Great job!” or when she gives…

@Mitchell Porter "Good luck explaining that one, materialist philosophers of mind!" Huh! No! I see it as a …

I would suggest, as TL;DR: "If it ain’t broke, it just doesn’t have enough features yet."

"I think the gods can still feel joy due to their ability of... Oh! Yeah? You're privy to the feelings of "t…

Great! The economy of early 21th century in a nutshell!

The 5 ->6 and 4->7 arrows show "irreversible-to-reversible" transitions and there are no 4->8 nor 5->8 arrows,…

Hmmm... This is one of your most outstanding posts and I don't see that many comments. I suspect this hits too…

I might be wrong but I categorize myself as neither, I see some sort of fuzzy big picture with a few "hard poi…

Abbreviations and acronymania ensures you are only talking to yourself, hope you enjoy it...

LOL, lots of words for a much simpler point: Is the there any reason for "happiness" to have the same meaning …

I can't recall the exact source but I've read once an interview of a wealthy man who were asked: "What's the p…

A nice change from business driven perspectives. However swapping diurnal for nocturnal shows that you are sti…

"I think coding and math will be automated by AI before they’re meaningfully gamified." Yeahhhh... In 1968 I …

Does it never occurs to you that all these "arguments" could just be meaningless blather and posturing? Being …

:-) You indeed “mis-replied”, I didn’t meant that the Archdruid article was more parsimonious than this one b…

"Humans and living things are more valuable than non-living things" Doesn't that make vegan/vegetarians some …

No, I don't buy that morality argument, I rather see it as a matter of defining the boundaries of "kin". If yo…

"humans are losing their economic value" Well... At least the minimal economic value of the "long pig" will r…

That's an easy one. The fox's data is made of bits and pieces scattered all over the place so when an new item…

Plus, beware of metaphors, they may be soothing but also delusional: http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/10/are-you-…

Of course it works, from the Catholic Church to ISIS to the banksters, brings us all kind of good...

LOL (TL;DR actually) It may be a good explanation of the Indian mind, a narrative not going anywhere may justi…

Please, where is the TLDR?

I didn't care to read this until I saw it linked at Slate Star Codex and with both praise and befuddlement. Co…

Ah! Shitty blogspot screws the link by "localizing" it: http://theblogattheendoftheworld.blogspot.com/2008/09/…

It's a mimetic crisis in the sense of René Girard you cannot escape it and it will get much, much worse befo…

LOL May be you should learn about the French idiom "enculage de mouches" (sorta frivolous pedantism ).

Welcome back to reality, your previous mindset where you supposed that you could have a meaningful global pi…

Looks like mathematics is about to take over "love" and whatever else belongs to consciousness.

The real question is: What about death?

I read about the 787 in Friedman and cringed. While Airbus has made some spectacular mistakes, I can't help fe…

My understanding of physics is at Dave Barry levels (E=H2O), so I can kind of figure out how cars run on water…

If you want to undermine any serious and educated point of view with booger jokes, I'm your man. I have two mo…

Interesting. In a slightly different sense, I think urban creatures are aware of only one dimension. We've bee…

Ignoring abstract philosophy and complicated words for a while... The brain is a bubbling cauldron of activity…

Now getting back on topic: Where do you draw the line between "matter possessing the attributes of consciousn…

Different axes: distance, mode of communication (face to face, telephonic, email, physical transport), type of…

Let me pick that up in reverse order. Dunbar's number also comes up in Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which is …

Part of my previous comment got munged, probably due to my not escaping the "less than" sign. Why the heck can…

People at the door, telephone calls and IMs are interrupts which oblige us to service them synchronously. That…

The whole essay begs the question - how would you characterize your response to the parrot? :) I think you…

It is a very useful experience to go over your childhood books once in a while. Not too often, to avoid trampl…

Heh. I chanced upon this video a while back, read the summary and thought, well, let's hope someone keeps the …

I have long had an idea for a comic, from which the world is safe only because I cannot draw. [frame 1] Dinosa…

Yup, look at Randall Munroe with xkcd, my current favourite strip. On the theology question: you have to opti…

Heh. I read about van Riper in Gary Brecher's article on the topic. Fascinating stuff, you can easily lose a…

Excellent blogger, item "Food for Thought" arrived, well packaged, metaphor slightly frayed but in excellent w…

Great post. The last line will be an excellent soundbite for your blook. Don't tell me you haven't thought abo…

Thanks for the algorithm, but I'd rather read reviews by you than try wading through the dross myself :) I th…

Neuromap studies are good for one reason: deconstructing the popular image of an atomic personality or "soul".…

Good one. I like the idea of bargaining as an iterative collaborative story-creation, like improv. And like im…

This is a response to your latest "Slate" clip, but I thought I'd do it here. Desktop apps and web apps are n…

Well, usually the way it happens is, someone solves a real life problem, then a grad student comes along to e…

I've been doing some disorganized musings along these lines - haven't really read Coase just yet. At work, I …

I have a different opinion on a slightly different problem - innovation in the context of "creating a successf…

Venkat, yes, elephants can dance. Like you said, they can move mountains and make things happen. However, the…

Happy Birthday, Ribbonfarm! Thanks for keeping this up. Wish I could read as fast as you can write :) Blogs …

Quick thoughts: Creative destruction shows up at its best in evolution. Look at a tiger chasing a herd of dee…

Maybe I'm only seeing it at a superficial level, but the thesis that "perfect enforcement is bad" strikes me a…

While listening to your most important customers is certainly a good way to do sustaining innovation, I'm a li…

"The idea that Web 2.0 distracts from SemWeb isn’t a technical opinion: it is the Boomers expressing disappoin…

You've covered it all, but I can't resist replying. My first answer would be a variant of the ironic: What el…

I think we're mostly in agreement... I've been trying my hand at #4 as well, though not in as structured and b…

As for the Mac - I've used 'em all, Windows, Linux and Macs. And the Macs win. Linux comes next. Windows third…

How about "pragmatic karma"? Small scale prisoner's dilemma games can be played with memory. When you have mu…

"But it is this very act of validating the unreal that actually creates an economy of dog-power, expressed out…

I remember Douglas Adams describing a similar effect, when he heard the one about "why can't they make airplan…

"For a comedian, I suspect the most devastating way to bomb is to find that your audience has long since perma…

Compelling review. Have you read Neal Stephenson's account of the undersea cable laying business? Pretty good.…

Aargh the green qualia, it burnss usss, it burnss uss my preciousss :)

I don't know why you're so down on empirical neurology. Have you looked at Ramachandran's ("... VSR, neurologi…

I wonder if I got you right. 1. Radical-disruptive innovations are ugly. 2. Tablets are radical-disruptive. 3…

Long post. TLDR: Apple is right about the iPad. Many tablet efforts tried to get a full-fledged computer onto…

Power, water, garbage, fuel. Do you know where they come from and where they go? I sure don't, and I doubt any…

Thanks. Feel free to take the material and do what you like with it; I have no idea when I'll be able to make …

If you're trying a diet, can you take a stab at validating Seth Robert's theories on set-point regulation? I…

The bigger social signal is the bookshelf. Glancing at someone's bookshelf, and a minute's conversation about …

I'm with you till "Reality Distortion by the Clueless". Excellent stuff. Reminded me of the Innovator's dile…

My knowledge of biology and replicator theory is even poorer than my CS, but... Biology is profoundly humblin…

4. Time Machine: No, Apple doesn't have a fundamentally better scheme. A targeted virus could stomp my Time ma…

Congratulations, you're number 4 in google search for "folkway culture". I'm a little confused about the diff…

Excellent post again. I like the way you take data points we all have access to, and weave them into a consist…

I know, 1989! I read it in college more than ten years ago, and glance at it from time to time just to marvel …

When I was young and innocent, I thought of organization as a tool to accomplish business goals. A marvelously…

[This has been on the backburner for months; long enough. Out, damned post, out I say! ] I have two bones to …

I had wanted to comment on this in your abacus thing too, but I don't quite get the mutual exclusion between h…

@nntaleb is certainly your evil twin :) I remember him tweeting about this... ah, here it is: If you need to …

Great post. Ask your mother why she adheres to tradition X. Chances are she won't know, but she will be very …

"This means going with your gut-driven deep qualitative analysis of one anecdotal case will be fine 9 out of 1…

Rick, you take the words out of my mouth. When smart guys who know better take an extremist position, there's …

OK, let me take it a bit further with my two current favourite hobby horses: Taleb's Golden Rule and evolution…

Did you mention your post on humans as the short-buffer/long-buffer switches? Facebook, Twitter, news aggregat…

Very interesting. I didn't know that tin was so rare and the consequences for bronze. Metallurgy has always be…

What do you mean by 'fundamentally sustainable'? Not a rhetorical question. Nature is basically a a furious, …

Interesting post, some very evocative phrases. I tend to agree with Brian's points though. 1. Complex languag…

[don't have the time to organize this any better, here it is before I simpy delete it] How then to explain t…

You got a Windows laptop and you called it 'Barbarian'? Ironic, given that Windows is the second most civilize…

Err.. I don't think you quite got me. iOS - which runs the iPhone and iPad, is ultra-civilized, without a trac…

Damn it, now I have more books to read :) The EIC has many fascinating aspects. Two questions, in particular,…

(Great post, as usual. Great comments, as usual) Entropy is an excuse to do nothing. Man is the measure of al…

Proprioception.

Hehe, I had just invented the Croesus Criterion: innovation is limited by the ability of the capitalist to und…

Milo is certainly not a theory of everything, but IMO it's more than a just-so story. The acquisition of marg…

From the earlier Le Guins, I got the impression that wizards gave people their true-names, much like we name c…

So I read this all over again (not for the last time, I'm sure), making a little more progress. The characteri…

Reminded me of another "signalling crazy" post by John Hempton: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2011/11/buy…

An excellent definition of hacking, the best I've seen. "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is often mi…

Most bon mots of the 2-out-of-3 variety strike me as thinly disguised 'sour grapes', and this one is no exce…

The formula to identify a formulaic author: has anybody reduced him to a shell-script? e.g. http://thomasfried…

Great arguments. However, there is a good reason for the existence of a large class of low-value, fixed-cost, …

Great points, but I disagree with the last bit about riches solving everything. Sure, they can resolve a Gordi…

Perhaps I still have Gervais Principle VI on the brain, by I notice a definite loser/clueless/sociopath patter…

As a long time reader, nothing in this glossary is a surprise, but summing things up in a pithy way can bring …

A recurring theme in your work: people will use ANYTHING as a proxy in their struggle for status. Whatever …

From thinking about your work and my own observations, I've come to the conclusion that status-seeking behavio…

Looking forward to the next installment! Being a git user really messes with your mind... ;-)

When you say: "When we engineer a particular veil of ignorance and paint it a certain way, we hope it will do …

Great food for thought, Venkat! Thanks! I've been wrestling with the implications of this system, and with se…

The hero-worship angle you are focusing on for virtue ethics, though I can see how it fits, makes me even more…

I'm good at complex reasoning and subtle habits, so maybe that is my problem... ;-) My "hero" is my own best …

I think it might be dangerous to lump all religious phenomena under the values pole. Religions are complex, a…

This may not be the place to get into the fine points of Aristotle, but the passages you quote don't have the …

Since I'm quite certain I'm neither a Clueless, nor a Loser ;-), let me submit that I think all three Gervais …

I'm going to disagree again (and in fact I think it strengthens your personality model to decouple Gervais fro…

Interesting post. I wonder if you have a citation for the quote from the Mahabharata "equality is for equals"…

Let me open with a mildly hostile formulation: Happy 40th birthday! Now for the real challenge: are you sure …

Well played, sir, well played... Should be interesting trying to find something to do with that particular pi…

... I figured it out! I'm going to use my credentials to open Marc's School of Sociopathy for the Terminally …

It is interesting to consider the Internet / Social Media and MMORPGs as "crashed realities". I think you hav…

If you don't believe in "cultural ether", how can you posit something that is a "high fidelity simulation" of …

Actually, I'm trying to get away from ontology and onto epistemology, which I think is where a lot of these pr…

As someone who fancies himself to have some level of connoisseurship in various things, including wine, I woul…

Is it a fake coral snake or a 100% authentic king snake? The "fakeness" only arises as an exemplar of a parti…

The snake isn't _trying_ to do anything. It is just doing its snaky thing, entirely sincerely and authentical…

I think the fault lies in the ruler, not in the scholars: he didn't think through his requirements and so aske…

It occurred to me after I posted that my post compressed a very large number of things I know about software d…

I'm struck that you don't directly address belief in this piece. You have to believe in the meaningfulness of…

A candidate for ritual based morality is Confucianism. Confucius had a strong sense that playing predefined r…

Interesting post. I can't help feel though that multiple functions of art are being mixed together. Art in a…

You might be interested in the ideas of Gurdjieff on the concept of "objective art" . I'm less convinced than…

I went to see Robyn Hitchcock last week, and he made a funny comment about someone as part of his stage patter…

Passing this through my own significance appreciation filter, I see a fundamental language problem (as Denis s…

I agree with you that capitalism, at the level of abstraction you are proposing, is the natural and inevitable…

Venkat, I think you are underestimating the epistemological process that goes into "You did, I saw you and it …

I think if you look at the work that has been done on the weakness of eye witness recall, the variability of e…

Zarathustra is definitely not the best introduction to Nietzsche.

I came to your writing through the Gervais Principle years ago, and I still think it is a strong metaphor for…

This is my new favorite of all your posts. A masterpiece.

But all the dog whistles are the best part! ;-)

I wouldn't cast aspersions on asking, but it would be unutterably gauche to answer. ;-) This post is like a f…

I should have added: if you find it both true and funny, you probably get it enough already.

@Alex Thompson: I think you are underestimating how hard it can be to understand someone else views and opini…

Two of my favorite characters: Socrates and Zhuangzi! Ever since I first read a Platonic dialogue I've been …

I'm afraid I totally lost the plot at this line: "Productivity as we know it is based on delayed gratification…

I suppose my problem with it is that, though I suppose some straw traditionalist might have used such a notion…

To clarify my own point, I think I conceive of productivity more like Scott Adams does in his book "How to Fai…

Great piece! My only "criticism" comes from the bite of envy and frustration of seeing someone else articulat…

It is the normal state of affairs that status/prestige hierarchies ARE decoupled from straight-forward financi…

I would suggest looking a little closer. There are some environments (usually ones where most people manifest…

I think the source of misunderstanding is that you are making the assumption that a status hierarchy has a nic…

Nicely written, as usual Venkat, and very entertaining. Unfortunately, I see two major flaws in this fable. …

Everyone seems to be recommending Fukuyama these days... will have to move it up the reading list. The thing …

How very boring, Venkat, jumping on the "Trump's win is oh so scaaaary" bandwagon. ;-) With a bit of a pivot,…

Let me clarify this. Our choice isn't between Trump and returning to triumphant globalism, where we all dance…

Perhaps I'm squinting too hard at the already squinting summary you are giving, but I am reminded of the barel…

The very fact that the program relies on randomness invalidates your premise. There is a whole field called Ko…

One of my long-standing interests has been personality ( or temperament, if you prefer ) and my standard way o…

Sorry Venkat, but I think it is time to eat your own dog-food. I'm a Canadian, and a committed liberal cosmop…

I'm actually suggesting something of more immediate concern to both of us (I think): our current models / narr…

Venkat, I think you are wrong to try to segregate individual "drives" as being social or individualistic. We …

Great post! It really resonates with my experience relating to my millennial friends, and I hope this is start…

You didn't go to the ultimate conclusion: We all live in some escaped reality or another. Probably several l…

Hmmm. Isn't it simpler than that? You become aware of a mutually escaped reality when you come into conflict …

You go it backwards (intentionally?). The slogan was: Think globally, act locally. The other way around is mo…

I have to confess I found this piece to be quite irritating. While your systematic scheme might be a useful t…

I think you've got the causality backwards again. By definition, ideological thoughts are not Interesting, si…

I have a suggestion for an Elderblog game for you, though I suspect you might hate it: post-mortems. Revisit …

Do you have an equivalent pithy name for the dominant Gen X aesthetic? As Gen X myself, I relate to this "dom…

Are you saying that. just as Millennials do with premium mediocre, Gen Z will compete for status through domes…

I tend to see status competition as more universal than you do ;) , but set that aside for a moment and try a …

I like that! Venkat should hire you! ;)

This just brought this concept together for me. Good one!

Geez, man. This sounds like a boomer telling me how great the 60s were. ;)

I think you have the attribution backwards: Harmon has one Big Idea, McKee is mired in a whole bunch of little…

"Elite overproduction" is a catchy and descriptive phrase, but a more general description is "broken system". …

I think I was pretty specific about what process was broken, and I definitely DON'T want a burn it all down re…

It is starting to look like GenX old age is gonna suck...

That's an easy one: artificial. Whether something was created by humans or not only matters to humans, not e.…

Nope. Unless you agree with Gongsun Long that a white horse is not a horse.

The words don't have the same meanings in the two cases. In one, artificial and natural are disjoint, in the o…

Venkat, the old stories are long in the tooth, and while they started out what I'll charitably call "oversimpl…

Paradoxically, this post fills me with optimism! One of your blogging strengths was always to propose construc…

Just wanted to congratulate you on a remarkably perceptive post. I was also pulled into Quora by Seb Paquet a…

Venkat, very excited to see what comes out of this experiment. Around the beginning of this year I made my ow…

Interesting stuff. I want to question the appropriateness of the 2x2 matrix because I'm not sure the two spec…

A couple more thoughts... The Hagel/Deloitte example is very similar to Allen/GTD. I am only superficially f…

Thought provoking stuff. A few observations I would like to get your thoughts on: The barbarian/civilized di…

Quick note on Disqus, Comments are now saved back to your local wordpress server so you can revert back or sw…

Interesting thought. Would you differentiate at all between the infrastructure and the underlying values of t…

After thinking about this a bit more I think financial systems do serve as very good examples of the civilized…

In reply to Venkat on 3/17/2011 11:41 below (seems we can't thread replies any further): I started to reply t…

In this context, we might want to reconsider what we mean by "sorting" and "group". The same technologies tha…

I am in agreement with the several other commenters above who are expressing doubts about points 3 & 7. I su…

I find it interesting that you are thinking about depth of sharing as primarily a matter of sharing informatio…

I am a couple years behind on this one but just found it for the first time and feel compelled to weigh in... …

Apologies. I was pulling from two different posts and several of the comments above (primarily Brandon and Ni…

Adding a +1 to this stream of SF Bay area comments. Happy to help organize a meetup in whatever way might be …

Venkat, I suspect you answer to the community question lies in some formulation of the crucible described in y…

One distinction I am surprised your didn't include though the hints of it are apparent throughout: The book i…

Thanks for the shout out. I agree with the additional insight that it is easier to gamble (or invest) from an …

One more point that we all somehow missed (unless some of the comments I quickly skimmed mentioned it): the ta…

I think I can help point you in the zero-sum direction. Both 4HWW and PUA are market hacks in that they explo…

Upon a second reading a couple themes are starting to clarify though I am still having some trouble with the t…

I agree with much of what was said by everyone above. The way I think about it is that context switching is d…

Credit where due: you had thought about it to some degree because I was reading some of your posts from the tr…

Right, the value is actually created by the people who close the loophole that the 4HWW or PUA type exploits. …

LOL indeed! This one makes me chuckle. When you are out here you will have to check out a crossfit class...i…

Interesting. I was expecting you to conclude the opposite based on the fact that your ideas are adaptable. I…

I am impressed! This very clearly elaborates on a number of frustrations I have been experiencing recently. …

I agree with much in the previous comments, particularly MFH's comment that putting too much stock in, what ma…

Interesting evolutionary principles could be inferred from that proposal... I am going to guess that willpowe…

Would you object to the following rephrasing: To be unsentimental is not about suppressing your humanity, it …

We probably mean subtly different things by "humanity". To take on a less ambiguous term... I would argue th…

First of all, thank you for writing this. I am working my way out of one of those troughs in the mindful lear…

Re: Venkat - I was just skimming through here again and realized that your comments on 'muscle confusion' rel…

"a similar kind of argument as for ethic food preferences — 'It tastes/feels good to me so everyone will like …

Interesting metaphor. I see a lot of parallels to the spate of recent research demonstrating the importance o…

So I take it from your framing here that Ghemawhat refers to "regulation" in the common nation-state oriented …

Pattern recognition and compression. I got very frustrated early on with some of the conventional wisdom yo…

To put this in psychological terms, "chunking" has been well demonstrated to correlate with high level perform…

Maybe pitching wanna-be writer/bloggers is the wrong approach. As you note in your quora answer, there is a d…

Hosh, I'm not clear where you are seeing disagreement. Perhaps my phrasing, "writing as an *amplifier* of hig…

You may be underestimating the degree to which subcultures are also "resistant to industrial-scale attention-m…

I see where your going though I still want to emphasize that this greater power accruing to marketing forces i…

Isn't the first part a plot point in the Bourne movies, that Jason Bourne's previous identity really had no re…

It seems like we could characterize each downturn as the point when a given set of cyclic shifts has led to di…

I don't have any great calendaring examples for you but the same dynamics definitely apply to deciding which i…

I've been developing this same distinction over the past six months or so without explicitly labeling it as su…

The large monitor would offer more benefit for writing tasks if it rotated to vertical. Being able to see a f…

I was wondering what I contributed to this until I got to that last section. Does this imply for you that we …

What you refer to here as "structural adjustment" is what we commonly refer to as "reform". And your thesis p…

Oh, I absolutely agree that there are foxy and hedgehogy predispositions. I'm just saying, take twins separat…

The OODA connection is an interesting one I hadn't considered. I think you could simplify it even further: F…

I am with you most of the way though I would substitute "scope creep" for "analysis paralysis". It is not nec…

Yes, there is a sense in which the extreme manifestations of each archetype begin to resemble the other. Take…

Taleb strikes me as almost the anti-Tolstoy, the hedgehog who desperately want to be a fox. The notion of "an…

Nietzsche is one of the main characters in Wilson's book so he definitely fits the Outsider type. I'm not e…

Yes I think that fits the pattern. If I see everything as arbitrary or impermanent then naturally I will prep…

Hybrid solution: pour the milk last and stop being so fussy about the stirring. It will have stirred itself b…

Hey Gunther, two thoughts...to some degree we have to distinguish the works of Nietzsche and Tolstoy from thei…

Tying in two related ideas: 1. Looking ahead vis a vis complexity of sequencing (in your last Tempo post: htt…

Yeah, you're right...a good deal of insight can be gained simply by rephrasing things in ways that emphasize …

There is some sense to this. My first thought was that there has to be some hypothetical we could concoct whe…

Pretty sure I followed most of it. I want to get one small quibble out of the way before responding to the me…

Jay, I don't mean to imply that crossfitters as a demographic group are more aware of their bodies. I was try…

Maybe instead of open-ended and closed systems we should talk about the way in which a system is evolving. A …

Count me among those who find this metaphor useful. Another way to think about it is that Lagrangian decisio…

Another way to think about this is to ask where judgment takes place. In the Jungian typologies the thinking/…

This is why I included the note "(consciously anyway)". It's not that she is incapable of answering such ques…

In answer to the comment below, which seems to have reached the thread depth limit... Yes, when I say "pushed…

I think your contrarian reading of "flow" is accurate under conditions of ossification of the field-superego -…

A lot of good ideas here - but I'll join the crowd wondering how culturally relative this description is. I ha…

Not sure how seriously to take this (have the odd sensation that there's an additional layer of satire I'm not…

Sarah and Venkat, thanks for this thread. I found it interesting to see this dialectial discussion where I dis…

I think you are missing the point by looking at a rectangle as the unit. While rectangles themselves may not b…

*complement not compliment. :)

An analogy that came to mind is a music concert. The crowd is there to lap up whatever experience or thrills t…

Can I suggest a much more fundamental exploration? This is something that I have spent considerable time and e…

*that there can be a cogent explanation at all.

When it comes to justice/injustice, it helps to frame the subject as a Venn diagram and section off the univer…

Interesting read! Had a few basic disagreements though which made the prognosis fall apart for my world-view. …

You could say that. Although what I was really trying to do was to iterate on the unknowns that Venkat specula…

@JB, I don't think you understood what I meant by 'democracy has been hacked.' The Constitution has almost not…

Ok, now I am confused about what your basic point is. For someone who is so enamored with how well articulated…

I am tempted to ask if you care to elaborate on what you mean by an elected monarchy exactly? And how it would…

"By putting a limit on what laws a govt can enact as exemplfied by the quoted para in my previous comment." B…

"Its just a reflection of the fact that the courts don’t work. The constitution/republic is poor quality and h…

"You seem to argue that some cultures do not afford liberty to the extent of the US system. That American libe…

Good read! Sounds like a detailed explanation of what the idea of ‘organic growth’ really entails and the mech…

It is hard to think of a single idea that embodies the Indian ethos and approach to life better than the "chal…

This reminded me of very cheeky, half unfunny joke from several years ago. A small village has a population …

I've intuited this exact idea for a long time now but never really got around to articulating it, so thanks fo…

I felt a whiff of high modernism in this post. Could it be that you are simply trying to legibilize a pattern …

"But however irrational the sentiment, there’s something about the feeling of this kind of day I want to hold …

Great post, Venkat! The mook-knight metaphor really captures the essence of the IoB, but I was hoping you woul…

That’s the question that Venkat has closed with too. My larger point is that these may be the dark ages for Ve…

"This was a sense making attempt by media professionals, who were grown up in the old regimes and interpreted …

Times like these is when you most feel the need for a fallback, fail-safe personal philosophy. You can run you…

I wonder if you’d find Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark useful. It’s a cultural history of the 30s, whic…

I started out fully intending to not comment, as my token 2 cents deficit contribution towards the mountain of…

This is one of those classic stories where I feel like your psychological projection transmogrifies into an ac…

This reminds me of a theory I had concocted several years ago when I had just started working, after college. …

I think you are massively underweighting the energy and transaction costs involved in seriously entertaining c…

Thanks for that detailed response, Mike! “Only a few people are angel investors and penny-stock traders. Sim…

Ok, I think I have a better sense of what you are trying to suggest now. And I am completely OK with there bei…

I think there is (at least) one level more to this current conversation that needs to be explored. That is to …

Great stuff! Reads like the first short story in a book titled Folktales for Existentialists.

This is something I have been thinking about a lot as well, but from a different angle of approach. It is inte…

While I am fully onboard with the idea of existing in a latent state as the baseline and only surging and spik…

Now that I read my comment again, I can certainly see why you would think this, Venkat. But thankfully (or per…

Thanks for the response, K! So I do see where Venkat got the sense he did, and I hear you too. I am definitely…

This was an awesome read! I am in an almost identical boat personally so I felt like my thoughts were echoed r…

It has always happened with anything that has a transactional nature and a time-decay consideration, which is …

There's definitely that consideration, Karl. The point is not to dismiss the value of experience and wisdom, b…

I have a much less complicated, possibly oversimplified way of deconstructing “random acts of X” behavior. To …

Admittedly, I wasn't aware of which one came first! Although it also sounds like the phrase was pretty success…

When you are in the middle of a crisis, it helps to articulate what you are really solving for, because people…

Beautifully written, Venkat! The one caveat to the idea of an inevitable, graceful slide into infirmity is so…

I don't know if this was intentional, but this is Buddhism 101 right here. The Four Noble Truths arranged arou…

The question then becomes, can a convergence on a "there is no grand narrative" narrative itself induce any me…

Reminded me of something I had come across a few days ago...apparently a quote by Ted Bauer. "For a small am…

Thanks Venkat! That piece is excellent and perhaps even more relevant today! I also feel like the recent Ark H…

You’ve touched upon a bunch of different aspects of your situation here, Venkat. And I can relate to almost al…

There’s a very peculiar kind of introspective, retrospective melancholy energy in this piece but one that isn’…

"What interests me a lot more is people who are relentlessly resourceful in the larger game of ordinary life, …

This made for a fantastic read! It is a subject that I have thought about long and hard for over a decade now,…

"Once a term had escaped to a subculture that dominates usage, it no longer belongs to the originator. In fact…

In my experience, SoS conflicts are always an expression of either actual/perceived scarcity, a deep seated in…

Have you noticed some people actually revel in navigating this kind of arbitrariness? For example, my dad. He …

Identify 100% with this. One aspect that has catalyzed this slide for me has been social media. It has devalue…

This is an impressive abstraction. Yet your criterion might benefit from the inclusion of some anthropological…

I've recently made use of the ideas of posturetalk and cluelessness as a way to describe the use of snark and …

Dr. Graeber, aside from the thin skinned, dare I say reactionary, comments how is this a good demonstration of…

This is a version of a speech I've given before to a pair co-workers who had a spat in the middle of a (limite…

Either way it doesn't matter, but my comment is an attempt force his hand, so that Venkat will know one way or…

I think the forum is a good idea.

Venkat, are you implying or insisting that there is only one good, or "right" way to creatively engage in self…

Dan, I'm not sure how to respond to something like that. Maybe you are in a position to "Make a Choice" but th…

Look, I'm not in the mood for a flame war. If you thought my posts were prideful then why didn't you say so …

I can work along those lines. Let me take a crack at clarification. I'm trying to get at the insistantance o…

>>I am not sure why you would expect effort in one domain to lead to deliver rewards in another<< That wasn't…

Given your many thoughts on the future I would wonder what you would make of the, La prospective movement. And…

Do I detect a hint of loathsomeness with such observations? Universal ("Art History" styled) critques necess…

I'm rather surprised. A thesaurus is the recognized source for the, "interchangability of words." Just as "in…

"I seem to have a talent for championing lost causes." I would disagree with this. You seemingly create new c…

That's an artful dodge if I ever saw one. Everyone here overthinks, you could level that very same critique …

I'm very intuitive and I trust my instincts. We are surly at cross-purposes, I think the internet by design …

So, out of a genuine interest, Venkat, within the scope of your own work, you have no concerns about your own…

Look, I'm not that smart but come on dude...

And you don't take my questions seriously enough... Thanks for the honesty and demonstration that my question…

I would rather not break into a thread that I feel I have no place in however In the interests of leveling I w…

This is the first post of yours that hasn't really gotten my hackles up. I was, perhaps mistakenly, reading i…

how “information work” scales This is a huge question in and of itself. And one that all those involved in …

Venkat, the Internet, as a technology, does you no justice. Or at the very least it is a barrier to proper (…

Zarathustra crisis Transcendence is both a noble and priviledged, goal. Those who are able to actualize or …

Such reduction seems odd given your own self-espoused desire for deep understanding. The fact you don't seem …

you appear to be masochistically subjecting yourself to stuff that makes you deeply unhappy For all your com…

The Internet is still frequently perceived as a world apart, or onto itself, in parallel to the ‘real’ world. …

Pardon me Venkat, but isn't that somewhat absurd? Technology is a decentralised human enterprise not a collect…

That's sounds great. My counter-point is that all that data doesn't help you in any imaginable or useful way w…

I think my critical disposition is too often interpreted the wrong way. As people always seem to take the perc…

I tell you that this is an incorrect reading of me, I am none of those demons you imagine. However, I have lea…

Why I read, and why I think I must continue reading are not going to be easy to explain to you. You keep wanti…

For perhaps the first time in history, through much of the world, there is no physical countryside of simple, …

I emphatically disagree with the notion notion that the "cloud" is anything more then a layer of data and exte…

I do live in the, "physical countryside" and enjoy the benefits of the community there. What and who exactl…

I share the opinion of the other comments here when it comes to the table. That said, I am highly wary of "r…

That was an interesting read, thank you. However I am still not sure how it demonstrates "refactored" percep…

Odysseus didn’t use models, the IDF does. I would clarify this. Officers as planners build models, yet in a…

I'm not 'dogging' I am seeking to understand. You may not see that, but curiosity is what drives my questions.

When you are faced with higher fabricatory depth than you are used to, it seems like magic This has an odd r…

Hmm... does it really matter who is or isn't the metaphorical magician: the "process itself" or those who phys…

Very engaging read. I find my thought revolving around the pragmatic "relativism" or "contingency" involved …

Are we necessarily assuming agency is arbitrary? Perhaps this is where the scientific scaffolding breaks dow…

Perhaps I may use these interpretations to attempt a contrast. These approaches are somewhat rooted in the li…

I've never liked the term "post-industrial." I think it is fatly incorrect, in that American kind of way (Amer…

Speaking as a celiac - you chose the wrong example there. Yes its a fad diet, which I too hate, almost as much…

I suppose so, just don't forget the part and promise that "real" science itself plays. Any discussion of scien…

I'm inclined to see this as a "rose tinted" view of the internet. Because everything is so "accessible" a "p…

You are taking me out of context, I was responding to Nancy about the internet (and specifically open source …

I didn't think it was possible to separate one from the other.

All of the words in question are synonyms for trust. Recursion and ritual provide the functional framework on …

Mike, I disagree with the characterization of trust as "transactional." My experiance with trust has everythin…

Assuming you are treading on the same intellectual ground as that you link to; you are well beyond "primal." …

I like to think my experience with the military has given me perspective on group motivations and individual f…

That picture, the "manifesto" or "expressive political act" is more a rhetorical feint then then an actual pol…

If that's the case then I think you are over-thinking the meaning of manifesto. I would argue that you are loo…

Josh, sorry to drag the discussion into an area you aren't comfortable with. I was enjoying the conversation. …

I have to contest the suggestion that all authority is "seeing" and/or "being seen." Such a definition ignores…

These notions of "legibility" at times are seemingly in willful denial of the ready knowledge of what might be…

Here is a link highlighting the tragic side of the "loss of wits" accompanied with the networked technology yo…

Link for the above Death By GPS http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/30/3362727/death-by-gps-in-desert.html

This makes me wonder where Industrial R & D engineers, chemists, mathematicians and perhaps even some start-up…

Is writing itself necessarily indicative of "the" self? Literary critics have argued over this stuff for years…

I think you are conflating the ideas of indoctrination and automation. This is hinted at by your choice of ex…

In an odd sort of way Venkat buy using "tradesman" rather then "craftsman" you kind of hit at a debate that go…

Kay, I think the prevailing paradigm you mention, the only one some start ups seem to think exists. Algorithms…

Kay, any walk through the Smithsonian will show the innumerable attempts to "improve the quality of life" of t…

Anthony, I think your biases are getting the better of you. You would never be in a position to make the stat…

I suppose from my "doer" perspective I find the notion of "social evolution" somewhat at odds with my own expe…

G You beg the question. Is there any place where such behaviors do not exist? Human trafficking still exist…

This line of thought strikes me as an elaborate apology for the failure of business leaders to foster cultures…

I saw plenty of “expertise is inversely proportional to distance,” and as I stayed on projects over time, my “…

So is the portal or flag only applicable within the man-vs-man dialogue (with or without audience) or does it …

We all suffer. We all die. That is human reality in the "real" world. In the space between birth and death,…

Now I'm going to spend my holiday weekend meditating on the abacus, which already suggests that I'll tend left…

Sorry, I've got to agree with Bob. This guest poster shamelessly exploited a historical anecdote to shill som…

As an attorney, which is just another way of saying I'm a story teller, I appreciate the defense of case-based…

Another great paradigm for self analysis. I admit, I was a bit disappointed to realized that according to you…

Thanks for the review. And don't feel guilty about your fascination with "povertynomics." I share it, and I …

I found the analogy to the One Ring very insightful because it brings the semiotic role of the product into th…

I find it mildly ironic that I am self-validating your post by indulging in idleness at work just now by readi…

I'm not an engineer, but I like how they think about things. Two concepts that I especially appreciate are "t…

A very thought provoking post, well-worthy of attention. I will definitely be looking at the books you've rec…

I don't know if it is as robust currently, but the jihadist stream to Al Qaida/Taliban operations in Afghanist…