Top Comments

I feel like you deliberately dodged defining "intelligible" for exactly the same reasons that all the dualists going back to Plato made perfectibility of the soul equivalent to

My knowledge of biology and replicator theory is even poorer than my CS, but... Biology is profoundly humbling to a programmer, showing that 0% programming

What you describe as your hypothetical "version 3" is basically what we think humans actually already are. According to the teachings of Vedanta, the karana sarira

While I am fully onboard with the idea of existing in a latent state as the baseline and only surging and spiking strategically as needed, I have to say

What if we distinguish two kinds of optimization strategies: (a) maximizing a certain parameter (leading to excellence on that dimension), and balancing a multitude

In three of the Latin Languages, making money is described using the same verb that means 'to win,' Spanish ('ganar'), Portuguese ('ganhar'), French ('gagner')

I recently had the experience of natural childbirth: 57 hours of labor, 25 of them active, including three hours of transition and two of pushing.

Yes, and there is some fascinating stuff there... Jack Parsons, a Pasadena-born self-taught explosives expert, talked himself into the rocketry lab at n

A few years back I wrote an essay on John Henry here: ow.ly/yaVFB. My take on the fable, in Venkat's terms, is that John Henry is actually playing an infin

Theory: "cultural ether" is an unconscious mental heuristic expressing a preference for polyculture vs monoculture. There are plenty of sound, non-magical arguments to prefer polyculture

Having started out my working career as a blacksmith, I'd like to add a few things. Iron is much more forgiving to work with than bronze. Wrought iron, the orig

I am impressed! This very clearly elaborates on a number of frustrations I have been experiencing recently. One of those frustrations I have taken to calling "the cult

Hi Venkat, There is indeed an entire field of research devoted to the evolution of computer programs. The main approach is generically called "Genetic Programming".

Have you read Christopher Alexander yet? This post seems to build upon some of his main ideas, especially his theory of design: The best forms evolve incrementally

I had been mulling over delving back into Nietzsche for about a week before reading this piece, and this treatment of dense writing and aphorism was enough to

It started as a nice essay but it quickly turned into self-congratulation. Rao, something you should consider is that we all have what you call the theocratic mindset

In reading this article, and considering a different context, I wonder about the scalability of each model (sales, marketing, PR). The example I had in mind was the recent municipal election in Calgar

Condensation faces the same hard limits that all data compression does. It will be lossy, lossless, or need to use pointers to data assumed to be shared.

I'd agree with Alex Ragus above. I think there are at least two different types of density, and at least one of "apparent density". With regards to the former, density can be achieved through compactn

Where to hook this up to Latour is with Graham Harman's book on Latourian politics, Reassembling the Political, where he links Latour's Copernican revolut

I understand the emulation model of virtue ethics you are proposing, but Christian ethics (at least in the Catholic tradition) are firmly rooted in Aristotlian ethics

Where have all the dodos gone? Dead as a dodo ... you've heard that phrase before, but is the dodo really gone? Is it really extinct? Well, is our good

Long post. TLDR: Apple is right about the iPad. Many tablet efforts tried to get a full-fledged computer onto that form factor, using the same GUI paradigms

Somewhat complementary to your system of social objects are what I suppose you would term "social anti-objects". That is, objects of mutual disdain that a group organizes around.

I think your contrarian reading of "flow" is accurate under conditions of ossification of the field-superego - like in the types of highly circumscribed fields studied by

The most interesting period in history to me is 15,000 - 10,000 BCE, for much the same reason: for whatever mystery, anatomically modern humans, who had been

This discussion has some very interesting implications for the economic theory of the firm originated by Ronald Coase. Coase argues that firms exist because within their boundaries

Pettiness and overconfidence fit nicely with Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's "interactionist' or "argumentative" view of reason (presented in "The Enigma of R

I'm not sure I agree that the pre-urban world was quite so clearly divided into firends and strangers (unless you mean a completely pre-civilisation world of hunter-ga

On "fun": fun is work done within a Magic Circle—a demarcation of space and time, where consequences inside the Circle do not affect consequences outside

Rick, you take the words out of my mouth. When smart guys who know better take an extremist position, there's usually context. I have spent 5 minutes in my armchair

Sorry Venkat, but I think it is time to eat your own dog-food. I'm a Canadian, and a committed liberal cosmopolitan like you, but as a systems thinker

I've always been a little bit uneasy about the definition of "decision" in these types of discussions. I think it tends toward being overly broad. I think most of

Ok, this is a cool idea, but it does kind of miss the point of how geological periods are defined. A marker event needs to be chosen — a "golden spike".

The association between cake and death is almost certainly from the game Portal, in which your character is pushed by an autocratic AI to solve a series of puzzles

Topology doesn't care whether something's flat or curved. For an easy example, the line y=0 and the curve y=sin(x) are topologically the same.

As I understand your question, the correct answer is yes. A bare photon travels at the speed of light, but we see light moving through materials (like water) at a slower speed.

Funnily enough, Machiavelli already used a similar model in The Prince, and I was going to mention this before I saw your comment. He pointed out that it would be harder to conquer the kingdom of

Been thinking about this a bit more from the perspective of teaching and learning. It seems to me that the job of educational materials is to support shle

Both 4HWW and PUA are market hacks in that they exploit market inefficiencies with minimal barriers to entry. They are not creating true wealth except to the degre

A key dynamic that seems missing from this (*very* good - the "might need to reframe my thinking" kind of good) analysis is that one of two political partie

I once attended a lecture by famous French logician Jean-Yves Girard, who is famous for his idiosyncratic, often rude remarks. He said that there are two kinds

Think about it this way. Each running process has a certain degree of variation that is statistically analyzable. Make 1000 widgets, and 50 are defective.

While the metaphor that initiated this thinking - the thrust-drag coefficient in physics - has generated an insight into time management that I think is very valid. I think the metaphor could be quite

Your definition of humanism makes some sense, but it isn't much like any of the standard definitions of humanism that I'm familiar with.

Hey! Thanks for continuing to put out such interesting and well-thought observations, it's disheartening to me sometimes how rare that is in anything I read

Venkat, We izzz a long time reader, but first time poster! my preciousssssss :-D! Sounds funny when I write ;-) Your fixation (penchant, just to sound

The last time I took a walk one night I walked about 12 miles along sidewalks from 7pm to 1am. During that time there was no one outside of their homes.

The idea of the Dirac sea is certainly related, but I think that the concept I am referring to can be more directly described as vacuum fluctuations.

The middle class is something of a myth: it's always been a population of folks trying to Trade Up. Thorstein Veblen had a great deal to say about this phenomenon

Two forms of authority: 1) the single external 'eye' 2) participatory - all monitoring each other Where does this leave Mother and Father? Take some idealised

You make thoughtful points here. Thank you. But there are a lot of logical leaps, and so the post feels more like a buffet of clever ideas than an explanat

I think the real problem is about half of all commentary is at the wrong abstraction level. People exchange inexact words that ephemerally and inexactly patch

Pattern recognition and compression. I got very frustrated early on with some of the conventional wisdom you address here, particularly the notion that you need to identify a target audience

This post seemed like an exercise in trying to philosophize away people you don't understand or don't agree with. I think that the sexy/schleppy division is re

Thanks for writing this up Venkatesh. This is a really thought-provoking post. I'm no philosopher, but I too have been thinking about some of these same ideas

I am reminded of a quote by a programmer known only by his online persona as '_why the lucky stiff'. "When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes

I think there are many more facets that need to be investigated for a truely useful theory of stuff which I'm sure you'll get to in your future posts.

I don't think you can conflate the GroupOn Ponzi scheme with the sharing economy, though - even if you ignore the Ponzi aspects of that particular endeavour.

Venkat, Great post. Lots of stuff to think about. Locusts, cancer cells, and human psychopaths all share a common thread: local (individual or species) fitness at t

This is a fun and interesting series of posts but it has one flaw: You don't seem to get "The Office" on a couple of points. The main thing that you're missing is that the Michael Scott character is w

As someone who's always been interested in physical theory, I've been trying to think back to my first moment of satisfied philosophical hunger, and I just can't

The barbarian/civilized distinction is not actually a matter of distinct groups but of the prevalence of each type within a given group. A barbarian group will have its

I'm interested in poking a bit more into how our idea of "creativity" relates to your sexy vs. shleppy distinction. The essence of "creative" fields

Kevin - Nicely done, and largely convergent with Charles Tart's not-very-well-known book _States of Consciousness_ (1975), which was decades ahead of its time.

Back to the point - let's step back and see what is it you are trying to achieve here. You want all the contributors to the value chain get their fair share...

Interesting concept. I'm trying to think of possible streams, based on my experiences of living in China on-and-off the last few years. Not sure if I understood your model perfectly...

Long time reader, first time commenter. I'd like to weigh in from the perspective of a (semi) insider. I have been working at a social media marketing firm...

It was my understanding that Aristotlean ethics are rather *explicitly* defined in relation to the actions of subjectively "great" men (Pericles being the quoted

Unfortunately, this analysis ignores the most intrinsic and fundamental difference between games and real life in that we get to choose what games we want to play

Well, you are not alone. I assume you have read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology". There is an old joke cum observation that has been applied to

There are two types of problems: technical problems, where there is a "solution" that can be enacted should everyone agree to do so. Engineers are very

I think you miss out an important part of the civilization/pastoral nomadism thing: Preperation vs flight. You suggest that it's about day to day consumption vs accum

Congratulations and good luck. This is a very gutsy move, so hats off to you for taking the leap, and for the others in your life to allow you to do so.

Bravo. When I was involved with various nonprofits I got the "real world" line from business people. My experience with businesses, including successful high tech

Venkat, I like your way of developing thoughts of this kind, but I'm not sure it is all historically sound. You say, "This explains why more primitive

I am failing to intuit something about this 2x2 and at risk of sounding silly, I'm going to write out my thinking. It strikes me as odd that the x-axis is a static, subj

Outstanding! I found this whole discourse, including the highly insightful diagram a perfect map by which to diagnose all my own successes and failures in a corporate life

Excellent post again. I like the way you take data points we all have access to, and weave them into a consistent and compelling narrative

Instead of big and little P-purposes we have self-referential trends and fashions which are generated from a self-observation of culture. Hipsters don't sell

When you say most people do real-time decision making, this is not true. When you are merely reacting to things, you are actually 1 step *behind*.

The words "decision-making skill" imply that greater skill gets one closer and faster to a desired outcome whereas poorer skill does the opposite. The desired outcome itself is assumed...

As the aforementioned Flatfingers (thanks for the cite, Rodrigo!), I should note that the model I've put together of four playstyles in the computer gaming context are explicitly not a hierarchy.

Very nice. However, I think you miss the point regarding overperforming losers. Many losers realize full well the reality of reorgs, mergers, and layoffs, and know

I read the Popular Mechanics article as well as the full BEA report. A real WTF moment for me was the Airbus design decision to average (!!) wildly disagree

I enjoy this but from an admittedly egotistical point of view: you've described my thought process, too. I'm a storyteller, mostly of fiction, but I loved math

I have followed you for years, with mostly positive results. I am disappointed at your decision to perpetuate a shallow understanding of an experience you will never have

Venkatesh, re-read this again more earnestly. This is quite simply one of the best, as-objective-as-possible-with-minimal-inherent-religiopolitical-biases narratives of the Indian condition.

Okay, here's a slightly different question. If we are Gollumized by consumer culture and trapped into producer work roles, which, no matter how interesting

I find myself agreeing and nodding along with most of your specific criticisms, yet unwilling to agree with the thrust of the whole... A nit-pick to make is

I understand (and agree with) the locust analogy as it applies to things like GroupOn: GroupOn encourages businesses to engage temporarily in self-canibalizing

First of all, thank you for writing this. I am working my way out of one of those troughs in the mindful learning curve and simply recognizing it as such makes

This explains why "platform thinking" is a misnomer. The most interesting platforms provide more freedom to others to do things in new ways.

Some slightly-relevant quotes (bonus points if you can name the sources without using Google): "Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere...

Strong ideological frameworks will adapt I think, carrying forward blends of wishful thinking, ignoring of data and sensemaking after the fact...

You may be underestimating the degree to which subcultures are also "resistant to industrial-scale attention-mining techniques". I won't quibble with your overall

Just read Vanity Fair's take on the dispute over whether The Goldfinch is "real" literature and immediately thought of this post... it precisely explains the

Venkat, have you watched the AMC TV series "Mad Men"? There is sooo much more William Whyte played out there. Also the movie "Revolutionary Road"

Been following the blog for a while; first time I have felt moved to comment. LEAN production ideals are useful in the setting of manufacturing, where process analyt

This article is great. It goes into detail in what Kiyosaki mentions but never goes into great lengths for. That is, he uses narrative but doesn't explain the process.

While he does use a few conceptual arguments. For example, he counters the "global homogenization" criticism with the reframing that more diverse choices for everybody

Fantastic post. Very thought provoking. A few thoughts: The early 16th Century also contained two powerful revolutions that enabled mercantilism...

A great post and a fascinating history lesson! Those (south Asians in particular) who forget their history are doomed... However, you may have skipped over the primary inducement

In a way, all thinking is modelling. And to borrow your language this is a nice fertile appreciative model. It certainly touches on an aspect of modelling behaviour that is frequently left out

A really great article. I very much enjoyed reading. This is probably worth at least two years of business school ;-) Anyway, in terms of "sufficient examples

I've just read all the mediocritia posts, and I admire your line of thinking. 1. Nature is mediocre - Organisms do not strive to "optimize performance." Surv

Venkat, I have only recently discovered you and your writings. I have been riveted. This is brilliant work and clearly what you should be doing. This particular

Thank you for this very helpful installment. It has given me some great insight into the dynamics of my own organization. We have had three re-orgs in the past fi

VGR, this is one of those bizarre coincidences... you seem to have posted this on May 4 second half US time, probably May 5 morning time here in India

I loved this essay. There is something about knowing the things a person carries regularly that exerts the strongest voyeuristic pull on me.

Venkat, A buddy sent me this post and I really appreciate your careful insight. I may not agree with some of your conclusions or recommendations

CONTAINS SPOILERS to the novel The City & the City: The concept of competitive, alternating domestic cozy incursions into the common space made me

Sometime in mid-2009, I attended a real estate investment seminar. The guy talking was trained as a preacher, so he spent most his time shifting people's attitudes

Interesting article! It particularly interests me that your response to cubicles changed when your social relationship to the workplace changed. This is something I've been thinking about

Some thoughts provoked by a thought-provoking post. On hacking: An important dynamic to hacking, I feel, is that of gaming the system; of subverting

Not sure about the generalist vs particularist divide. First of all I'm definitely anti-particularist. For example I really dislike the obsession of the historical detail.

Venkat, I stumbled 3 weeks ago with ribbonfarm trying to order my thoughts about competition vs collaboration in organizations (specifically searching for Gareth Morgan

Following up on my comment above, we have a situation where the One Machine provides a sort of template or platform for the invention of new products. Makers just naturally try to explore

I came here to make Josh's point, but alas, I suppose I'll make another one instead. You propose subjective evaluations of cultural ether map to individual subj

I've been trying to figure out how to define the difference between "authentic" and "not authentic", because I sense there is a difference but couldn't describe it

It seems to me that cultural ether does not need to exist in order for one to believe there's a difference between Baltica Dry and some hypothetical

Really good primer on cyberpunk, which I've never really felt I had a good handle on. Very slippery stuff, as it seems to be defined inductively from reverse engineering influential works

Wow. This after the culture wars map (which was refreshingly serious for the important stuff discussed). Your usual snarky humor woven into original takes...

One more point that we all somehow missed: the tax benefit to investing in a surplus of time (over money) is enormous. This strategy incurs virtually no tax

So far, I have mostly found the fundamental ideas in your post solid and tried to discuss views or extensions to related aspects. For once, I like many points

A comment on your Lift talk which I want to leave here. There was a strange lack in your talk which also corresponds to a lack in Taleb's thinking.

I hope it's clear I'm not suggesting an atavistic reversion to some past set of patterns - that's impossible - rather, looking at past patterns for information

In essence, I am asking, precisely where is the predictive ("refractive"?) power suggested? Or, is there no predictive power and is understanding built moment

Hi Venkat, I've liked a lot of your writing and your saint/trader dichotomy is my favorite yet. You can see echoes of it in Lacan's writing about the anal

Wow, it's interesting to see how almost diametrically opposite we are on these positions: 1. Positive psychology will take a hit: To say that happiness is an org

Working in a "communication" company ( formerly an "entertainment" company ) I see where you're coming from in the concept of attention mining and attenti

A shortcut description of boat stories; a hero experiences, orients, gathers, returns to equilibrium. The story of progressive relaxations to equilibrium after discon

I'm not sure that this post hasn't gone completely over my head but I understand your main points to be: 1 - That the "Hydras Eat Unknown-Unkno

There are some rich investigation to be had in Ethnobotany, Anthropological/Historical Pharmacology and such like. And in particular the relationship between the predominant drug usage by think

An excellent definition of hacking, the best I've seen. "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" is often misunderstood to mean eyes looking at source code.

So the "don't care" people add no value to making decisions based on a distinction, whether they see it or not, whereas the people who care will emphasise a distinction even when they don't know

Without undermining your meta-narrative, which I find stimulating and, at least with respect to myself, somewhat accurate (I am a lawyer with a lawyer-mind mindset); you oversimplify certain

Heheh, nice, I hadn't thought about the make-money thing in a while. It was a thought experiment in the same theme as this paper, that it isn't in our interest to make money

NI/NU noise classifications need periodic revisitation to guard against sudden, non-obvious warps to I/U. Example: road flares for your car. If you live in a flat place...

What I'm seeing in the four criteria of freedom is a lot of concepts that coincide with chaos theory. The trait of inscrutability makes me think of hysteresis...

It's interesting how Facebook would be the less-escaped reality. You're caught up in your day job, finishing up with a client, only to find out an hour later

I like the concepts here, but get fuzzy very quickly when trying to apply this to my job in a 1,000 person corporation with another 1,000 contractors.

I think there are three parts here; avoiding the "tragedy", the more nebulous concept of sharing compensation for value, and the problem of actually getting

I like the analysis, but I have to argue that you can do both. In fact, I think it's imperative to do both and all of the examples you listed actually DO

This post has altered how I think about product development. Until reading this, I considered myself to be a true believer in lean startup methodology. You've convinced me that it is fundamentally fla

Are you familiar with Ibn Kaldun's notion of asabiyah? I learned about it through Peter Turchin's work. He has a lot to say about the center/periphery dynamic...

I felt a whiff of high modernism in this post. Could it be that you are simply trying to legibilize a pattern or a structure (that you have termed stack luck)

Just found this blog and am enjoying it immensely - you think good. I'm not at all sure about the drummer/dancer implications, though. My experience includes decades

In 1940, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren published a book entitled, 'How To Read A Book'. It expresses much of the 'intentionalist' readin

Great post. Ask your mother why she adheres to tradition X. Chances are she won't know, but she will be very insistent that it be 'forwarded' to the next generation.

There's a certain fascinating engineering thinking that goes on when people try to consider the minimum standards under which poor people can live. It's very similar to the protein packs and recycled

I agree, this could look simple as a big picture model. but multi-stream fluid dynamics are rarely simple on a micro level. Accurate local weather prediction

This is an impressive abstraction. Yet your criterion might benefit from the inclusion of some anthropological notions alongside the sociological ones. This would concern your comments

"I actually can't think of a single great end-user open source product that is not a clone of a commercial original" Although I agree with this impression I think it is a misleading one

I'm a fan and actually got Virginia Tech to buy your book, which I'm reading. Your ideas are wild. For the most part, though, short form seems to best medium

Many aspects of the nature and impact of money are entertainingly covered in The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. It's a richly rewarding read.

In no particular order: * The phenomena of being able to choose your career is somewhat of a modern social change. A more appropriate rhyme for much of civilization would have been p

For some reason this post sparked lots of semi-disconnected thoughts in my mind: 1. The motivation of false hope (maintained via intermittent reinforcement)

A year ago you gave the optimistic prognosis that the culture wars will end in the early 2020s. Does that still hold under the revised big picture?

I disagree; just because every room has a smartest guy doesn't invalidate the principle of trying to avoid being said guy, even if you may sometimes fail.

How does this vision of the future of work, as dominated by free agents, fit in with the McLeod Hierarchy / Gervais Principle? I can think of two interpreta

I'm more in line with Marc Harmann's assessment. Most importantly, it's an overall broken system or rather a system that is working well for less than desirable purposes

I'm not sure that we are as far long on the cycle as you seem to suggest in your last section. I do not think that we have yet seen most of what, 50 years from now, will be understood as the Internet.

Stack luck is knowable, computable, and manipulable. It is just not reasonable. Yeah, but it seems you never go much further into unreason than surfing on

Actually, I'm trying to get away from ontology and onto epistemology, which I think is where a lot of these problems get cleared up, or at least reframed enough so

excellent article. many ancient indians had solved this puzzle of 'internal government' there are 4 entities inside us, which work in a parliamentary fashion.

I hung on every word as you described my 20s (all 10 years of which were spent working with VC-backed startups as well as starting my own by the end)

The big, dark secret of the lifestyle design movement is failed relationships (or failure to even form relationships). Touché. But then who has rel

One of the main signs of these ideologies is the notion that a qualitative problem (quality of life) can be solved by a quantitative one (indefinite lifespan), Not at all.

What do you mean by 'fundamentally sustainable'? Not a rhetorical question. Nature is basically a furious, shifting dynamic equilibrium of a bunch of fundamentally unsustainable

"The open source world, as a result, has produced far more original products for programmers than for end users." The computer skills of end-users are determined by the softw

I think you are also missing another dynamic in the economy - the return of the aristocracy due to scale effects. People who win the various cultural pro

I was at the London Ribbonfarm meetup a few weeks ago. Something interesting: there were a few Lesswrong readers there, although Ollie, the organiser, had neve

Once you "see" the next trough on your way up, anything too much past it is a purely temporal benefit. Should I perfect combustion cylinders and fuel injection or start designing electric cars?

I am in agreement with the several other commenters above who are expressing doubts about points 3 & 7. I suspect the disagreement stems from the ambiguity of

In marketing literally every single brand is trying to court "Millennials" (a nebulous group aged about 18-30) . It's hammered to death, and recognized as

Hello Venkat I've been reading your blog for some time and always look forward to some thought-provoking arguments appearing on my feed. However, one thing bo

Thanks for the shout out. I agree with the additional insight that it is easier to gamble (or invest) from an excess of one or the other than from a

Sorry i didn't read all the comments. Having lived in Brasília for 10+ years, i find the whole argument very interesting, enticing really, but utterly un

I don't think it's that. After all, the traditional attention commodity of television advertising mined the attention of exactly the most passive attention

Do you have an equivalent pithy name for the dominant Gen X aesthetic? As Gen X myself, I relate to this "domestic cozy" much more than the alien

Of course, you have to be in the right place for the world to conspire to make you a winner despite your mediocrity, elevating you to godhood via blessed storms

Interesting. A definitional question: If natural language encompasses "mathematics and other general symbolic representation systems," why doesn't it also encompass software code?

IMHO lawyers are part of the category I refer to as "protectors" or "defenders," whose role is to protect others from attack by predators and parasites.

I enjoyed the article and found myself wondering if the fact that existential terror is a part of life in places like Israel and Estonia are the cultural

Long-time-listener/first-time-caller: I've been thinking about this all morning. Provocative; stimulating; vexing; suggestive. Excellent. "The Hero is drawn out

Spoken like someone who doesn't have kids. When you're single, or dating, or married with no kids, the script is easy to throw out. Unfortunately

A particularly good example of the pricelessness/free divide can be seen in relation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is bound legally to provide

Great discussion- more please. I think Thomas Lord hits the nail on the head. Michael Scott is a prime example of "The Fool Triumphant," in author/scre

This is an awesome series! The one thing that seems missing when I get to the end is the article on straight talk. You skip over it because it doesn't happen

I found the analogy to the One Ring very insightful because it brings the semiotic role of the product into the relationships that partially define personal meaning.

What I got from Sterling's "stop acting dead" speech (Reboot 11) is that the options for retiring to metaphorical farms are disappearing.

This is why, I suspect, your book struggles against your blog. In order to adequately explore concepts in Tempo, it assumes a slow build-up of a whole set

Something that might be worth looking into is the concept of picoeconomics. I think the best general introduction is Breakdown of Will (I'm reading it now).

I don't really follow your logic. You said "[Technology] is about increasing ability to stop pretending to be what we're not. About taboos falling away and fewer things being

I dunno about covid, but I am extremely familiar with the noun-retrieval problem. In summer 2016, I had a moment like you describe, where I mentally reached

Interesting. I'm not a psychologist, and most of my knowledge of the extrovert/introvert divide comes from various second hand online sources and business books

The NFL as a metaphor suffers from what Taleb calls the "ludic fallacy" - the belief that life is like a game. It's a closed system with a small pool

Very interesting, I've been thinking about this for a bit, particularly the observation that computer games drift closer to Ludus than Paedia. There are a few games

I think there are ways to move from a very asperg-ish state of mind to a very holistic one, here's an example, although it may end up being longer than your post

1. Subtly or sharply, all relationships diverge. Hold each for its time, and not longer. (A rule about breaking relationships) 2. A partnership requires frequent mutual

"Guiltware" is a great term, thank you Brandon. My policy with "Sita Sings the Blues" is DON'T give if it hurts. People give because it feels good.

Interestingly, the 60s counterculture was explicitly anti-rectangle, reflected in their embrace of the geodesic dome (circles and triangles) and use of

I do a bunch of marginal reading in bed, often using my Android phone (Nexus One). Let me point out that I (personally) detest "mobile-friendly" versions of almost

BTW, I really don't like the "saints" terminology. The prototypical guardian is a cop or soldier or something like that, and while we expect them

In section "The Enactment of Authority" you allude to it, but I think the model in general is missing the necessity of a belief of desire for the gaze

Something about the way you construct sentences is a bit off putting. The net effect is that it makes simple ideas complex sounding.

The key difference is how each of these species comes to know what it knows. Hedgehogs are foundationalists with centralised small-world belief networks, and foxes are coherentists

"If we continue, as we do today, to pretend that priceless things are literally rather than poetically priceless, we will continue with our grand display

A quick thought on grand narratives (or, for that matter, on any narratives). Should we view them more as prescriptive (Pigs/sociopaths shaping the world) or as descriptive (pigs and prey acting indiv

I have to admit at the beginning of this series I was incredibly wary of what I have found to be your tone, terminology, and attitude more than your actual

Did you mention your post on humans as the short-buffer/long-buffer switches? Facebook, Twitter, news aggregators all have us little rats hitting the reload button

Solid post on many of the surrounding concerns, and kudos for keeping it balanced on Freud vs. Mainstream (post-1950s-ish) Psychology. While Freud was wrong about a lot of things...

I am currently sitting in a nearly-empty apartment after a pretty extreme stuff shock. We (me, wife, 2 kids) liquidated nearly all our stuff and moved to a

Venkat, A fitting choice to conclude this series as it is the strongest work of them. This one was through provoking enough that it took me some time and a couple reads

I'm skeptical that a Globalization folkway will ever develop. I think the ethic of transcending culture is too great among those who would form this new culture.

Actually I agree with most of what you've said -- part of what technology has done is that they've dismantled a lot of the artificially created rhythmic cycles

Interesting history but don't think the case you make for less power for corporations is very strong though. The only data I noticed in the blog is on the prop

Fernand Braudel spends a good amount of time in Vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism discussing the discovery of distillation of hard liquor and the origins

Quick, random-esque comments: 1) You and Taleb are more alike than I-think-that-you-think-you-are. Your eloquent phrasing of: GP showed me that categorical views

Surely, by your own argument, your meta-ideological-simulation ideological simulation expects that the ideological simulations are Potemkin assembl

It's inaccurate to claim that 'new age' popped up in the 60s -- to do so ignores probably the most interesting new age / silicon valley connection.

This is a very interesting conjecture. I fully agree that computing is the largest disruption to hit the planet in some time, but I am not sure that the target

Nicely written, as usual Venkat, and very entertaining. Unfortunately, I see two major flaws in this fable. First it makes the Rousseau/Locke mistake

A fascinating article. I may have missed a key point here, but you seem to imply that the value (in terms of satisfaction rather than $) created for the artisanal

It is remarkable, right? I am really only seriously trained in thinking about slow-moving things at the smaller-than-a-planet scale, so I can't claim

One quite notorious overlook here is the creation of the modern limited liability (LTD) corporation. This occurred in the middle of the 19th century. Some sources say 1862

Take your example of direction-finding. Maps are a pretty new interface for figuring that out - and since people make maps using language, they're a pretty social interface.

This sounds like a fascinating book and I definitely look forward to reading it. This leads me to a similar realization that I've only recently been able to articulate.

The freedom you describe looks like negative freedom, freedom from the constraints of collectives through leadership over them (or perhaps distance from them).

Why do you think it is necessary to go through Act I to get to Act II? If Act II is a purely internal affair and Act I is about collecting external markers

That is an extremely charitable interpretation, since it has a very different form than the claim quoted. This isn't even the most egregious statement made. The idea that

O.K. I have looked at it. It is non-sensical. The whole idea of the decision loop is rather linear (in a time sense) in the first place. In a complex situation

Let me open with a mildly hostile formulation: Happy 40th birthday! Now for the real challenge: are you sure you are on the Socio-Path, or rather just an anti-so

I look forward to the follow-up article where you disassemble this issue into its constituent parts and end up offering the conclusion that a 25-year-old girlfriend is/isn

Hi Venkat, if you like shipping containers you should see what we do with them in Christchurch, New Zealand. We had a force 7.1 earthquake in September

It's impossible to communicate emotional experience verbally. Isn't that what art tries to do? It does bother me that we can't really mature as a species until we find

Both GPS and intertial-based navigation are both based placing you in the same abstract, featureless coordinate system, they just have different ways of doing it.

I've been binge reading this series since I discovered it, and I must say it's one of the most fascinating pieces I've read in a while. Your writing style...

Having read "The apparent variety and uniqueness in our personalities is as illusory as the apparent variety in what we consume..." I was immediately

Locusts are an excellent, easily gatherable, source of protein. They often provide -better- nutrition during a swarming event than the crops they displace...

Your observation near the end of this post, that Facebook creates a false harmony based upon caution, reminds me of Bentham's panopticon prison.

Your analysis of the double-take zone with respect to old social equals whom time and space has contextualized has crystalized for me why I dislike the social

You're a most interesting writer and thinker, but I have trouble telling what this is about. I just got, and am reading (and sometimes listening to via synth

A thought-provoking article, and one in which where "The Secret" is quoted I still haven't been able to get a handle on. Well done. One point, though.

A pernicious coping mechanism is the selection effect on meaning making. If one model of fun is the perception of danger minus actual danger there is an analogous structure

Software has already eaten the world, which is why Breaking Smart 1 reads a bit like a defense of the status quo. It is Venkat wearing the mask of Fukuyama

I think the reason that so many people are bothered by wealth inequality per se is that being products of civilization, exponential outcomes are a relatively recent possibility.

I liked the "American Cloud" article better. This one felt a bit like a keynote-speech for executives. As I understand the original use of "deep play" by Geertz it is a social order which distributes

This whole discussion seems to ignore where the "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast" quote comes from - it's a quote from Drucker and it refers specifically to the pr

You're probably thinking of openness in terms of possible state state space? As in comparing a game with multiple branching points vs a narrative with a single sweep? That's actually a very different

There are two questions here. One is "why is nature a mathematical system?" Or, in other words, why do mathematical assumptions hold when applied to

As I understood the concept of "inner space" in Ballard, it is a regressive psyche which has been pulled out and is now all-over-the-place. It is in the birds

The conceptualisation of technology as "The One Machine" running on interchangeable parts is brilliant, but I don't think I agree with the framing of the rest of your post.

Something that's been missed here: the purpose of a truly capitalist zombie is not to create a perfect copy of the original, but to make money.

Okay, I get it. And your article is a good one, in my opinion. You raise and elucidate some very good points, and I like the idea of escaped reality.

Thanks, thinking it in terms of edge regimes makes complete sense to me now. Let me try to give it go.. In a sense, could the rules 7-12 be

Shannon might guess that the recitation practices were attempts at preserving the original form of the piece -- because Shannon showed that redundancy provides the means

Really enjoyed this essay. "Conditions degrade to maximally stress the survival intelligence available." Your comment that suffering and surviving are unstable conditions sounds quite

I'm not thoroughly versed in Lean Startup literature yet, but 'pivots' imply a sudden or drastic change in direction, which at first pass strongly reminded me

Evaporative cooling is a great metaphor. I think Twitter in particular has had something of a market for lemons problem, but probably less due to d

This is a pretty amazing article. I won't pretend to fully understand the deep technical details, but the concepts I do understand are stitched together

This is my favorite Ribbonfarm post so far this year. It's concrete, applicable, and indirectly makes your recent series of posts on the saint/trader personas less ethe

Really enjoyed this, thank you. As a practical matter, I've found that it can be difficult to express freedom and also engender confidence in professional settings.

I love it, and moreover, grok it. But still feel that there is a Kobayashi Maru type move for the truly great wherein you refuse to play choose

I'm just now learning about lean startup theory, but one thing that has been in the back of my mind is that if you start with a fairly radical vision of your ideal goal, pivoting accordin

Good thinking, Venkatesh. I myself would describe your concept not as 'thick strategy narratives' but as 'thick narrative strategies,' bc I believe the crucial

There's a simple reason why managers think carrots work: Because that's how you attract great employees in the first place. You offer people great money

What are some of the obstacles you would see to transcending the fox-hedgehog dichotomy? What are some of the ways to get closer to that? Some ideas that came

Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws

Thinking about these things over the past couple of days, some thoughts: I sense that there's a disconnect in our thinking about the nature of freedom. One kind of freedom

I am mentally stuck on your liberty vs. time chart. I don't see a turn-around. Full disclosure: I am a GenXer from middle America. On the whole...

"Computing disrupting language really is the mother of all disruptions." What about language itself? We can't even think of what language disrupted because we don't really know how to think without la

There is a certain limit to 3rd culture positivism, I guess. Our "tribe membership" with respect to a company is both a serious aspect of our lives

@tubelite — Ergo, the liminal->supraliminal transition must have happened in lockstep with language development, way before the Neolithic. How then to

Incorrect. You need to read the original research here, not a popularization. The cuckoo nests performed better on one metric (any successes) and worse on another

Sarah Perry's been talking about this stuff for a while now, and I commented something before about more complex dynamics where we do not merely recognise patterns

Or we reward hip-hop artists with millions of dollars for their own particular brand of rhyming jargon. Actually, hip-hop is a great example of an incredibly "literate"

Venkatesh and I occasionally discussed the possibility of a-synchronous ritual systems -- like you, I tend to be skeptical about its actual implementation, although the internet

Shibusa became a guiding principle in my life after a decade of working with Japanese engineers. I live by two dicta: Honour Thy User and Data First.

Perhaps. Or (particularly in the context of this discussion) perhaps you need to consider refining your "sales/marketing/PR" strategy? > When a business grows

Fascinating point. I'm amused by the timing (!) of this post since I'm wearing a wristwatch for the first time in many years, and a mechanical watch that req

I personally think of Domestic Cosy as a sort of... palliative care, in a rather existential sense. There's something casually, almost cheerfully (and thus refreshingly)

Did you mean to link http://allthingsd.com/20100317/the-case-for-the-fat-startup/ instead of this blog in the second last paragraph? On this note, all evolved machines (living ones)

Is there nothing a 2x2 cannot do? And by that, I don't mean to imply that you are a "doer;" since I get the vibe that you'd prefer otherwise.

This is terrific and I am looking forward to reading what comes out of the Fellowship. Reading Tempo was very influential for me. Here is a half-formed thought.

It sounds like the effects of incentives and risk lurk closely behind your thinking on the categorisation of workers whether using your Gervais Princip

I've really enjoyed reading your book, and blog, and am excited to see how you will develop your writing and thinking. A few of my friends have caught the bug...

Very interesting. I didn't know that tin was so rare and the consequences for bronze. Metallurgy has always been a black art to me, and I could never understand how

I love the notion of trying to understand people through their dominant narratives. But I've always approached this spatially (across nations or cultures) rather than temporally

Hmm.... Well, drama is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but my parse of the episodes to which you (Venkat) refer is different: In the episode

I realize that "data" is not the plural of "anecdote" but I am moved to comment here because this brilliant article entirely explains my career trajectory.

A long awaited finishing piece, worth the wait. Thanks Venkat! When reading through it, the "game" parts reminded me of James Carse's "Finite and Infinite Gam

After reading your story, I feel your style as a fiction writer oddly enough resembles Borges because you don't just focus on the characters; you use your stor

I discovered your blog a few months ago and it has become my favorite. Your essays consistently surprise me. They make connections and explore concepts that I haven't

I would like to better understand your truth / happiness dichotomy. Above, you explained your version of truth (seeing the world as it is), which I can identify

Great analogy between machines and children, Venkat. I'd just like to point out that bacteria in the intestines are referred to as flora rather than fauna.

I enjoyed reading your post, Venkat. As usual it's a feast of new mental models; stimulating and sensible. What I'm struggling with is your apparent concern

I'm pretty sure the Blue State version of this is the idea that America was founded on the idea that "all men are created equal". Since the guy who wrote that

The mind expands like the universe, but the body does not ( yet ). That's why Nietzsche wasn't consistently nihilist but he inverted meaning and value instead

One thing I'm afraid has been blurred, particularly in this sidebar, is the work/life distinction. When I read the first Gervais Principle post, I (like most others

Counter-point: "The surface of another planet won't look like a California studio backlot or the Vasquez Rock formations where the original Star Trek shot so often

This seems to map to your 2x2 grid for thinking styles. NI/NU is opportunistic (and in that sense has a place in one's plans.) I/U would be procedural

I'm a slashdoter who started with The Office and I'm working my way back. Great food-for-thought stuff. Even as 100% dog I enjoyed this one

Quantification to the rescue? How quantified is a typical RbCbA? Does quantification affect decision-making? An example: In the worst possible case, it

The statement "innovation as a system of survival and preservation as a path to death" is something I've been thinking about. With reference to that, what are your th

Wo-ow. I suspect the flu somehow adds to the depth and intensity of your ongoing analysis :-) Some thoughts that got triggered: -Powertalkers are not only able

I notice a certain fairy-tale-like cadence to this story, especially with the repeating element of our character returning each with an incremented counter.

How very boring, Venkat, jumping on the "Trump's win is oh so scaaaary" bandwagon. ;-) With a bit of a pivot, we can take all the ideas you present here and explain why Trump is necessary at the momen

"... was socialism"? Actually that inverse pattern is not actually socialism but a state-monopolisation (arguably meant to be a staging point to genuine socialism).

In addition, to use Taleb's words (assuming you've gotten around to Antifragile), I'd say that synchronization severely cripples optionality Meeting a single dedicated

We probably use some sort of linear prediction that first over-estimates and then under-estimates the underlying exponential process, but where does that li

I've usually seen the siege of Atlanta tagged as the start of industrial land warfare, not WWI - with the Europeans seeing where Grant and Sherman's bloody-mindedness

If you don't believe in "cultural ether", how can you posit something that is a "high fidelity simulation" of it? This is the big flaw in zombie arguments

Thanks for the fast and thoughtful response :-) I think the Is-Ought issue is the key one, actually. Your accurate and creative insights into the role of sentiment in our cho

I'm sure you've read it, but this precise point was exactly what makes reading "The War Of Art" (Pressfield) so harrowing for anyone currently occupying

Your formulation of sanity as escape from the simpler (simplistic) known-quantity of death, contrasted with the popular conception that sanity is an ideal to adhere

In my experience, which has caused me to become rather more cynical on these fronts over the last year or so, content or process positions often rely more upon

Wow! This is the best review of a strategy book that I've read in years. I skimmed Blue Ocean Strategy and found is unsatisfying, but couldn't quite put my

God, this was such a thought-provoking piece. Raised questions I didn't even realize were worth asking — always my favorite kind of thing to read. That said...

Just after I hit submit on that, I regretted it. Partly because even I've given up on security for others. Previously, (say 4-6 years back), people would

Hi Venkat, I got confused two parts of your post. I'm in middle of angst and the "figuring it out" so this post was quite interesting, it would be a great h

This makes me really think about my (1) value internal to the company I work for vs. (2) the value I have in the free market.

Wonderful posting and it definitely prompted far more thoughts than I can capture here - would love to have a conversation on this. I have become increasingly engaged

Venkatesh, thanks for the post. Below are a few excerpts you may enjoy from an essay about the origins of the term "hacker," by UC Berkeley CS professor

Hi Venkat. I've been reading your stuff for a while now with great interest. I was identifying with Operator, Contrarian and Hacker (maybe leaning most toward Op

Hey Venkat, Thanks for the reply. I was under the impression that your post was philosophical and in the realm of abstraction rather than science, since there isn't any science of memory continuity

Hello Venkat, Your articles are thought provoking and I appreciate your time in creating and sharing them with the world. If memories were transferred to another

Reading a post titled "Ethereum, Slayer of Moloch" made me jolt upright and drop other things and start reading up on this immediately. You should read the post it is built on

Ever since I started studying (and then teaching) strategic foresight or design futures I like to say that the discipline can be seen as a small attempt to steer history.

My rationale came from this question that dominated the post: "Why should we do things that are NI/NU?" The answer to me seems to be that if you're only doing things

. Exactly. And I say that from experience. I am an American man who moved to Thailand at the young age of 60. Venkat wrote, "we move dozens of illegible variables

While I thoroughly enjoyed your post (and will have to read it again to understand more of it) I find myself wondering why you didn't mention (or probably

One quadrant is not "higher" than the other. Often you'll find that a new tactic developed under the gun informs a new doctrine, which then generates new

I really liked your post, "Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect" and its corollaries (Daemons and the Mindful Learning Curve and The Calculus of Grit)

I think you could have balanced T's as a matter of how much knowledge and expertise you have. It is possible to be very knowledgeable in one domain

Thanks for this post, along with your Quora answer it's made me think about my own efforts as a writer. At first I was finding it had to see the universality

There's work to be done on the history of cyberpunk, & I'm not sure how much of it has been done at all. After all, this is a genre that, in its pure form, lasted a pretty short time

Venkat, I have been reading your posts for sometime now but never commented because most of the time I couldn't comprehend all that you said or because I didn

Okay, behavioral vs cognitive outcomes is a helpful way of framing it, I think I see what you're getting at better now. But what that framing suggests to me

On first reading, I (who abhor sentimentality) find myself rooting for Team Grey. The extraversion of my youth and the practical necessity of constantly

I like this idea. I have not thought about applying the 4 forces as a mental model before. It got me thinking about mixing the idea with sociology and neuroc

I just read parts 1 and 2 of the Gervais Principle and this genealogy. This is really great stuff. I wonder if you have read Fukuyama's The End of H

I actually just found this series today, having arrived at this site maybe a week ago by way of one or another fairly influential curators of fine internet reading

Hello; Thank you for enlightening the experience we all had but didn't sit down and recognize. I guess something good comes from TV. I have one question:

Thinking about it further, a lot of what Venkat has shown us is that there are artificial consequences and natural consequences. As a teacher, I'm constantly called

Beautiful stuff. Written. I had to put my phone away, and curl up into a ball from time to time to read this. The fetal position was especially helpful...

I just found your website today through Quora, and I'll be spending more time here after some of the interesting things I've read. Anyway, I wanted to comment on

I don't buy it. Nomad groups are routinely wiped out by civilizations; civilizations, in so far as they are wiped out, tend to be wiped out by cultural spread

Very nice post. Ceramics and glass are fields where the artists are frequently also chemists (via glaze formulation), btw. One thing worth considering

Your use of Buber's dichotomy confuses me a bit! I'd love to hear more about how you made those associations. I see that the Be-Somebody axis is linked to publi

Outstanding analysis of a very important and timely topic. I'd love to see your take on creativity and the "waste" of time. After so many years of cor

Good insights in this one, I like your definition of work. Yeah, knowledge work is tough because of having to define it - especially running your own

Thank you for keeping this blog free. I'm a university student, and so can't really afford to pay for access, but I wanted to say that ribbonfarm.com

In the body of your article you assert that marketing communication tends to be mono-thematic and take place along of one of 3 possible typologies...

I've been developing this same distinction over the past six months or so without explicitly labeling it as such. For a while I tried to do my writing at the desk

Pondering on whether there is a different approach we could take, I was reminded of Toffler's statement in Powershift, "Law is sublimated violence."

Time Machine: No, Apple doesn't have a fundamentally better scheme. A targeted virus could stomp my Time machine disk quite easily. That's why I suggested WORM.

Programming, writing and math are among the skills where there you get both significant effort shock and significant reward shock. Programming and math are moving toward

This reminds me of a story about color blindness. An interesting thing about color blindness is because people that have it literally see light differently, they can see patterns

Whilst I agree with you in spirit, I sincerely doubt that you really didn't see anyone else idling - as long as we understand idling to be the state of allowing your mind to

Yes! I'm glad you arrived at this line of reasoning and I hope you explore the adjacent territory further. Re: "I will not rest"-style mission statements (which I take

This post prompted me to look back through my email history and, as far as I can determined, I've made 120 introductions over the course of the last 9 months

I'm curious what you mean by the '*essential* difference' between meditating and Smash Hit. I assume the zen-like trance you described is what psychologis

@gwern: As to your first point, I think the way to avoid that is to choose strategically the ways in which you interact with the system. So while you

Venkat, I think this whole post is somewhat akin to a long and detailed argument of how to divide the payment of the tip amongst the diners, without any t

There are two types of "free:" "Truly Free" and "Somewhat Free." You are invited and encouraged to use a Truly Free service without any obligation whatsoever.

I think that one thing that's going on here is a conflation of different meanings of science. One meaning of science is a sort of idealized set of practices

When words have to serve several meanings, they become ambiguous. In literature this leads to layers of meaning which are artistically valuable. But in argument

Hi Venkat, What do you think about Hariri's comments here http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional "...where every human

Your "lonely atoms" seem to parallel the "slackers" in Venkat's slacker/clueless/sociopath trichotomy. The slackers were rationally disengaged from work...

One tactic figured out by Harvard to maintain status illegibility, at least on the low end is the "happy bottom quarter" philosophy

Hate to get semantic on you Venkat (actually that's a lie, I love getting semantic), but I feel the urge to air some pondering I did some time ago

Well that was fun! A few threads: 1. Being kinda-ok-I-guess may be subject to hedonic adaptation, i.e. the meme of the person who achieved great

Put up a "review" of this article which views positioning as a kind of "test first programming" for business. The 7 positions are then the tests, not rules

Venkat I love your nonstandard analyses to death but don't you think this claim warrants a bit more than a bald assertion: "The restaurant check-splitting

Hi Venkat, excellent post. Feels like you're speaking directly to me, here. I retreated off the internet over the course of 2012-2013 -- deleted my blog, deleted my twit

The word *belonging* suggests *membership* to me, but I wonder if orientation works better. In the current version, I guess 'GP-sociopaths' are scattered outside the

Consciousness exists because an agent which can model its environment can survive better. Introspection exists because an agent which can model itself as part of

A syllogism: 1. A principal role of government is to intervene in the case of market failure. 2. If a business sector is too profitable...

I am not sure I believe that money is always and only used as a pain-relief mechanism. Are there not pleasures to be had in true luxury goods (rather than status-based ones)

Consider also the other side of coin - random firings could be beneficial simply because they open up space for new players and new ideas. Josef Stalin practiced

The biggest, least prepared institutions sitting around ignoring this at the moment are Universities, of course. I'm trying to frame a way of thinking about what will h

I think you've mischaracterized Nassim Nicholas Taleb's position (whom you incorrectly called "Nicholas Nassim Taleb" -- I thought you might want to fix

Could you elaborate a bit more on why you think System Dynamics is an approach that is fundamentally flawed? I do understand that the tools are not applicable

I notice a darker view of sociopaths in this post than in previous ones. No hint of the concept in the original post that these are the people making the organis

I'd be interested how you think the good waste concept relates to people as a resource and the practice of outsourcing to India/China/your-cheap-labour-locale.

Instinctively I harkened back to the essay on the Dead Curious Cat. It would seem that the argument here is Curiosity as Pain Avoidance/Seeking Alpha

Using Venkat's narrative scheme I'd say that our market capitalism has been a civilization built around the anti-computer, not the primary computer.

You might like a book by the Viennese psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, called "Man's Search for Meaning." It's one of the sources for the ideas in "Grou

So I read this all over again (not for the last time, I'm sure), making a little more progress. The characterization of Schumpeterian growth as colonizing time is particularly ins

This is probably the first time your thinking feels like it has seriously intertwined with mine. Not too long ago, I was trying to understand a statement I've been pondering: "The essence of being dee

Venkat, are you familiar with Heidegger's concepts of Dasein, Das Man, and being-in-the-world in his work Being and Time?

I have been thinking a lot lately about your "Milo Criterion" writing. Basically a lot of what you talk about revolves around a PUA concept called "social proof"

Regarding your speaking style and how you end up staying in point, paul graham had something along these lines to say as well. "I first noticed this at a co

As a long time reader, nothing in this glossary is a surprise, but summing things up in a pithy way can bring problems and tensions to the fore. I'm concerned

An interesting concept. And with the flow of money now moving into places like China, India and Brazil, are they new rivers, new tributaries or a flood

I was wondering what I contributed to this until I got to that last section. Does this imply for you that we can stay fresh by continuing to redirect the outer layers

Another thing that is part of the abundance of content online is that among me and my friends almost everybody is totally Instapaper bankrupt.

No interest in Ribbonfarm image memes ? Bummer. I've been playing around with an idea lately: patch-based commenting. Instead of fussing about with quo

As someone for whom the search for meaning is probably a more urgent existential matter than an occasional sudoku-like diversion than you, my sense is that divergentism

I've always thought of this as a question of leverage. A CEO is trying to control the efforts of perhaps a thousand people. Most of those people have a strong bi

There's something rich about this piece; it's much more amorphous than I've come to expect from you. Think about the poke; it's a form of flirtation that uses

Good article. There are close similarities to "Unbundling the Corporation" (see below). In that article the three organization types are - Production innovation, Customer

This post touches on something I've been thinking about for awhile. What if the technology of surveillance develops to the point where states no longer need to see

One key to a successful distinction between the creative desk and the administrative desk might be to ruthlessly purge the files of the latter on a regular periodic basis.

Appreciated your rare essayistic foray, Venkat. It did feel like it belonged more to the Tempo blog though (or Aeon for that matter). Anyway, a few que

Great explanation (although I knew where you were going from your introduction). Unix is secure, but PHP removes many of its protections, including the dis

The real point of contention on this topic is that we *can* make technological changes in order to alleviate much of this crime, but we generally don't

Just some random questions & thoughts that may or may not be relevant... 1. In biology, mutations happen at the DNA level and are expressed in the organism's

Not directly related to this post, just wanted to share a new example of Domestic Cozy I found in the wild: https://cancelledplans.us/ Cancelled Plans Candles.

You might be interested in my comp lit/cs PhD work about something pretty much exactly like the idea of 'a world hash that picks out a grammar in a world.'

Interesting article with lot of food for thought. It seems your three options map to the three Porter generic strategies. More precisely the Treacy/Wiersema remapping into their "value disciplines"

Goes both ways though. I thought beating 2048 would be a lot more fun than it was. As it turns out, it's not. you just get a button saying 'keep on playing'

I have a suggestion for an Elderblog game for you, though I suspect you might hate it: post-mortems. Revisit old posts and praise/critique them based on

Do you suspect that there could be systematic bias between different kinds of people in their preferences for interacting with books, threads, streams, or long-forms?

Wow, this is me and my wife to a tee (I'm the introvert). The way we often express the conversational disconnect to each other is that, to me, she keeps

I think non-processed food or eating attentively may also be rich variables in food, possibly richer than protein or vegetables. It's possible, IMHO, that coding is richer than math.

Venkat, Have you been reading Ernst Jünger's masterpiece: The Storm of Steel" ? Jünger often uses metallurgical metaphors. An excerpt from the last

So I take it from your framing here that Ghemawhat refers to "regulation" in the common nation-state oriented sense of the word. However, you also mentioned

@nntaleb is certainly your evil twin :) I remember him tweeting about this... If you need to listen to music while walking, don't walk; and don't l

But isn't there a third way, other than redistributing or creating? The way of the curmudgeon. I find that as I approach my mid-fifties all too aware of

I've been thinking about immortality for awhile, and this post explores many of the things I've been thinking about in interesting ways. The main question I

Pretty interesting and a topic that has really interested me for many years. Probably since a combination of Being John Malkovich and Ghost In The Shell

Your point is interesting and well presented. I wonder how each persona you present would re-frame the failure to preserve their version of reality.

"You're advanced when you begin failing in ways nobody has failed before." How can one tell when one is failing in new ways? I don't think it is straightforward

As an attorney, which is just another way of saying I'm a story teller, I appreciate the defense of case-based reasoning. I'd much rather deal

This "always complete a triad to 2x2" rubric is a familiar construction in mathematics, called a "pullback diagram" or "fiber product". If you have two

Despite the fact that I periodically dig out ear wax with a re-shaped paper clip (kids, don't try this at home or you may perforate your eardrum), you h

Are you going to tie all your positive attributes to that one name? Replace "fulfilled, creative, questioning, honest-with-self person" with "sociopath"? I ask

Fabricatory depth is a great concept! You could invert it to ask: how large a group is needed to make all the things I use? Or all the things

The bit about "[t]his of course does not mean that anything that does not look polished is free. The presence of rough edges is merely cause for further

There are a couple of references to the method of simply trying to reduce the number of variables. First, you say that in a highly bound and complex environment...

I'm sure you realize that "meta-ness" of your post, although I am unsure if you intentionally omitted it. I've been a regular reader of Ribbonfarm for a fe

Two books that are somewhat related: Cognition in the Wild - I've seen this recommended on ribbonfarm, and it seems relevant here. The main idea seems to be that tools

A related concepts is that of *dismissal*. To dismiss an opponent's argument is a means of planting a flag: a way to avoid engaging with the substance

The zero-sum analogy was thought provoking. I've always viewed Uber as displacing and disrupting the taxi industry by modernizing the IT infrastructure involved

The idea that reading human life is a way of enhancing it is not as old as it might seem. On the contrary there has been always a painful awareness that r

I am an English teacher and I've tried to seriously address questions five and ten. I do want the kids to get the benefits from free play and exploration.

Two comments. (1) This is an interesting adjunct to http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/powers-of-swarms/all/ … I was curious about the state of

How close would you say weirdness is the (existentialist) absurd? The "Awkwardness and Religion" section of the article reminds me a lot of early parts of Camus

Great essay. One thing that I find disorienting (and you mention it in other essays) is the idea that you decide what you feel. In my model, feeling is

Before this post I always took stone soup to being Keynesian economics before Keynesian economics (in the version I heard, stone soup fed all of the village...

Your breakdown of Seattle's path reminds me of Gray Brechin's "Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin", a similar outline of the economic history San

In the future, I suppose layoffs will become bleed-offs. Reorgs will become reroutings of flows. I just imagined how Kim Yong Un plays with Slack

After reading this I followed up and found an interesting companion word to zemblanity and serendipity which you may already know. I can't help but think

I'm wondering how cultural impacts of markets vary with "simulation fidelity". At low fidelity, market ploys are not threatening. Victorian-style advertisements seem quaint...

I like this concept but I tend to think it's more of a Frankenstein's Monster rather than a Zombie, particularly in relation to the 'evolution' you talk ab

I've got a topical trade for you - surrogacy. Some countries/states allow commercial surrogacy, some only allow altruistic surrogacy, some forbid it of course

In undergrad, I loved macro but hated microeconomics, but couldn't figure out why until I read this. The models that microeconomics explains always felt un

Do you think there is room in the possibility space for heterarchic saint spaces? Eg can we imagine non-market values-based exchange that revels in instab

I spent too much time in my formative years hanging around with the Theory of Everything dudes, but my first impulse—and flag that word for special irony—is to recast all these along a sort of habit a

Hi Venkat, I continue to be curious about the "input" area of the GP pyramid. It occurred to me that most of the pyramid diagrams suggest that everyone starts at

"They never lower their masks. In fact they are their masks. There is nothing beneath" I think this is the most telling line in your entire writeup.

Ah finally! Thanks for making my day. I'm confused about the connection between group value creation and a goup's social capital. What can the alpha

I think you're detailing the systemic problems of all of public life here - from governments to corporations on down. The systemic programming you attribu

I was thinking about uses for this post. I have thought of these points (which may be incomplete or totally wrong) so far: 1. Gods do not talk back.

The big question in your post is: "Is there any kind of escape that does not involve couponing on the edge of hoarding-madness, or log-cabin survivalism?"

"Enough of us" — what about the rest that did not choose? My thinking is that they became a means for the life-choosers to explore and engage uncertainty.

There's probably a nice game theory model here, but I'll leave that to someone else. You're quite right and that game would be prisoners dilemma and because

Interesting that you would look to lift the customer engagement pieces and separate them from the culture. The most valuable obersvations I saw in the book were:

The key theory of nature-nurture-torture sounds like another way of telling the story of the Velveteen Rabbit. He is a made object (nature) that is loved by a boy

There's been plenty of analysis, books and lecture tours about the Long Tail and the Short Head. For some balance, it's time to do some analysis of the Fat Middle.

Hehe, I had just invented the Croesus Criterion: innovation is limited by the ability of the capitalist to understand innovation. The (quite understandable)

Power, water, garbage, fuel. Do you know where they come from and where they go? I sure don't, and I doubt any city dweller really knows. I'd bet on

I've long thought that a lot of the confusion around the disdain for money arises from how the word money means two very different things; "the act of earning

Yep, you saw a lot of the things I saw when I used it. I'm surprised you didn't emphasize the mindfulness property of the uninterruptible portion

Do you have a citation for the book, essay, or speech where Holmes says "I would not give a farthing for the simplicity on this side of complexity...

Continuing the ribbonfarm tradition, the labels are carefully mischosen to mislead the casual newcomer. Barbarians, as opposed to savages, are the wild, untamed...

I love the stream metaphor and the notion of liquefying. But I'm not sure how this is different from traditional 19th century Europe to New World, lots of streams

A lot of the examples in the comments wouldn't pass a "voluntary slowness" test. For example, many ESL teachers in rich, heavily urbanized East Asian locations are in it for the fast pace

Interesting. I like your idea that the circulation of these people is putting in place the electrical wiring for a globalization of ideas. What about u

I agree with you that here-now vs. there-then categorization functions are fundamentally arbitrary. However, I vividly feel the distinction between present in

I participated in an NSF funded program for young scientists (well before my ambition to be a chemist was transmuted into settling for humanities

My concern is that this aesthetic-appreciative approach not crowd out the potential for a more rigorous, bivalent discussion that it seems you're pretty uniquely

I think this has interesting applicability to warfare, obviously Gideon with his 300 men, trumpets and glass jars being a historical example. A more current one being

Interesting vantage point - some days ago I listened to a philosopher talking about different kinds of waiting, distinguished by the emotional "mode" you are in

I wonder if we realize the failure of legibility not so much through a failure of representation - the world outside doesn't really fit our simplified view

I stopped reading (temporarily) at your definition, which doesn't match any model of capitalism I have. The rest of your post seems to be about trade or

Venkat, you said almost everything that I wanted to say in reply to this — so thanks, saved me a lot of trouble :). But now I'm left in limbo between two competing sch

The cryptonym idea was not to arrest identity as much as it was to delay it, or rather create a space for identity to emerge when a definitive name must be chosen

Are those behaviors social realities or are they simulacra? I don't understand the ontological distinction which is made here and which seems to be important but whi

I know this is not the point, but the term bug is much older than that. In 1878 Thomas Edison wrote a letter to Theodore Puskas...

Isn't the idea of a "dead" economy closely related to the idea of money as a prize for a good which reflectively expresses the current value relative to all

Bravo! From years on two of these three sides (boutique consulting, Benish in-house support to McKinzoids), I say you only exaggerate judiciously. Might have more fully developed Khan's genial menace

Ok, let's accept that definition of curiosity. There's still the necker cube of viewing something as a collective vs organism. Collectives must justify curiosity

No offense, Venkat, but I don't think it's as hard to pull out of the consumption spiral as you portray it. And you're not alone in that portrayal

I wasn't thinking so much of your readers (1/5 seems fine given the topics) as the authors you discuss. Aside from Dunnett none of the favo

Another dynamic I've noticed is that careers perceived as SLP often succumb to the economics of oversupply. Employers have all the bargaining power and employees have none.

Ah, I see I've explained myself badly. When talking about power, I meant the power relation between the user and the person making purchasing decisions. Bloated mo

Hi Venkat, when you write "life simply isn't [...] convex", what do you mean by life's convexity? (I know the mathematical concept, but I fail at applying it to 'life'.)

Interesting read! Had a few basic disagreements though which made the prognosis fall apart for my world-view. I figured I would talk to that part instead of risking a total TL;DR.

Venkat, Thanks for the well-done review of my book and Lee Smolin's. I think you give an accurate and reasonable take on what is in the books.

Aaron - you raise an interesting point. And one that never came up when I studied the text in grad school. If the jazz had been strictly improvisational

I've been thinking about your comment for several weeks now. I wish I had something profound to report. I think you're right in your observation about project

Excellent post. A few thoughts: 1. The present scope for realtime communication cannot be over-stressed. Leaving behind friends and family used to be one of the most heart-wrenching things...

Really enjoyed your post. It's interesting to apply Bourdieu's notions of taste to the normcore phenomenon. Sociologist Sam Friedman recently applied it in a similar way to the UK comedy scene.

I think the concept you need to develop your notion of cloudworker culture is the cyber version of the flâneur. This notion was inspired by your blackberry+sta

Count me among those who find this metaphor useful. Another way to think about it is that Lagrangian decision makers naturally place decisions in context

Really interesting and provocative article. I'm most interested in your ideas about meditation and the DMN. Not all Buddhist meditation is done with open eyes;

Excellent statement on how we are now at a turning point in the evolution of how human society achieves consensus – or breaks down in strife. However, I believe there is already a clear path forward

Excellent ideas. As a grad student in translation studies, I'd like to point out a few things about "the fall of high culture." "Instead of condensing new

Well I'm late to the party and there are about a dozen things I'd like to say in response to this epic post, but... I'll limit myself just to three

Thank you for your thoughts. I did notice that Kant's Critique of Judgement follows the same trajectory. He locates the sublime as the "good" of the suprasensible

You are missing the point. Why does Baltica Dry simulates a local beer in the first place? Precisely because capitalism lacks authenticity, it needs and strives

First, thanks Venkat for airing this post. I guess the thing I was really trying to capture was that software, to me at least, is really crystallized method.

Your description of the Sociopath reminds me of http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html . It's strange to think

I find myself resisting this analysis. We are not our supply chain. Artists shop at artist supply stores, but that doesn't make them merely art supply consumers.

This is a very deep and thought-provoking approach that I will have to re-read. But given both my interest in AI and my inability to resist thinking about increasi

Well here I am, after the second reading. Wanted to say thanks again, Mike, for this article. It tickled me in all the right ways. Society-of-mind is one of

I love this post. I know a lot about goatspace, but look forward to seeing what more you come up with about crowspace and ratspace. Your accumulation

But is the universe inside our heads entirely Platonic? Platonic to me implies pure reductions--we have those, but we also have narratives. My thought on nar

Brilliant abstraction. Reminded me of two other frameworks: Kling's Three Languages of Politics, and Sulliway's Born to Rebel contrasting eldest vs youngest children.

The word attunement from psychoanalytic literature might be useful to you: "Attunement in psychotherapy refers to the ability of your therapist to pick up

Ok, fair. I'd likely never go pro in anything in the beauty category. Maybe this distinction only applies to people's primary economic activities? An odd co

So I just heard about a fun little example of this a few days ago. Many Venture Capital firms are prevented from "recycling" their money from a liquidity event back into the fund

Prior to the limited liability corporation, few corporations existed. The EIC and VOC were one of only a handful of corporations. And they were an attribute of the Mercantilist era

I think this is a bit narrow. But since you brought up software and hardware: Linux, the canonical open system, can be pretty constraining depending on what you want to do.

Could you explain more about your European vs American event observation? What would you have the Americans do differently? Different Agenda? Room layout?

The way you're using the word "sociopath" is an extreme case of "not even wrong," comparable to defining "pedophile" as "a grownup who loves children."

Art and Aesthetics used this way make sense, but masks the way art and aesthetics can be used to constructively expose complexity, dissonance, strangeness.

Say you're trying to derive some conclusion by looking at a purposeless model. Do you find it more convincing if 1) it's complicated, so you didn't twist it

At least hydra ate Saddam Hussein and having many clones and being illegible didn't help him in the end. Wasn't the Bush doctrine with its preemptive strikes against rogue states...

Oky, so a good CEO is someone with zero interest in exploring other directions than the one he personally sets, and companies are simply betting on

Like many, including presumably Bill Gates, I hope the climate war will be fought with agile, open processes, networked organizational forms, and a great deal more autonomy

To provide a counterfactual example: the Netherlands is traditionally a nation of very high database density most of which are interlinked these days to provide more seamless services

Sounds like marketing: Creating a visible distinction (a brand) that is then imbued with meaning (through advertising) so that it now makes a difference.

A queen is strictly more free than a castle. In any chess situation, replacing your castle with a queen will certainly do no harm, and almost always do some

The conventional wisdom "surround yourself with smarter people" has obvious in-game benefits. You oppose it by finding a basic logical issue, by deriving the issue from a model where 1. Everybody is t

Wondering if you've fleshed out a schematic to gauge whether the apparent desire to be lost isn't actually just chronic denial or escapism.

My only counterpoint-- and I hesitate to call it one since I largely agree-- is that absent a certain vague inevitability, people generally seem to over-dedicate mental resources to bet-hedging and CY

I forgot to say that the main thing that groups all of these together is that they can never venture into "why?" or "what's the point?" territ

OK, let me take it a bit further with my two current favourite hobby horses: Taleb's Golden Rule and evolutionary psychology. Taleb's Golden Rule: "We favor the

The fallacy doesn't stay alive because we see rare shining examples, it persists because it's an extremely simple and easy motivational tool/decision-making metric.

I'd suggest a closer inspection of mansions (either manors or palaces) in the past would show they were more densely populated than you might think

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

I am curious why you suppose sociopaths are less likely to be found in organized religion than in other organizations. In my experience every organiz

Notwithstanding the (R) symbol affixed to this famous quadrant, it certainly was a popular time management concept before Covey. If one can handle the think

I think this is interesting, but it doesn't really connect with your statement: "One sign is that there are a lot fewer people heading to Asia to reinvent

It is interesting to consider the Internet / Social Media and MMORPGs as "crashed realities". I think you have a point that both bring us into immediate

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that primitive societies are more womb-like than technologically modern 'realist' societies. To me every culture produces wombs

"Broken beyond repair" - that's how I would summarize states 4-7. However collapsing them into a single state might lower their rhetoric value. As always the

The power and longevity of the John Henry story quite obviously comes from its resonance with Marxist class struggle — it's the fight between labor and capital

I wonder why #1 and #9 are so opposed in temper? #9 expresses sympathy for civilization despite all its flaws whereas #1 denounces it on a

Melanie Anne Phillips argues the ideal ending would be Grant changing from loving order to embracing chaos. He has been set up as an order character through hating c

Humans don't innovate unless they have enough mental, social, and economic space in which to indulge their maker urges. Refinement reverses when (it's always been

I'm not getting the quantum physics connection here, but I also thought of a software analogy, this kind of self-interference sounds a little more to me like

Hate to be a killjoy, but from what I see neither Fox nor Hedgehog scored any touches; therefore no points awarded and match is a draw.

It looks like there is a small error, I think you meant "When I first tried to put Taleb's views in relation to my own, it struck me that his talents

My reading of this post leads me to think that you're considering these (meta)cognitive categories from a strictly mechanical data-collecting-and-processing point of v

Your "[curiosity] is about variety-seeking with an eye to discovering meaning" seems very similar to Schmidhuber's description of curiosity, which you've probably heard of

The funny thing about history is that whatever stuff you learn seems to be what has been known by everyone for ages: I thought it was the standard popularised

Neutral isn't purely oppositional to good as an end-state... It's continuously giving rise to good. Most / many players who gain a temporary edge in the market leverage it

Isn't rejecting these emotions, and the narrativism they represent, entirely just a kind of self-handicapping purity fetish? Shouldn't they be tools that you

What interests me is that everyone who Michael likes (other than Holly) is someone who's learned Babytalk. Beyond the fact that Toby plays the role of t

Good sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and stupidities of mob

What I'm still wondering is where that organizational dark matter went. I assumed that what you were getting at is that eventually an organization, like an organism, dies under

@Venkat I'm curious about your categorizing of the Soviet Union with Tolstoy. I can see it in the 70s and 80s when stagnation really set in. However

presumably you've seen Gelernter's work on this: ... "the human mind moves back and forth along a spectrum defined by ordinary logic at one end and "dream logic" at

The "The New Author Platform (Mary Ann Naples)" link goes to the "ARGS Doesn't Work ..." article, which emphasizes the common ground new journalism shares with code-t

It optimizes for the survivability of the autocatalytic loop rather than the humans within it Except for the speed which allows us to see it I don't

Suppose someone picks Beauty + Sense and is successful in both s.t. he can also make money from his artifacts and their interpretation, say a guy like Le Corbusier

I'm not an engineer, but I like how they think about things. Two concepts that I especially appreciate are "testing to destruction" and LD50. Finding t

This piece feels somewhat long on abstract assertion and short on illuminating detail relative to your work in general. The first half feels like you're building up to an interesting argument

Interesting analysis. The book seems to be similar to some stuff written by pankaj ghemawat, a one time HBS prof who has written about the history of strategic ideas

Some questions. What is so specific about 2013 that it justifies the intersection between the time lines of the language and that of the computation? Snowdens exp

Just to clarify my point above, I am not questioning the empirical link between depression and truthseeking so much as emphasising other motivations in the background

". You do so by creating mental room for emotions to drift out of your subconscious, recognizing the desires that generate them and labeling the r

There's a strange paradox here if we juxtapose these two excerpts: "For a while, I was inhabiting an escaped reality full of crimes requiring

(I could be reading this wrong, but...) On the other hand, it may not be THAT bad. There are some definitely stifling aspects to this situation

Is Robin Hood/Sheriff of Nottingham/King for Gorilla/Godfather/Ghost backwards or did I miss the point? In your discussion of policing I was reminded of the Pan

From the quoted John Salvatier article: This turns out to explain why its so easy for people to end up intellectually stuck. Even when they're literally

Venkat: In this, you focus almost primarily on perception (what can I see & know about the world). For me, the more interesting problem is interaction (how can I affect t

About 8 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, most people printed out the lecture notes to bring to class and annotate. I did the math and realized

It's one thing to accept all that phenomenology. It's quite another to take the constructs on top of that seriously. The whole of political theology is just analogical reasoning.

What about the option that the present contains a temporary weirdness that will transform into even stranger weirdness in the future? To me the explanation seems cl

Feels like there's a contradiction between the claim that the old institutional order is dying and will be replaced by reactionary nationalists and the notion that the old

"Nolan's Machinist" Nolan didn't make The Machinist, if you're referring to the Christian Bale movie. "A summary notion of what it is like to be, not just a

I think you are using "collective action" in a more expansive term than normal usage. In the standard meaning, a collective action problem exist when group go

Yes, it looks like the woman in your examples are well anchored in mundane practices or in faith, without any significant incentive structure which drives them

I disagree about DS9 being a carrier bag story. This is mostly because I don't view the differences between the hero's journey and carrier bag as ones of place/set

After the last ten years of corporate monopoly, technological stagnation (in the internet field, that is, there are other areas -- like battery chemistry -- where progress

I took it to mean that you can "see" all the edges from anywhere - a person that believes they can imagine all the possible outcomes and then lives

"Elite overproduction" is a catchy and descriptive phrase, but a more general description is "broken system". Any healthy society needs a mechanism to incorporat

I'll second all of this, especially your last paragraph Venkat. Maybe this isn't what Sarah was going for, but I think it would be interesting to find something

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about the idea of "postformal thought" Venkat, AFAIK(aka searched ribbonfarm for the word without finding it) you haven't covered that yet.

I'm somewhat disappointed by the plot. The MacGuffin data scientist Cassandra Hadoop was just introduced to avoid the drama that was built in part I.

P.S.: If Michael is the Wise Fool, what are the other characters, as stock dramatic figures? The following is off the top of my head. As in commedia dell-arte...

This contradicts *many* descriptions of war I have read, maybe all of them. Everything I have read suggests soldiers and civilians party a great deal.

I'm interested in slightly decompressing the relationship between compression and action. Compression is always relative to some algorithm for decompression- in the case of art

I've noticed a curious duality that's arisen as of late surrounding attention. Anyone who attended South by SouthWest this year couldn't help but notice the increasingly desperate & expensive marketin

I wonder how 'male' the need to self-actualize is. I have a friend of mine whose a psychologist, she has a pH.D., and has, over the last few years,

I see platforms as a partitioning strategy. The stuff you want to constrain goes in a platform, and everything else goes outside and uses the platform as a shared context

I'm reading this through a software development lens. Software libraries and frameworks (interestingly, Apple calls them "kits") have a lot in common with your two kits.

You've distilled as good a definition of art as I've seen. Your definition generalizes art into a practice, distinct from aesthetics or production, which means

One thing to add here: financiers often talk about "pools" of money as well. This fits in neatly with your metaphor, because it implies a somewhat stagnant source

To add to Romeo's list of similar distinctions: The bias-variance tradeoff: the fundamental problem of how a model or intelligent agent can generalize from past

You may want to look into compressed sensing. Basically, it's a way to physically transform the input of a sensor system into a basis that is more compressed.

This is an interesting post, for me because of what's left out: institutions, how they handle nomads, and the participation of all kinds of personality types within them.

The reference to the head exploding derives from the Brahmoyuddha tradition mentioned in Sama Veda etc. Essentially the notion is that the loser in a debate must lo

After ruminating on this, I'd like to say back to you what I see in the Penrose triangle: http://imgur.com/a/ZBIxL I'll leave it to you to tell me if I'm on the right track

I had/have something similar - in fact I found this post because I was googling "my memory for names has got worse since having covid". For me it does only

In a conversation about this post at work today, we were wrestling with your remark that "similar processes are used to deliver a set of distinct products or services", and the distinction

It amuses me to think that the death of the author is represented by an immortal author function. Although actually, I think that would be wrong; if the context fun

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

Much of the ugliness you describe is probably contingent. In The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander offered the 15 transformations as a reliable way of enhancing wholeness

I could go on for some length on the core of what you're saying here, but that'd be better over a pint some time, and I largely agree with what you're saying

Venkat (and other commenters) -- I want to recommend Michael Thompson's 'Organising and Disorganising'. His four- or five-part typology of complex systems corres

Perhaps the onions were originally used as a crude thermometer, but this purpose this had been forgotten? Primo Levi tells a very similar story in the "Chromium" chapter

This is very interesting, but I see at least one thing that strikes me as a false association. Talking about these things from personal experience is fraught with p

Yes, Gartner is essentially selling their view of a set of vendors but the decision to base their matrix on the vision-execution axes is their conceptual creation

First, it's good to see the word "mysticism" used in its proper technical sense, meaning the branch of religion that is concerned with the direct encounter with

To make your grid complete, you'd need to add "care, but don't know" and "can't tell, but don't know." A pretender is someone who cares and knows

I think this may cover *exactly* the same theme as Rader's post on "The Dual Mind Problem." (I mean that in a good way--it's good to see consistency in

If all that's required is a mental structure to use as a guide, even if it's wrong (or rather, incomplete, because everything is incomplete...

I'm somewhat in the field of applying statistics to everything, so this hit a bit close to home. I agree that there is such a thing as an abuse of statistics.

I wrote a comment a month or two ago about this post in terms of Deleuze's distinction between the clear-confused and the obscure-distinct, and coming back

Mediocrity as a strategy fits nicely with a psychoanalytic concept I've been reading about recently. In "The Burnout Society," Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes

I met Allan Kay in 2010 when I was doing a research project on Doug Engelbart and the development of GUI computing. I asked him what he tho

You're neglecting to account for a continuum in behavior. Perhaps a 99% nomad is deeply selfish (although I remain ambivalent), but what about 60%?

Watching the talk too, very interesting connection there; if emotions are interpretations of bodily processes, what is the process or processes connected to pleasure

I had a massive comment attached to the last one, which I never got around to posting but I was fascinated to observe a very opposite reaction; Peterson's core appeal/c

There's a paradox in this definition of community which I find quite interesting; although you talk about the distinction between communitarian feeling and escape, in your model depth

The vortex and the anti-vortex as I drew them actually do have opposite topological charge, in the sense that walking a closed loop around the vortex/antivortex produces a +/-360 degree rotation

When fountain pens and cheap factory-made paper made their appearance, writers were able to waste paper, and as a consequence, written words.

Passing this through my own significance appreciation filter, I see a fundamental language problem (as Denis suggests), and one that can even be formally defined

The puzzle vs mystery distinction in the Mystery genere is very nice. I can think of other literature (sub) genres it appplies to.and nicely splits the types

It occurs to me that this doesn't actually need to be a form of redistribution at all. The first bit of it is great, with the focus on wealth as a complexity problem

All of the really skilled organizational politicians I know would come in as the moderator/compromise voice in public, to make sure nobody powerful loses face

Heh, I made a ten-dollar version in 1981: eight LEDs glued to an old vinyl record album, each with an electret microphone an and op amp. Spin the disk

This is an interesting project. Two ground-clearing questions. 1. Would a theory of money have to be historical? Would it aim to analyze what absolutely all money

The analogy to lasers is a good one. An amplifier that *isn't* in a resonant chamber can be "pumped" with energy and left waiting for a seed pulse.

The main comment I have on the notion of technical debt is that it isn't exclusively technical. It is at least as much about politics within and between business entities

Per your anecdote, it's most accurate to say that I'm completely uninterested in doing business that way. Furthermore I believe there are other ways to do this kind of business.

Finally read this post today while taking a break from Robert Coram's well-researched biography of USAF Col. John Boyd (Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed

Interesting! One thing you might be interested in is the "triage" model by Stafford Beer, which is similar to this, (but with differences obviously): The central layer

I have two bones to pick with your excellent thesis. First, that "losers" have struck a bad economic bargain by not doing the whole capitalistic striving...

Speaking as someone who's worked in a sales environment for lo these many years, I think you're not going deep enough here. A major counter-example to your hypothesis

Kevin, I agree with your most general thoughts, but want to raise some questions about the details. Let me start with the agreement: 1. I very much agree that we should hope that a grea

Interesting ideas; the definition of a soft technology is very useful. However you are thinking much too small. Language itself was a disruption of a much larger and older soft te

To shut down the imagination, you have to both prohibit its natural expression and fill the space that would otherwise be naturally occupied by its products.

You sort-of mentioned this in your post, but it wasn't in your running list at the bottom - workers in Arab Gulf nations (Kuwait, Bahrain, certain cities in Saudi, Qatar, UAE

There's a stream motivated by the Canadian domination of speculative mining finance. There are three vortex cities that are fairly tightly connected: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto.

Telecommuting, of course is another way to make the towers stack with less pain and suffering. Of course, if you do that, you have to create mental compartments...

I tend to split what you call infinite horizon into two parts: - extravagant extrapolation, which is the bravado version of falsifiability, where you look

Nassim Taleb has talked about idleness in his work as well, calling himself a "flaneur" (one who walks around without a destination in mind). He treats it

Nixonland is the middle volume of a trilogy (so far; I think Perlstein will keep going up to the present). There is _Before the Revolution_ which focuses on Goldwat

Thanks for the review. And don't feel guilty about your fascination with "povertynomics." I share it, and I don't feel even slightly evil about it.

Hasn't the startup business in the last couple of years being mostly about services being moved from the professionals to the users? For instance each time I'm doing a journey I spend quite some

So many good insights in this post that I had to start writing the comment before finishing reading the article :D This is a topic I've thought about quite a b

Technology as a single whole; apologies if very old news, but this was looked at by Kevin Kelly as the technium http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/index.php

By my analysis, machine learning is a case of naive "doer-ism" (I think you just mean "pragmatism".) On a mathematical level, our reality is fractal

I agree with your assessment, however I'm not sure we still have the ability to experiment with solutions at a small scale for many of our most pressing

How come startuptown is on the scarcity side of the map, in fact, right next to the ocean of scarcity?

Maybe I missed this, but is it possible to induce tragedy? Or would it be as simple as 'be more risky about everything'?

I can't imagine anything I yearn for less than this disembodied, controlled, disconnected view of "life". Sorry Venkatesh, but it seems to me, despite all the

@JB, I don't think you understood what I meant by 'democracy has been hacked.' The Constitution has almost nothing to do with it. If democracy were code

are you familiar with Elliot Jacques? He has alot of head-scratching but nonetheless interesting things to say about the value of performance reviews

Well, you know, there's a bit of a difference between saying you don't agree with the overall argument, and saying that there isn't one, that the book is

I know this is an older post, but I just had to post this link here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ Should make you think about how dan

There are no low hanging fruits any more. Everything worth aspiring to (and any paid employment that offers dignity) is for 99th percentile talents.

I really enjoyed your close reading of The Office in the original article, but I'm losing interest the more you go into the realm of bland generalities.

Xerxes I died a hundred years before Alexander was born. Alexander fought Darius III. Additionally, the substitution in the transition was an Achaemenid king for a Macedonian one...

Hmm... a new version of Actors Network Theory. I wonder if each author who goes towards "fundamental sociology" will create one sooner or later which fits him

It also seems that there are 'illegibility hats' that grant the wearer a reprieve from closer scrutiny. The hat signals that the wearer has a socially defined role...

No, your original intuition is correct. There is only one type of charge in this problem: the total winding number. There isn't a separate conservation of clock

The whole article is engaging, but it seems to be several degrees off. Perhaps the clearest example of what I mean is this: In your "early beta stab at a new theme"

It's a good article, but I'd like to challenge the comments on Brexit (the UK vote to leave the European Union). 'Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change...

Milo is certainly not a theory of everything, but IMO it's more than a just-so story. The acquisition of marginal users is a significantly different problem than acquiring initial users.

Your summary of the Singularity claims seems inaccurate and unfair. There are a variety of distinct claims made by different classes of Singularity proponents.

Hmm. Touché, to a certain extent. Transient though those (media) events may be, I guess the point is that they are multiple and that we're all ex

Links in hypertext theory (Bush) and the links used in HTML have little to do with each other. In hypertext theory, links are associative like a poet's use of a word.

These are NOT the key to success, only the pitfalls to be avoided. You can screw any good opportunity by being too mediocre on any of the 7 po

Boyd's insights included detecting invalid assumptions. In The Essence of Winning and Losing (1995), he described how to accomplish this with a "many-sided, implicit cross-referencing

Not intending criticism too harshly, but if the publishers said "sorry, we won't publish you unless you've already got a body of published work"

Ritual is fundamentally social Bad news for Venkat's "grounding rituals". Now that you have grabbed back the word "ritual" and filled it with all kinds

I've been diving into the web3 space myself, trying to get a feel for what is actually happening there, whether it means change for the future, and what kind

I think it's worth distinguishing between two different possibilities: one, that mild existential terror makes us better off by itself. Two, that mild existential terror doesn't actually contribute to

After watching the two seasons on Netflix, and thinking on them for a while, I feel like "art" is much more important to understanding Black Mirror than anything else.

This notion of "open source" design of mechanical products is not really all that radical. The adoption of "design+manufacture" outsourcing by the aerospace industry is just a natural progression

I'm not sure I agree that late style represents a finite game, I haven't read that book specifically, but if we bypass it to go to the raw material, and think about the characteristic elements

I'm not certain it's historically unprecedented. You could make a case that those least open to experience had a special role in solidifying the new modes

Here's a point on Carse; I think he's fundamentally wrong on finite games, even in his own terms; he says that the terminal move kills the opponent as a player. This is not true

The Recurse Center is perhaps a good test case for both: 1. The Recurse Center was originally called Hacker School. There weren't any signif

I think replacing "luxury beliefs" with "referred chauvinism" destroys some of the content of Henderson's argument. It's important to him that ideas operate like luxury goods

Hi Evan, 1) Matter and anti-matter are properly thought of as different kinds of excitations in the same field. The example of a field that I gave here doesn't have both matter and anti-matter.

I've been doing some disorganized musings along these lines - haven't really read Coase just yet. At work, I was struck by the realization that we seemed to do

The comparison of chronic vs acute symptoms is very appropriate, interestingly, I seem to remember (though I can't find where googling) the same characterisation being used for the UK in the 1970s

Yes, totally agree (and with Andrew Hay's comment as well). I touched on some of this, briefly, over at my home blog (http://www.meltingasphalt.com

Could it be that the purpose of 'vision' is ..um .. psychobiological rather than managerial ?. Vision, if it 'works' , makes workers feel good

OK Venkat, I thought of four more problems with describing this as merely change-of-basis. 1) You're starting too late if the origin is at age 18.

A few reflections on this review 1) In appliances, what is happening right now is intensely generative. The iPhone is not the right case example (it is actually highly closed

So, I was linked here from Slate Star Codex, and uh, holy cow. So, this works as a defense in that it explains why certain actions shouldn't be understood as motivated by de

This is interesting, but it seems like almost an inversion of Ibn Khaldun. He would have said that the barbarian is individually stupider but collectively smarter.

"Fun" is work done within a Magic Circle—a demarcation of space and time, where consequences inside the Circle do not affect consequences outside

"In the West, our scientific 'truths' still follow the same basic pattern of Judeo-Christian mythology and are subject to its cognitive structure." In what possible sense is this true?

I don't agree that human civilization is a "devouring, predatory virus" -- that's hyperbole. Plenty of animal systems overshoot their resource bases, and if they had our technology

I'd be interested to know where you got the figure of 10,000 BC for the epoch at which humans by which spread throughout the world.