Comments Section

Thanks Nigel. I think the "shut up and calculate" phrase was in Smolin's book, in reference to the way 70s era…

Wow, looks like I've stirred up quite a hornet's nest here. I thought after so many months, the controversy w…

Hi Bhaskar, great to connect again! There is no need to register -- comments are open on this site. You can su…

Hey TK, Yes, it is interesting that most of us don't question the definitions of very basic things, so the p…

Thanks all for an interesting conversation. I couldn't have hoped for a more stimulating start in the first we…

Hi Torp. My response ended up turning into its own blog post :) Follow-up

tubelite: Good points about the 787. the thing is a sales miracle and a case study in open innovation and 'o…

Hadn't heard of that Pratchett (Terry, I assume?) quote. Right on :) Quasi-teleological arguments always lend…

Can I recommend this essay on my blog? It’s cool and thought-provoking and obviously quite topical. Plus it’s …

"[He] had read much, and although he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his reading …

I pondered this 'down to 1 dimension' line of thinking for a while, but decided it was not true in general, bu…

Torp: Good points all, I particularly like the point about building trust in a network of suppliers and not c…

Hmm... I didn't think quite that far into Rowling's own motivations. A commentor on Part I thought I was readi…

Well, most departments are also silos, yes. But in matrix organizations (which I'll talk about next in this th…

I am not supposed to click on my own ads, per Google's terms, so I clicked on your link. Interesting; I got to…

Alright, I am not quite the disruptive sociopath I come across as here, mostly I behave, and also run my own m…

Viraje -- I am going to take you seriously despite the smiley. Your point is actually an important one. The on…

Hmm... not a bad start. Am having trouble visualizing this though. Reminds me of the Beltrami projection to vi…

There's this book called "naked conversations" which is trying to teach corporations the art of wandering off …

Whoa! That's a LOT to respond to. At least 2 threads that should be forked off into new posts (philosophy of m…

Hmm... I do remember original Mercator as a kid. Most maps I see still show Greenland comparable to Australia …

Hey Arthur, nice to connect again! The guy is very famous in industry, and it is interesting that he is taking…

Yes, this is a fundamental philosophical problem that has not been adequately addressed that I know of, and he…

Hey, the business stuff isn't going away. How else can I maintain a scholar-warrior persona, short of joining …

I'll do a fairly thorough examination of the experiential vs. epistemological approaches as and when I find go…

Hey Seth: You find substance in "why something rather than nothing?" Somehow that one doesn't grab me. In fac…

Hi Viraje: Don't want to figure out all this right here in the comments to the first blog on this theme, but …

Hmm. The communication-by-transport is definitely on its way out. The costs are simply too high, esp. with gas…

Hi Diane: Thanks for the missing details on the Cirque du Soleil story, which I was not aware of. That's a ke…

Hey Viraje: Wow, that's a lot of food for thought. Quick responses, since some of my more complex thoughts on…

Hmm, okay, I didn't quite think of twitter in that way, but that makes sense. Though it is yet another high fr…

I think you can't argue for the line of marbles becoming a line. It would become a point. If r is the radius, …

Hmm... I think we got somewhere here. Combine the sociological 50 foot rule with some form of a Dunbar number,…

Have you ever truly been aware of a decision? See the Buridan's Ass thought experiment. In practice decisi…

We accomplish the inverse. Our brain does the translating, annotating each object in our field of vision with …

Kaps: Yup, I have the gimp, and photoshop as well. It isn't the s/w, it's my artistic skill :) Am just startin…

Hi Diane, thanks for the pointer. Pogo does indeed seem like a great WITW analog. Looks like a complete anthol…

Gian-Carlo Rota has a great description of the personalities of logicians in 'Indiscrete thoughts' (pun intend…

I found the reference to the 50-foot (50 meter rather) rule: a couple of colleagues at work pointed it out, as…

I suppose even in juggling, if you drop too many balls, you get fired from the show. I am curious as to why s…

Hmm... maybe I'll try to illustrate your 2 panel gag. Very funny :) Am learning a few tricks about comic strip…

Hey HEY, hands off NCW :) I hadn't heard of the Van Riper episode (just googled it...here is one description…

Excellent thought, especially the idea that if you time things right and pick the right wave, "suddenly things…

Thanks for the comments guys. Nice to have my observations validated given that I've never been in the restaur…

Well, one last salvo in this debate. I wouldn't agree that just because a set of facts can be used to argue bo…

I am going to be adding additional thoughts on Kitchen Nightmares as comments to this post, since I don't like…

The onion piece is hilarious. The Chuck Lorre thing is pretty neat too, 2.5 men is my new favorite rerun sitco…

Hey, nice to see you alive and kicking. My point about 'derisive laughter' proved :). So I guess my attempt to…

Us idea guys only have a private sense of humor. No public one. Anyway, this is a beta stab at this theme; not…

Charles, thanks for the refs. That's the second reco for Morgan's book in as many days, so I should definitely…

Hi Rob: I agree that most good managers do adopt this approach; the question really is what proportion of mana…

Hi Navin: Good points. I've definitely seen scenario 1 play out a couple of times at least. There is a delicat…

Thanks Kaps, very interesting. Scott McCloud in 'Understanding Comics' proposes a similar distinction, but ref…

I haven't yet explained the emotional 'signature' of those transportation scenes, I just noted them because th…

Curious. I checked out the overcoming bias site when it was first pointed out to me, but rather quickly (and i…

James: Interesting comment there, and it took me a long time to process. I think what misled me here is your …

I'll certainly be updating this map as my visualization improves (and maybe when I find a good artist :)). I a…

That's an interesting observation, that the best metaphoric thinking on business is not in business books. I w…

Thanks Sharon. I like your bifocals metaphor. I wonder if there might be an interesting way to visualize combi…

i.e. for 0, pi, lines approach from east and west respectively. you can't define tangents at corners obvious…

Ah, c'mon Ramu; not all presidents are GWB, and not all CEOs are clueless sons-of-founders. There's definitely…

None taken. Gotta lead the cheers surreptitiously in this age of personal branding. Sorry for late show-up. Yo…

Wow, why would I delete that? Far from being a troll, it is a pretty neat antithesis to the more rapturously m…

The first approach you outline is time consuming, but probably the only provably effective way to improve your…

Evan: Haven't really thought through the issues posed by immersive virtual realities besides my one cartoon a…

Just watched an episode of the original British version where Ramsey turns around La Gondola. The most interes…

Justin, you'd be surprised at the number of experienced technologists with long resumes who don't know of thes…

I've seen the poignant guide too, though I didn't think of it before as representing the same sort of new grap…

Hmm... I see your point about boundary blurring, but I think there could be a way to frame this issue in more …

Good point. Salkowitz addresses this in the book, by segmenting into younger/older members of each gen. He tal…

"Chief Scientific Officer"

Hmm... the metrics issue is one I've always been ambivalent about, because for every metric, you can always fi…

David -- yes, your clarification on the 'M' in the Grabowski ratio is very important. For your previous quest…

Hi Ian, Thank you :) I am in the Bay Area every couple of months or so. Should be able to bump into each oth…

They actually have quite a line of business going with this test, mainly as part of larger organization-level …

Hmm... that is scarily perceptive of you. The quote is very apt -- hadn't thought of it that way. I'd say, I a…

Oh, I don't mind. It's not like I am handing out grades here (hmm... maybe I should rewrite this material as a…

Hmm... and I thought only my company worked that way; fighting over headcounts in a grim battle of attrition q…

Erik -- that's twice you've brought up Clay Shirky, and I've seen him cited in other places a bunch of times. …

I'll post here books which I'll probably include if I ever get to a second version of this. Charlene Li's Gr…

I have been evolving a response to your questions Dave, and unfortunately/fortunately, it is snowballing into …

Ah sorry, no. We'll only get the CONCEPT right by 2010. Execution may take a while longer :P

Gregory: you lost me. Possibly there is something in what you say. But over the years, as my patience for loos…

lol :) I'll take that as a compliment actually! I do have more of a tamas-rajas-sattvik approach to this stuf…

If the success criterion is really "requires a strong, committed, visionary leader - someone who can figure th…

@ Abhay; the latter. My poor attempt at ironic-sexist humor for 2008.

@ Gregory... interesting comment, that you think the two are related. I actually happen to think linking creat…

I've updated the map to include Groundswell by Li and Bernoff, and 'The Future of the Internet and How to Stop…

Thanks for the comment Josh. I agree, cluelessness and flexibility in outlook are not the same thing, and havi…

gregory: you are conflating materialism with reductionism. given your advaita references, you are a monist I …

Nemo: You can't. Your best bet is to tune it out :)

and here I was thinking you are a non-dualist :) why do you believe an ability to 'be' in a raw 'be the consc…

Good point JB. The 'orchestrator' in my list comes closest to a sales person, but this is still internal sales…

HBR has a nice little review of an opinion/prediction by Drucker on talent management. Relevant excerpt: Th…

See... you naturally jump to creative-destruction or plain creativity when you think of this stuff! You went o…

Now that makes MUCH more sense :) I'd always misheard it as hansi. But 'laughter' accidentally works neatly to…

Kinda :) except for the leisured rich folks (as in the novels of Edith Wharton for example)! If you look at …

I think I'd actually stick to the knowledge worker-industrial worker comparison. Today's knowledge worker clas…

Brendan: I think you are possibly being too cynical. A cat toy truly maps to 'love and belonging.' The publish…

Gina: Thanks for your comments. It would be interesting to hear your view of the gap between the way the R&D …

LOL@arthakranti. I enjoy a good economics joke, thanks :). I always wonder about people who try incredibly si…

Umm... lemme be careful here Anittah. I do find Surowiecki's book useful and well-written overall ("roughly, d…

I think I agree that there are probably 4, though I don't actually dislike #4... MLM's, sales, politicians. I …

Update: my original post generated quite a storm of responses, so I've posted a follow-up guest post on Enterp…

Bobby: Yes, what you are describing for Flickr is a classic diffusion process. Somewhere in the book the auth…

Okay, that's not quite so much shorting as it is bargain-hunting. Wonder if there IS an equivalent of shorting…

Thanks for the comments folks. @Van Scott -- thanks, and glad to have you on board. I checked out your blog …

Aww, c'mon. That's so 90s. Guys, keep voting!! TechNomad is starting to pull ahead! Venkat

Thanks for the pointer to the flaneur concept Chuck. Very interesting. From what I've read so far on the Web, …

Thanks, glad you liked the piece. Sisyphus is definitely my role model and I cite Camus too much. One of my re…

Good point Sharon, and I wonder if it is as relevant to small-ticket consumer markets as it is big-ticket ente…

@ irv ... you're thinking astro physics not astro nomy . And agreed, that's really hard physics. I almost wen…

Steve: Thanks for the reco: have heard of the bicameral mind thesis, but hadn't tracked down the source to Ja…

Marigo: This line made me curious: What I like about this example is the absence of narrative. . Could you e…

Go right ahead Marigo, post any links you think might be useful. You can either post them in comments, or send…

Derrick: that's some seriously intellectual writing you've got there :) I'll file away and try to understand y…

Businessweek has a similarly themed speculative economics article, sourced from GigaOm, called the 10 laws of…

Rachel: the gender bias was deliberate. I usually am conscious about it and write with s/he language, but in t…

Steven: In this post, I merely asked the existence question about culture, framed broadly enough to allow for…

Manju: No, I wouldn't agree with your distinction. If you see value in blurring the boundary in one direction …

Well... I wouldn't commit to specific dates and percentage levels. Just the overall shape and underlying dynam…

flip -- can't see what you are talking about. - Venkat

It's a bunch of exploratory essays from his blog, which he had for a short time I think. It was the 2nd book, …

:) good point. I like the idea that GTD isn't about things not going wrong, it's about 'getting back on the wa…

Love the idea Tabby :)... though I think the term 'rainmaker' is already taken for a top sales person who gene…

Hi Giuliana: My thinking was that in the space that matters (virtual), cloudworkers are relatively stable. My…

Hi Matt: You are bringing up some extremely good questions, and I cannot answer them in a comment for the very…

The book doesn't have any advice for interviewees. I've seen quite a few blog posts doing the rounds from care…

Hi Sameer: Good point about what counts as 'reasonable' expectations. The psychological shock, as you say, co…

LOL!

Okay, you are raising two points here, and I don't think 'who' (government or private enterprise) matters when…

Good point about the simplicity-complexity tradeoff. There's good reason to believe that besides complexity th…

Thanks Lisa. So since this is what you'd have written yourself, I expect I can rely on you for some word-of-mo…

Hmm... Bach gets a little too mystical about it for my tastes, but yes, I see what you are getting at. I read …

That did come out in your book, that you recommended X/W/S/T/C rather than pure W/S/T/C, and I suppose the who…

Thanks for the MacLeod ref; now on my list. And yes, the naive approach to personal branding is obviously the …

For some reason comments links aren't showing up as clickable. Will look into it. The quote is very interesti…

@saurabh I may be completely misremembering or mashing up details of different designs that came up, so not su…

Dave: am curious as to why the club model might not be legal in the US. If you have a membership-by-nomination…

Greg: I am not attempting definitions. I am reporting my perceptions of what I am hearing and reading. It wo…

Two points on the 'market leader' thing: 1. If it isn't going to become the market leader, I have to admit I …

Hi Ganesh, thanks for posting the additional examples. I was actually not aware of some of them. Gartner, I le…

Well, as it happens, this post is older than the grids post and the triangles post too I think. I am a fan (th…

Okay, now you've officially added more value to this discussion than I did with my original post :) I do have…

LOL @ your characterization of Tufte. I admit I've had the books for a while but haven't done more than browse…

Dan: I was analyzing the broader use of the terms strategy/tactics, where the military context is missing, and…

Thanks everybody, for the excellent comments. It is gratifying to find out that at least a few readers find ri…

Frank: The first line of thought worries me because it builds in notions of society, agency and subjective va…

Venkata: the corruption issue is one I hope to address in a future piece. But check out the views of Thomas Gr…

Thanks Kapsio: on a much less academic note... here's Slate's take on the possibility of Skynet, by P. W. Sing…

Venkata - the link is the 'buy me a beer' wordpress plugin (I use the cafe setting). It hooks to paypal. Not a…

I'd say Case 2 is really a manifestation of the laws of entropy-complexity. I do think the vast majority of pe…

I am actually thinking more broadly of what actually is being bought. At Amazon, you are a) buying a book, b) …

Mason: thanks for the refs, they sound interesting. Let me challenge your anecdote a bit though. What if the …

Thanks; wish I could interpret every zero-comments post as speechless admiration :) I agree with your point,…

I don't believe he has published this idea. It was just in a DARPA presentation I heard at Stanford.

John: I wasn't clear, I guess. I meant that that precision/clarity is true of both. But in innovation languag…

Well, I thought it would be obvious; tragic of course! Venkat

Thanks Bob, and yes, the connection to classical ideas about drama and tragedy hadn't escaped me. It was just …

Deep: Probably a 6/10, B+. For calibration, all the related books I've cited in this article would probably ra…

Saurabh and Justin: I am not sure what I feel about footnotes... I don't think I agree that they are the leas…

Hey thanks, House of Leaves certainly seems worthwhile, and looking it up in Wikipedia got me to the idea of…

Thanks Basti, Julien, Markanday and Jack. Interesting to see that many people seem to be thinking about such …

Checked it out. Wow, you've really turned the idea into a critique of ways of doing politics :) Venkat

Isnt a hyperlink just a “ref” that may direct you to another book instead of the foot of the page or the end o…

Hi Anupama: Yes, Berne did come up with that terminology in the transactional model, but since few people get…

David: There is room enough in this world for the exploration and updating of both the letter and spirit of …

Thanks for your comments folks! Glad you liked it. Deepak: don't let the review stop you from reading the boo…

Shane: Are you suggesting that I have a God complex or am a tortured free-associator? I'd like to adopt the p…

I think I had the comments RSS up, but it seems to have vanished in my last theme upgrade. Will look into the …

Justin: I guess outfits like partnerup.com are trying to do something like that. But I think the need for …

well this is one of my more-beta-than-usual pieces, and the argument is not as tight or even clear to me as I'…

3 comments from ruby programmers. Interesting. @John: So the Japanese find even the minor ostentation of boo…

LOL@ Katsushika. You are right about my tendency to 'clarify.' Bad habit. But price of putting out long beta t…

Oh man, talk about peer pressure. Lots more people tuned in at low amplitude high frequency bands. @jeremy I …

Energy bars. I like that :) You are demonstrating how powerful per-capita thinking is in your comment. You've…

John, yes... I didn't reference it in this article, but I have a post about that: Sapir-Whorf, Lakoff, Metaph…

@RG yes, but where did those denominators/ratios come from? 1:1 comes from the rough visual equality of 2 prot…

We need the mechanics metaphor here. I'd rewrite that sentence as "margin growth [velocity] is decelerating [i…

I actually have a whole section of a chapter of my book devoted to archetypes, including a dictionary of anima…

@tubelite As usual, you are spotting gaps and taking the argument much further than I could :) Didn't even oc…

There is definitely a supply-limit and a demand-limit effect. But I am not sure that with ubiquity, that we l…

Heh heh, I've shared too many secrets already :) But I don't know really. I would guess it has to do with wh…

Xianhang: Interesting point. I think I personally make a distinction between humor for humor's sake vs. humor…

Awesome, thanks. Was not aware this had been studied academically :) Will definitely read this paper.

Paul: Like I said, I am not religious about the number, but 30 does seem too high. I think the effective size …

Frank: unique insights and "mess of forced analogies and muddled thinking" aren't mutually exclusive... :) Xi…

I think most bloggers, even the most mercenary money-oriented bloggers, are in large part motivated this way. …

Thanks for the ted talk link Ganesh. Hadn't seen this one before. The 'school killing creativity' seems to be …

Thanks Hang. Y combinator ref... seems like I shot from the hip a little too quickly there, making an assumpti…

You are extrapolating well beyond what I said. I was posing a biological conjecture, not a moral/social utilit…

Sameer: Oddly enough, I don't consider it very provocative, and I do in fact find it to be true in my (obvio…

Ganesh: Call me shallow, but I think I'd like the position, fun though the pursuit is. And I'd probably use a…

Glenn: Interesting. Do you have the reference? I can only think of sleep as a true "no time" experience. Just…

Interesting point about the very idea of "work" needing to be constructed. My cat doesn't "work" and neither d…

@Diane @Divya ... Women seem to operate by a notion of "frenemy" which has always puzzled me. @otoburb ... no…

Well, the "evil" bit was rhetorical grandstanding anyway :) I think it is a very specific sort of "there but …

This is insane! The Esquire piece also uses Batman/Joker as an example and has a bullet-list recognition algor…

That's an interesting insight, that authors probably write for their evil twins. Probably true in some cases …

Heh! Looks like you and I are shaping up to be evil twins after all :). Positive psychology had me conflicte…

Haven't read this particular book (it seems good though), but my sense about Buddhism overall is that a good d…

@tubelite the VSR article is great :) Now THAT I like; focused and cleverly designed experiments to probe spec…

Thanks Rich! Daily visits are useless though, since I mostly post weekly or at most twice a week :)

The comic is quite hilarious. I hate those returnables rooms too. Have always wondered why the floors are so s…

Thanks Mansoor! @otoburb Figuring out which of the 3 tracks you are on, a priori, is non-trivial I think. No…

The inter-level oscillation is interesting. Perhaps those who get into that mode are turning work into a Sisyp…

NBC studios...? Not sure actually. The "Hollywood model" of movie-making has of course become the textbook exa…

My general thought is that any information that can be codified and systematized like the Netflix PPT cannot b…

Yup, I've read 'society of mind' (or most of it anyway). African sunrise with coffee. Sounds strangely appea…

There is something in the thought about children that seems to require probing... can't quite put my finger on…

This response seems to keep coming up. One part of the answer is that anyone who is actively optimizing at the…

It is pretty clear that we differ at the level of basic philosophical commitments. I do think the 'clueless' i…

Interesting that you bring up government. All this logic is upended in the world of government, and another Br…

I'd conjecture that a company comprising solely of sociopaths is called a law firm or management consulting fi…

But see, you had to use qualified or modified versions of the word 'cat.' Just calling someone a 'cat' is not …

Kevin - Thanks for highlighting a key point. I didn't make the prescription/description distinction cleanly in…

Interesting thought. Reminds me of the Meryl Streep "death becomes her" movie. Part of it is that societies t…

Thanks for the ref Rasul, and glad to meet you again on the blog.

So the decision of whether to improvise or not really boils down to a judgment of whether it will be the best …

Tim: Glad to have you onboard (onfarm?). Had not heard of wabi-sabi before. Sounds like a very interesting a…

Interesting points. I think I mostly understood your #1 (you are emphasizing the "push" of industry capacity a…

Well, I'll count all that as further experimental validation of the thesis. The best humor always comes with a…

Thanks Shiela, that is very interesting stuff. I am not as up on mythologies of the world as I'd like to be, a…

Your comment validates my general unhappiness with this model. I kinda posted it in the spirit of perpetual b…

I've started but not finished Veblen, to be honest. I also get the sense that unlike Whyte, his focus is prima…

BTW, Re: Babytalk doesn't really fit into transactional analysis. This is because games in Berne's sense requi…

I think a lot of Powertalk learning is merely by imitation and post-hoc explanation ("ah, I see the structure …

You are anticipating my Toby deconstruction exactly right -- reluctant babysitter :)

I wouldn't say small companies are immune. This stuff just shows up in somewhat different forms... Venkat

PostureTalk as an intermediate -- I think you are right, but only the subset of PostureTalk that is good Power…

Yup, "Revolutionary Road" was really good, and I cited it in my OM series somewhere. "Mad Men" ... people keep…

The math TA analogy is apt. I have experienced it myself, and experienced the frustration of the "how did you …

Sorry about the low availability of the site today folks. Mix of choking and site caching not being optimized …

Guilty as charged, except worse. I am now 35, with a little bit more than $0 in the 401(k) :) But at least I…

LOL! By far the best comment on this series :)

The Wikipedia entry on transactional analysis is a fairly good summary.

No, I would say good/bad is not part of the fiction. I have not yet really touched upon morality and the soci…

Re: small groups, see my Crucible effect article.

Watch the show... Thomas Lord's comment isn't quite what it seems :) Venkat

Update, 2012: I modified the bit about Oscar to reflect this comment discussion and his character as it evolve…

Just saw this game theory question. I was rather enamored of the field for a few years, but then my taste for …

I've watched the entire Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister series as well. You are absolutely right; the dy…

I read 1984 and Animal Farm like 20 years ago, so I am left with only a very blurry sense of the details. But …

lol! Thanks for spotting that. Will fix the usage.

Some quick responses all around, including some fresh comments on Hacker News 1. For all those who are spot…

You are right, I AM blurring the lines here. I'd say at the level of overall moral/philosophical stance, a soc…

Good point. I'd refine the point as: "belief in organized religion is incompatible with sociopathy." So sociop…

Seems in the vein of my evil twins post. I am not surprised at all. A previous commenter, Duke, posted the …

I haven't yet replied to Thomas Lord, but since your comment is in the same vein, I'll respond briefly here an…

Definitely a case of "drama in the eye of the behavior" and speculating about the unseen intentions of fiction…

Hmm... I think the show would get boring if Jim's character went the same route as Michael's. His history is d…

Marc: we are in agreement about Michael's goals (popularity, having friends etc.). Where we differ is in whet…

Marc -- Now you've done it. Broken the 4th wall I mean. The 'truth in the art' aspect for me only concerns t…

LOL, this has been a good discussion. Now we have to consider whether the "conscious/unconscious" creative pro…

Point taken. I've seen a few blog reactions that suggest that religious organizations aren't very different fr…

I think you are right that we are debating the division of the tip, but I don't quite buy that rewards in pers…

It is a complicated topic :) At least as complex as healthcare, which took Obama's gang 2000 pages, right?

Thanks for jumping in and responding Tony. Stacy -- to build on what Tony said, two points. 1. You are right…

Yes, there is certainly a huge wave of creative destruction underway already. I think the most productive que…

Yes, I think it will be moral, social expectations policing. The tradition of 15-20% tips didn't arise from no…

Brandon, I think there is a BIG difference between people's formally stated pricing models (which is a functio…

Thanks for the thoughts everybody. There are too many themes emerging here to develop in the comments discuss…

Also 2 more points. 1. Twitter is an obvious candidate to solve micropayments somehow, and I've seen some cha…

I'd like to believe that, but is far more likely to be a coincidence. The writers have an obvious baby theme g…

I mean the impact on digital technology on the entire world, not just cyberspace... how it is changing work, l…

This social anti-objects (or anti social-objects or anti-social objects) are an interesting problem. Like kids…

A very fair critique and I appreciate it. It bothered me to write this piece for exactly the reasons you ment…

Undeniably true. Those are the perils of writing in beta when your thoughts are somewhat tangled :) The last 2…

Not quite. I genuinely believe that gut feelings inject randomness. Read my review of 'Who: The A method for …

Well, it is not quite semantic hair-splitting. There's an important point there. It is a common in modeling to…

A weird example to analyze here is the Gladwell 'Blink' example of blind vs. open auditions for symphony orche…

Glad you brought up Hamming's talk, because it illustrates some of the complexity. Particularly in his bit abo…

I don't know enough about Bell Labs history to comment further, so I'll leave it at that. PARC was smaller, b…

Random firings... definitely like that idea. Valuable even to the randomly fired in some sense... too many peo…

The details have to be worked out, but I definitely agree that the lifecycle is rational in a macroeconomic se…

Not suggesting that this be arbitrary for the hell of it. What if you know you HAVE to let 10% of the workforc…

Wow! And I thought I wrote long comments :) Am traveling till Jan 1, but will read carefully and respond afte…

The short response is: yes, I AM constructing the sociopath as a sort of idealization of "perfect human." As a…

I don't quite grasp all the things you said. Needs more thought. But the point you make about artists suggests…

The fictional data here is of course the Michael-Dwight interactions. Prima facie, your take on inter-clueless…

For #5, social filtering for monetizable content, I didn't mean things like doctor/plumber listings, but infor…

I was just in Thailand, and during a hike in the northern hills, I was in a t-shirt and my local guide was bun…

LOL @ Californians comment. Extreme heat does have its own deathliness. Extreme stillness and ennui overcome …

The book cites research that shows that compensation only matters up to a point, and as a basic condition of w…

New Scientist has a piece covering the same research. Some interesting discussion.

Kinsley and James: Now I have to visit Australia :) And NZ. Venkat

Robert: I think Natalie's reaction is just a visceral response to the suicide incident. There is no evidence …

More a technical exercise in futuristic hyperlinking than a pub stunt. I think I've milked this audience for a…

@Brutus: Yes, I suppose the tone is glib; a case of some convenient fatalism/liberating hopelessness creeping …

dyebyedx: I didn't miss that scene. I just didn't know what, if anything, to make of it. What do you think th…

Thanks Dan! Robert: Perhaps I am giving away too much...the entire 4th chapter of Tempo, titled "Narrative Ra…

Duke: Re: class in america, I think you'd have to define your terms a lot more carefully. People mean very di…

Xianhang: I agree with your folk theory. Both negative and positive thinking can be addictive, just like exerc…

Ben -- you are actually pointing out quite an irony here (and I am not quite sure what to say about it). Even …

Peter - that sort of description of subculture groups is probably more literary than anything, so I am guessin…

A lot of people have been asking me to extrapolate and extend the ideas in this series to the world at large, …

ACS: Yes, I've seen the performance/potential matrix. You underestimate the sociopaths who designed that mode…

Farhat: Very nice to see Naseeruddin Shah is still active. Haven't seen much of him in recent years. Sadly I …

No, I wouldn't go that far because it is obviously not true. I'd say 2 conditions are necessary. First, the sy…

Alex: Sounds like a fun idea. I know very little of improv beyond this book (am idly thinking of taking a clas…

Yup, I've read End of History and am quite a fan, as you might expect. It does get sold short because of the n…

The mapping is actually fairly straightforward if you include those who exit the traditional organization in o…

Heh, heh! I always aim to annoy a bit as part of my top 5 buttons to push with every post. But I take umbrage …

Heh! I'd like this post to be the definitive guide to bargaining, but I am afraid I am not good enough at it m…

Well, I suppose possibly the songs helped shaped my attitude, or my attitudes helped me pick out songs. Or bot…

Frank: Good points about wanting kids to break out of DDD. I don't have kids so I didn't think of that angle.…

Excellent points all. I think all SLP professions have this profile. What makes people still flock to them is …

tbm: Yes, "craft" as a way out is a time-honored hypothesis in philosophy. In Hegelian thought, the "slave" se…

Hey, long time no see! And yup: didn't want to analyze the marriage aspect, since that strays too far from my…

Dorian: I think you are critiquing more than MVP. You are critiquing the notion of goals and outcome descripti…

As usual, you've managed to post a comment that outdoes my original post. Makes me wonder how much the convers…

Yes, that certainly seems to belong in this discussion somehow. I only heard about the tech debt concept last …

Yeah, we are one black swan away from extinction, and several white swans also loom. I am told Delhi will run …

Greg: Thanks for this ntertaining and illuminating comment. My drummer/dancer thinking is probably far too in…

Bart, Greg B and Rodrigo: Am enjoying your sidebar discussion, but it is quite obscure to me since I am n0t …

Dan: glad this meets the parent-friendly requirement. I plan to send this to my dad as well. Unlike most blogg…

RG: Atheists tend to be among the most religiously inclined people you can meet. Bart: That Israel/Hebrew ad …

Great minds think alike :) Two chapters of my upcoming book are devoted to creative archetypes and narrative…

Josh W.: Your comment reminds me of an episode of Yes, Prime Minister involving the appointment of a new bisho…

Frank and tubelite... It almost seems silly to use the word diet as a way to describe what should be 'normal' …

I think of it as a mix of laziness (easier to think things through for myself than to dive into the literature…

Yes, inherited social class DOES sit uneasily with GP, since GP is fundamentally a meritocratic (though not ne…

Fixed, thanks!

Good points about demand-driven. That's why I speculated that we need open source market research as well, to …

Artists deciding what not to do usually means having the courage to get rid of too many pointless subplots etc…

Doh! I should have spotted the 'Learning' strength connection :) Great build.

Dhananjay: Nice pastiche on Silence of the Lambs. On related note, some cancers arise because we can't stop s…

JLD: Spolsky represents one type of good developer, not all. I guess there are those who miraculously are able…

Whoa, did I get punk'd or did I get punk'd. Edited the article and removed that reference. Fortunately, the ar…

Patience, patience. I do have a full-time job :) Promises shall be kept. Venkat.

I am not kidding at all, but you probably need a teacher plus the book to do it in 5-6 weeks. I've seen it hap…

RG: Thanks for the myth=mithya reco, will check it out. Re: old threads... I guess it is part of the consta…

Thanks for the comments and references guys. Hang -- your short post on the reasons for insularity in economic…

I will, I promise :)

Folger's: You need to read part 1 to understand my definitions. They are not the usual ones. Barry: I haven'…

Milan's book really is pretty good, though I didn't get as much value out of it as dog-owners might. Worth at …

RG: Getting more "serious" is probably bad for commercial ambitions :) If that tendency is there, I'll have to…

Robert S.: I think the sales call was genuine skill (remember, he WAS an overperformer as a salesman), but it …

Paula: Never heard of "cognitive archeology" ... any good online refs? Having been to Bali, and seen those r…

It is only partly an accessibility thing. My own main reason for wanting to decouple the ideas from the show i…

The Austrian school has been on my to-read list for way too long. I know most of the major ideas second hand, …

LOL@ Hal No, my mom is no Machiavellian Medea :) Quite the opposite. And no, I have had no major female figur…

Stefan: Good questions all, and I don't want to provide flip answers. I am wary of too-quick assessments based…

Ben: I think I agree with you on owning stock. Unless you own enough to be a market mover/exercise clout at sh…

ERE -- Thanks for the clarification, and 'A history of interest rates' sounds fascinating (generally I find th…

Mitchell: Yes, circumstances of course limit how much freedom you have to bum around. But within the constrai…

Good point. One person's technical debt is another's irreversible technical entropy! Venkat

tV: I think you nailed the problem with this approach: "Point being, this kind of individualist Exodus is non…

Dave: Good point about agenda-free exploration, but that's harder to achieve than it might seem, since subcons…

Carl: Actually, I didn't mean to suggest that the literature prof wins in the end. If all trajectories proceed…

Okay, NOW this is getting funny. I'd like to see the script both expanded into absurdity and connected back in…

That's very clever, and actually makes a broader point than mine ("us vs. them" is a superset of "us realists …

Not sure I entirely understand your point, but it sounds like you are saying that idle questions are symptoms …

Thanks for the Dillard ref. Couldn't find it online, but have made a note. Differences in cultural priorities…

I think the paraplegic thing as well as the other stuff is in 'Stumbling on Happiness.' Checked out your obli…

I think "addiction" is exactly right. I can't think of an immediate dangerous consequence, but I tend to belie…

Harlan: The book is somewhat tongue-and-cheek and is actually quite critical of people who view their lives th…

@Mary Shh!! Though shalt not question God(in) :) I agree... the Dip should have been a 2-pager, and Tribes, t…

Wow! Okay, your comment adds about 3x more value than my original post :). And your knowledge of both biology …

I think the fact that "a lot of this happens abroad" is the main fact, not a minor detail. In any country with…

"It’s still vulnerable if it’s running a webserver with PHP though, as that provides a homogeneous attack surf…

Hmm... "good viruses" ... you mean like find a hole, write a worm to propogate and exploit and close it all ov…

You ARE an exception Farhat. You're describing 0.01% power user behavior. Multi-OS VMs? dlls? SSH vulnerabilit…

I am familiar with genetic programming (have used simple techniques myself). I guess I am proposing a bigger v…

I nature, the feedback happens at the level of sexual selection. Clear skin, high symmetry, big tails on peaco…

Thanks for the links, Thomas, Ravi and Senthil. Am getting myself quickly and cheaply educated here :) frooge…

As it happens, 2 sexes IS arbitrary, and Ridley's book has many delightful examples of more than 2, as well as…

Yes, there will be a high failure rate, but the nice thing about the digital world is that a lot of testing fo…

Inoculation can kill, so perhaps there's a cheaper/safer way to educate people about the cost of scenarios? T…

I think you may be underestimating the huge influence of Rome even today. It goes beyond building and law cod…

Peter: There is a practical problem with trying to be global on a global scale because you can't possibly mak…

Deleting the last comment, since there seems to be plenty of better material online :) See : Wikipedia for i…

Afraid I don't have much general insight to offer that isn't better covered by online sources. I can see that…

I don't think you can map the metaphor at such a literal level. You have to work at the level of abstraction o…

Getting ready to hit the road, so will try to keep this brief: Justin and Hang: Re: Third Culture... it has s…

Hmm... as a social object, Di works. As a part of a folkway, she would only work if her story were integrated …

It is interesting, as you say, that the avid WOM'ers aren't yet struck by the cognitive dissonance of being de…

Always nice to provoke a response from a silent-majority reader, hope to see more :) You are right about broa…

Technically, in logic, "Mutual Belief" is "A knows and B knows, but A doesn't know that B knows, and B doesn't…

Ghemawat is quoted extensively in the book.

No idea, will check why that's happening. Supposed to be dynamically updated.

The Walker article is funny, and scarily high-level in its references. Interesting that in 1989 the guy was a…

Canute, Stefan, RG: Thanks for the b'day wishes and builds on the abacus idea. For once, I don't have a whole…

fixed

Actually I don't mean "true to yourself." I don't really know what that means. I mean it in the more commonpla…

Thanks! Haven't yet read his new book... looking forward to it. He does seem to have gone into dangerous terri…

I think 'happiness' and 'contentedness' are at the same level of abstraction and I doubt we'll get very far tr…

link fixed

I think taking an average of fore/hind brains would be a good enough approximation of this situation in most c…

You're welcome; always glad to ruin someone's holiday weekend :P

Returning to this comment, this particular line interests me: "People with power need to imagine the sufficie…

I think jld is actually correct. Happiness IS actually fundamentally a social thing. But this is a complex poi…

hk: the link between depression and realism is fairly well-known (see for example wikipedia on depressive rea…

This is a very subtle distinction you are bringing up. My tentative answer to your robot thought experiment …

Thanks, but money is a subject I don't want to tackle seriously until I actually figure out how to make some :…

LOL! You caught me. No, there hasn't been one that I know of. But I am writing one where it is one of the…

Fixed, thanks for spotting that Martina. And glad you like the blog!

Mix of technical, philosophical and pragmatic reasons: 1. Technical: My background is in control theory, the …

Good to know I have a potential revenue stream in the poster business :D

Abhay, I tried: not a 'how to write' but a 'how to read' How to read business and self-improvement books Y…

It's a good idea for a project, but backward-looking IMO. You will unduly constrain yourself if you frame the …

I don't know about you, but when I stretch the definition of 'happiness' that far, it starts to become meaning…

I am not sure their sense of "growth and learning" is what you and I are talking about. Based on how that valu…

I was tempted... but you have to be more careful and kind when talking about real people/companies. Plus real …

I think a separation *is* possible. Having a prominent 1-800 number and hiring slightly more expensive custome…

Yes, the study of stupidity and ignorance requires a particular irreverent and skeptical attitude that histori…

Kay: I don't entirely understand your comment, but I think you are making two leaps I don't agree with. Firs…

Is legibility required for scale? Hmm... the successor to the highly legible Roman empire was the Byzantine (…

:) That's exactly why I am self-publishing. Cover art is a fairly specialized skill, and I've sourced it bef…

Ha! Nice try! Am not about to offer free homework help here. I charge a minimum of $150/hr for that :)

"Evil twin" is right. I use the same reasoning to conclude that there ALWAYS is a narrative. The take-a-walk p…

Seriously? Arrested? I am not sure if you are kidding, but I believe that could happen, since I once had a s…

I will allow for a "serendipitous bananas" exception case :)

I think idleness extends to letting your mind wander, so you are duly certified as 'walk taker' :) Too-earnes…

Already pre-empted your objection, heh! See my response to Mike Walsh. See also: this xkcd strip

I admit I've taken my share of random drives. Definitely counts. As for 'pointless burning of fuel' who's to s…

Mike: You can add a link in your directory, and short extracts of DC-relevant posts with links, but not the c…

Flamed for a post about walking, who'd have thunk :) Sorry if it offended you. I am sure there are many pocke…

I am not sure about this example. Are you sure this is crazy? Doesn't it boil down to "who reinvests the proc…

Excellent find. Someone said that the iPad is a 'deeply cynical' device. This article reinforces that point. …

But be idle for idleness’s sake? I don’t know. I’d actually say that would be a sad desire and a sad existence…

"I need a giant pie chart telling me in red/green how much time I’ve wasted today every time I open a tab. Mon…

"Am I reassured that there is a messianic web of intent? Meh. We don’t want to be intended. Like the monkeys, …

It probably is IPD. It usually turns out to be in these cases. But game theory is a little too full of tricky …

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Gelernter's work, will add it to my input buffer :) Not sure I understand what you …

Fixed, thanks! I think intent CAN be made simple if we apply a stock-market metaphor as I suggested in one of…

This book sounds excellent :) Added to my intake buffer! Venkat

Ah! Touche! You are right. Any system we design to counteract this would end up first acting in the interests…

Better for me of course :) Certain autocracies have been known to benefit serfs and slaves at the expense of …

I wrote this more than 2 years ago (wow! time flies) and now I find I don't really understand the post myself.…

Completely forgot about that. Absolutely, will pass on any coffees earned :)

True, it is a minority we are talking about, but it is the supposedly "elite" minority of bleeding-edge inform…

There is a lot of emerging evidence that 2.0 technologies ARE sparking successful attacks on big global proble…

Though my wife works for Gallup, I didn't do/get anything special (I keep trying to get her to get me special …

Matthew: See Simon's comment. I may be wrong about the level of collapse of Soviet era stuff. I don't know t…

No worries: I'll still be the majority poster on this blog... :) Just trying to spice things up with some v…

Pete: I agree, boxing has the same literary proportions compacted into a smaller time, due to the intensity of…

I do recall that Lord Mancroft line. Very apt :). I remember the Botham incident, though I was only 7 at the …

Pete - you seem to be in the minority. I think this post may have been a little too dense and conceptual for m…

That sort of thing too, yes, but I was mainly thinking of the sort of 'cultural fit' interviewing that for exa…

I'd argue that your ability to hit these 7 switches is proof that you ARE on a positive feedback loop. That's …

Thanks Pete, I like the idea of treating this as a non-prescriptive tests. You're right about that... I am ver…

Hadn't heard that one, very funny :)

Very perceptive of you to detect that there is a background story. Unfortunately, I can't share any of the sev…

"Consider the hippie question: your deduction of the hippie position from talking to a single hippie implies t…

I have been gingerly tiptoeing around the broad-brush 'narrative fallacy' approach of people like Taleb and Ty…

Well, okay, if you are a lawyer, you understand that I was saying "learning from one data point" by way of rhe…

They are unrelated. I was providing 2 separate examples of sheep/wolf used as metaphors. Venkat

Well, use your textbook of course. I made mine up, and my analysis is of a business as a whole, not just the "…

Thanks jld and Scott... pretty good answers that cover the ground. I really have nothing to add, except one ma…

Think of it as switching jobs. I actually looked at these dynamics of switching to increasingly valuable socia…

Socialpath: Your details are interesting, but the whole point is that you cannot legitimately infer a global,…

Sex I think, is considered a little too dangerous to routinely use as table stakes (by either sex) these days,…

Rick: Read Part I. By the theory in this series and the special definition of 'loser,' yes, a dojo full of ni…

This is very interesting. I hadn't thought of this particular impact of top-down design before. I was thinking…

Just catching up with the comments here.... sorry for the lag. Thanks for the comments everybody. Rick and jl…

Naveen: I'd seen the article before, when I was thinking a lot about transaction costs, but had not considere…

I had to read your first comment several times before I understood your sentence "Finally – I found the perso…

Interesting, that Zuckerberg model. Quora has already become one of the thriving babies of Facebook, so this c…

Now that's MUCH clearer. I think that's a defensible idea: you'll need IMC when you are least able to get it,…

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. I guess I am circling back to those ideas again with more analysis, in a wa…

Lemme qualify that... they can arise that way, though that's not the only way. Cost (plazas are cheaper) and…

I think the two cannot easily be separated. How you interact is based on how you perceive. Gossip for instance…

Actually there is evidence that people find the less civilized side more comforting. There is research by Rach…

The increasing product inventory effect is an interesting thing to consider. I don't know enough about hyrdolo…

Yes, that's pretty good. The TV series is very good as well.

Very interesting case. I don't think you could conclude that PR is more scalable though. It simply seems situa…

I think I agree with Michael below. I don't have well-formed thoughts, but one illuminating bit of anecdotal …

I've seen a lot of sloppy BE work that confuses utility functions with absolute rationality.

Hmm... I'd actually say those are the people who should NOT twitter. I think there are studies showing that s…

Interesting. Looks like there is an opportunity here for a smart usability researcher to figure out what "mobi…

I read a detailed second-hand summary in a psych textbook long ago that quoted extensively from the original, …

I agree we sometimes work really hard to satisfy ourselves, but because we control the acceptance criteria as …

I thought about the weight-loss example while writing the post and concluded that there IS a customer there...…

A 'magic circle' is a nice way to think about whether or not the consequences are significant enough to count …

Well, unsociability is not the same as non-humanism/mechanism, since the solitary are human too... but you ar…

Yes, this was a very sloppy piece by my own standards, and more a set of casual working notes than a fully tho…

Yes, that's the focus of the last couple of chapters of the book and the whole "fortune at the bottom of the p…

Sorry for the late reply, just saw this comment. I was not aware of such problems with Kiva. My experience w…

:) I am not going there...

Steve: sounds like you are talking about variability selection theory in combination with neoteny. The idea …

I think I first heard of VST in Brain Rules by John Medina. I haven't backtracked to the primary references.…

LOL! That's an incitement to at least 10 flame wars in one short paragraph... engineering vs. liberal arts, cr…

I think you may need to be hooked by a person on the site rather than the site itself, like I was. It's the pe…

That's okay. I couldn't find a point either :) Sometimes I just do these discursive pieces to think out loud.

So far the crowd has been of very high quality. That's both the strength and the weakness.

You are certainly not alone in these views. I've met a lot of people who think this way. If I thought yours wa…

Thanks for weighing in Seb :) I've found though, that getting people to appreciate the complexity and value o…

Done.

Isaac and Josh: Thanks for the comments. We'll probably tweak the design a little more to see if we do better…

Pretty much all my personal favorites (eg. 'The Infrastructure Instinct' is one of my favorites this year) are…

Well, my disillusionment was more the dethronement of certain "heroic ideas" (in this case, to do with the pow…

Stefan: It is partly pragmatic (you are the exception, in generally, there is a 'natural frequency' for each …

I would be pretty disappointed with myself if I can't beat the 'doesn't suck' level of expectations :)

Damn, forgot about that. Yes, the link structure has changed. Will update the post links.

I am actually trying the early to bed/early to rise thing to see if it actually gets me to H, W, W. If it does…

I got about a quarter of the way through "Infinite Jest" before I gave up, but I have managed to finish severa…

Very possibly I exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I find it curious that you choose as your counter-example…

I avoid pomo terms where possible because it tends to buy linguistic precision at the expense of general acce…

Hmm... I actually didn't get far enough to detect those themes. Perhaps I only read like 10%... I vaguely reca…

Drilling for the nerve there, jld? :) But yup, you guys may be right. A role in the spotlight does tend to sw…

My terms of service on this site allow me 34% rhetorical exaggeration on Thursdays. I do manage to spend quit…

It's a broad-based movement. There are the demented ones, and the thoughtful ones. No need to tar with one bru…

I don't find labels particularly useful. I prefer to say that I have a certain approach to thinking about anyt…

Interesting, now you've rescoped from veganism to vegetarianism :). Both movements have the misfortune to be k…

Ah come on! I've been justly accused of too much meta-commentary on some previous posts, but in this case, it …

or example, I’m almost completely indifferent to that list of brand preferences, and most other brands. Once y…

This will probably sound like bad news for you if you liked the concepts and ideas: having fun with tongue-and…

You're right that it is unrealistic for most businesses, but most businesses probably don't need to account fo…

Wow, you seem to have powered through quite a bit of this blog very quickly :) Hmm, "asura" is an interesting…

I won't comment/respond now, since this article is basically obsolete, and I'll save my revised definitions fo…

Thanks for the ref, this quote uses clearer terminology than mine, I like "pseudovariety." Nice to see I am n…

This reminds me I need to spend some time backlinking/trailblazing some unorganized themes on this blog. I hav…

Thanks for this detailed description of what the Cashflow 101 gameplay feels like. I've been tempted to buy it…

Wow, didn't know the thing had this much activity behind it! I didn't know the web version is now free. I'll g…

I am inclined to accept 'be slightly loopy' as a brand name for the next email newsletter :). Strange though…

Maybe you intend to resolve the questions raised in another post… Yes. I avoid processing complex themes pre…

:) Better come up with a marketing position that does not inherit Google Wave. No matter how good your idea, t…

Kinda, but not entirely. Edge/corner cases are subtly different from boundary conditions. Generally core dyn…

Well, so long as you continue to think for yourself, as you seem to be, no firings needed :) Welcome aboard! …

Thanks for the comments guys. Brian: That's a pretty bleak reading, but also admissible given the facts of hi…

Sorry for the ambiguity. "By 10,000 BC" is "by or before 10,000 BC." You're right, it probably happened well b…

That last item is very interesting, where you create dramatic tension by having people act out of character. I…

I can’t make up a plausible “accident story” for tin bronze that I like. One thought is that since Syria is a …

I think "plentiful=cheap" is a good approximation for that far back, when pricing in currency was probably fai…

Josh: You are clearly well ahead of some of us. I came to these conclusions only recently, via deductions fro…

Paula: Thanks for sharing the thoughts. They are quite fascinating. You should definitely develop the theme f…

I updated the cover graphic in the post... now shows the latest, final cover.

"Rapture of the nerds" was not my line. It was the headline of an IEEE article. The Singularity idea is obvio…

My point was about formal empiricism. Of course zeitgeist/context matters. Of course my "brain/mind has alread…

This is fascinating. I had no idea there were hobbyists trying to recreate ancient iron-making methods. If y…

I find time/money to be too close for metaphoric comfort. There's more going on there, and the Lakoff analysis…

At the moment, I can't think of any. The economic web is just too messily wired, connecting Gollumizing/non-Go…

Re: me and many ribbonfarm readers being able to break away, that's probably true, and in fact, there are thin…

That's an extremely interesting view of the start of the process. Do you have an "after" post? From your stor…

Yes, I've often reflected on that irony. Game theory often doesn't work, but when it does, it takes a rather s…

I think I am already seeing signs of the interestingness/cash flow trade off. On the one hand, I want to spend…

I think I saw that change on your FB profile a while back. Hope your pursuit is going well!

Hmm.. you're right. They aren't donations so much as they are sponsorships in the sense of TV and events. Not …

Joel: Thanks for the pointer. This looks fascinating, and since it is only a couple of hours drive away from …

Yes, that's one thing I am afraid of. Which is why I am not rushing to commit to projects immediately.

Thanks Isaac, the Nietzsche quote is apt. Several others have said similar things. Another regular reader Hal,…

Interesting. I almost did that too. I think there a dozen or so major "design patterns" emerging here, in term…

Oh thanks, I can connect the dots now. I did watch Food Inc. and I remember the farm. Thanks for the pointer …

"Thought process changing" is pretty much my definition of getting older. Otherwise you are just watching tim…

RG: Thanks for the additional data point. I just found another person who's "going back." Even my 10 days in …

The Catholic Church is the biggest landowner in the world today. On the other hand, Genghis Khan has 16 milli…

Hoppered. Sea cultures/fishing cultures have also been sadly under-studied in history. Am reading Mahan's "Th…

Taleb, I presume? Or Ferris? Now I just have to give up carbs.

Not condoning the actions so much as pointing out that different bits of data suggest different proportions of…

jld: you'll see that Greg Rader has commented above you. If these ideas get some traction, yeah, barbarians ca…

Entirely unintended convergence, but I suppose subconsciously the themes have all been related for me (and man…

I admit, I do enjoy that part of my writing the most, twisting labels around to mislead/distract/emphasize dow…

I think you are right that the boundary conditions driving all this have to do with abundance vs. scarcity. Th…

And you could interpret the fact that the attacks didn't bring down the capitalist system infrastructure, j…

I am reminded of two similar readings of the Genesis story, both of which I've mentioned in the past: Daniel Q…

Ah, be kind. There's more than one set of categories with which you can think about complicated things. I def…

One sense has been proposed by Jeremy Rifkin in "Time Wars," in which he argues that the historicist model of …

Hmm... that leads to the obvious question, what is the difference in symbolic thinking/supraliminal sophistica…

The cave paintings in Lascaux were circa 15,000 BC, right? On the cusp of the Neolithic revolution. They c…

perhaps asymptotically, "less unsustainable than nature by itself is"?? dunno, yeah, the phrase is a bit of l…

check out Paula's post on liminality/supraliminality, and my comment on metacognition. Wild thought... perhaps…

Aaron: Care to elaborate on that idea of how this big-picture view of history turns into a personal mode of i…

Kevembuangga: I think that's what Popper tried really hard to do in "The Open Society and its Enemies" (it's b…

I've read the whole book. I just used part of it for this post. And as I said, "this is partly an attempt to r…

I'll let this one go... :)

Shh!! Not so loud :)

Lee and Sasha: Used to be mainly a Unix (Solaris) guy back when my main use of the computer was programming. …

Ha ha! I am in the transition between Firefox and Chrome actually. FF has a bunch of toolbars and things I am …

That's what I had the last time I bought a laptop. Good experience.

Sure, quote me.

Good point. Cultivation implies effort. Grazing is predation followed by backing away to let the stocks regene…

Alright folks, keep it civil please. The discussion is also wandering far enough afield that I'd like to reque…

Jeremy Rifkin has an interesting book that I haven't yet finished, The Empathic Civilization . Actually, all…

That post was one of the original motivations for the book. I need to go update that though, since the treatme…

That strat-tacs post is one of the weirdest ones in my archives. Before the Gervais Principle, it was by far t…

Damn, you had to go find real numbers, didn't you? I concede :) The Sims vs. WoW is probably a bad way to mak…

There's something in your mapping. I may have become an iPhone fanboy after 1 week of use. Still prefer window…

Heh, it won't be much good as a doorstop or weapon, since it's only 1cm thick and a softcover:) I cover nearl…

Oh damn, now I go back read your comment on a REAL computer, I can see I misunderstood. Previous comment was p…

Jacob: I plan to let the early reviews do the talking. That's the point of this stealth edition. I am too clo…

The Amazon version will be printed by LightningSource Ingram. AFAIK same process (digital print-on-demand), di…

I think people near the middle of the spectrum are actually there on average . In given situations they may a…

The colorblindness thing is fascinating, thanks for pointing that out. Reminds me of the analysis of the Ashke…

Perfect example :) Yes, E's can feel "used" by I's.

I don't think so. It was true in the 90s/early 00s, but with mobile internet on the rise, the E's are managing…

This post was actually 2x as long, and the second part was all about sorting and the sociology end of things. …

Yes, I do mean "degree of attachment." To some extent it is also "content exchanged." Often introverts don't …

Gregory: This one is enough that I had to reread the piece myself to understand your comment. I now think th…

Brutus: I assumed everybody here is familiar with the MBTI. Brandon: can't take credit for 'aspirational dis…

I've come across aspie as both a self-applied pride label as well as an insult ranging in seriousness from aff…

I meant to link this classic Atlantic article in the post, but forgot. Caring for your Introvert by Jonath…

I also think this is doable, but the danger is slipping into micronation silliness and pointless socio-politic…

Wow, you are certainly digging up some REALLY old posts. This one is from July 2007, how did you even find it?…

The first thing that jumps out at me from this post is the idea that docility might have lead to intelligence.…

Do you have a reference for the following assertion? Anatomically modern human beings living over the last …

I didn't detect a gender-political or sexist thread in Brian's views. I appreciate your pointing out a potenti…

I demand a broker's fee :)

This calls for somebody buying me lunch IRL.

Afraid so. You'll have to get it from Amazon now.

Not really. Realism and nihilism are very different sensibilities. Not sure where you are getting your impres…

If you'd like to post a comment, please do so on the post with all the road trip logistics and details at the …

Thanks Alex, you are the second person to recommend the book to me in a week, so that definitely means it need…

Not sure what map you are looking at, but the second leg goes right through the Bay Area. I should be there s…

Gulp! I better start training.

Wife and cats will be in Vegas. We're subletting my in-laws home there for the summer. Since it is furnished, …

Ben and Ian: two invites is a party in my book. Portland is definitely on the list now. Venkat

Believe me, I tried real hard to make up a route that could cover all 48 lower states. There just isn't one th…

There's a few people here, and I've met several of them 1:1, but I am afraid I am not spending much time here.…

Yes... I've been there a couple of times, once for an event at Pepperdine. Awesome location, am definitely tak…

Wow, that's a very generous offer Mark. I'll definitely take you up on at least part of it. I've done the Bi…

This post is specifically about information work, which does not behave the same way as things like auto repai…

Hi Ellen, sounds like it *should* be on my route, so I'll definitely email you to set something up.

I actually have plans for an extended stay in Seattle, since I am hoping to record the audiobook version of th…

Hmm forgot Philly. That would Wednesday afternoon. Will email you.

Austin: Not this time I am afraid. Trying to optimize for new places, and I've actually lived in Austin. But …

Alex, awesome. Either/both would be great!

Yup he was definitely a character. It was interesting contemplating his life by his gravesite. Odd sense of pe…

Yes, Portland is giving the Bay Area a run for its money for 'highest density of ribbonfarm readers' :) Will …

Not this trip I am afraid, but rolodexed away.

Possibly Dayton?

I am becoming a big fan of writing by practicing artists. Keith Johnstone, Francine Prose and now this one.

Didn't we discuss the etymology to death on the barbarian post on ribbonfarm? I thought we concluded they WERE…

I think it is less a question of technology and more a question of generational effects. The tech has been ge…

Thanks, yes it would be Vancouver, BC. Thanks, will probably be late June/early July by the time I make it the…

I am trying to avoid the trajectory you seem to enjoy immensely :) But perhaps resistance is futile.

I definitely feel I was born several centuries too late.

Sorry... saw this late. I already passed through Dayton and it was a weekday, so that probably would not have …

Yes, though that aspect was more about false confidence (the Duning-Kruger effect) while this is about the cau…

The looping between conscious incompetence and conscious competence... I think that's exactly the point of kat…

Likewise. But next time perhaps. I suspect I'll be back in AA since some interesting collaboration possibiliti…

My conjecture in Tempo is that the biological basis is the stress response (fight/flight). The structure of …

Baton Rouge is doable, I just emailed you.

I guess I'll need a separate research triangle trip. Not feasible on this trip unfortunately.

Yes, Vegas is definitely the city that never sleeps. To the point that they try to remove all visible time sig…

I am beginning to understand why. I did spend a lot of time on several sections where I was trying to make one…

They are. Lots of murders in them, including Michael Jordan's father. Especially on the east coast in places l…

I agree that partially unfalsifiable narratives are necessary to actually drive decision-making (that was a ma…

I think rational narratives in gambling that aren't obviously ludicrous involve utility rather than money. The…

I'll probably figure out my general uneasiness about 4HWW soon. I don't think it is unrealistic. Like any othe…

I like your essentially entropic argument about why the worst-case outcome does not represent a reversible los…

Semantics aside, I am not yet entirely sure where I am taking this. I think there IS a sense in which the stra…

+1 on that last point. The pressure from family and friends to move to a money-over-time surplus style and the…

Excellent point. The tax benefits are something I hadn't thought about at all. In an imaginary weird country w…

Wow, you're on an insight role here Greg. I think you nailed it! Beyond the unsustainability itself (which doe…

thanks, fixed!

Isaac: Gronk is right. It's not something to be explained really. And it doesn't have to be mindfulness (that'…

This is the force driving mega-urbanization around the world. Megacities organized around neo-urban lines are …

I don't know how to resolve the dichotomy either, but the notion of attention entropy might be relevant. Time …

fixed, thanks!

Normally, I'd agree with you about not hanging a theory of the world on a single term, but "time" is a rare ex…

fixed, thanks.

My favorite example is Tom Sawyer's perspective shift on fence whitewashing. All successful perspective shifti…

I am fascinated by money too, and have written a few posts about it, but haven't understood it well enough to …

I'll have to get that. Multiple people have recommended it to me now.

It doesn't yet. I suspect state-owned corporations share many of the essential features of regular corporation…

To the extent that it is based on any one thing, I'd say it is based on the same thing political social contra…

I am hoping to get more details as I log more weeks actually living these ideas out. I think I rarely buck re…

Sounds true in principle, but I do find lately that every move to a new computer is painful. Plus things like …

I thought of Alton Brown actually, and had that very "unitasker" point in the article, but deleted it since I …

I used to be that way about books, but now with the Kindle, it's gotten somewhat easier. I am rapidly selling …

Thanks, now I know what bits to spend more time elaborating if I ever turn this into a book. Had to do some le…

I bet there are historical detailed trade route maps around. Here's a visualization of container shipping.

Shh... don't give away the punchline of the sequel :)

The first graph is completely made up. The second graph is real. I think the quantitative data are inconclusi…

Your previous comments (posted as uchicagoman) were pure trolling. You are welcome to post here so long as …

Fascinating. No, I don't know much about the Hudson Bay Company, but the story does not surprise me much. The …

Sure, there seem to be a couple more people around Vegas as well. Would be great to meet up. I actually meet t…

Err... why, may I ask? It's not like this site/URL is going to suddenly vanish tomorrow. Why not just a bookm…

I am honestly flattered to be compared to socks :)

Not sure if you've read the book yet, but I have a fairly careful and detailed treatment there, covering your …

I haven't yet gotten to defining and discussing perspective economics... this article was in a way a long pre…

Yes, not all attention is equal. But that actually strengthens the case for scarce-attention economics. If we …

Actually pepper was never quite as big as textiles. Even within the spice trade, control of Indian pepper was …

Interesting. Could you elaborate? I thought Africa (outside the parts that were already kinda colonized by Isl…

As I understand, the involvement of the EIC in the slave trade was indirect, via other companies, and only for…

The key factor is in whether an idea maintains its identity and history on its journey of citations/references…

I'd definitely like to come out to Australia, but I don't know that there are too many readers there. Hopefull…

I hadn't, that's awesome thanks. Venkat

Entropy conquers all, so "building" is really a question about time-scales of persistance. Whether you use you…

Tentatively, that seems right to me, and fits my notion of cloud as well. Cloudizing something makes that dime…

This one is probably my favorite.

Hmm... this is the second time somebody has tried this on me. The first time is here.

No idea. I don't have a process. It's basically random browsing, recommendations from friends and readers etc.…

I think the refined/unrefined mapping will work. It may be the connection I am thinking of to the Freytag stai…

Hmm... if we take this argument all the way, then it suggests that the notion of 'flow' is actually a dangerou…

Don't forget your juggling. That's pretty much a perfect illustration of 10,000 hours and the 3Rs :) Seems to …

Glad I am evolving in the 3Rs and developing this approach to exploring ideas :P. Yeah, I've done enough of …

Good point. I didn't adequately think through a non-featureless way of thinking about navigation (other than i…

Joerg -- can you elaborate on KFTF? I haven't heard of it or read it. Perhaps a short elevator pitch explanati…

I am thinking I should replace "reference" with "reuse" (your own previous work). Programmers use their favori…

Glad to have you on board Jiao! Venkat

Hmm... I think you are making a slightly stronger commitment than I am. Or maybe I am making the slightly stro…

I don't think there's any way our views can converge :)

Elliptical is me, definitely.

No idea where you're getting that. I said "typical scientist." I know of no scientists I respect who actually…

Fixed, thanks.

Fixed both, thanks :)

The analogy is at the level of how games are governed, not how they are played, so it is stronger than you are…

The problem with nationalization is that the transition of a market to commodity status is a reversible one. …

Exactly. I agree completely. The weak creating a balance of power among the strong is fundamentally a much har…

Yeah, I wrote this before I wrote the grit post, and some ideas changed in my head. This stuff is coming toget…

Apparently the akismet spam filter didn't like you. Just found your comment and approved it.

Was occasionally an issue 10 years ago, but these days, everywhere in the US, you can usually find vegetarian/…

Those were some early exploratory thoughts. I think I've gotten more radical now :)

:)

Yes, I am referencing slow food. But there are some very unrealistic elements of that. I am headed in a much m…

Excellent point. The existence of a competitive environment of above-Milo-rate players can force you to go hyp…

You are being too charitable with your Croesus Criterion. Capitalists understand innovation just fine. They ju…

Patrick and tubelite have said what I'd have said. I originally had a remark about distinguishing first-wave l…

It'll take me a while to process this connection to curve fitting. I think I get what you're saying, but I'll …

Pivots are among the most problematic concepts in lean startups. They are not really about letting CEOs steer …

Ideas without packaging basically don't spread beyond the local idea economy. They are like farmers' market pr…

Short answer: yes. But the problem is broadly recognized in big companies. The startup sector has this self pe…

Ah I see. I tend to think of this as Knuth's "premature optimization is the root of all evil" effect. I think…

I think investor influence is part of the reason, but the theory is also set up with just the kind of over-sim…

Ah, darn. Am going senile. Fixed.

I am afraid I don't get it. This was an exploration of fairly mundane business questions. The S-curves merely …

Ah, yes. Backwards mapping. You didn't miss the point. And yes, the random delay idea seems to be deeper than…

Working on something sort of like that.

Actually the book seems to work unexpectedly well stand-alone, at least for a significant subset. There appea…

Fixed, thanks. What would I do without crowd-copyediting :)

Unintentional. A case of something being so big and in your face, it is easy to miss. Definitely qualifies. Al…

Yeah, you're getting the distinction I am trying to fingerprint. It's going to be a fuzzy set obviously, but t…

There is an ironic analogy here to Nazi war criminals...

I think the Irish loop may not qualify as a true gyre because there is no economic life within the loop itself…

See my previous posts: The Epic Story of Container Shipping The Outlaw Sea by William Langwiesche I may…

Where do they travel?

I think there is definitely an an anthropological angle here. I think each stream can be characterized via an …

I think I saw a visualization based on immigration patterns over a century at some point, on Youtube. Yes, t…

I think you misunderstood my voluntary slowness point. I didn't mean pace of life. I meant speed of movement a…

Now that I think of it, this may be where I first got the idea actually. Back at Cornell a few years ago, when…

Heh, if this is a stream, I was part of it. Even interviewed at JPL. I'd say this isn't a stream though. It's…

That's a very good example. I had the same learning curve in drafting.

Interesting. I'd call it the 'technological condition' though, to avoid confusion. Is it really distinct, or m…

I think it is possible to add endless useful wrinkles, which is why I think the real trajectory has a fractal …

Not familiar with it, thanks for the ref.

Hmm... a sawtooth halfway up the heavy lift. I can think of a couple of examples, but I am not entirely sure w…

Welcome to ribbonfarm :) I definitely think the model needs modifications for different domains, and while I …

The 99%? :P

Yes. It is not a difficult extrapolation. And there's fictional sources like The Office covering the same dyna…

I am not very knowledgeable about the Bible, but I do plan to make use of the basic "Christ died for our sins"…

Fixed. Thanks for catching that. Venkat

She doesn't work there anymore, and I'd read the books/taken the test before she joined (in fact I encouraged …

I think this is a dangerous argument. Evolution can easily go down a complete dead end and kill species by dra…

We tend to compartmentalize life activities because things seem too complex otherwise. But of course you are r…

Tom: I think when you DO have an engine going, it is unmistakeable. So in a way, if you have to ask, you don'…

Fixed both, thanks. Damn these Germans.

It's been recommended to me a few times. Haven't yet gotten around to it.

Am planning an ebook compilation with a couple of extra pieces, but not a true expansion into a proper book. T…

That's fascinating. I was not aware of the history of the intention-based legal system. I still suspect there…

Yes, it's definitely gotten darker. I may be taking my cue from J. K. Rowling's last 2 books. I do believe th…

Fair enough :) Surgeon General's warning: overuse of metaphor may lead to crash-and-burn.

Damn, it honestly didn't occur to me at the time. I'll see if I can do a cover price change, though if they di…

Somewhere inside of me I have a posting on “the necessity of the feeling of inevitability and the modern techn…

I agree that dynamic exists. In fact it's the 'burn the bridges' effect probably, in an internal mode. You ce…

Submitted the Kindle manuscript to Amazon 2 days ago. Should get through their approval process and go live wi…

I don't really see a conspiracy of Pigs here. Pig narratives come together bottom-up via a number of forces th…

I think it is a bit of both. It is indeed micro-narratives adding up, but Pigs also have a way of opportunisti…

I think I am trying to explore an orthogonal notion of why both FC and GHT might arise from a fundamental feat…

I tend to the view that the dynamics of capital are derivative rather than fundamental, since for the last cou…

Not sure I parsed all that, but much to chew on :). I think we actually agree more than you seem to think. I…

Interesting, I hadn't thought of the interaction of globalization and cyclic effects. I suppose because the pr…

Thanks, this is a useful elaboration. It's gotten me thinking that there is room for an alternative telling of…

Wow, that's a lot of stuff to absorb. I think I saw something on waste in China a while back. The garbage doc…

Hmm... yeah, I guess I am seeing fatalism as a certain kind of liberty. Acknowledging that you are trapped is …

The book is available on the Kindle now.

It's probably not worth overthinking that much. A good example is probably work-life compartmentalization for …

Sigh. Yeah, Nook is next on the list.

I don't really pay attention to authors, I just pursue ideas that interest me.

I'll let this ad-hominem-ridden comment go this once.

Not really physical exercise to augment the pomodoro technique, but a way to understand the technique itself i…

Yes, that's what I meant. If your flow is so unstable that a 5-minute break will disrupt it, making it more ro…

No, he doesn't... sorry, my accidental misrepresentation. But I guess you could say weak forms of those things…

I don't know quite what to say to that. I suppose you have every right to defend the book and clarify your int…

I did not find the overall argument persuasive partly *because* I found it incoherent. This is not a subject …

LOL! The email address seems to be legit, but who knows. I've responded on the assumption that it is the rea…

Yes, I agree the small business class is an exception. They aren't really middle class culturally even if they…

Responding to everybody trying to go down the Matlab rabbit-hole in one comment. I used that example to illust…

Yes, kids completely change the equation. That's why I don't have any and don't intend to. Another sign of t…

LOL! Why would you think I'd defer to social proof for something like this? I've used the thing for over a dec…

Curious thing about book-keeping. I am actually enjoying it for now, though I am not doing a great job. It is …

Shibusa sounds awesome. My Corolla is pushing 130k miles/12 years, though I am afraid my possessions no long…

Interesting that Boeing uses force feedback. That's definitely the most intuitive mechanism. In my answer to …

It's not fine china per SE, but whether you actually use it regularly enough to justify owning. Most don't. An…

I've never actually met a convincing T-shaped professional to be frank. The theory is great on paper, but I th…

He has some circuit-breaker type ideas for preventing things like the Asian financial crisis from spreading. M…

Both are historicists, which is a much more sophisticated position than naive linearity. Ghemawat's historicis…

Okay, that's enough. Please don't make me lock down the comments for this post.

Well, the show itself jumped the shark with the Pam-Jim wedding, so I have a bit of an excuse even if I did, b…

Complex questions. I hope to get to some of them in future posts. Sorry I don't have instant answers.

That would probably be overkill. Don't want to be running a social news community.

Hmm... never really thought people would have drastically different views about posting blog comments vs. foru…

Fixed, thanks.

I would argue that good poetry tends to be extremely precise. Precision in language follows precision in inten…

I think you are missing something important in labeling refactoring/reframing as leading to "apparent density.…

Thanks Andy and Gwern for the pointers to the Straussian literature. Am not familiar with it.

haha... the ganesha-trunk thing was entirely accidental. Just noticed it.

I considered cleaning up and posting that here, but am wary of slipping into instructional mode. If I could fi…

Yes, I actually started thinking about this when we were exchanging emails about how that same effect shows up…

Yes, I use the pattern recognition/compression explanation too, but it seems to be hard to understand for most…

Decrease of course. Nothing good in any of my models ever increases :)

That's actually something of an interesting debate in the philosophy of mathematics right now... whether or no…

Re: the writers/thinkers distinction... I think there's no really way to understand this idea compression/dens…

That's a pretty well-developed line of thought that I've encountered in multiple places, though I can't think …

That's fascinating. I am not tactile/kinesthetic at all, except in narrow domains like cooking and a little bi…

Thanks for the link. Not familiar with that work. I am not interested in path-planning so much as maneuvering.…

Good point. I think my argument works though, so long as there was some sort of transition from nearly empty t…

It goes along with falling job security. When your average job tenure is around 3 years, or if you're a free a…

Early kinship network structures were equally famous for festering vendettas and faultlines that never seemed …

They don't. At least not consciously. They are perhaps informed by a shared set of design principles and a rel…

That's a much better way of putting it than mine. We are all prisoners of our own opportunism and others spec…

I predict there will be an alternative crypto-identity cyberspace for regular people (not just hackers, cracke…

Yes, missiles are a better metaphor for today for startups, but a little too idealized perhaps. The feedback l…

I am continually amazed by how writers who manage to do cogent-seeming cultural commentary while completely ig…

Seth Godin once said that the right time to start marketing a book is 3 years before you release it. It's the …

You're exactly right. The submarine (strategic nuclear subs at least) example is great, because it is a weapon…

Yes, the "need not be smooth" was a big aha moment for me. I think the monks who first explored mindfulness di…

Yeah, I realize slogan is a favorite one of the culture-trumps-strategy crowd, but I think, understood correct…

Not to mention the growing economic difficulty of surviving off the grid. In fact, the more you want to get of…

It is not so much an expectation as a condition created where such economic-non-participation becomes impossib…

Well of course. That's what sparked this post in the first place. I am trying to keep the value growing withou…

Well... yes. Didn't mean to draw an analogy between the two types of marketing. The processes and industry st…

Haven't heard of that. Hoppered.

Yup, I got that. I just think your model will gradually acquire greater utility. In a world of a gazillion per…

I think I'd better leave this one for our next in-person conversation :)

As far as I am concerned, anything that stays within classical economic models is a scarcity-driven activity. …

Good point. It obviously lies past Less Wrong prairies in Kahnemannville, right next to Areilya and Cowensburg…

Yes, many do seem to start with abundance visions. But it seems to vanish by Series B. The bootstrap world is …

22% of the 400 odd people who've Liked ribbonfarm on Facebook are women, so at least 100 I'd hope. But it's pr…

Yeah, that was the gist of the criticism, that I never mention or cite any women authors. My rather weak defen…

I've heard 3 different arguments for declining birth rates. None of them is very tightly linkable to the time …

I haven't read that book, but I doubt he's headed in the same direction I am. Kelly tends to be about straight…

I think the two work together. The motivations make us want to believe, and the rare examples help us bolster …

Just saw this comment. That's weirdly cool, though an earthquake seems like an expensive way to get there.

Fixed both. The fact checkers shall inherit the earth.

Formal learning actually impedes this sort of thing. Time and access to books is really all you need. But you …

Experience knowledge and book knowledge work differently in some ways and are similar in others. I was talking…

Hyperbolic in what sense precisely?

Hmm... Not sure if discounting is the right model here. This is more prediction error than NPV. We may care le…

Glee: That's not what I asked. I asked why we might systematically overestimate in the short term and underes…

Sorry, you're too late. @otoburb already called it first on Twitter :)

To everybody jumping to things like K-waves, I have to admit, while I do read about those ideas (which include…

You are basically talking about the RbCbA sub-class that is sort of in the lean-six-sigma territory. The way y…

I do a mix of "get it off my mind" and "worrying." Though I call the latter "active incubation" --- I have lit…

Slow down dude. This post is almost a year old.

Make a pot of money and skip town of course.

Hmmm... Religions as ideas don't really count as social engineering manifest. Religions as institutions... pe…

Rumsfeld's implied quadrants are a Johari window for humanity as a whole, with the self=humanity, other=nature…

Social proof is actually not a concept originated by the PUA community. It's broader and a general behavioral …

Not my term. Ask Bruce Sterling. But dark euphoria seems more correct. The emotion is still the same but spark…

Hmm... good point. Iraq 2003 was hardly an unknown-unknown though. I wouldn't call it the politics of anti-fra…

Not a true unknown-unknown or an intellectual response.

Yes, this talk was primarily for IT middle managers. Simplified accordingly.

Not mine . Taleb's.

I didn't say you should never over-rule. Only that you shouldn't over-rule them in some areas, at some times. …

Looks like there's a lot of passion behind your project. Didn't really understand the material in the links, …

Fair summary, if a little abstruse.

I'd say a hydra proves its hydraness primarily by defeating attempts to model it, so the modeling is necessar…

I had that prosecution/defense asymmetry pointed out in one of the Quora answers, so that's the reason I was c…

Yes. I ignore the hacker-cracker distinction. It is asocial, but that doesn't mean it cannot also be essential…

Exactly. This is all about just working out the implications of the 2nd law, loosely and metaphorically applie…

I would agree with the idea that thinking is non-platonic in general (that was the point of the construct I la…

Not yet. Two down on my list, after Cognition in the Wild. Just finished Tycoons.

I'd say hackers are ontogenically ancestral to both amateurs and professionals. They stand prior to that dist…

I think we disagree here, see my reply to d3vin. I think patching/exploiting _should_ be conflated because hac…

Well, the selfish gene is the better penny unit, but basically, yeah.

Yes, I think Kickstarter is a great model. I may use it for a different project. This generic sponsorship plus…

Haha, that's a clean deconstruction. Where did you get this particular version of the story? There are clearl…

Yes, I think this is a subject whose time has come. Curious that you bring up the opportunity/threat distinc…

Visited last year actually. Not the Jazz Fest, but the city. I enjoyed it, but it might be almost too flavorf…

Awesome :) I think I like the phrase "I run a lot hotter." That differentiates me from a lot of people. I "ru…

Wow, you may have missed your calling there :) Yeah, I know what you mean. Writing formulaic stories feels go…

Your social activity now influences what search results you see by default. G+ content is a big factor in this…

Steve, the point of the hackstability concept is that by their very nature, hacks cannot get you onto an incre…

:) that's a tough one.

Yes, I was focusing on those two because they are the fundamental skills (or skill buckets if you like) corres…

You seem to know more than me here. I am afraid I don't know much beyond the Wikipedia excerpt.

Thanks for the link. I've never actually heard a ghana-patha recitation, so this was very interesting. Re: pr…

Great breakdown except for one missing element: logical closure. If I give you: x xx xxxx xxxxx You can fil…

Great minds think alike :) Some friends and I are designing a language game now for the BSE email list.

I'll leave it as is. The comments do foreground a concern. My speculative thesis is that literacy meant what …

I don't quite agree with your hypothesis. I think the poor classes were always literate in the sense of being …

My background is in engineering, not law. Makes for a big difference I think. Several SingInst and LessWrong t…

I don't have answers, but I'll say one thing: I don't the successful survivors/thrivers actually understand wh…

Hmm... It's been a while, but I don't recall those lines. Maybe my edition used different words for translatio…

Heeheehee. I can now reveal that my private test for the success of this post was purely its ability to annoy …

This sounds like an excellent system, especially for a paperwork-heavy profession like law.

Interesting point about large monitors. Microsoft Research claims that it has dramatic increases on productivi…

The printing press is one piece. A lot more happened. The discovery of sea routes to America and India (1492, …

Definitely. Perhaps ADD can be reframed as being too focused, rather than too distractable. If you stare in th…

These days I routinely take pictures of where I park my car (either a pillar with a number in a parking lot or…

This is a fascinating angle. I've covered the 19th century quite a bit lately, and touched on the education as…

Looks like I'll have read it now. A friend commented online that Sartre's nausea is a perspective on mindfuln…

Fixed, thanks.

Yeah, probably. I did that for the Tempo blog, and have thought of doing it here, but I get tired even thinkin…

It's the 'entrepreneurs are the new labor' thesis I mentioned in passing in a recent post. Will be developing/…

Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this, and basically abandoned the idea of a generic forum. The book club ide…

Probably too heavy-weight as a solution. I'll probably do this one day when drunk but feeling energetic. There…

Nope, never heard of it :). Was working directly off the common metaphor of "forged under fire."

Ah, haven't been keeping up with the Boyd blogosphere lately, but am glad to find validation for my armchair m…

MS Paint

I have no idea what you're talking about, what I am supposed to have just realized, what semiotic angle you se…

No, that whole line of thinking is turning into a draft for a potential book.

This looks suspiciously like a false choice to me. I think leaving things out can be as dangerous a mechanism…

Yes, I am in the cellphone category too. That hypothesis is very interesting. Basically, getting weaned off …

Well, at least on the thin surface of Planet Earth, we co-evolve with "nature" as well. We're responsible for …

This is getting close, isn't it?

Interesting. I hadn't thought of Aristotle v. Plato, but I think the same point has been made using mythology …

No, I haven't read Heidegger. Some fertile thoughts there though. Curious coincidence. I was just thinking a…

I rarely say this to people, and this is especially ironic since you have been presenting this "blue collar in…

Sorry you feel unwelcome here. I'd reassure you that is not the case, but I honestly have no idea how. We see…

Lol! huduga illa, muduka. Vais aagitu.

They can always gift the extra copy to a friend. Or an enemy, come to think of it.

Hmm... that's part of it. But even on the earning front, once you get away from the EFF type people, you still…

You're over thinking it. It's two posts I haven't yet included in any list.

That's why I said ONE data point :) And very rich/illegible/fertile singletons at that (=narratives). Agree w…

Hmm... that's a very fascinating reframe. Have you written anything about it? ('how to acquire existing money'…

If it were easy to define it would be a puzzle or problem, not a mystery. To me, 'mystery' means strange pheno…

I'd say they are generally a ubiquitous and background variable to all activities. For example "space" (coordi…

I think Gerd Gigerenzer is talking more about the paradox of choice in general, but yeah, seems very related.

Well, the tweet-sized answer is that you and I are conversing right now in English rather than French or Hindi…

I am sympathetic to this candidate fertile variable, but it is in general too... well, general. I prefer speci…

Coding richer than math. Hmm... very interesting idea there. Not sure it is now, but I think in future it will…

Love the "I think..." :)

Interesting. Yeah, figuring out what to drop rather than what to do is often a productive exercise.

Hmm... I am afraid I don't quite see it. Does seem pretty forced.

I think that falls in the 'reloading stapler' category. GTD has 3 selection filters for a next task, in order:…

Institutions, government, constructs like money and religion, civic life, culture, norms, grand narratives, mi…

Ah, okay, it is clearer now. There probably is a deeper unifying thing somewhere. As you might recall, the l…

I'll wait for someone to cure cancer or start a war and credit/blame ribbonfarm before celebrating. It is one …

The stuff I don't do is fairly simple. I don't dance or play chess at grandmaster level, won't ever run a Fort…

If it turns out people want turpentine, I'll sell turpentine.

:) you take me way too seriously dude. More seriously than I take myself.

Great point. Yes, a subtle and unnoticed change in context is one of the most dangerous things in the world. …

Hmm... PNI/PNU is another interesting way of reversing the model, like Joseph Kelly's "priority of neglect."

Rushkoff is on my radar but I haven't yet read him. Thanks for the nudge.

Well that's certainly the nicest bit of anecdata about people applying GP I've heard so far. Things I've heard…

A rule of thumb is a procedural shortcut that does nothing beyond what is advertised. Like the Rule of 72 for …

Yes, that's one of the reasons Taleb is one of my clear evil twins. There is a lot of commonality in our think…

Fixed, thanks.

Get somebody to buy me a ticket out and I am game.

It's called early beta testing. That's how we roll these days, Uncle :)

That was a joke. The Singularity is completely capable of preventing itself from happening.

Yes, the second example is particularly good. I realized this after working out with a personal trainer for a …

Nothing profound. Just gruntwork. I put all the links from my annual roundup list into a spreadsheet, filtered…

Agreed, that's always ideal. It's like gravity assist slingshots in orbital mechanics, used in Voyager. You ge…

Very interesting, thanks. I didn't get into the legal side of the story (the gradual evolution of laws surrou…

Fascinating, thanks. I am exploring some of this in much greater depth in my next book project. You may be in…

I have no idea what you are talking about. I am completely happy with the Internet and what it does for me, an…

I am not bristling. I genuinely do not understand you. Sometimes it is superficial (you phrase things in confu…

Lol, I give up.

Thanks, now I don't have to do the rebuttal. I also like the rough litmus test in the comment by Mr. Pinto …

cross="equal or exceed" I am redeemed by the skin of my teeth :)

I'd say you have beauty as a hobby.

I think you're trying to read more nuance into this than there is. Engineers are not by definition in any cate…

I don't think there is. The point in Star Trek was that the thing was a simulation with an "outside" that you …

It's always relative. So you can't look at beliefs. You have to look at actions. If large groups were followin…

Yup. Something like that. I haven't thought through a proper mathematization in the form of a conservation pri…

That makes sense. Money, sense, beauty are all variables that depend on social proof for their valuation to l…

I mean 'sense' in the sense of 'internal consistency' rather than 'truth.' Truth is hard to talk about. Consi…

"Which seems to suggest its impossible to be a decent person without mindlessly upholding the social system." …

Hehe. I do have more detailed, non-sour-grapes arguments, but withheld them to just try the thing out on peopl…

I am less interested in debates about starts and ends than the S-curve inbetween. There is no one cause of cou…

I think what barbed wire specifically made possible was long, straggling frontiers where stalemate persisted f…

I think there's definitely technological potential left. In fact, maybe 80% of the potential is untapped. And …

Actually, this is not true. One of the weirder insights from traffic analyst firms like Hitwise is that the po…

Try "Click" by Bill Tancer for more on the porn/social networking anti-correlation. I don't agree with your cl…

It strikes me that the greatest technological innovation that has not yet been made is a braking mechanism for…

Wasting people in a good way is not possible I think, since that basically maps to slavery on the other end. B…

Agree with the inference, though I do think the specific case doesn't hold up, since there is an editorial and…

Thats a toughie. I suppose leisure class creativity relies on that.

So long as it is a powerful minority, in or close to the economic 1%, I don't mind.

Damn, had never heard of the book until now. Will add a note. Dumb. Should have googled. The title is too obvi…

That's a toughie. Political parties and businesses aren't really capable of thinking this way in their present…

Hehe. I'd normally delete this comment for the personal attack, but I'll let it stand in this case since it is…

Biases usually operate below the level of conscious desires. You may not be aware of them in a way that you ca…

Wouldn't you agree that others have to be engaged in pain-relief activities to supply you with those things? W…

That is a good question. I have no idea. If I had to bet, I'd say money iff pain. Painless civilization seems …

This is a very interesting bunny-trail. To add to the data, Indian languages (based on the two I speak) do …

This is getting gradually harder. Economic opportunity is being sucked into big cities and major metro areas.

You live in a metro area. I was careful not to say just 'big city.' so you're a consistent metro mouse. And …

Certainly it will remain so for many, but rather paradoxically, the ability of the cloud to support a work-any…

In a broad sense, factoring in motivations for behaviors, you are right. In the narrow sense that I think matt…

Fixed, thanks.

The number of people wanting/trying/actually-doing this is quite large.

Yeah, bunch of such pickaxe sellers/wannabe in the Bay Area. Met two yesterday.

Yes, and I believe that's really the only way you can be effective. Effectiveness does involve narrowness, eve…

Something like that (you got inner/outer mixed... the bottom is 'outer' in the sense of being the first-respon…

I don't think these are particularly advanced concepts intellectually. They are the sort of thing that you und…

Coal Mind historical rigor I presume. :p

I used the term 'Dark Age' because that is a common label for that frame. You are welcome to disagree with m…

You guys give me way too much credit for putting thought into aligning writing/thinking with tagline. "Refacto…

Definitely, let's plan on lunch or dinner soon. Should be in and out of the Bay Area over the next few weeks.

West's model is descriptive, not analytic. I don't think organizational structures ("loosely coupled, largely …

Russell: Google "Patterns of Conflict" for a (rather cryptic and long) analysis in slide-deck form, of Blitzkr…

Considering you once told me I'd peaked with GP, this is reassuring.

I basically know nothing about the PE industry, so I'll have to take your comment at face value. Sounds plausi…

I entirely disagree, but this is not the time and place for that conversation, and I am not the right person t…

That is very perceptive and useful. It also lets me off the hook for a lot of things, so thanks. I wouldn't s…

If I read the criticism in the link correctly, sounds like they *should* be conflated! Agreed that experience …

You nailed the issues that arise from a Porter framework, and also exactly where I am going with this. I am ac…

Interesting. No I was not familiar with this example. Do you have a good reference for the details?

Lots of interesting things to explore here. The Chinese restaurant example is one of many such examples I thin…

Ah sorry, I knew that. Sloppy. Will fix.

I tend not to be interested in frameworks per se, only in the useful/surprising/interesting conclusions they l…

I actually got interested in fabricatory depth due to the aspect you point out: inverting leads to asking how …

Random comments, in no particular order: 1. My favorite understanding of the free will hypothesis is that its…

I am starting to feel old and tired. I suspect too many guest bloggers would beat me if I didn't give myself a…

It is the lack of self-expression as a strong motive that distinguishes the tribal mindset from the creative o…

There's probably a correlation between density of coffee shops and liquor stores and... something. I don't kno…

No, not read that. Thanks for the ref. I suspect there is a big can of worms here. I've barely scratched the s…

Yes it is easy to conflate being considerate and being on time in a clock culture. Lots of material on the his…

The two are not in conflict. You can find the least-effort path to a goal. In fact that's what most planning a…

Thanks, those are awesome builds.

Clearly you're blackmailing me into hiring you as a research associate :)

That is a very provocative thought.

that transformation to tautology is an interesting point. it is analogous to the construction of science as a …

I think there's a few in Austin, but I don't think there's critical mass yet to do a meetup group there.

thanks, fixed.

Hmm... yes, I think fable can also stand for basic Keynesian thinking on stimulation. You'd need to add in an …

I don't think I understand your point here.

This is exactly like the opening sequence in Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, when Dent's house is being demoli…

Very good point. Wonder if we could put the lion, hedgehog, fox and turkey into a 2x2. What would x and y axes…

I think the main difference is that they seem to approach it as play rather than work.

Much as I'd like to, I don't think I can claim a Grahamesque Mumble Premium of substance over style. I've seen…

This reminds me of Zimbardo's "Time Perspective Inventory" which talked about how children from volatile envir…

This is indeed a useful word. I've heard it used occasionally, but it isn't part of my regular vocabulary. I t…

Thanks for the links, going into hopper...

Interesting. Yes, I can see why static typing would appeal to hedgehogs. I am now trying to reconcile this wit…

Interesting. Is there an ML technique you'd say deserves to be called a "curiosity driven algorithm"? BNs/DBN…

No, I am not familiar with Schmidhuber. The connection to compression algorithms makes sense if you're talking…

Fixed, thanks. Alexander and gwern: I see your point, but this really was a typo :)

I don't think Taleb has a consistent position intellectually, or wants one. He has consistent values though…

Yeah, that was my basic conclusion too. The humanist-antifragility thing. Ties in to your old guest post about…

I don't think the question is that deep. The observed behavior would be unmotivated seeking of certain kinds…

I don't think sentience implies agency. Conversely, I don't think agency requires sentience. In fact, I think…

Hmm... I need to spend some time studying babies.

Good points :) Yeah, I was talking much more basic stuff. 1 step ahead of your current decision is 1 step beh…

lol! I don't take sugar in my coffee.

I'd be interested in hearing more about any strategies you have for #10. One thought that occurred to me was …

Interesting, I hadn't thought of the mother/father angle. But that seems more like bad cop/good cop rather tha…

Yes, "recurrent death" is a good starting point for exploring curiosity in corporations. That's been my own st…

Never thought of that, but yes, that reading of Lila makes complete sense.

I'd have thought you would identify the meditative gaze with the opposite of an authoritarian gaze. A sort of …

Theres two distinct notions of betrayal and punishment here I think. Standard prisoner's dilemma defection (wh…

That is a very useful 2x2. I had never thought in terms of the content of what is known. Assigning a polarit…

I was strongly reminded of the viral photos that recently did the rounds, showing St. Peter's square during th…

The UX metaphor is definitely shared access, not renting in the traditional sense. The accessibility and short…

Airbnb is more in the cannibalistic rather than predatory phase of locust swarming, as I argued later in the p…

Think of it this way. If per capita car ownership falls from 1 to 0.5 in a community, and we think of car+adul…

Yes, that's exactly right. It is fundamentally a volatile place, an unstable equilibrium between two stable on…

Well.... if you look at the SOP of Airbnb hosts, they start with a low price to build up a rating and then jac…

Whoa, this is an essay in its own right. Lots of thoughts in there. No immediate response, but noted and simme…

Airbnb is an interesting tiered system. There's pure consumers, prosumers and pure hosts within the p2p networ…

Hehehe!

Short version: They had all their few eggs in one small basket. Richer people are more diversified, poorer one…

Hehe. Entertaining thought.

Yes, I am familiar with Frankl via quotes and extracts here and there. Didn't know the connection to Groundhog…

You're parsing things at a level of metaphysical and experiential fundamentals that is overkill for what I am …

You have an interesting definition of 'kill.'

lol!

That's an interesting connection. I harnt thought of tvam tat asi that way.

I think we're chasing down very different ideas that happen to share a vocabulary.

I just remembered a line about how bloggers "write themselves into existence" online. This is particularly t…

Yes, he's a failed redeemer. His piles of unprocessed complaints that he gets as HR guy represent the sins and…

You got it. I don't know if there's anything useful here, but your summary points capture the gist.

Thanks, that book looks interesting. I thought it was about game theory, but looks like it's a more philosophi…

Aargh, pure paper-napkin sloppiness on the first, "not showing all possible transitions" on the second. Will f…

:) I haven't watched much of Community. I don't know Nietzsche well enough to figure out how consistent I a…

I like this: "Maybe the clueless person internalizes artificial consequences and thinks that they’re nature. …

I think the difference is willingness to act in consequential ways among real human beings, and affecting thei…

I think the intense de-conversion is the most common mode. It's hard to see how this sort of transformation co…

You're welcome :)

Einstein once said that the reason he made his breakthroughs was because he thought about child-like questions…

I think learning some version of this stuff precociously at a young age has unpredictable effects basically. I…

Lol, I don't take myself *that* seriously. This stuff is mostly recognition based rather than exposition/expla…

Nah. It's a mix of people abandoning me after GP finale and too conceptual an approach. I like doing that occ…

Dan, Demdam -- I suspect you guys are the exception rather than the rule. Different types of post enjoy clearl…

Yup, no refactoring here. Just a head on attack with a lot of technical debt incurred.

you're welcome :D yeah, I'm familiar with Berne's transactional analysis stuff. I quite like it, and have cit…

Thanks for the refs. As I like to say, "I do independent thinking/wheel reinvention for free... citation and e…

"stance on expression"? Just calibrating expectations :) I've had people get offended when I don't immediatel…

I don't think Straight Talk is that mysterious. It's just rather raw and bruising to Losers, due to the lack o…

This question interests me a lot since it was my area of research as a postdoc. Around 2000-2003 there was a l…

Probably, if I ever get to it :)

Hmm... not sure the game metaphor is straightforward for a single person. People do have 'internal critics' a…

Very interesting. Consciousness seems the wrong word for this, but I can't think of a better one. This idea o…

thanks, fixed.

Fiat currency allows for easier deficit spending than with gold, since it can be financed with bond issues (Ke…

Hmm... not sure this orchestra has a conductor. I think this is a natural outcome of slowing growth.

The coffee mug example is about producers, not consumers. I am perfectly fine with the logic of consuming prem…

I think I agree with Goblin here... 9/10 of "work" is hidden in the B2B world where it isn't as easy to trade …

Intriguing speculation, but I can't think of good examples of essential "reading bedtime stories to machines" …

I'll have to think more about this static/dynamic schlepping distinction and its relation to learning. I agr…

Well, isn't that basically how scenes based on serendipity evolve? Like startup people working at cafes that d…

Haha, yeah. Ditto me and my wife.

"Totally impossible" is your key phrase here. It makes your thought experiment uninteresting in the same way s…

No, this is not at all what I mean. You're reading something unrelated into my remarks.

No, more like https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/02/16/glimpses-of-a-cryptic-god/ and https://www.ribbonfarm.c…

I think what bothers me is the conflation of self-actualization and self-indulgence. Your reading of my argume…

I like this taxonomy.

Yes, the breakdown question is a serious one. I attempted an answer in https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/04/18/h…

I don't think there's really a way to do schwag ironically.

Me neither.

I find this mostly plausible, except that it feels like an over-extension of Myers-Briggs thinking. In collect…

I really like the absence of optimization idea.

This new Atlantic piece is apropos: Meaning is Healthier than Happiness

Yes, there is an interesting trade-off here: stick to an old script that is more widely shared, or move to a n…

I am still trying to decide whether you are an evil twin or not June.

Yes. I was trying to skirt around those specific bunny trails (chaos theory and more generally, the obvious ma…

Hmm... I'd say a hat that shields you from outside scrutiny also limits your freedom. A hat is a "closed bound…

Interesting. Didn't think of that. Perhaps it is difficult or impossible to a priori separate the two without …

Thanks, your experience confirms mine as well. The most "free" rich people I know seem to treat wealth as flow…

Hmm... interesting speculation there. Language certainly is one of the least restrictive modes of free express…

Yes. Gollumization is journeying towards degeneracy. I don't think it is an accident that the word "degenerate…

That's a good point.

Interesting thoughts. I may be using words slightly differently than you think. Belongingness is not membersh…

:) Appropriate, and yes.

That notion has always seemed completely incoherent to me to be honest. Your freedom cannot be defined in term…

No, I wasn't able to trace the original.

Read the Gervais Principle if you want to understand the backstory of why I use the term that way. In genera…

Havent paid much attention here for a few weeks, interesting discussion :) I am now thinking a lot about thin…

Yup. Still on my to-read list for that very reason. Now that I can sail, the book should be a better read.

Definitely. Meant to cite that, but forgot.

Yup, this one is necessarily abstract, since most consulting work is NDAed. But yeah, need to be less lazy ab…

You should look for another reason. Sacredness is sufficient, but not necessary for motivation, so I too think…

Source code would qualify as a hybrid, as I argue later. But the native embodiment of computing in production …

Not sure about that. Time is a feature of the physical universe rather than a technology. Technologies we've b…

Nothing very special about 2013. A single S-curve for a complex disruption like computing is obvious a sort of…

You got it. Some people seem to think MxM is separable via a simple cut. I am saying, the full expressivity of…

I'd say diffusion of language and maturity are two different things. Large time scales screw with intuition. P…

I find myself getting sucked into one of two modes of processing this idea. First, I find myself in distribu…

Afraid not. Don't think print is worth the trouble for these quicker projects.

"knowing how not to fail is not the same as knowing how to succeed" in short.

Fair enough. That was a bit of a throwaway comparison between the most obvious frontier-migrations of then and…

The problem isn't with eliminating bullshit or abandoning values. Those are the easy parts of the problem. The…

Very cool examples.

Yes

Kay: I think there is definitely a strong design aspect. This is not an unstructured combinatorial optimizatio…

To consider a puzzle as tricky as this one to be solved by ones own ancient progenitors is a case of...ahamkar…

Hmm... I think you mean something different by particularist. It's not so much being caught up in particulars.…

Disdain is not how I would characterize my position. It is more about aesthetic priorities. To me, recourse to…

I like the adaptive/technical distinction. On the question of scale though, you don't get to scaled value con…

No, at least not generic executive function decision-making. It seems to be fundamentally domain specific, so …

It's not a nitpick. It's an opinion based on assumptions about a certain kind of calculative rationality! I a…

One of the advantages of the acceleration of everything by technology is that when such apparent "rigged game"…

Kay is right. I think Sterling's notion of Dark Euphoria (in favela chic and gothic high tech flavors) is a se…

Well, competition IS one of the basic evolutionary mechanisms for the economy, so who's winning/losing is of i…

Interesting, thanks. Bookmarked.

That's a good tweet-length summary of deep play. I think that's exactly what you get when you embed childish p…

Hmm...not sure what you're getting at here. Yes, different actors in a situation have different degrees of ski…

Good point. I think there's two basic ways to define "survival of the species." One is whether the grand narra…

Sorry, missed this comment earlier. Something to that idea of early Bolsheviks going for a difficult goal. I…

No! I haven't read it. Sounds cool.

On the two disagreements... hmm... I'll leave that aside for now. I think we might be at a behaviorist/cogniti…

Ankur: See the Blogging Residencies page for an index of Mike's posts. Will also include in year-end wrap up…

Stay tuned. More on that in a few months.

Yes aesthetics certainly matter, so long as you recognize they ARE aesthetics, or elements you put in to induc…

Yeah, that hedging is a reality that every employee thinks about, but employers like to pretend isn't a real t…

That's a great thought experiment, the idea of a state as a sort of perfectly empathetic, listener therapist w…

I've heard a few people suggest that. Freemium world. Poor pay attention taxes via advertising in exchange for…

Interesting case. I think this sort of thing will become increasingly common, reach a tipping point, and trigg…

Fixed, thanks. URL will remain misspelled though, to avoid backlink breakages.

fixed, sorry.

Excellent thoughts there. I defined aestheticization (the process operating on an existing reality rather than…

Added, thanks.

thanks, will fix. broke in the move to a new ISP.

Yes, bullshit, like any kind of manure, is good fertilizer for the growth of the new. Frankfurt explores why …

I'd argue that noise has no truth value. It's simply pre-justification. As for the how of bullshit detection…

I thought I said the exact opposite: "capable of being unpredictably turned into falsehood by a change in re…

Then again, Byzantium lasted a thousand years. Nearly two thousand if you count the Ottoman empire as a rebran…

Do you have a proposed alt definition?

Circularity is not a bug, it's a feature of all relativist epistemologies based on falsification rather than v…

Fixed, thanks. Interestingly enough, I've had discussions on Alan Kay before. The invent/predict thing is pur…

I suspect you cannot have balanced T's because what thickens/thins either the stem or the bar is some sort of …

I work with a16z, so familiar with Balaji's thinking. Lots of smart people thinking about this all over the p…

I think emotions are just another kind of data processing and come in fox/hedgehog varieties. Haven't thought …

Point out any specific typos you spot and I'll fix 'em. There is no such thing as "republishing" in blogging. …

Hmm... Yes, trust in your own knowledge is something to be explored more. I'd say foxes are systematic doubter…

Artifact of a recent ISP move. It's the default 404 page, which I haven't bothered to edit. Thanks. Hopefully …

That's a really good analogy. In a different comparison, UK vs France in the 17th/18th century, France would b…

Fixed.

I think we're still figuring that out very slowly. And yes, I think mortality and humanity are always the pere…

I go through phases where I do more or less of these kinds of posts. Been a while since my last one I guess.

lol! there's a sci-fi idea there... immortal ghostly consultant who inhabits the internet and haunts companies…

I don't think I'd go that far and claim memories alone can create consciousness. Interesting thought though. …

That's a funny thought.

I don't think this kind of immortality would really get at individual qualia transfer. At best the recipient q…

One aspect of the distinction you didn't get to is measurability. Not in an artificial metrics sense, but natu…

I've known it to happen though. Negative archetypes are often more recognizable in the mirror than positive.

I am broadly familiar with that tradition since I grew up around it, but don't see it as more than a loosely a…

This is a longer and more complex conversation than is possible to conduct in the comments to this post. Suffi…

Very timely for me, since I've lately been thinking a lot about a very related idea: packaging... I have a pos…

I keep wondering: can strange attractors be usefully designed in some sense? I think our intuitions of what …

Not quite what I said about tribes.

I'd say only away from where you were, not towards where you might end up. Kinda like how they talk about Voya…

I don't quite buy that. Sure there's an inner journey and an external expression with Campbell, but the specif…

I think your view will depend on how deeply you've managed to delve into online experiences (it's limitless, a…

Barbell vocabularies ftw :)

I enjoyed (Re)Work by Fried. Good, pithy book on product-orientation.

I think the solution to the specific issue you point out is actually very simple and already exist: push over …

It is non-zero-sum to the extent that it introduces new patterns of mobility that are not obvious 1:1 substitu…

What can I say, I am an inconsistent fox :). "I am large, I contain multitudes" etc. To reconcile, I think I'…

Do something over be somebody dude!

Yup. I played around with that idea in my immortality piece, with the ghosts/vampires distinction. Proust come…

Germans are both uberreacting and Uberreakting :)

Good point. Wasn't getting to that level of deconstruction. That's more like a disruptive step increase in pow…

Welcome St. Dymaxion!

Isaac: You've seen the ribbonfarm neighborhood map , right? I'd like to come out to London and hang out with…

Oh, I am not saying RSS is literally dead. It'll stay alive as long as the standard remains and products like …

Hmm...from where I stand, people have been changing pretty steadily. The fraction of good remains small, but w…

That's too cynical. The founders are in it for the right reason imo. They just have some unfortunate idealism …

Yeah Instapaper debt is a problem.

:)

Haha, love it! Catch 22 "Washington Irving" school of commentary. The WP plugin should be called "Washington …

A proper platform to do what you're talking about would be to Wikipedia as Git is to Subversion.

I'd say that individuals are customers of a specific product only to the extent that they have learned behavio…

You're talking about the decline of canonicity and shift to polycentric narratives. I am all aboard that train…

That would be a black hole at the center I think. Good point. Regime of unconscious mastery, shu-ha-ri. I thin…

No. Yet another one on my long list.

Thanks, hoppered. Gathering reading deficit at incredible rate :)

"Put down the hammer and opened up a distributorship for steam drills...But most people don’t have the inclina…

Haven't yet gotten around to watching that show, though I caught a few glimpses. Need to watch.

That discomfort is *precisely* what I am trying to trigger here! Saint is not a positive term for me. It deno…

Yeah, I think I've noted that binge-reading pattern. It seems to be appearing across media. For people on Hulu…

Wow, quite a lot of thoughts packed in there. Quite a bit I disagree with there, but it would take quite a lon…

Openness is a trait (one of the Big 5). Saint/trader is an archetype pair based on syndromes of traits. I'd be…

Good points, and I don't have complete answers, but for the first part of your comment, my old post on grit …

It's not so much the fact that everybody is guarding something (of course that's true) that I am poking at, as…

Well, I'd be a hedge fund manager rather than a blogger if I really drew as tight a "we" circle as you suggest…

Hah! Perfect. I haven't ready any Zizek, but have reached the same conclusion. As I tweeted yesterday, "My add…

I haven't kept up with Christensen's later work. Since the statute of limitations (aka comments closing) on th…

Thanks for posting the alternative perspective. I think this is the heart of the difference in our readings. …

Your understanding is correct. My sentence is somewhat ambiguous.

Hah, interesting connection to Pressfield there. I haven't read anything by him, but he has popped up on my ra…

Do you mean "sleight" or "slight"?

Yes, classic pattern.

Holds in group settings too, but easier to slip into pathological kinds of seduction with groups. Cf: Simpsons…

You'll have to let me know how it goes :)

Heh, 2048 is not exactly a life-defining game. I think you might have had a teensy bit of over-anticipation th…

I think coding and math will be automated by AI before they're meaningfully gamified. Writing is actually clo…

Is this choreographable at all? Or doomed to Tiger Mom failure patterns?

Yeah, this is pushing beyond territory I've become familiar with to a relatively new one. So even though I've …

I am devastated!

Excellent analogy.

Interesting. Yeah, SF is fascinating too. Not as up to speed on local history there, so I used Seattle as my e…

Yeah, I couldn't resist trying to cram in the refs :)

Can't deny that :) I find it fascinating how little most people care about the fascinating things in the world…

Well, I tried to foreshadow a bit with the hat stuff and the drone... but I guess it wasn't enough. Am not act…

Thank you, that is very flattering.

I've never really met a proper exception to the asshole-at-top rule for big-impact companies. If you run into …

Yeah, the coffin buying example was very contrived. Couldn't think of a decent real-life example, so I made on…

This is a whole subtle rabbit trail of its own. It's confused guardian/trader signaling. I think "pay what you…

Fixed, thanks. Sociopath Freudian slip :)

I had a fairly detailed mapping worked out. Monetary policy shows up as the goodwill (or lack thereof) of othe…

A lot of people have exactly the opposite bias :) They think macro is all bunk and micro is at least slightly …

That is a toughie.

#23 is a condition, #26 is a response that accepts the implications of the condition pragmatically. #24 and #2…

Precisely, that's the rational view. I am making a remark on the psychology of how people actually behave arou…

Tina -- you're right. This is really not a very new-reader friendly article. I suspect long-time readers will …

I think the ambiguity is a fundamental feature. Unless you test under a minimum level of stress, you won't be …

What!! It's useful? I'll have to try and avoid that in future posts :)

That's roughly what I meant. The legalist archetype is in fact about constructing an artificial leader so to s…

But "pedagogical choice" is at the *heart* of the matter with popular self-improvement lit and popular religio…

I'd guess true operators are compromisers and have trouble being sincere enough about values to look at functi…

That makes sense. I think it's all a matter of emphasis on different phases of the "clockwise circuit" narrati…

Haven't heard of the first one, but the birth-order stuff has always seemed vaguely shady to me. It's just too…

You got that right Marc -- I frankly do see the virtue ethics pole as the home of the Clueless for the most pa…

Of course. I am talking about statistical proportions. I think there's a higher proportion of Clueless at the …

:)

There's definitely a values/pricelessness component to why organizations exist. Coase's model has always seeme…

I can't recall where I read it, I think it was Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, but there's a lot of resea…

At the level of individual personalities (on a desert island say), yes, I think the fox/hedgehog typology is m…

I am inconsistent/schizoid about them. Raised on regular, now a convert to oxford, but old habits die hard.

That said, I expected from the title to see a model explaining how transactions take place when something trul…

I think it's a possibility. The closest example I can think of is the foodie microeconomy (adjacent to, but ve…

Yes, that's the general principle. It's just very hard to recognize in practice what actions they map to in a …

In terms of sequence, these last few posts kinda pick up where I left off last year with the sequence on freed…

Maximizing frequency of releases, pushing lots of critical updates at peak load (Intuit example), chaosmonkey,…

So the generalization would be any sort of totalizing statement that ignores internal tradeoff constraints wit…

Yup. Otherwise known as derping , especially when done unintentionally.

Go through the paradox loop one more time and dumb/smart switches again :)

This stuff gets rediscovered or restated in new ways repeatedly. Not just Daoism, but a bunch of other philoso…

Yup, you get the tensions right. There's a delicate balance between poetry and near-mathematical formalization…

Hating games is one of the most well-developed games around, in its own right :)

Read the it-thou article linked in the last paragraph.

Somebody pointed this out to me on Twitter as well, and it's actually a *great* example of a parrot. A non seq…

I am actually sincere here. It's not rhetorical hyperbole. I have written a post in the past (2009), The Cruc…

Nope, this is not quantum uncertainty. I almost made up a Heisenberg-themed title for this post, but decided t…

You get a Sociopath game-design bronze medal! Congrats :)

Of course I do; I am just going about it in a different way because the traditional way doesn't really seem to…

Nothing. It's a joke. Though the axial age did end around that time. That would be a retcon though.

I think you definitely get a bit of a pass being a prosecutor. That cannot be exactly inspiring day to day.

My work here is clearly done :)

That project is indefinitely on hold due to work :)

Thanks for the comments. Some interesting things to mull there. Things like childcare do require a different l…

I may do so at some point in the future.

:)

You misread in a more positive way. I said surviving and slacking are unstable. Suffering unfortunately is sta…

I think one of the four elements does play a starring role at any given time, by driving choices. You could be…

The problem is, I've never known anyone to stabilize at "survive" or "slack" for a long time. Even if they hav…

Wish you all the best. Hope you figure it out.

Yes, fixed. Thanks for spotting that.

I didn't think of it till Tom asked the question.

Slacking at work is a tactical decision about a current situation. I fully endorse it when that's appropriate,…

Convexity is how Taleb mathematically formulates his idea of antifragility. I was referring specifically yo th…

Clever, but not what I meant :)

Not sure I understand your confusion, because there IS a time axis, except it's the intrinsic arc-length param…

The relativity is why disruption is possible in business. The disruptee is getting smarter faster with respect…

Dude, you're over thinking it. Read what you like, don't take it too seriously, appropriate what you agree wit…

I've switched to a Bayesian framework on this stuff now :) My prior probability for all collapse scenarios ove…

Taboos falling away etc: consider how interracial relationships and homosexuality went from issues that could …

Gordon and Nick: While I usually appreciate Brit humor fairly easily, I have to say if there is any here, it e…

I get the sense that there is another side to this whole thesis: that there are _new_ modes of consciousness b…

I tend to think recreated wombs in new media (example, religious groups on the Internet) are more fragile than…

Yeah, I didn't explore persistence much, beyond mentioning Philip K. Dick's definition. It's a separate theme …

You're conflating technology and suspension of disbelief like I pointed out in the post. It was much harder a …

I don't buy it :) From what I've read, Pharonic Egypt and other ancient cultures were politically totalitaria…

By "no essential difference" I mean something like, "if you know how to swim, it doesn't really matter if you'…

Yes, this is related to the sociopaths-as-game-designers line of thought. The difference is that I think escap…

:) And the dialectic continues. It's partly why I invited Sarah to resident-blog. I could sense from her other…

That's your version of our discussions Ryan :) I think asynchronicity and atemporality are in fact the natura…

Well, the most powerful technologies seem to be about breaking out of the constraints of natural rhythms. The …

Yes, with about 60% probability :)

Kay -- who was that "drag towards classicism" comment directed at? Sarah, Ryan or me? It's unclear. Ryan -- I…

For me, pattern recognition of others precedents has been more important than documentation in practice. When …

Nice connection. I've always been very wary of the "platform thinking" evangelists like Sangeet Paul Choudary…

:) Cute signpost.

That seems like an orthogonal concern. For similar kinds of partitioning, you could get more or less of a wall…

Agree with all this. I think you can't judge the "freedom" created by a platform up front, but only after it h…

I am not a dev psych expert, so this is all based on stuff I've vaguely picked up randomly over the years. So …

Yeah, GEB and HHG were ur-texts of sorts for 80s people (though I didn't read GEB till like 1995). I think you…

Yes, this is a necessarily male-biased view and thinking of self-actualization as a sort of lemonade you make …

Ha, I've always thought exactly the opposite. Fox News is the exact opposite of foxy. It's pure hedgehog: stro…

Logical (weak) vs Intuitive (strong) holds may be clearer terminology. So that would make "Strong views, weak…

Thanks, useful connection points.

Lots of threads here to pull on here. This is a rich vein, and even though I am much more interested in develo…

Limbo is kinda what I'm going for here as an editorial direction for ribbonfarm. Sort of an idea hedge-fund, s…

It's been on my radar but I haven't read it. Need to escalate...

I am not doing any more of those :) Didn't really get into House of Cards. Quit after Season 1.

Lol!

Adding this Aeon article here for reference. Aeon on Tipping

The x-axis is decreasing number of arbitrary rules from left to right, the y-axis is increasing desire to cont…

Possibly I am being too subtle or succumbing too much to the temptation to include serious ideas in my continu…

Actually, just because *some* junk DNA has non-coding functions, does not mean it is ALL functional. I suspect…

Unlike my fictional alter-ego, I am not unnecessary; I am a luxury optional extra for those who can afford my …

I'll let you guys know what I actually do for a living the instant I figure it out myself :)

I did not know that :) I'm going to have to chat with some of my ex-McKinsey friends for more accurate color …

Yeah, you got the idea. Roughly what I was trying to do. In a comic-strip or TV format, there would have to be…

:) We certainly have our fair share of the YouTube Commenter demographic.

Sadly, all you freeloaders do not provide anywhere near enough sponsorship money to keep me in the lifestyle t…

Yup :)

Ah, thanks for spotting that.

Very perceptive :) I realized at the end of Part II that I had set up too big a premise for a short story and…

"What is at the center of it all? If we look deep into the core of peopling, at the essential nature of our sp…

Ah come on, now you're switching to commuting as an easier target than interstitial spaces in general? That's …

"Our goals tend to be individual goals; our fulfillment state is not heaven, but fame and career success, even…

Whatever affiliations she might acknowledge, to NRx and stuff, I suspect she's just trying to reconcile the tw…

Nope. Know nothing of his stuff.

Have to catch a flight soon, so will try to drive to closure here :) See -- I don't think there's a disconnec…

This is the defining trait of cluelessness in a way. Not understanding how you are perceived. Precondition to …

Certainly capitalism exploits the value of real things. I am saying those real things do not need "cultural et…

Or for some, it'll be a case of "oh, that's why it costs less than I expected" and go away happy that they spe…

Check the history of Frankenstein's monster. The "monster" was intended as the hero of the story by Mary Shell…

Touche :) But not really. Wanting to not cause pain to others capable of feeling it only requires believing i…

That is a very good point. I think I made roughly the same point with the concept of "combinatorial variety" (…

The Neuromancer ending is actually a very good illustration of the Nozick experience machine choice. In practi…

The claim that humans are losing their economic value under the current social order (via robots replacing the…

My problem with the idea that there are aspects to collective experience NOT reducible to individual experienc…

Also: thought of a Minsky connection. Knowing you, I suspect you're making an unconscious leap from "society o…

Nope. You're pulling the equivalent of an ontological argument stunt. I am merely arguing that you can produc…

You are conflating two different questions: the existence of hedgehog ideologies in a state of competition is …

I am not going far enough perhaps, but what I am trying to do is give the benefit of doubt to people who are m…

See that's the part I don't get. How do you make this leap? "you can say there is no group experience. but the…

No, I don't think I've heard Debord mentioned before. I am very sloppy about tracing the genealogy of ideas I …

Hmm. This bit deserves further development: 'There’s also a type of even more ephemeral, abstract information …

What I call autopoietic lift. See Hacking the Non-disposable Planet I do believe in collapse because it has…

This is brilliant. I did a quick skim and already got like 5 things out of it. Now have to do a slower deep re…

Ouija boards ftw :) I don't entirely agree with Sarah's account of these phenomena, but that's part of the re…

Park benches are particularly interesting, since many are dedicated as memorials to dead people. It's sacred i…

Not actually true. We reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 1960, before the moon. The entire Age of Exp…

Fixed :) Your comment retained for posterity as evidence of my sloppiness.

This isn't really market-like so much as a convergent evolution of markets and organizations. We're already he…

I'm with Carlos here. I think a key problem with this argument is a conflation of social processes with episte…

The conflation process goes the other way: the idealized process does not work and the more closely you approx…

I do that too, (barbarian, sociopath etc.) but in this case I think you were not being provocative. You were s…

Yes but one person can benefit from washing hands without it being social. Personing is enough. A pendulum osc…

Yes, larger organizaitons can be more confusing especially if it's not organized in a way where local workgrou…

Yes. It's quite astounding. But they are also among the most well-protected economic entities in civilizatio…

Do you mean the Morrill Land-Grant era U's (1850s) or vocational/trade type schools? Public schooling really w…

Yes, I think we do. When a kid imagines dangerous criminals all around and skulks around with a pocket knife, …

Haha, yes that's a common one these days. It's the whole, "in my time we didn't ____" pattern of reasoning ab…

Hmm. I think you're succumbing to Veblen pastoralism. You're always carrying something. You're never truly nak…

Wait till you try on Oculus or Magic Leap :D

:)

Yes, bahramdipity has been on my radar a while. Still thinking through how it plays with Boydian concepts. My …

Ah, another connoisseur of fine stolen pens from hotels and conferences :D Yeah, a knife is a great thing to …

" The quantumness comes in when you start thinking about the motion of this fluid at the very small scale, and…

Got it. Kinda. Feel educated up from unknown-unknown to known-unknown now. Technical jargon is great :D IMO,…

Still got it, *fist pump*

Portland is a motif for a particular kind of clueless culture that is deeply complicit in the industrial crony…

I'm not making a mistake. I am deliberately conflating capitalism, trade and money. The idea that there is a m…

I have very little use for those definitions since they don't help answer any questions I find interesting. An…

One possible application might be counters/customer service windows that need to be closed for some backend wo…

Testing new captcha plugin

Hmm will take a look

That's interesting. No I hadn't heard of him, thanks for the pointer.

Thank you for sharing the grandmother thing. Hard thing to admit to in most societies, but I think it's valuab…

Thanks, that's good to know. Never played that and it struck me as a bizarre name.

At first blush, dares seem similar to trials in Huizenga's account in Homo Ludens. There, it is not so much a…

No I haven't fleshed out those differences

Yeah, more 'meditators ruining everything' :D

"A mouse that talks, is 500 feet high, and can control the weather" Depends on context right? God-mouse story…

Hey no fair. That dude was a villain in batman, not a trader :)

Ah damn I read that poem decades ago. If I'd recalled it, I'd have mentioned it. Yes, exactly that principle.

Yeah, I get that... I was skipping lightly over a few million steps :D But you're bringing up a new and perha…

I'll point out one obvious implication of the story itself: if Ryan had a twitter account between 2011-2013, t…

😢

I wasn't trying to be subtle about that. That aspect is crudely in-your-face by design 😄

It's a bit of both isn't it? Situations provoke an uncontrolled emotional response, but then mature adults can…

I will just leave this here for reference. Thought occurred to me related to Murray Davis point: underminin…

Nice!

She'd be half a generation earlier in soft sci-go with PKD no? More balancing out physics with social than doi…

Thanks for the Smartha nuance. I know the term of course, but didn't know that's what it referred to. I keep l…

People who support through money demand payback in the form of economic enablement. People who support through…

Thanks, I'm glad my effort to strike exactly that tone seems to have worked. It's a tough challenge, writing a…

This might be my new most favorite piece by you, and I think it sheds a different kind of light on the idea of…

Bunch of thoughts in no particular order, since this is closely related to stuff I think about on backburner f…

Oh I totally agree this is part of software eating the world. In fact my breaking smart newsletter yesterday …

Priest = COO usually in SV tech companies 80% of the time, CMO or VP Sales 20% of the time Ratios reverse in …

Hehe you went full political :D Did you see my old post on part of this stuff, The Veil of Scale ? Did the h…

All the questions are actually DMN processing, since if you’re thinking of such things you’re in reflective mo…

Those 3 pairs dont’ actually span the finite/infinite game divide. Rather, they span the lines dividing the ed…

Good questions. You’re not reading the example rules wrong, but perhaps thinking of them in idealized contexts…

Nice test! The key with abstractions is to break it down to object-level actions. With mathematics, geometric…

A simpler answer to your question is: this diagram is clearly a tool and we’re going to end up using tool-brai…

I think you got the basic idea now. You may want to read the Carse book if you haven’t already, to get a bette…

I think 2020-24 is still my prediction. These things are strongly narrative driven, and Trump is a bigger part…

Good questions. I my even address a few of them in future posts 🙂

Afraid I don’t understand the question

Something something performative neuro-atypicality

Thanks for the comments across the series Sean. We should get together and chat about this over coffee or drin…

Interesting, I was not aware of that. Is that just your observation MaYa --> YaMa as a permutation, or is that…

Yeah I've been thinking about that

You missed a key point: Meta things aren't included because they don’t involve the enactment behaviors like 9-…

Sure. The argument is about interruption, and is agnostic to potential resumption. Right now there’s a clear b…

“Highway” and “ideological simulation” were probably poor terminology choices since they convey a misleading i…

Oh yeah that episode is covered in the book. I just didn’t cover it on my tweets. Fascinating stuff.

Actually it was the 80s. Those were the real best years. 😎

How long it takes you to do a trial-and-error cycle. Eg print a design to see if it fits, then redesign and re…

It’s nobody’s job to sell you on this 😂 You either find a reason that works for you or you sit it out

Oh no worries. It didn’t come across as confrontational at all. I’m just highly resistant to being cast as an …

Damn you guys take me so much more seriously than I take myself I have to do a double take to see if you’re re…

Was thinking of Memento, sorry. Will fix.

Hehe exactly the effect I was going for

I wrote a post about that once :) https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/08/06/on-seeing-like-a-cat/

No, look at the little section icons :)

Any good scientist biography seems to showcase idiosyncratic methods, And yeah, not limited to science. I thi…

Nice! I like it

This might be the cutest pair of comments ever posted on my blog :)

Huh, second reco for this today. Looks very intriguing, thanks. Will read.

I appreciate your comments, but am going to stick to my metaphoric usage. I see value in the historical discou…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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