Even More Mulling: Themes, Readings, and Bacteria
I. The Apparent Direction of My Writing The Fogbanking Blog, an only-vaguely-planned expression of my day-to-day thoughts on my reading, revolves around my interest in building things that consciously change behavior. I’ve posted notes and summaries about alternative historiographies, convergent evolution, games, design, organizational behavior, culture, apologetics, and philosophy with that same broad theme: the more »
Networks/Crowds
Machines are incredibly intelligent in many ways (I hope that’s not you mumbling at the use of ‘intelligent’ that way…), but in the universe of possible minds, it’s clear that the set of machine cognition only slightly overlaps with the set of human cognition. Ignoring concerns about energy use, there are problems that standard commercial computers more »
Open Source Warfare
DownWinger John Robb believes that crises will continue and that recognizable middle-class life will collapse. Nation states around the world will decay from the inside, keeping the vestiges of legitimacy but becoming, in reality, hollow states. Alternative forms of organization, such as the narco-state in Mexico, will propagate. Robb’s interest in resilient communities is very clearly more »
Institutionalism I
The year I was born, Douglass North published a paper [pdf] in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, titled “Institutions”. Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have more »
That Vision Thing
Writing process for this month: daily, write 100 words of notes or summaries. Flesh out over the weekend and in spurts during the week. Release a few of the more complete posts once per weekday until material empties. A half-thought about running large things using vocabulary I’ve been flinging around. Procedural decision patterns more »
Codification
On Ramit Sethi, the writer behind “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” (How’s that for a name?) “[…] Willpower is a depleting resource. We should focus on setting up systems, automating behaviors we want to happen.” Sethi’s self-help shtick involves getting twenty- and thirtysomethings—of whom he has 500,000 online followers—to put as much of their financial life more »
The Taxi Driver
I called for a taxi, looking to get to an airport. The driver was a youngish Hispanic guy. He turned down the radio volume as I entered, but I have a long relationship with talk radio- even the crazier flavors- and I recognized the gravelly voice immediately. “Was that Alex Jones?” “Yeah- you know Alex more »
“Game Change”
Yesterday I posted this: “People’s life stories tend to be told as a series of big, “seminal events” and accomplishments that appear to have a direct logic between them. There is a sense of movement and distinct decision points. (I’ve made arguments about this view being fallacious and un-useful, so I had to kind of more »
“Escape Velocity”
In college, my roommates and I developed this idea of an event’s “escape velocity” in a life story. The idea is a simple one: People’s life stories tend to be told as a series of big, “seminal events” and accomplishments that appear to have a direct logic between them. There is a sense of more »
Superstars
Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois’s book, Man, Play and Games to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. – Roger Callois, more »