I first briefly lay out alternative media theory as it existed prior to the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

How this phenomenon translates into absolute, rather than relative, risk, however, is a bit thorny. A large study published in 2018, for instance, found that among women who had children between 34 and 47, 2.2 percent developed breast cancer within three to seven years after they gave birth (among women who never had children, the rate was 1.9 percent). Over all, according to the American Cancer Society, women between 40 and 49 have a 1.5 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

In some sense, by studying one model deeply enough, we can study them all.

The notion that counting more shapes in the sky will reveal more details of the Big Bang is implied in a central principle of quantum physics known as “unitarity.” Unitarity dictates that the probabilities of all possible quantum states of the universe must add up to one, now and forever; thus, information, which is stored in quantum states, can never be lost — only scrambled. This means that all information about the birth of the cosmos remains encoded in its present state, and the more precisely cosmologists know the latter, the more they can learn about the former.

A stunning thing that we forget, but the link here is not part of the author’s intent, but of the reader’s analysis. The majority of links in the memex are made by readers, not writers. On the world wide web of course, only an author gets to determine links.

Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair

Social scientist, on the other hand, have focused on what ties are more likely to bring in new information, which are primarily weak ties (Granovetter 1973), and on why weak ties bring new information (because they bridge structural holes (Burt 2001), (Burt 2005)).

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment.

game theory

Similar to my recent musings (link coming soon) on the dualism of matter vs information, I find that the real beauty may lie precisely in the complexity of their combination.

climate theorists

Pluralism

In graph theory, a tree is a connected acyclic graph; unless stated otherwise, in graph theory trees and graphs are assumed undirected. There is no one-to-one correspondence between such trees and trees as data structure.

Willard Van Orman Quine insisted on classical, first-order logic as the true logic, saying higher-order logic was "set theory in disguise".

One possibly important strengths-based moderator for children and adolescents is belongingness. Feeling a sense of belongingness to a wider social group is considered a ubiquitous need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Osterman, 2000). This notion is rooted in Maslow’s (1987) conceptualization that humans, like other animals, have the need “to herd, to flock, to join, and to belong” (p. 20). Belonging may be established in peer groups at school, but youth may also find belongingness through other social channels, such as teachers, parents, extended family, or community groups. This is supported by research from Appleton, Christenson, Kim, and Reschly (2006) that links the social context of students to academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Furthermore, it is important to differentiate belongingness from other allied variables associated with interpersonal functioning, such as social support and peer acceptance. While social support and peer acceptance connote a passive engagement of the individual with the social network, a sense of belonging represents a more active engagement and an internal experience of a strong psychological connection to a group (Brown, Alpert, Lent, Hunt, & Brady, 1988; Mallinckrodt, 1992; Mallinckrodt & Wei, 2005). Belongingness then involves a dyad, group, or community that one senses one’s current active membership completes. When individuals belong (have belongingness), they believe a dyad, group, or community is not complete without them, and they are not complete without the dyad, group, or community.

We conclude, then, that the present state of the empirical ev-idence is sufficient to confirm the belongingness hypothesis. Theneed to belong can be considered a fundamental humanmotivation

The need to belong also appears to conform to motivationalpatterns of satiation and substitution. People need a few closerelationships, and forming additional bonds beyond those fewhas less and less impact. Having two as opposed to no closerelationships may make a world of difference to the person'shealth and happiness; having eight as opposed to six may havevery little consequence. When a social bond is broken, peopleappear to recover best if they form a new one, although eachindividual life tends to involve some particularly special rela-tionships (such as filial or marital bonds) that are not easilyreplaced. People without intimate partners engage in a varietyof activities to find partners, but people who have partners al-ready are much less active at seeking additional relationships,consistent with the satiation hypothesis

Abundant evidence also attests that the need to belong shapesemotion and cognition. Forming or solidifying social attach-ments generally produces positive emotion, whereas real, imag-ined, or even potential threats to social bonds generate a varietyof unpleasant emotional states. In short, change in belong-ingness is a strong and pervasive cause of emotion in ways thatsupport the hypothesis of a need to belong. It is also evident thatpeople think a great deal about belongingness. They devote adisproportionate amount of cognitive processing to actual orpossible relationship partners and interaction partners, andthey reserve particular, more extensive, and more favorable pat-terns of information processing for people with whom theyshare social bonds.Deficits in belongingness apparently lead to a variety of illeffects, consistent with the view that belongingness is a need(as opposed to merely a want). Both psychological and physicalhealth problems are more common among people who lack so-cial attachments. Behavioral pathologies, ranging from eatingdisorders to suicide, are more common among people who areunattached. Although most of these findings are correlationaland many alternative explanations can be suggested, recentefforts have begun controlling for these other factors, and thepure, primary effects of belongingness appear to remain strong.It appears, then, that belongingness is not only pleasant but alsoapparently very beneficial to the individual in multiple wa

Interaction without an ongoing bond of caring should alsobe only partly satisfactory. Two predictions can be made.First, insofar as the need to belong requires that some interac-tions reflect a relationship context, it can be predicted thatinteractions with changing series of partners should be lessthan satisfying. Second, if the interactions are supposed toreflect the context of positive emotional concern, then peopleshould not be satisfied by interactions within the context ofan ongoing relationship or social bond that is not marked bypositive caring. We look for evidence for the specifically mu-tual nature of the bon

The effects of belongingness on mental illness parallel thoseon physical illness. Rejected children have a higher incidence ofpsychopathology than other children (Bhatti, Derezotes, Kim,& Specht, 1989; Hamachek, 1992). Children who grow upwithout receiving adequate attention from caregivers showemotional and behavioral pathologies, as demonstrated experi-mentally by Harlow, Harlow, and Suomi (1971) with animalsand as corroborated by observations of human children byBowlb

Yet another highly aversive emotional state is guilt. Despite along tradition of analyzing guilt in terms of self-evaluation accord-ing to abstract moral standards, recent work has increasingly em-phasized the interpersonal structure of guilt (Baumeister, Stillwell,& Heatherton, 1994; Cunningham, Steinberg, & Grev, 1980;Jones & Kugler, in press; Jones, Kugler, & Adams, 1995; Miceli,1992; Tangney, 1992). Empirical studies of how people induceguilt in others have found that such inductions are almost entirelyconfined to close interpersonal relationships and that a major rea-son for inducing guilt is to cause one's partner to exert himself orherself more to maintain the interpersonal relationship (e.g., byspending more time with or paying more attention to oneself;Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, in press; Vangelisti, Daly, &Rudnick, 1991). Many episodes of guilt can thus be understood asresponses to disturbances or threats to interpersonal attachments

The belongingness hypothesis predicts that people shouldgenerally be at least as reluctant to break social bonds as theyare eager to form them in the first place. A variety of patternssupports the view that people try to preserve relationships andavoid ending them. In fact, Hazan and Shaver (1994a, p. 14)recently concluded that the tendency for human beings to re-spond with distress and protest to the end of a relationship isnearly universal, even across different cultures and across theage span.Some relationships are limited in time by external factors,and so these are logically the first place to look for evidence thatpeople show distress and resistance to breaking bonds. En-counter groups and training groups, for example, are often con-vened with the explicit understanding that the meetings will stopat a certain point in the future. Even so, it is a familiar observa-tion in the empirical literature (e.g., Egan, 1970; Lacoursiere,1980; Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles, 1973) that the members ofsuch groups resist the notion that the group will dissolve. Eventhough the group's purpose may have been fulfilled, the partici-pants want to hold on to the social bonds and relationships theyhave formed with each other. They promise individually andsometimes collectively to stay in touch with each other, theyplan for reunions, and they take other steps to ensure a continu-ity of future contacts. In actuality, only a small minority of theseenvisioned reunions or contacts take place, and so the wide-spread exercise of making them can be regarded as a symptomof resistance to the threatened dissolution (

The fact that people sometimes form attachments with for-mer rivals or opponents is itself a meaningful indicator of a gen-eral inclination to form bonds. Cognitive consistency pressuresand affective memories would militate against forming positivesocial bonds with people who have been rivals or opponents.Yet, as we have already noted, the Robbers Cave study (Sherifet al., 1961 /1988) showed that people could join and work to-gether with others who had been bitterly opposed very recently,and Wilder and Thompson (1980) showed that social contactcould overcome established intergroup prejudices and stereo-types. Orbell, van de Kragt, and Dawes (1988) likewise showedthat impulses toward forming positive attachments could over-come oppositional patterns. In their study using the prisoner'sdilemma game, having a discussion period led to decreasedcompetition and increased cooperation, as a result of either theformation of a group identity that joined the potential rivalstogether or explicit agreements to cooperate. Thus, belong-ingness motivations appear to be able to overcome some antag-onistic, competitive, or divisive tendencies

Festinger, Schachter, and Back (1950) found that mereproximity was a potent factor in relationship formation; peopleseemed to develop social bonds with each other simply becausethey lived near each other. Nahemow and Lawton (1975) repli-cated those findings and also showed that pairs of best friendswho differed by age or race were particularly likely to have livedvery close together, suggesting that extreme proximity may over-come tendencies to bond with similar others. Wilder andThompson (1980) showed that people seem to form favorableviews toward whomever they spend time with, even if these oth-ers are members of a previously disliked or stereotyped out-group. In their study, intergroup biases decreased as contactwith members of the out-groups increased (and as in-groupcontact decreased)

This preferential treatment of in-group members does notappear to be due to inferred self-interest or to issues of noveltyand uncertainty about the task (Brewer & Silver, 1978; Tajfel,1970; Tajfel & Billig, 1974). Inferred similarity of self to in-group members was a viable explanation for many of the earlyfindings, but Locksley, Ortiz, and Hepburn (1980) ruled thisout by showing that people show in-group favoritism even whenthey have been assigned to groups by a random lottery. Thus,patterns of in-group favoritism, such as sharing rewards andcategorizing others relative to the group, appeared quite readily,even in the absence of experiences designed to bond people tothe group emotionally or materially

we propose that the need to belong can, in principle, be directedtoward any other human being, and the loss of relationship withone person can to some extent be replaced by any other. Themain obstacle to such substitution is that formation of new re-lationships takes time, such as in the gradual accumulation ofintimacy and shared experience (see Sternberg, 1986, on thetime course of intimacy). Social contact with a long-term inti-mate would therefore provide some satisfactions, including asense of belonging, that would not be available in interactionswith strangers or new acquaintances.

The likely result of this evolutionary selection would be a setof internal mechanisms that guide individual human beingsinto social groups and lasting relationships. These mechanismswould presumably include a tendency to orient toward othermembers of the species, a tendency to experience affective dis-tress when deprived of social contact or relationships, and a ten-dency to feel pleasure or positive affect from social contact andrelatedness. These affective mechanisms would stimulate learn-ing by making positive social contact reinforcing and social de-privation punishing

Competition for limited resources could also provide a pow-erful stimulus to forming interpersonal connections. There areseveral potential, although debatable, advantages to forming agroup under conditions of scarcity. For example, groups mayshare resources and thus prevent any individual from starving(although sharing deprives other group members of some oftheir resources), and groups may appropriate resources fromnonmembers (although there is the problem of how to distrib-ute them in the group).

hildren who de-sired to stay together with adults (and who would resist beingleft alone) would be more likely to survive until their repro-ductive years than other children because they would be morelikely to receive care and food as well as protection. Cues thatconnote possible harm, such as illness, danger, nightfall, anddisaster, seem to increase the need to be with others (see alsoRofe, 1984), which again underscores the protective value ofgroup membership. Adults who formed attachments wouldbe more likely to reproduce than those who failed to formthem, and long-term relationships would increase thechances that the offspring would reach maturity and repro-duce in turn

At the interdisciplinary level, the belongingness hypothesismight help psychology recover from the challenge posed by cul-tural materialism. Cultural materialism (e.g., Harris, 1974,1978, 1979) is based on the assumption that human culture isshaped primarily by economic needs and opportunities, and sohistorical, anthropological, sociological, and other cultural pat-terns should mainly be analyzed with reference to economiccauses.

. The need to belong shouldtherefore be found to some degree in all humans in all cultures,although naturally one would expect there to be individualdifferences in strength and intensity, as well as cultural and in-dividual variations in how people express and satisfy the need.

we propose that a need to belong, that is, a needto form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of interper-sonal relationships, is innately prepared (and hence nearlyuniversal) among human beings.