In James C Scott’s book Against the Grain he describes how the regular collapse of the early Mesopotamian states led to increase in life expectancy among the scattered populations. Densely packed livestock and humans together with a highly stratified society on a monotonous grain based diet often led to pandemics, famines, war and rebellion.

In the early American republic, the founding generation consciously chose to associate the nation with the ancient democracies of Greece and the republican values of Rome.

The '80s conservatives continued this rejection of the common good, denying any connection to the poor, feeling no need to share the wealth generated by industry, and pressing their own vision of a morally bankrupt nation.

You used to have to live in Reaganesque denial to swallow whoppers like the "fact" that the US has spent trillions of dollars on the poor with no result.

Conservatives learned to talk like victims as well, decrying prejudice against Christians or conservatives or white males.

By contrast, conservativism never dies.  Whatever the economic or social changes going on, there is always someone to oppose them-- generally those whose wealth and attitudes were formed by the old system.

So, liberalism has been right in every one of its battles, and conservatives wrong. 

Gay rights.  Here no consensus has been reached, but it's another area where conservatives are simply wrong, and what was formerly considered troublingly radical-- acceptance of homosexuality-- now seems like mere human decency. You don't have to like gays and lesbians, but that's no reason to jail them, fire them, beat them up, or deny their civil rights.

you can see the results today in Russia.

The liberal impulse is a) to solve problems, and b) to solve them using the state. 

You could define a liberal as someone who thinks that legal and economic disenfranchisement backed up by vigilante terrorism is no way to treat people.

Still, if you doubt that change has occurred, go back a century and read what people said about non-Western cultures; the sense of absolute superiority will hit you like a mugger.

The ancestral environment gets a lot more respect these days

Deconstructionists maintain that everybody's ideas but their own are merely the result of social conditioning.

Architects have rediscovered the virtues of human-scaled, miscellaneous, quirky, vital cities.  The skyscraper in a park-- instantiated as many a low-income housing project-- turns out to be a nightmare.

Extreme forms of socialism are a disease of capitalism, and become stronger whenever capitalism indulges its penchant for mistreating the poor.  Is it really such a a hot idea to keep twenty percent of the population struggling, suspicious, and well-armed?

And for that matter it's fascinating how many of our institutions, from families to faculties to churches to law firms to condo associations, are organized internally along socialist lines (relying on common ownership, and making decisions based on the common good).

Socialism is like Christianity: it might work if anyone tried it.  Rius's backtracking is not entirely foolish: people are normally taken in by labels, and consider the Soviet system to be socialistic because it said it was.  But to say that the workers controlled the means of production in the USSR is to make a bad joke. It was basically a state monopoly with control firmly in the hands of a small managerial class.

But remember the '30s, when the capitalist nations had all knocked themselves into grinding poverty

The intellectual fashion at the turn of the century (and well beyond) was for the artificial, the planned, and the scientific at the expense of the natural. 

There was even less good to say about non-European cultures.  If they could not Europeanize, it was better that they simply disappear.

We also know that students retain very little of the object-level information they’re taught, generally reverting to failing grades on the same tests they’d previously passed weeks or months after the corresponding subject matter was covered.

in the United States, the adoption of the Prussian model for compulsory education was in large part an indoctrination project — explicitly so, by many accounts. It was a useful early tool for the faithful replication and spread of Protestant Christianity, which as a matter of doctrine placed the responsibility for interpretation of the scriptures (and thus salvation) on the individual. Soon after, the same memorization-based, one-to-many model became a tool of the state.

Many have argued that the archetypal modern school — with bells, lectures, whiteboards, and frantic note-taking (or doodling, or snoozing) — is a factory. As the story goes, the Prussian model for schooling — which the United States adopted roughly in concert with its determination that the whole thing be compulsory — was designed to produce a homogenous human product: compliant industrial or agricultural workers, with a few basic competencies relevant to rote work.

we are probably not going to be very effective in understanding that the other does not see itself as evil. It does not see itself as an enemy that must be fought. I don’t necessarily need to agree with it, but to demonstrate that I can’t even run the program, simply for the purpose of social signaling seems the height of folly.

The question is why have we put such an extraordinary emphasis on intellectual consistency, so that we are constantly alerted to the hypocrisy of others, but we are seemingly blind to it in ourselves.

Liberals are concerned with starvation in Africa, climate change, the threatened biosphere, factory farming, and issues that, important as they are, are far removed from the ordinary American’s day-to-day existence.

Conservatives are (on average) sociable, agreeable, and conscientious, as well as concerned about pleasing and fitting in with others of their group. When compared to conservatives, liberals are (on average), less socially astute and less attuned to the needs of others, less agreeable, and overall, less happy.

There’s something else about conservatives that is interesting: they’re happier than liberals.

Purity rules and emphasis on obedience to authority are tools that help small-scale societies increase group cohesion and survival.

So what hit me so hard when reading the work of Jonathan Haidt was the realization that the three moral systems that liberals disavow, but conservatives embrace (that is, respect for authority, prioritizing in-group members, purity) are the hallmarks of the collectivist value systems I learned about as part of doing cross-cultural research and living overseas.

The downside is that collectivist cultures can have an oppressive small-town mentality that punishes nonconformists who challenge religious, gender, or sex role norms.

friendships in individualist societies are typically many, diverse, and often shallow

They understand that each system has evolved to solve the problem of how individuals can benefit from living in groups, and they see both systems as having pros and cons.

Haidt proposes that the moral worldview of liberals focuses on justice and fairness, with equal treatment for all, and on care vs. harm, which involves having compassion for others.

favoring one’s in-group over the out-group,

But the China trip had sensitized me to the virtue of minimizing individualist displays and respecting the desires of those above one in the social hierarchy. In the collectivist cultures of East Asia, people have been less concerned with expressing their individuality and more concerned about harmonious relations with others, including being sensitive to negative appraisal by others.

As we’ll see, the significance of this supposed achievement is also undermined by the fact that the majority of people living under the Spartan state did not take part in it. Heck, the majority of males living in the Spartan state didn’t take part in it. Hell, even the majority of free, non-foreign men weren’t eligible. That’s because the agoge was restricted to the Spartan citizen class – the spartiates – who in turn comprised only a tiny minority of the people actually living in Sparta.

In the film, Leonidas graduates by slaying a wolf that was hunting him. But it is almost certain that the real Leonidas graduated his Spartan training by stalking and murdering an unarmed, untrained man at night.

What does the krypteia do? They would fan out into the countryside (worked by the helots, a slave underclass we will discuss in more detail in the next post), hiding by day and at night come out and murder any helots they found out, or who they thought showed independence of spirit (Plut Lyc 28), essentially functioning as a secret police to keep the helots in line through exemplary murder.

Thucydides and Xenophon were both aristocratic Athenians (they got to be generals, rather than common soldiers), frustrated that democracy – in their view – let the fickle, uneducated and poor ‘masses’ make decisions that ought to have been left to their ‘betters.’

The CDC said in a statement Saturday to the Times that the agency “did not manufacture its test consistent with its own protocol.”

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

They traveled as far east as Baghdad and as far west as North America, which they discovered some five hundred years before Christopher Columbus.

And isn’t this truer to our immediate experience of inspiration than the comparatively banal and trivialized view of inspiration that we tend to hold today? Virtually all great artists and thinkers have often, during their moments of greatest inspiration, felt themselves to be vessels for some mysterious power working through them, and over which they have little, if any, conscious control.

Óðr is a force that causes people to create or perform any of the arts; to pronounce a prophecy; to enter an ecstatic trance, as in shamanism; to produce scholarly works; to enter into the battlefield frenzy that was the hallmark of Odin’s elite warriors, the berserkers and úlfheðnar; or to become possessed or go mad.

Some people have hoped to find in the warlike valkyries a mythical image of female warriors that had some counterpart in historical reality. But the historical, human counterpart of the valkyries wasn’t female warriors.[12] Rather, it was sorceresses, who used magic with the intent of influencing the outcome of battle but didn’t physically participate in it.[13]

She wasn’t even allowed to decide whether to accept or reject a particular suitor in the first place.[1] Adultery was almost always impermissible for a woman, and according to the laws of some Viking provincial law codes, if a husband caught his wife in the act of adultery, he could legally kill both her and her lover.

they generally gave men a higher social position than women, and they believed that an individual’s worth largely consisted of how well he or she fulfilled the role of the gender/sex to which he or she belonged.

fragile quantum states

large quantum systems generally interactstrongly with their environment, causinga process of decoherence, which destroysthe system’s quantum properties

“How many computational steps are needed to findthe prime factors of a 300-digit number?” The best classicalalgorithm known would take about 5 ×1024steps, or about 150,000years at terahertz speed. By taking advantage of innumerablequantum states, a quantum factoring algorithm would take only5 ×1010steps, or less than a second at terahertz speed.

Quantum informationscience has revealed that entanglement is a quantifiable physical resource, likeenergy, that enables information-pro-cessing tasks

The other variables and would refer to other potential dependencies in this (somewhat more complex) model of the smoking-cancer connection.

We’ll see that even without doing a randomized controlled experiment it’s possible (with the aid of some reasonable assumptions) to infer what the outcome of a randomized controlled experiment would have been, using only relatively easily accessible experimental data

under what conditions, exactly, can we use experimental data to deduce a causal relationship between two or more variables?

I often wonder how many people with real decision-making power – politicians, judges, and so on – are making decisions based on statistical studies, and yet they don’t understand even basic things like Simpson’s paradox.

Our conversation about time and the future must necessarily be global

But there is no reason to believe this. We might be living in the last gilded bubble of a great civilisation about to collapse into a new Dark Age, which, given our hugely amplified and widespread destructive powers, could be very dark indeed.

The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.

much of what we call art — paintings, novels, poetry — are secondary, byproducts of rarefied attention. Attention, then is the primary art form.

Even if language does only reproduce an impoverished expression of consciousness, why engage with experiences in the deep terrain beyond linguistic reach? That can only be vaguely, allegorically alluded to, just as Zen calls itself nothing but a ‘finger pointing towards the moon’?

Words, like nets, are porous. The substance they carry leaks out the bottom, and by the time they reach someone else’s ear, much of their initial haul is missing, left at the source.

The first act was Intel and Microsoft: differentiated software running on utility hardware. The second act was ushered in by Netscape and the web: differentiated hypertext on utility Internet infrastructure. Part two of the second act was the iPhone and mobile: hardware and software catching up to what the Internet was natively capable of.

Objects have inertia; it’s hard to abandon them for a different object. But functions do not. It’s very easy to abandon a function-as-a-solution in favour of a better function.

Objects have high switching cost. They’re usually expensive. Their complexity is often exposed to the user. They require careful consideration before a purchase. Functions are the opposite. There’s very little switching cost. They’re usually cheap. Their complexity is masked. They can easily be event-driven. They can be consumed frictionlessly, and they scale.

“What are we starting to frictionlessly consume in compounding quantities?” Here’s my answer. It’s deceptive, because we don’t usually think about it in these terms.We’ve begun to consume functions.

Instead of owning objects, we’re increasingly accessing functions.

We call their ability to provide access to something scarce a value proposition. If your value proposition is useful but not differentiated, then you may get customers but you won’t be very profitable. On the other hand, if your value proposition is differentiated but not useful, then you won’t get many customers. You’ll be all style and no substance.

The Red Queen’s consequences can be seen everywhere: in biological evolution, in the stock market, and in human happiness. Just like Alice, the faster you run, the more the world runs with you.

What’s actually important is the scale of work that Google and Facebook do to power everything except the differentiation that a pointy client (an indexed web site; an Instagram profile) will provide.

These aren’t horizontal or vertical businesses anymore. They’re giant utilities that sprawl out in all possible directions.

Horizontal and vertical arrangements of businesses are both predicated on the notion that there’s a scarcity of supply that can drive ROIC. But that’s decreasingly the bottleneck.

The cycle perpetuates, the Red Queen gets faster again.

Every dollar Slack spends on building underlying utility infrastructure, effectively competing with AWS, is a dollar not spent on what makes Slack special. AWS faces the same thing, in reverse: they know to dedicate every dollar not to guessing the next Slack, but rather into building the primitive building blocks it’ll be made of.

She argues that if city planners persist in ignoring sidewalk life, residents will resort to three coping mechanisms as the streets turn deserted and unsafe: 1) move out of the neighborhood, allowing the danger to persist for those too poor to move anywhere else, 2) retreat to the automobile, interacting with the city only as a motorist and never on foot, or 3) cultivate a sense of neighborhood "Turf", cordoning off upscale developments from unsavory surroundings using cyclone fences and patrolmen.

Noting that a well-used street is apt to be relatively safe from crime, while a deserted street is apt to be unsafe, Jacobs suggests that a dense volume of human users deters most violent crimes, or at least ensures a critical mass of first responders to mitigate disorderly incidents. The more bustling a street, the more interesting it is for strangers to walk along or watch from inside, creating an ever larger pool of unwitting deputies who might spot early signs of trouble. In other words, healthy sidewalks transform the city's high volume of strangers from a liability to an asset. The self-enforcing mechanism is especially strong when the streets are supervised by their "natural proprietors," individuals who enjoy watching street activity, feel naturally invested in its unspoken codes of conduct, and are confident that others will support their actions if necessary. They form the first line of defense for administering order on the sidewalk, supplemented by police authority when the situation demands it.

She instead advocated for dense mixed use development and walkable streets, with the "eyes on the street" of passers-by helping to maintain public order.

Abundance allows for compounding to proceed unimpeded, but it also destroys pricing power and threatens ROIC.

how come the majority of our speaking and writing consists nearly exclusively of only the top several hundred words or so? The reason is that the more we use a word, the less effort it takes to retrieve that word and use it a second time. There’s no incentive or disincentive to use any word over another.

When consumer choices are low-friction, we don’t see normal distributions at all. We see bifurcated distributions, often between differentiated if, then choices on the one hand and a default else option on the other:

Inspired by Grand Theft Auto, the question motivating this essay is: what would happen if we put the resources and talent of a major video game or movie studio toward creating great explanations, rather than pure entertainment products? What could Rockstar Games achieve if they spent even a tiny fraction of that quarter billion dollars creating, say, a digital reimagining of the physicist Richard Feynman's famous Feynman Lectures on Physics? Or what happens if a movie director such as James Cameron, the creator of movies such as Avatar and Titanic, turns his resources toward reinventing a classic such as Molecular Biology of the Cell?

The most important fact about compulsory schooling is that students do not -- indeed, cannot -- choose to attend. Instead, they are required to attend, for what society deems "their own good". This is true even in the most enlightened schools. A student in such a coercive environment does not have full responsibility for their own learning. And, in my opinion, it is not possible to do serious intellectual work without full responsibility for your own learning.

I believe it's worth taking non-traditional media seriously not just as a vehicle for popularization or education, which is how they are often viewed, but as an opportunity for explanations which can be, in important ways, deeper.

emotional involvement is the foundation for understanding. Even when explaining abstract, intellectual subjects -- perhaps, especially when explaining abstract, intellectual subjects -- creating strong emotional involvement is crucial. If someone's desire to understand is strong enough, they can overcome tremendous obstacles.

We can do this by not just providing the facts, but by also directly cueing changes in people's habits of thought. One simple idea for how to do this is to dramatize as vividly as possible the point at which an interruption in our thinking should occur. It's that moment which we want people to recognize and act on, as it occurs.

Another strength of this explanation is the use of blue bars to represent Democrat votes and red bars to represent Republican votes. Using these standard mnemonic colours further lightens the load on our working memory, and makes it easier to follow the explanation.

Simpson's paradox shows that some of our ingrained intuitions about statistics are not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. A really good explanation of Simpson's paradox would help us rebuild our intuition about statistics.

surveying to get proportions correct; projections to correct for the curvature of the Earth; methods to depict topographic features; and so on.

there are plenty from kids who praise the books’ “adventuresome” qualities, while the few who talk about the book’s Christian themes note that it was their mom or church leader who alerted them to the connection—at which point they “saw” it. That would probably have pleased Lewis

The depiction of Eustace’s loneliness is hardly marred by schematically dispensed wisdom, and yet it is truly an illustration of the punishment that attends spiritual and moral failure, with no instructively chiding chimes. The realization comes from within, for Eustace and for the reader.

Even Aslan, the magisterial lion who is the series’ explicit Christ figure, is an invention as radical and original as it is religious; he communicates almost wordlessly with the Pevensie children, who find solace burying their hands in his mane and often flinch while looking in his terrible eyes. He is a symbol, to be sure, but he is also a character any agnostic child can relate to—one who resists neat categorization, like the animals in Where the Wild Things Are who “gnash their terrible teeth” yet are mysteriously alluring.

people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

None of which get far these days, because of the weakening of another set of negative feedback loops — those of democracy. This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends upon the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow. Give the people who want to distort market price signals the power to pay off government leaders, get the channels of communication to be self-interested corporate partners themselves, and none of the necessary negative feedbacks work well. Both market and democracy erode.

In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.  

It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

diversity

Let a thousand flowers bloom and ANYTHING could happen! Who wants that?

A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. The human immune system has the power to develop new responses to (some kinds of ) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).

Anti-poverty programs are weak negative loops that try to counter these strong positive ones. It would be much more effective to weaken the positive loops. That’s what progressive income tax, inheritance tax, and universal high-quality public education programs are meant to do.

The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes necessary a global government and global regulations.

One of the big mistakes we make is to strip away these “emergency” response mechanisms because they aren’t often used and they appear to be costly.

Delays that are too short cause overreaction, “chasing your tail,” oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long.

The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is to rebuild it, if you can.

A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays. That’s why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.

Spending more on police doesn’t make crime go away.

Electing Bill Clinton was definitely different from electing George Bush, but not all that different, given that every president is plugged into the same political system.

Another of Forrester’s classics was his urban dynamics study, published in 1969, which demonstrated that subsidized low-income housing is a leverage point.2 The less of it there is, the better off the city is — even the low-income folks in the city.

All we must and can do is remember and learn back our pre-lapsarian vocation of care; there is no alternative. And for this we would first need to slow down and recover the lost art of seeing and registering the splendor of nature.

Such a magical garden needs no intervention of any kind. No wonder Odysseus rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality and decides to return to Ithaca to his aging wife Penelope – to the more challenging and uncomfortable life of commitments and concerns.

In the garden, appearances are lush. Everything seems as if it is freely given, originating from some hidden, mysterious source. That is why in literature, they are often sites of epiphanies – spiritual or erotic or otherwise – gateways to other worlds or orders of being.

"but when I see his hair so carefully arranged, and observe him adjusting it with one finger, I cannot imagine it should enter into such a man's thoughts to subvert the Roman state."

pallium

who as yet had no beard, and so thought to pass undiscovered, took upon him the dress and ornaments of a singing woman, and so came thither, having the air of a young girl