Pack Experience

Interesting article on how we navigate through life in packs or small group of people.

Look around. Packs of humans are everywhere. Clusters of people riding escalators. People standing in for groups in ticket queues. Mothers ordering meals for children at restaurants. Families clearing immigration together at airports. Groups of people playing sports. Packs backstop all of social reality. When other levels of social reality unravel and fail, pack realities get stronger. Your emergency preparedness plan — for floods, earthquakes, hurricanes or whatever is the big risk in your neck of the woods — is almost certainly a pack-level plan that includes family, neighbors, and friends. Pack realities are much stronger in countries, like India, where higher levels of social reality are particularly weak.

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Venkatesh Rao — Ribbonfarm

Deep Laziness

Deep thoughts on laziness.

Imagine a person who is very lazy at work, yet whose customers are (along with everyone else concerned) quite satisfied. It could be a slow-talking rural shop proprietor from an old movie, or some kind of Taoist fisherman – perhaps a bit of a buffoon, but definitely deeply content. In order to be this way, he must be reasonably organized: stock must be ordered, and tackle squared away, in order to afford worry-free, deep-breathing laziness.

Consider this imaginary person as a kind of ideal or archetype. Now consider that the universe might have this personality.

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Sarah Perry — Ribbonfarm

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CEOs Don’t Steer

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CEOs don’t steer and that might not be a bad thing. A well written long read for the weekend.

Public displays of CEO thinking are impressive primarily for their sheer banality, far above and beyond the needs of non-offensiveness, political correctness and perception management. You can tell it’s coming from deep down. It’s not an act. I’ve seen it on display in candid, private settings as well, where there’s no particular reason to keep things simple. CEO world views really are that simple. That does not mean they are simplistic or entirely a consequence of survivorship bias and attribution errors.

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Venkatesh Rao — Ribbonfarm

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Entrepreneurship is Metaphysical Labor

Jeff Bezos provides an excellent example of this in his most recent shareholder letter. By focusing Amazon on being a “customer-centered company,” Bezos uses a vague phrase for which the precise specification can be created and re-discovered as long as the company is around. This encourages the most creativity, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship by Amazon employees in every future decision.

Philosophers of metaphysics have straitjacketed their field by insisting that truth comes in only one flavor. All the while, for centuries we’ve had another class of practicing metaphysicians who adopted a partial truth version of events. We’ve called these people entrepreneurs.

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Joseph Kelly — Ribbonfarm

The Art of the Conspiracy Theory

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Reading these conspiracy theories is one my guilty pleasures. Today’s needull looks at what makes conspiracy theories.

A look into the content of contemporary conspiracy theories can give us a better idea of how this works. The beliefs of conspiracy theorists are actually quite diverse: there are fundamentalist Christians, militant atheists, left-wingers, right-wingers, flat earthers, hollow earthers, alien believers and deniers, and simulationists. Some are convinced that the Illuminati have altered the Bible; others argue why that cannot possibly be. But there are some concepts that are shared across belief systems. One concept is predictive programming: the belief that a secret conspiracy broadcasts hints of its future evil plans in film, television, and other media. The predictive programming concept, coupled with any particular event, provides a ready-made template for a conspiracy theory. The video maker’s creative role is to locate and organize themes, clips, and individual frames that appears to predict the terrible event (essentially coincidence detection, which requires a great deal of focused attention), and to present it in a convincing manner.

The complete article

Sarah Perry – ribbonfarm

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