There are multiple "models" of the stages in the customer buying decision-making process. (more)

New Math Untangles the Mysterious Nature of Causality. IN HIS 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet... Erik Hoel, a 29-year-old theoretical neuroscientist and writer, quoted the passage in a recent essay in which he laid out his new mathematical explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. (more)

author: Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire (Climate Change) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Greenfield (more)

BigCo, Big Media, Big Government, Big Agriculture, Big Medicine, Big Education, Big Retail, Big Religion, etc. (more)

"That the available Control variety must be equal to or greater than the disturbance variety for control to be possible" - William Ross Ashby (more)

W. Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 in London – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby. His two books, Design for a Brain and An Introduction to Cybernetics, were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the brand new discipline of cybernetics and were highly influential. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby (more)

Anton Troynikov: Telescoping Ambition. San Francisco is delusional, and has been for a long time. This is occasionally a good thing; San Francisco is one of the few places capable of taking big ideas seriously when they’d be laughed out of the room anywhere else, and in tech SF provides the funding and social infrastructure to let people run with them. For this reason SF tends to attract people with big ideas, and people drawn to big ideas. (more)

Ambition is the decision to take yourself seriously. I’ve always been ambitious. But I’ve also always been suspicious of that ambition, wondering if it’s a genuine hunger or just a prettier name for insecurity. Maybe I’m just desperate to avoid feeling ordinary. (more)

A. C. Grayling: Family Feuds. Review of THE SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHIES, A Global Theory of Intellectual Change(. By Randall Collins. Isaiah Berlin once remarked that what philosophers do in the privacy of their studies can change the course of history, and he cited John Locke and Karl Marx as examples. (more)

Malcolm Gladwell on Saturday Night Live, German philosophy, the Lunar Men, and other examples of the "social dimension of Innovation". When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly-in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative-a mutual-admiration society... One person's passion-be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks-fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects... What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence... Jenny Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states-the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity-you create an environment (the BlogWeb?) both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. Is this a Creative Network or Social Network? A Network Of Learning? cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress. (more)

book: Joseph Henrich's theory of human success, emphasizing that our remarkable achievements stem not from individual intelligence but from our collective brain—our capacity for cumulative cultural evolution. (more)

Anton Troynikov: Elite Underproduction. Elite Overproduction is a meme started by Peter Turchin. It's also essentially unworkable on its own as an explanatory social theory, which Turchin himself goes on to clarify; [Turchin] says “stagnating and declining living standards of the general population and increasing indebtedness of the state” are two other critical factors. (more)

The word "mid-witted" was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post "The tragedy of the mid-witted" in which he commented on a life story article "Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume" by Jennifer Wright... The term "midwit," meaning a person of average intelligence, saw use on 4chan starting in late 2013... On January 1st, 2017, an anonymous 4chan[6] user made the earliest found post which used the IQ bell curve diagram to argue about the similarity of political views of groups with low and high intelligence... On June 24th, 2019, an anonymous /pol/[11] user posted a Manlet meme referencing the horseshoe theory interpretation of the IQ bell curve... The viral popularity of the format began on March 10th, 2010, when an anonymous 4chan[15] user posted a meme about Ted Kaczynski and the anarcho-primitivistic ideology. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit (cf Middle Mind) (more)

what seems like Elite Overproduction is really Midwit Overproduction.

OpenAI o3 is a reflective generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model developed by OpenAI as a successor to OpenAI o1 for ChatGPT.

Google notebook+LLM app https://notebooklm.google/ (more)

"Sociopathy" and "Sociopath" redirect here. For another usage of these terms, see Antisocial personality disorder. Psychopathy, or psychopathic personality,[1] is a personality construct[2][3] characterized by impaired empathy and remorse, along with bold, disinhibited, and egocentric traits. These traits are often masked by superficial charm and immunity to stress,[4] which create an outward appearance of apparent normalcy... The DSM and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) subsequently introduced the diagnoses of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and dissocial personality disorder (DPD) respectively, stating that these diagnoses have been referred to (or include what is referred to) as psychopathy or sociopathy. The creation of ASPD and DPD was driven by the fact that many of the classic traits of psychopathy were impossible to measure objectively.[11][12][13][14][15] Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare later re-popularized the construct of psychopathy in criminology with his Psychopathy Checklist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy (more)

see Existential

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (/ˈsɑːrtrə/, US also /ˈsɑːrt/;[4] French: [saʁtʁ]; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."[5] Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943).[6] Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre

Isolation, DisEngagement (more)