I was listening to the Smashmouth song, Walking on the Sun, on my MP3 player on my way back from BART this afternoon. A former acquaintance of mine once dissed the song to me by pointing out that the initial lyrics were ripping off the Coke ad “I’d like to teach the world to sing […]
Category: thoughts
Recipe for a good conversation
I was at a dinner party last night and had a great time. It was a good mix of people, with good conversation ranging over a variety of topics. Afterwards, my friend and I were discussing what made for a good conversation. I’ve pondered this before, because I really like good conversations, and I previously […]
Enlightened Selfishness
Picking up on yesterday’s anarchy post, I was thinking about what it takes for anarchy (or even capitalism) to work as a society. I was talking with some other friends last week about the concept of enlightened selfishness, and I think that is one of the keys. What do I mean by enlightened selfishness? It’s […]
Anarchy is Progress!
A friend of mine pointed me at this email, where a reader of Gizmodo criticizes them for having the temerity to insult the Queen of England. In particular, he says: Some institutions in the world, like the church, must stay intact or it causes a breakdown in civilization. There must be a counterbalance that allows […]
Cubicle Zen
A little while ago, a friend of mine was complaining over IM about their stupid coworkers. In a moment of levity, I replied “Welcome to the world, young grasshopper. You must bend with the stupidity as the reeds bend with the wind. Stupidity is an unstoppable force – it can only be diverted, not ignored […]
Context, cognitive subroutines, and collectives
In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to think about how to connect the ideas in this post, where I describe how we have different groups of people in different contexts and often find them difficult to identify them outside of the context in which we know them, and this post, where I […]
Identification and context
I just had an amusing incident. I was on BART on my way to work, and was lounging in a seat reading my Economist with my music playing. Somebody taps my leg as they’re walking by. I look up, see a guy smiling at me, and I know I recognize him, but I have no […]
Mental models as tools
After the disjointedness of my last post, it’s probably worth going to check out the comments, because I think I clarified some of what I was thinking with the help of my commenters. What I want to talk about today is how we use classification systems, and more broadly, mental models. Let’s start with the […]
Stereotypes and Classification Systems
I was having an email discussion earlier today with a friend where the topic of stereotypes came up. As is common, my friend said that stereotypes are bad, and we should judge people based on their own individual characteristics. This gave me an excuse to launch into a longstanding rant of mine, wherein I defend […]
Filtered world views
This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring. I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming […]
