Stanley Milgram study, pushing people to administer shocks to subjects. (more)

Tim Wu is an American academic who ran unsuccessfully in the 2014 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor of the state of New York. He is best known for coining the phrase network neutrality (Net Neutrality) in his paper "Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination",[3] and popularizing the concept thereafter, leading in part to the 2010 passage of a federal Net Neutrality rule.[4][5][6] Wu has also made significant contributions to wireless communications policy, most notably with his "CarterFone" proposal.[7] Wu is a scholar of the media and technology industries, and his academic specialties include antitrust, copyright, and telecommunications law. In 2013, Wu was named to National Law Journal's "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers." Additionally, Wu was named one of Scientific American's 50 people of the year in 2006, and in 2007 Wu was named one of Harvard University's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine.[1] His book The Master Switch was named among the best books of 2010 by The New Yorker magazine,[8] Fortune magazine,[9] Publishers Weekly,[10] and other publications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu (more)

Existential therapy - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_therapy Instead of regarding human experiences such as anxiety, alienation and depression as implying the presence of mental illness, existential psychotherapy sees these experiences as natural stages in a normal process of human development and maturation. In facilitating this process of development and maturation, existential psychotherapy involves a philosophical exploration of an individual's experiences stressing the individual's freedom and responsibility to facilitate a higher degree of meaning and well-being in his or her life (more)

Existentialism (/ˌɛɡzɪˈstɛnʃəlɪzəm/)[1] is a tradition of philosophical enquiry which takes as its starting point the experience of the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.[2] It is associated mainly with certain 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,[3][4][5] shared the belief in that beginning of philosophical thinking. While the predominant value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity.[6] In the view of the existentialist, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential angst" (or variably, existential attitude, dread, etc.), or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[7] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism (more)

Angst means fear or anxiety... Where animals are guided solely by instinct, said Kierkegaard, human beings enjoy a freedom of choice that we find both appealing and terrifying.[5][6] It is the anxiety of understanding of being free when considering undefined possibilities of one's life and one's power of choice over them... While Kierkegaard's angst referred mainly to ambiguous feelings about moral freedom within a religious personal belief system, later existentialists discussed conflicts of personal principles, cultural norms, and existential despair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angst

Known for his Brave New World, which seems to me his most simplistic book. (more)

Taylor Pearson: A Brief History of Existential Terror (more)

Venkatesh Rao: CEOs Don’t Steer (more)

Zeynep Tufekci (/ˈzeɪnɛp tʊˈfɛktʃi/ ZAY-nep tuu-FEK-chee; Turkish: Zeynep Tüfekçi) is a Turkish[1] writer, academic, and techno-sociologist known primarily for her research on the social implications of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data in the context of politics and corporate responsibility. She is an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts. Tufekci is a monthly contributor for The New York Times op-ed page on topics related to technology's social impact... She worked as a computer programmer before becoming an academic and turning her attention to social science.[4] Her research and publications include topics such as the effect of big data on politics and the public sphere,[5] how social media affects social movements, and the privacy and security vulnerabilities exposed by the coming Internet of Things. In general, she has sought to outline the potential negative societal consequences of social media and big data, while not rejecting these phenomena outright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeynep_Tufekci

Mesh Network-over-WiFi vendor (more)

Experiment without Limits, a self-improvement book by Chris Sparks. http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2019-08-13-SparksExperimentWithoutLimitsInsideTheCreativeProcess (more)

Data + Intuition: A Hybrid Approach to Developing Product North Star Metrics (at LinkedIn). We present a five-step framework for developing quality metrics using a combination of machine learning and product intuition. Machine learning ensures that the metric accurately captures user experience. Product intuition makes the metric interpretable and actionable. (more)

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read email. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

Was a Netscape browser developer, then Mozilla evangelist. It was big news when he left the Mozilla project. Coiner of Zawinski's Law. (more)

Jamie Zawinski on the horrors of GroupWare. "Groupware" is all about things like "WorkFlow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from "unchecked" to "checked", and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review." Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy... So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing Social Software (and these days, almost all software is social software). (Compelling) (more)

Philip Gerrans & Chris Letheby: Psychedelics work by violating our models of self and the world. Just what do these (psychoactive) drugs do? Psychedelics reliably induce an altered state of consciousness known as ‘ego dissolution’. The term was invented, well before the tools of contemporary neuroscience became available, to describe sensations of self-transcendence: a feeling in which the mind is put in touch more directly and intensely with the world, producing a profound sense of connection and boundlessness. (more)

An altered state of consciousness (ASC),[1] also called altered state of mind or mind alteration, is any condition which is significantly different from a normal waking state. By 1892, the expression was in use in relation to hypnosis[2] although an ongoing debate about hypnosis as an ASC based on modern definition exists. The next retrievable instance, by Dr Max Mailhouse from his 1904 presentation to conference,[3] however, is unequivocally identified as such, as it was in relation to epilepsy, and is still used today. In academia, the expression was used as early as 1966 by Arnold M. Ludwig[4] and brought into common usage from 1969 by Charles Tart.[5][6] It describes induced changes in one's mental state, almost always temporary. A synonymous phrase is "altered state of awareness". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_state_of_consciousness

Chris Sparks releases Experiment Without Limits: Inside the Creative Process — The Forcing Function. After three years of coaching, I had no idea why they hired me. (more)

Self Tracking for Self Improvement? (more)

communication skill - cf Debate, Toastmasters