Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a "father of information theory".[1][2] As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship.[3] Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

Book-in-progress (to-come Sept'2022?) by Brad DeLong. What I call the “long twentieth century” started with the watershed-boundary crossing events of around 1870—the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation—which ushered in changes that began to pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity’s lot for the previous ten thousand years. What I call the “long twentieth century” ended in 2010, with the world’s leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870. The years following 2010 were to bring large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways and for different reasons at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should. The end of American Exceptionalism—where the U.S. was near-universally regarded as an important model for at least some degree of emulation—an apparently permanent productivity growth-rate downshift; the failure of global north institutions to adequately deal with the Great Recession that started in 2008, the COVID-19 plague, or global warming; the rise across the globe of political movements that are called (politely) fascist-adjacent, neofascist, or (impolitely) fascist: all these told us that the Grand Narrative of the long 20th century could no longer be made to fit. It was a new set of stories, needing to be made comprehensible by a new Grand Narrative or Narratives. What it or they are we cannot yet know.

Famous family therapist. Author of PeopleMaking. "Mother of family systems therapy" (Family Systems Theory) (more)

Family therapy (also referred to as family counseling, family systems therapy, marriage and family therapy, couple and family therapy) is a branch of psychology that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_therapy (more)

The Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) is an integrative approach to individual psychotherapy developed by Richard C. Schwartz in the 1980s.[1][2] It combines systems thinking with the view that the mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities (cf Society of Mind), each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities. IFS uses family systems theory to understand how these collections of subpersonalities are organized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artificial general intelligence. MIRI's work has focused on a friendly AI approach to system design and on predicting the rate of technology development. In 2000, Eliezer Yudkowsky founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence with funding from Brian and Sabine Atkins, with the purpose of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence (AI).[1][2][3] However, Yudkowsky began to be concerned that AI systems developed in the future could become superintelligent and pose risks to humanity,[1] and in 2005 the institute moved to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage those risks, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Intelligence_Research_Institute

A network of place-based communities experimenting with new forms of governance and solidarity. https://embassynetwork.com/ (coliving?)

Leverage Research is a non-profit research institute dedicated to aiding scientific advance. Founded in 2011, the organization conducted independent explorations into important but poorly understood topics in the social sciences. Today, Leverage Research studies the history of science and how historical discoveries were made, and supports novel research in young or under-resourced fields. https://www.leverageresearch.org/ (more)

Jason Benn is Experimenting with new learning formats. Inexplicably — and despite my total control of my schedule — I found myself having a lot of unproductive meetings. (more)

The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of "The Vicious Circle", as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country... Charter members of the Round Table included: Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist; Robert Benchley, humorist and actor; Heywood Broun, columnist and sportswriter (married to Ruth Hale); Marc Connelly, playwright; Ruth Hale, freelance writer who worked for women's rights; George S. Kaufman, playwright and director; Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter; Brock Pemberton, Broadway producer[4]; Murdock Pemberton, Broadway publicist, writer[5]; Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor; Robert E. Sherwood, author and playwright; John Peter Toohey, Broadway publicist; Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquin_Round_Table

Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s... In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille—met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre. They discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. Following a practice that had become increasingly popular by mid-century, they often ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air,[5] but not for the purpose of making sketches to be developed into carefully finished works in the studio, as was the usual custom.[6] By painting in sunlight directly from nature, and making bold use of the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the beginning of the century, they began to develop a lighter and brighter manner of painting that extended further the Realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism

The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century,[1] including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts."[2] Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.[3] A well-known quote, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is "they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Group

Invisible College is the term used for a small community of interacting scholars who often met face-to-face, exchanged ideas and encouraged each other. One group that has been described as a precursor group to the Royal Society of London consisted of a number of natural philosophers around Robert Boyle. It has been suggested that other members included prominent figures later closely concerned with the Royal Society;[2] but several groups preceded the formation of the Royal Society Of London, and who the other members of this one were is still debated by scholars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_College

Pim de Morree: Bursting The Bubble: Teal Ain't Real. Once in a while we feel the need to write about an uncomfortable feeling that's been niggling us. This post is one. It expresses a discomfort we have about so-called 'teal organizations'. The feeling has grown just as rapidly as have the sales of the highly influential book by Frederic Laloux, "Reinventing Organizations". And the feeling stems from its dogmatic interpretation by some readers. (more)

Thomas Piketty (French: [tɔ.ma pi.kɛ.ti]; born 7 May 1971) is a French economist who is Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics[1] and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics. Piketty's work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013),[2] which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

Thomas Piketty's Capital In The 21st Century ISBN:067443000X posits that Capitalism inevitably leads to exploding Wealth Inequality (Increasing Returns), and that this has been would have been more apparent in the last century had it not been for World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. (more)

Here’s Exactly Why You Finish Some Things and Not Others (more)

Beyond Social Networks: How Cultural Beliefs Really Spread. Social contagion didn’t adequately explain the anti-vaxxers. “We were passionately divergent about how we interpreted the same reality,” Goldberg says, “yet the idea that we were in different networks was just incorrect.” (more)

Alex Danco: Progress, Postmodernism, and the Tech Backlash. Anti-tech sentiment is far from a universal stance. But it’s more coherent, and therefore more dangerous, than I think most tech leaders realize. To really understand this movement, you need to recognize it as part of a reaction to something bigger than tech. It’s a rebellion against postmodernism. (more)

Whatever Happened to Just Being Type A? A few years ago, Gretchen Rubin, the best-selling self-help author, pivoted from the happiness racket into the habit business with her seventh book, “Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives.” Embedded in it was a personality typing system of her own invention she called the Four Tendencies: a homage to Freud’s “fateful tendencies.” (more)