content that tries to be education packaged as entertainment, but fails at both (more)

Summarized (lots of quotes, stretching fair use) from Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodingers Cat Trilogy (written in 1979). Not saying I agree with this, but it's an interesting scenario... (more)

David Chapman: What they don’t teach you at STEM school. What they do teach you at STEM school is how to think and act within rational systems. What they mostly don’t teach you is how to evaluate, choose, combine, modify, discover, or create systems. (systems thinking) (more)

Free tool/course from Cedric Chin for XmR charts. https://xmrit.com/ (more)

Donald J. Wheeler is an American author, statistician and expert in quality control.[1][2] Wheeler graduated from the University of Texas in 1966 and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from Southern Methodist University. From 1970 to 1982 he taught in the Statistics Department at the University of Tennessee, where he was an associate professor. Since 1982 he has worked as a consultant. He is the author of 22 textbooks. His books have been translated into five languages and are in use in over 40 countries. He has been invited to contribute to two state-of-the-art anthologies, and has had articles published in 16 refereed journals. He is a fellow of both the American Statistical Association and American Society for Quality. He was awarded the 2010 Deming Medal by the American Society for Quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Wheeler

approach to optimizing product quality, cf quality control

approach to optimizing product quality, cf quality assurance

Sasha Chapin: Your Intelligent, Conscientious In-group Has Bad Social Norms Too. I’ve noticed that a significant number of my friends in the Rationalist and Effective Altruist communities seem to stumble into pits of despair, generally when they structure their lives too rigidly around the in-group’s principles. Like, the Rationalists become miserable by trying to govern their entire lives through nothing but rationality, and the EAs feel bad by holding themselves to an impossible standard of ethics. (more)

Scott Alexander: A Cyclic Theory Of Subcultures. David Chapman’s (2015-05-29) Chapman Geeks MOPs And Sociopaths In Subculture Evolution is rightfully a classic, but it doesn’t match my own experience. Either through good luck or poor observational skills, I’ve never seen a lot of sociopath takeovers. Instead, I’ve seen a gradual process of declining asabiyyah (more)

Cedric Chin: What To Think When Looking at a Chart. ...one question that I've had over the course of this series is: if understanding variation is so important and process behaviour charts are so good at helping you understand variation in your data, why aren't they more widely used? And I think I have a partial answer: (more)

Rival Voices: Fuck it, we ball: on rats, postrats, metarats, nrx what distinguishes and generated them. As some of you know I’ve recently (yesterday) had a small spat with the putanumonit guy. (more)

David Chapman on Countercultures: modernity’s last gasp. The countercultural mode of the 1960s-80s marked the final attempts to rescue the glory of systems from the maw of nihilistic collapse. It failed, and we live in its wreckage. (more)

David Chapman: How To Think Real Good. Thinking about thinking: I enjoy thinking about thinking. That’s one reason I spent a dozen years in artificial intelligence research. To make a computer think, you’d need to understand how you think. So AI research is a way of thinking about thinking that forces you to be specific (more)

Rival Voices Tweet: LessWrong is structurallly analytic, you see? It suffers from the same problems which is why it leads to meaninglessness. Now, TPOT is littered with post-rats, ex-rationalists from LessWrong, that reached stage 4.5 (more)

Cedric Chin: Process Behaviour Charts: More Than You Need To Know. This week’s Commoncog post is for members only; next week’s post will be free. Process Behaviour Charts: More Than You Need To Know (members only) — We last talked about process behaviour charts in Part Two of the Becoming Data Driven in Business Series. In that piece, I introduced the idea from Statistical Process Control (SPC) that the way to become data driven is to first understand variation, and the secret weapon that SPC practitioners have is the process behaviour chart (more)

Post-Rationalism, Post-Rationalist. (more)

"Meaningness" https://meaningness.com/ and Fluid Mode writer

Late modernity (or liquid modernity) is the characterization of today's highly developed global societies as the continuation (or development) of modernity rather than as an element of the succeeding era known as postmodernity, or the postmodern.[citation needed] Introduced as "liquid" modernity by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, late modernity is marked by the global capitalist economies with their increasing privatization of services and by the information revolution.[1] Among its characteristics is that some traits, which in previous generations were assigned to individuals by the community, are instead self-assigned individually and can be changed at will.[2] As a result, people feel insecure about their identities and their places in society, and they feel anxious and distrustful about whether their self-proclaimed traits are being respected.[2] Society as a whole feels more chaotic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_modernity

business strategy book by Richard Rumelt; followed by The Crux (more)

Attitude expressed by Robert Anton Wilson. (more)