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)

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)

aka Psychopath? similar/different. cf Pathological, Gervais Principle (more)

no, not Being and Nothingness; different book mentioned in The Psychopath Test. (more)

brain-smushing book; widely referred to as GEB ISBN:0-465-02656-7, by Douglas Hofstadter (more)

Douglas Hofstadter on Godel, Escher, Bach, and AI. The actual story behind GEB begins with me as a 14-year-old, when I ran across the slim paperback book Gödel’s Proof by Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, and was soon mesmerized by it. I intuitively felt that the ideas that it described were somehow deeply connected with the mystery of human selves or souls. (more)

Superhero, AlterEgo, SuperPower, RealityHacker, Warrior, Renaissance Man? (more)

typical distribution curve of any set of LargeNumbers (more)

Steven Johnson notes that SAT scores (High School) have improved over the past decade. Math scores have never been higher — they’re 14 points above where they were 10 years ago. Verbal this past year is four points above where it was a decade ago. And yet, during that time period, there has been a 38% increase in the number of people taking the test — a trend which has the effect of dragging down the average, since the new test takers tend to come from the bottom of the class. (Their equivalents in 1996 didn’t bother taking the test because they didn’t plan on going to college.) There’s also a huge increase in minority test-takers, who tend — again, on average — to have lower scores than the rest of the population.

Scott Alexander questions Bernie Sanders's plan for a free College Education. At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”? (more)

Scott Alexander: Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context. There are many statistics that are much higher than you would intuitively think, and many other statistics that are much lower than you would intuitively think. A dishonest person can use one of these for “context”, and then you will incorrectly think the effect is very high or very low. (more)

Richard Coyne is a professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of several books on the implications of information technology and design, published by MIT Press, Routledge, and Bloomsbury Academic. His work is strongly influenced by the writings of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer on hermeneutics and interpretation theory, particularly as developed by Coyne's colleague Adrian Snodgrass in the 1990s, and with whom he co-authored the book Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking.[1] He is Professor of Architectural Computing and was Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment (which covered the disciplines of architecture, history of art and music) until its merger with Edinburgh College of Art. Coyne is an architect by training and brings a design-oriented and spatial understanding to his research and writing on digital themes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Coyne (more)