Cultivating A State Of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

- James Baldwin

One of the easiest things to cultivate but yet most humans never do so. 

An important piece of the year: 

When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. 

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One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.

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There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.

To slip more easily into the state, many develop strict habits around their work, rituals even.

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Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. 

Thinking of the work in religious terms, as a service to, or a search for, God.

Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone.

Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. 

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The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head—the innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions—it did not come from the center, it came from those who ran from it.

 

Being Honest & Standing Up For Truth Matters

Two thousand years earlier, a North African king named Jugurtha rode out of Rome having just bribed a tribune to shut down his own corruption hearing — then arranged a murder while he was in town, for which Rome’s punishment was a polite request to leave. Looking back at the city, he delivered the greatest exit line in ancient history: “a city for sale and doomed to perish if it finds a buyer!”

That line gets quoted as an indictment of the people who sold Rome. It is worse than that. It is an indictment of the buyers.

Jugurtha wasn’t indicting the Senate for being evil. He was indicting them for being cheap. He walked into the mightiest republic in the Mediterranean, expecting resistance. He found a clearance sale.

There is a line. Cross it, and the arithmetic flips. The people gaming the system start to outnumber the people holding it up. Every honest person left standing starts to feel like a sucker. Then that person stops being honest, which moves the line again. Then the next person adjusts. Then the next.

A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.

That is the asshole threshold.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

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Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

- More Here

How To Thinking In Writing!

One of the best pieces I read so far this year.

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.

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Once I stretch my understanding thin in writing, I often see holes right away. I start correcting myself and discarding ideas already while typing. I cut ideas that are obviously flawed. I rewrite what feels ambiguous to make it more precise, concrete, unhedged, and true to my understanding.

The flaws I see immediately, however, are only the more superficial flaws. The deeper patterns take a longer time to emerge—because they are further from my established thoughts and so are harder to articulate.

Often, they occur first as subtle emotional cues. As I reread a passage, I notice a slight tension across my chest or my eyes fog over. For some reason, it doesn’t feel right. There is something wrong here. 

These subtle feelings are easy to dismiss (“Eh, words are slippery, I mean something slightly different . . . there is no reason to obsess about this”). But in my experience, it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her. Our best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.

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The emotional tone of these questions is, in my head, lovingly curious; I’m not trying to put myself down. I’m out to kill ideas. I want to help them evolve and spill forth more insight. Often this dialogue ends with me changing my mind about several premises and coming to a different conclusion, but the original idea remains the seed—no less valuable for having been proven wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.

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Counterexamples are useful in two ways. Either you find a counterexample that a) proves one of the premises wrong but b) does not change your mind about the conclusion. Lakatos calls this a local (and non-global) counterexample. This means there is something wrong with your explanation. Perhaps you need to change that part of the explanation? Or perhaps you can simply drop it, making the mental model simpler and more general? Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding. 

An Ordinary Mind On An Ordinary Day

Ask about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication.”

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

- Excerpts from the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

Wisdom Of Atisha

The best spiritual teacher is to challenge your weakness.

The best instruction is to strike at your very own shortcomings.

The best friends are mindfulness and introspective awareness.

The best motivating factors are your enemies, obstacles, illnesses, and sufferings.

The best skillful means is to be free of second guesses.

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There are many philosophical systems of both non-Buddhist and Buddhist schools, all of which are but garlands of conceptualization. Conceptualizations are beyond calculation, and they have no use. As there is no time to spare in life, now is the time to seek what is most essential.

Train your mind to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings, who equal the expanse of space. For their sake, strive to gather the two accumulations and dedicate all roots of virtue that arise from this toward the full enlightenment of all sentient beings. Make sure that you recognize the nature of all of these as empty and their characteristics as like dreams and illusions.

- More Here

Purnima Devi Barman - One Woman Found A Way To Save The Rarest Stork In The World

The pessimist in me would have thought this would be possible but the optimists in me knew only a handful of people always have (and will) change the world for better. 

Purnima Devi Barman is one of those rare humans. I salute to madam, thank you , thank you from Max and I. 

How one community—and one woman in particular—have found a way to protect the rarest stork in the world simply by learning to appreciate the species and embracing it as one of their own:

As the conference began, Melvin says she was impressed to hear what women were accomplishing, especially in low-income countries. But she was particularly interested when the host of the meeting, Purnima Devi Barman, got up to speak about her work with a gangly and obscure stork called the greater adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius). Once close to extinction, the bird has rebounded in Barman’s home state of Assam in northeastern India. And that success, according to widespread consensus, is primarily because of Barman, who has single-handedly transformed the species from a reviled nuisance to a beloved cohabitant among a surprisingly broad cross-section of people, including government officials, mothers, and people who pick through garbage dumps for a living.

Hearing Barman talk made Melvin want to get involved—an effect Barman seems to have on people. More than a year later, the two women and several colleagues published a paper that looked at how community involvement has helped to advance conservation of the striking storks. Among her most successful strategies, Barman has created an “army” of women who care for injured storks, throw celebratory baby showers for the birds, and weave stork-adorned fabrics for sale.

In contrast with decades of top-down and high-cost conservation efforts, experts say, the driving principle behind Barman’s work is deceptively simple: Saving species requires buy-in from people. Women, in particular, can be powerful partners, even—or especially—when they don’t hold traditional forms of power in their cultures. By including women in conservation projects that have simultaneously changed their own lives, Barman’s work may hold implications for similar efforts everywhere.

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The greater adjutant is not a traditionally beautiful animal, and its lifestyle isn’t pretty either. A member of the stork family, it has skinny, knob-kneed legs, a relatively puny bald head, beady eyes, and an elongated orange pouch that hangs from its neck like a deflated balloon. It is awkward and large, standing about 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall. It is also notable for its smell. Traditionally called hargilas, which means “bone-swallowers,” greater adjutants drag dead carcasses into tree tops, where they eat the flesh and then drop stinky messes of poop onto the ground below. The birds also spend a lot of time in garbage dumps, where they scavenge for food. 

In the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of greater adjutants lived in wetlands across much of Asia, from Pakistan to Cambodia. But habitat destruction, pollution, poaching, and the loss of their nesting trees pushed numbers sharply downward in the first half of the 20th century. A reputation as a bad omen in many places didn’t help them in the face of these threats. By the 1990s, there were an estimated 400 birds left. They have rebounded somewhat since but the International Union for Conservation of Nature still classifies them as Endangered, with only 1,200 to 1,800 birds confined to Cambodia and two regions of India—Bihar and Assam, where Barman lives. 

Despite the longstanding cultural disgust that surrounded the birds, Barman quickly began to appreciate the storks’ more appealing side. Raised for several years by her grandmother, who often took her outside and taught her songs and stories about birds, she developed a connection with nature that brought her solace during a period when her parents were away. Later, she studied zoology and wildlife biology at Gauhati University, where she earned an undergraduate degree and then a Masters in 2002. Eager to pursue a PhD, she gave in first to family pressures to get married and have children, giving birth to her twin daughters in 2005. She started her doctorate work in 2007, with a focus on greater adjutants.

Aware of the outsized conservation attention that goes to India’s charismatic megafauna like rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis) and tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Barman had started thinking about studying hargilas when she saw them in a wetland while doing fieldwork for her Masters. Why, she wondered, had she never seen them in her own village? As she began to collect data, she visited the few villages where they did live. While there, she would leave her phone number so people could call her if they had anything to report about the birds. One day at the end of the hargila breeding season in 2007, she got a call. A villager In the Kamrup District had cut down a giant tree on his property. The tree contained nine nests, filled with hargila nestlings. 

Once at the scene, people gathered around and laughed at her. They jeered and teased her about her concerns. They were angry and mean. “Why are you lecturing us?” they asked her. Why should we care about such an ugly bird?  Would she pay them to care? Would she come live with them and clean up after the birds? Would she eat the birds on her way home?

Trembling with embarrassment and dismay, Barman thought about her daughters, then just 2 years old. On the way home, she made a decision to delay her PhD work. “I thought, ‘No, I won’t do it now,’” she says. “‘First, I’ll rope in all the people. I’ll win the hearts and minds of the people. We will start a people’s movement. And then, only if I’m successful with the birds, I’ll pursue my dream.”

Her plan was to start with the basics: Meet people. Build friendships. Try to understand community concerns. Remembering the comments from men in the village, she cleaned temples to earn trust and show she was listening. Her compassion ran deep. She recognized that these weren’t bad people. They thought they were doing the right thing: ridding themselves and their properties of a messy bird that was a bad omen. It wasn’t their fault that they thought poorly of hargilas. They just hadn’t learned about the value of wildlife.

The Memory Maker

I work in AI and I can assure you these technologies are not magic but just tools with immense flaws and limitations.

I am a human being and I can assure you that I am an organic entity with abilities handed down to me from millions of years of evolution but nevertheless I am an organic entity with immense flaws and limitations.

The core issue which we are embarking into this century is that the people want to monetize these simple AI technologies by just tapping into my evolutionary flaws and limitations and amplify it, 

If you are intelligent and aware then you can use these tools enhance your prefrontal cortex and without giving a dime nor data to the assholes in silicon valley. Only if you are aware… 

A very good piece by Tim Requarth: The Memory Maker

To understand why we’re so susceptible to false memories requires understanding that the brain doesn’t store memories the way a phone stores photos. When you live through something, your hippocampus— a deep brain structure vaguely shaped like a seahorse—encodes that experience by binding together its constituent pieces: what you saw, what you heard, where you were, how you felt. That bound-together pattern is the memory. Over hours and days, the hippocampus replays these patterns, perhaps while you sleep, gradually strengthening their hold in the cortex, in a process called consolidation. What makes these memories so unlike phone storage, and especially relevant here, is that recalling a memory means the brain must partially relive it. The brain recalls by reactivating some of the same sensory and spatial patterns that were present during the original experience. Your brain doesn’t access a stable, static stored memory of yourself at that summer picnic in the park; your brain recreates it by activating some of the same neural circuitry that fired when you were actually squinting in the sun, actually wiggling your toes in the warmed grass. During recall, it fires again, faintly.

The beauty of memory, not as a static storage bank but as a dynamic process of on-demand re-creation, is that it’s efficient. You can access a tremendous amount of information about your past without having to dedicate special storage space to your personal archive. But that efficiency comes with risks. Each time you replay and reconsolidate a memory, it can subtly change. Other things you’re thinking about during recall, how you feel while recalling it, other, similar memories that activate similar patterns of neurons, these can mix and mingle and, ultimately, change the reconsolidation of the original memory itself. And once changed, it doesn’t revert because there is no gold-standard stored version. There is only the latest replay. And because memories are, essentially, reactivations of specific patterns of sensory and other neural activity, that means that sensory patterns alone can get consolidated as memories. This is a false memory. And a false memory, once seeded, benefits from the same machinery as real ones. And the brain’s fact-checker, the prefrontal cortex, arrives late to the scene: the reactivation of sensory and other neural pathways is already underway, the memory reconstruction already in progress, before any evaluation of whether the memory is genuine even begins.

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Piech’s experience suggests that Sora videos could activate spatial memory, meaning that Sora videos also tripped up the brain’s more fundamental systems for sorting real from imagined. “Although it may be disconcerting to contemplate,” as cognitive psychologist Marcia K. Johnson wrote in a 2006 paper, “true and false memories arise in the same way. Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context.” Johnson’s work on source monitoring, which is the brain’s process for sorting reality from imagination, revealed there’s no tag, no stamp in the brain that says this actually happened. Instead, a scene’s qualities during recall—how vivid it is, how spatially coherent, whether it arrives unbidden or requires effort to reconstruct—are what make it feel real or imagined. Memories of actual events are usually richer, more embedded in space and context. Imagined scenes, or recollections of scenes from movies, tend to feel thinner, more schematic. But the distributions overlap, and the brain relies on these imperfect cues to sort memory from imagination.

The trouble is that these cues can mislead. If remembering a synthetic experience activates the brain just widely enough—rich perceptual detail, spatial depth, the feeling of having been somewhere, of having been with someone—it stops registering as fantasy and starts registering as memory. Piech’s recollection of Sora generations were arriving with enough of those qualities to blur the distinction.

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One potential consequence is how these tools could shape identity, at scale. I was particularly taken by a term Deutsch coined: propagandi, or propaganda directed at yourself. If propaganda works by shaping collective memory, propagandi is more atomized, more intimate. You’re the propagandist and the mark, constructing a version of yourself that doesn’t exist, for an audience of one. I called Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams to help me stress-test Deutsch’s speculation. McAdams developed the influential concept of narrative identity—the idea that identity is built from autobiographical memories, that the self you’ll be tomorrow is constructed from the memories you have today. Contaminate the memories, and the identity may shift. When I described what Sora users like Deutsch were experiencing, McAdams said he hadn’t heard of the phenomenon yet, “but a moment’s reflection suggests that it is inevitable.” These AI videos could “ultimately be encoded and reworked as ‘things that happened to me,’ and then perhaps ‘important things that happened to me that are now part of my life story.’” Propagandi, in other words, isn’t just a clever coinage. It names a mechanism for rewriting who you are.

A hopeful read isn’t hard to find. Piech made a K-pop dance video of herself, fluid and confident, moving in ways she can’t. After watching it a few times, she told me, she started to feel like maybe she actually could. Athletes have used visualization for decades; maybe Sora was just a more vivid format. Therapists working with trauma have long known that memory can be beneficially malleable; perhaps tools like Sora, carefully deployed, could help people revise the scenes that haunt them. 

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But something else was nagging at me, in addition to the potential psychological consequences: Even something as intimate as autobiographical memory doesn’t form in isolation. It’s fundamentally social. In a process scientists endearingly call maternal reminiscing, children learn to shape experience into story through dialogue with caregivers, a process that continues throughout life: the friend who leans in or looks skeptical, the partner who remembers it differently, the listener who asks a question that reframes the whole event. Even the distraction level of the listener can affect how well we remember our own memories. In one experiment, a psychologist had participants tell a story to a friend who was secretly distracted. A month later, the speakers remembered their own experience less well simply because of how a listener behaved during their retelling of it. The attentive listener isn’t just receiving the memory; they’re helping to construct it.

Now imagine referencing something your friend doesn’t share, because it never happened. The blank look. The awkward silence. You might question yourself, wondering if you imagined it. You might question them. Or you might learn to stop bringing it up altogether, retreating from actual human social interaction to more AI simulacra of human social interactions, which never push back, which always affirm. The false memory, born in isolation, produces isolation again when it enters conversation.

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Some nights after our son is asleep, my wife and I sit on the couch and reconstruct the day for each other. What he said at breakfast, the weird thing he did with his yogurt spoon, whether the stalling tactics at bedtime were really that outlandish or whether we were both just tired. Sometimes we seem to disagree on the details, even if we were both there. She’ll point out something I didn’t notice, or I’ll interpret something we both noticed differently, or she’ll add a layer of interpretation by connecting his actions to similar actions the day before. The narrative shifts a little, adjusts a little to accommodate both of us, and by the time we’ve moved on we both begin to consolidate memories of something neither of us quite experienced—which, in the end, is the uncomfortable truth: Memory and experience are not synonymous. I used to think of this process as more akin to fact-checking, of sifting fact from embellishment, reality from interpretation. But it’s not quite that. It’s something more meaningful than checking facts: sitting there, remembering them together.

Culture - The Word That Fucked Up Our Species

I have written so many times about how almost all atrocities committed against our fellow animal family members is not considered immoral since people take umbrage behind the fucked up excuses of “culture”. 

People use culture to macro bullshit and not focus on micro morality which is precious for life on earth. 

Alex Nowrasteh’s wonderful piece is looking at this monster at a different angle. Different angle but same monster. 

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

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If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

 

The Social Edge of Intelligence

If AI capability depends on the social complexity of human language production—and if AI deployment systematically reduces that complexity through cognitive offloading, homogenization of creative output, and the elimination of interaction-dense work—then the technology is gradually undermining the conditions for its own advancement. Its successes, rather than failures, create a spiral: a slow attenuation of the very substrate it feeds on, spelling doom.

This is the Social Edge Paradox, and the intellectual tradition it draws from is older and more interdisciplinary than most AI commentary acknowledges.

Michael Tomasello’s evolutionary research establishes that human cognition diverged from other primates by a process other than superior individual processing power. The real impetus came through the capacity for collaborative activity with shared goals and complementary roles. He argues that even private thought is “fundamentally dialogic and social” in structure—an internalization of interaction patterns. Autonomous neural capacity is far from enough to account for the abilities of human thought.

Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis quantifies the link: neocortex ratios predict social group size across primates; language evolved as a mechanism for managing relationships at scales too large for grooming. Two-thirds of conversation is social, relational, reputational. Language is often mistaken as an information pipe, but it is really a social coordination technology.

My own position is that collective intent engineering, found in forms as familiar as simple brainstorming, accounts for most frontier cognitive expansion. The intelligent algorithms of today have not been built with this critical function in mind.

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The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone. It was forged in conversation, argument, institutional friction, and collaborative struggle. It lives in the spaces between people, and it shows up in AI capabilities only because those spaces were rich enough to leave linguistic traces worth learning from.

Every time a company automates an entry-level role, it saves a salary and loses a learning curve, unless it compensates. Every time a knowledge worker delegates a draft to an AI without engaging critically, the statistical thinning of the organizational record advances by an imperceptible increment. Every time an organization mistakes polished output for strategic progress, it consumes cognitive surplus without generating new knowledge.

None of these individual acts is catastrophic. However, their compound effect may be.

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are not those with the highest AI utilization rates. They are those that understand something the epoch-chaining thought experiment makes vivid: that AI’s capabilities are an inheritance from the complexity of human social life. And inheritances, if consumed without reinvestment, eventually run out. This is particularly critical as AI becomes heavily customized for our organizational culture.

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The Social Edge is more than a metaphor. It is the literal boundary between what AI can do well and what it will keep struggling with due to fundamental internal contradictions. Furthermore, the framework asks us all to pay attention to how the very investment thesis behind AI also contains the seeds of its own failure. And it reminds leaders that AI’s frontier today is set by the richness of the social world that produced the data it learned from.

- More Here

The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’

Petty tyrants are more focused on personal victories than on national priorities. The good news is that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Once we understand their common flaws, it becomes apparent why they eventually fall rapidly from power and leave few changes to government that last. Understanding this pattern can help us recognize a critical feature that distinguishes leaders who damage their nations from those who create lasting good: their relationship to truth.

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One of the worst mistakes the opposition can make is extending contempt for the tyrant into contempt for the tyrant’s supporters. Most of these supporters sincerely believed that the tyrant would be more likely to solve their problems — often real grievances that the opposition had failed to address. Blaming the supporters denies the reality of the failures and reinforces their support for the tyrant. 

As Napoleon consolidated his power, his critics described the farmers who supported him as “a sack of potatoes” and Parisian workers as having “their minds crammed with vain theories and visionary hopes.” This attitude of condescension made it easier for Napoleon to position his opposition as arrogant elites and himself as the champion of ordinary people.

When the opposition makes it socially acceptable to show contempt for anyone who disagrees, they cooperate with the tyrant in creating a cycle of divisiveness that distracts from reality. That cycle sustains the tyrant’s hold on power. 

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Once they had disabled democracy, these tyrants managed to hold onto power long after their popularity faded. Even removing the tyrant was not a guarantee of short-term success. In the Philippines, democracy has still not fully recovered.

It is much easier to stop the rise of a tyrant than to accelerate their fall. It would have been far better for each nation if the leaders of the opposition had learned from their failures, postponed their short-term ambitions and concentrated on preserving the democracy.

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The legacies of these truth-based leaders have long outlived the leaders themselves, and they continue to benefit us in the 21st century. Bismarck’s social safety nets are still thriving in Germany, and they have been widely copied. Singapore is now a prosperous nation, and a Singaporean passport will get you visa-free entry into more countries than any other. Roosevelt’s Social Security is so successful that politicians on both sides of the aisle now compete to take credit for protecting it.

Look at what endures from these six stories: not the propaganda, the posters and parades, but the institutions that continue to serve their nations decade after decade. The children who are healthy and literate. The elderly and disabled who live in security and dignity. The deposits, safe in the bank. The honest civil services that provide real protections and solve real problems. These are the legacies that matter.

- More Here

Ideas Of Slavery

Now a new book, John Samuel Harpham’s The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery, asks us to reconsider that standard account of events. Harpham does not discount economic or imperial explanations for the rise of New World slavery; what he suggests, instead, is that those explanations can make sense only within a culture where “slavery was available as an option.” His goal, as he puts it, is to discover “the reasons for which slavery was understood to be a status about which narrow-minded men could make calculations.”

The result is ironic and tragic in the way of the best history. Initially, Harpham claims, the English hesitated to embrace African slavery. Then, when they did, their decision was not based on any perceived racial difference or inferiority. It was based, instead, on something even more troubling: Harpham believes that English people enslaved Africans not because they were seen as different but because they seemed so very similar.

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Harpham’s history reconsiders Jordan’s account of that “unthinking decision.” If the keynote of Jordan’s book was that early English observers saw Africans as different, the keynote of Harpham’s is that English people had a lot of different ideas: about Africa, about Africans, about skin color and about slavery. Nowhere was there broad agreement, he claims, except perhaps about the essence of slavery. But early English ideas about slavery were also different from what we might expect.

Throughout the period when colonial slavery was taking shape, Harpham explains, English writers still relied heavily on a conception of slavery that they inherited from ancient Rome. In contrast to the ancient Greek idea that some people could be “natural slaves,” a view most commonly associated with Aristotle, Roman law defined slavery as the product of convention. Individuals were naturally free, in this view, but could be reduced to slavery if they committed a crime or, more commonly, were captured in war. “In short,” Harpham writes, “slavery arose in Roman law as the result of history rather than nature, as a fact of modern life rather than a timeless feature of the universe.”

Accordingly, the central question for English writers in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not what qualities made a person a natural slave—a question that might lead to a racial answer—but instead what circumstances allowed for enslavement. The English showed a special interest in this question, Harpham suggests, because they were simultaneously forging a national self-identity based on “the conviction that theirs was a nation dedicated to freedom.” This conviction grew out of internal developments, such as the decline of villeinage (a kind of serfdom), but it also took shape in direct contrast to England’s chief international rivals, the Spanish and the Portuguese.

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Rebel - Refuses To Consent To Falseness, Injustice, Or Mediocrity

Rebellion is not merely reactive but creative. It doesn’t only tear down — it seeks to reimagine. Albert Camus understood this when he wrote that “I rebel — therefore we exist.” For Camus, rebellion was the refusal to accept absurdity passively. It was the insistence that life and justice still matter even in a godless world. To rebel, then, is to affirm the possibility of meaning precisely where meaning seems most threatened. It is to insist that one’s freedom and integrity are worth defending, even when doing so brings discomfort or risk.

Rebellion typically begins in solitude but inevitably reaches toward solidarity. The solitary rebel says no to hypocrisy, cruelty, or exploitation; yet the truest form of that no is said on behalf of all. 

[—]

To live rebelliously in this deeper sense requires courage of a particular kind — the courage to trust one’s perception of what is wrong and to act in accordance with one’s conscience. Many people lose meaning because they no longer believe their own perceptions. They feel what is off — at work, in politics, in relationships — but they suppress that intuition in order to get by. Over time, this suppression breeds cynicism and fatigue.

Rebellion restores vitality by reuniting perception with action. It says: “I see what I see, I know what I know, and I will live in truth.” That alignment itself is deeply meaningful.

The pathway of rebellion does not exclude tenderness or humility. The most enduring rebels — figures like Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, or the many artists and thinkers who defied oppressive norms — rebelled not out of hatred but out of love: love for justice, for humanity, for the sanctity of truth. Rebellion, rightly understood, is a form of devotion. It refuses to let meaning be trampled by fear or conformity. It honors life enough to resist what diminishes it.

For the individual seeking reenchantment, rebellion may take quieter, more personal forms. It might mean refusing to keep up a façade of perpetual busyness or success. It might mean declining to participate in conversations that are mean-spirited or false. It might mean leaving a career that pays well but deadens the heart. In each case, rebellion functions as a reclamation of self. By saying “no” to what is meaningless, one makes room for what is real to appear. The act of refusal becomes the act of awakening.

This pathway, however, carries hazards. A rebel without an anchoring vision and a sense of humanity can become a cynic or destroyer, mistaking constant opposition for depth. To avoid this, it would be wise to tether rebellion to love, to beauty, to some image of the world as it could be. The purpose of rebellion is not to stay angry forever but to clear space for creation, renewal, and joy. Rebellion that remains open-hearted is not corrosive but cleansing; it removes what is false so that truth can breathe again.

In this way, rebellion restores the pulse of meaning through the experience of agency. The disenchantment of modern life often stems from powerlessness — feeling that one’s choices make no difference, that the world is too vast or corrupted to be changed. To rebel, even in a small and symbolic way, is to reclaim a measure of agency. It reignites the sense that one’s voice, one’s actions, one’s very stance toward the world still matter. That sense of mattering is one of the foundations of meaning itself.

Finally, rebellion reenchants because it reconnects us to the moral dimension of existence. It reminds us that life is not neutral or arbitrary but charged with value. Each act of rebellion is, at its core, an assertion of value: this matters; I matter; truth matters. That moral clarity dispels the fog of meaninglessness more effectively than any abstract philosophy. It returns us to the felt conviction that life is worth the trouble, that the struggle itself is vital.

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Robert Trivers on Evolutionary Biology & Math Of Honor Killings!

The Ideology, Economics, & Psychology Behind The Modern World's Draining Of Color From Homes, Cars, & Everyday Objects.

If you go to slums of Bombay to Brazil to Mexico to Kenya, you will notice a riot of colors. Yes, there is crime there, most people who live on day to day paycheck are content and happy. 

Color helps psychologically! It’s “Biophilia" of living in a rainforest - its one of the least studied simple psychological boosters. 

Max’s home is a riot of colors - living room is yellow, basement is pink, bed rooms are other colors - no no to neutral colors. I learned this a long time ago and even my dress has a variety of colors. 

I noticed something weird maybe a year or two ago, 5 plus years since Max passed away - a lot of my new t-shirts etc., were greyish… so I cleaned up my wardrobe and brought back color to my life. I was subconsciously depressed without Max. 

Color is the simplest and easiest confidence and psychological booster we have but alas we, sapiens even tend to ignore it. 

Very good history of why this transformation of color to grey happened in US and spread to across the globe: 

From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.

But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?

The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a gradual but relentless draining of pigment, not just from exteriors but also from interiors and from the stuff of everyday life, like cars and phones. In 2020, researchers at the Science Museum Group in London found evidence of the trend’s longevity. Feeding roughly 7,000 photographs of everyday objects — kettles, lamps, cameras — from the late 1800s to 2020 into an algorithm, they then asked it to track color distribution over time.

The result: a striking shift toward achromatic — that is, neutral — colors in material culture.

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In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos argued that ornamentation was not merely unnecessary, but a sign of arrested moral development. Truly evolved people, he suggested, would gravitate toward clean lines and plain surfaces. Applied ornament, including the use of color as decoration, didn’t enhance; it cluttered and distracted.

Loos’s polemical target was Art Nouveau, then in full frothy bloom. His arguments were influential on the Bauhaus school of art, which canonized restraint and straight lines. It, in turn, informed the International Style that swept global architecture from the 1930s onward, a style that favored glass, steel, and concrete. All gray: not just by default, but as a statement of seriousness.

Le Corbusier, pioneer of what we now simply call modern architecture, made the point with characteristic charm, declaring that color “is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.” Ouch.

The desaturation didn’t stop at buildings. Car colors have been meticulously catalogued since the dawn of the automotive age, making them a useful proxy for the broader culture’s chromatic pulse. Black had its first heyday as a car color about a century ago, when Henry Ford famously quipped that his Model T was available “in any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”

Frank Lloyd Wright As A Mirror Of The American Condition

The fixation on Wright’s paradoxes obscures a deeper contradiction embedded in the culture that produced him. Namely, that the United States has always been ambivalent about the individual: we valorise self-reliance but distrust those who stand too far apart; we celebrate democratic ideals but are uneasy with idiosyncrasy; we admire originality while punishing the disorder it brings. Wright lived squarely inside that tension. He took seriously the idea that one could make a life and a world from first principles – an act of courage in the best light. Hubris in the worst.

Seen through that lens, Wright becomes less an outlier than a mirror. His contradictions, less personal failings than reflections of the American condition. Our yearning for freedom is matched by our fear of its consequences; our desire for order by our suspicion of conformity; our reverence for the natural world by our relentless reshaping of it. Wright’s work endures because it speaks to these tensions with a force that resists resolution. If we judge him only by his wounds or only by his wonders, we see only half the man – and half the nation that shaped him. The truth, harder and more interesting, is that both are inseparable. His greatness is entangled with his flaws, his vision inseparable from his unruly humanity. To reduce him to saint or sinner is to miss what is most alive in his work: a belief that the individual, in all their contradictions, is still worth building for.

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Grounded In Reality Piece On AI Mania

I don’t say that because I think that AI models are bad or because I think they won’t get better; I think that AI models are very good and will get much better. No. The fault is not with the models, but with us. The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we’ll need humans to deal with them: we will have, in other words, complementarity.

People frequently underrate how inefficient things are in practically any domain, and how frequently these inefficiencies are reducible to bottlenecks caused simply by humans being human. Laws and regulations are obvious bottlenecks. But so are company cultures, and tacit local knowledge, and personal rivalries, and professional norms, and office politics, and national politics, and ossified hierarchies, and bureaucratic rigidities, and the human preference to be with other humans, and the human preference to be with particular humans over others, and the human love of narrative and branding, and the fickle nature of human preferences and tastes, and the severely limited nature of human comprehension. And the biggest bottleneck is simply the human resistance to change: the fact that people don’t like shifting what they’re doing. All of these are immensely powerful. Production processes are governed by their least efficient inputs: the more efficient the most efficient inputs, the more important the least efficient inputs.

In the long run, we should expect the power of technology to overcome these bottlenecks, in the same way that a river erodes a stone over many years and decades—just as how in the early decades of the twentieth century, the sheer power of what electricity could accomplish gradually overcame the bottlenecks of antiquated factory infrastructure, outdated workflows, and the conservatism of hidebound plant managers. This process, however, takes time: it took decades for electricity, among the most powerful of all general-purpose technologies, to start impacting productivity growth. AI will probably be much faster than that, not least because it can be agentic in a way that electricity cannot. But these bottlenecks are real and important and are obvious if you look at any part of the real world. And as long as those bottlenecks exist, no matter the level of AI capabilities, we should expect a real and powerful complementarity between human labor and AI, simply because the “human plus AI” combination will be more productive than AI alone.

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The fascinating Insights Of Robert Trivers

Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.

It is hard to overstate the importance of his work. Einstein famously published four groundbreaking papers in 1905, a year often referred to as his “Annus mirabilis”, during which he revolutionised physics. Trivers might be said to have had a “Quinquennium Mirabile” for the five years between 1971 and 1976, during which he produced a series of ideas that revolutionised evolutionary biology.

Reciprocal altruism - 1971:

The human altruistic system is a sensitive, unstable one. Often it will pay to cheat: namely, when the partner will not find out, when he will not discontinue his altruism even if he does find out, or when he is unlikely to survive long enough to reciprocate adequately. And the perception of subtle cheating may be very difficult. Given this unstable character of the system, where a degree of cheating is adaptive, natural selection will rapidly favor a complex psychological system in each individual regulating both his own altruistic and cheating tendencies and his responses to these tendencies in others. As selection favors subtler forms of cheating, it will favor more acute abilities to detect cheating.

Parental investment -1972:

Since the female already invests more than the male, breeding failure for lack of an additional investment selects more strongly against her than against the male. In that sense, her initial very great investment commits her to additional investment more than the male’s initial slight investment commies him.

[—]

Critics of evolutionary theory sometimes argue that it does not make any predictions that can be tested and that it only rationalises what has already been observed. Trivers’ work is one of the best examples disproving this accusation. In his paper on parental investment, Trivers argues that the differences in behaviour between males and females should reflect the degree of asymmetry in their parental investment. As a result, animals with more parental investment asymmetry should show greater asymmetry than those with less, and if we ever find animals with role reversals, we should also observe reversals in strategies. And indeed, we observe that in animals with less asymmetry in parental investment, like swans, the differences between males and females are less noticeable. In the rare cases where male investments are larger, like in seahorses, where the females literally place their eggs in the belly of the male who incubates them, we observe a role reversal, with females courting males and competing for access to them.

Parent Offspring Conflict - 1974:

The offspring can cry not only when it is famished but also when it merely wants more food than the parent is selected to give. Likewise, it can begin to withhold its smile until it has gotten its way. Selection will then of course favor parental ability to discriminate the two uses of the signals, but still subtler mimicry and deception by the offspring are always possible.

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Obviously, overall parents tend to love their children and children tend to love their parents, but Trivers showed—with a theory now largely supported by empirical research— that the whole picture is more complex, because there are always also elements of conflict in parent-offspring relations.

Self-deception - 1976:

In the preface to Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, Robert Trivers proposed a solution to this problem: our tendency to self-deceive, to think we are better than we are, may serve as a mechanism that enables us to deceive others more effectively. He wrote:

If … deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray – by the subtle signs of self-knowledge – the deception being practiced. —Trivers (1976)

Commenting on this assertion, psychologist Steven Pinker remarked, “This sentence... might have the highest ratio of profundity to words in the history of the social sciences”

[---]

In a 2011 paper with Bill von Hippel, Trivers developed this idea further, listing how self-deception can help. When trying to deceive, people may face cognitive load (the cognitive work required to make sure a web of lies does not have glaring contradictions). Given that lying is a betrayal of trust and is sanctioned when it is found out, it is risky, and people can get nervous about being found out, possibly showing signs of nervousness. Finally, people might try to mask signs of nervousness, thereby also behaving in a way that indirectly suggests lying. Self-deception, by inducing people to believe in their own lies, so to speak, can eliminate these possible clues while leading others to believe the preferred story of the person self-deceiving.

Trivers’ theory of self-deception has been supported by empirical research (including research I have contributed to). It explains what seems to be one of the most irrational patterns of human behaviour as emerging from strategic incentives.

Trivers has been one of the most influential evolutionary biologists, and his papers are still worth reading today. His insights, published more than 50 years ago, are fascinating. They often align very well with economic theories of behaviour, and it is therefore regrettable that his ideas are not more well-known in economics, and in particular in behavioural economics.

A key feature of Trivers’ take across these contributions was to see that beneath the world of social interactions we observe, there are deep structures in terms of incentives that shape the game we play. Understanding these games and their structures helps us make sense of the seemingly endless complexity of human psychology and social dynamics. In several key contributions, Trivers helped lift the veil on the underlying logic of human behaviour.

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There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

[---]

A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

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No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

[---]

That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

[---]

One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

[---]

Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

[---]

The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.