Unconscious Influence Cialdini has long studied the forces of influence that exist outside of our conscious awareness. The most common is social proof, but this one is a bit tricky, since everybody knows what social proof is, and every tends to try to leverage social proof in their favor. But all of us […]
Energy Harvesting Strategies
Origins Of Imperialism Human imperialism has been around for a long time, in a lot of different forms, and under a lot of names. Imperialism, of course, is when large societies have become empires are specifically and strategically attempting conquest. But even smaller bands of raiders like the Vikings of the middle ages […]
Malthus and Overpopulation
Nature Video I started watching this interesting set of science videos. It is a set of 24 videos, 30 minutes each, and they’re all about life sciences. The one I watched I can watch them out of order. The one I watched started off talking about populations and natural equilibrium. They were talking about […]
Ancient Frame Battle
Meaning Is Subjective Most farmers would agree that rain is a good thing. Most elementary school kids on a Saturday morning would agree that rain is a bad thing. Meaning is something that is very subjective, very flexible and very relative. One of the best skills you can develop is the ability to consciously […]
Unsustainability
All Modern Societies Are Unsustainable There are a couple of different ways to view an anthill. You can look at it as one singular organism unto itself or you could look at it as a collection of individual organisms onto themselves, all genetically programmed to support the meta-organism. You can look at a beehive […]
Time Preference Destruction
The Death Of Every Society In a recent post, we talked about the idea of time-preference. How it is the meta skill that is behind every other skill. How the lower your time-preference is, the more easily you can delay gratification. The more you can plan your future instead of living day to day. In […]