Archive of posts with tag 'Culture'

March 12, 2025 • #

Great interview with the author of one of my favorite books from the last several years, Joe Henrich. The WEIRDest People in the World is a fascinating look at the origins of human culture and the evolution of human psychology.

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August 25, 2024 • #

Escape the Algorithm →

Wrote this week about the problems with feeds, algorithmic discovery, and passively letting the machines define your taste.

We all need a return to active participation in what we consume.

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August 24, 2024 • #

“Pace layers”

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The Whole Earth Index →

October 17, 2023 • #

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was a counterculture magazine from the 1970s. Ostensibly it was about DIY and self-sufficiency, with a focus on product reviews, but flip through an issue and there’s almost no subject you won’t find. It reflected the publisher’s holistic, systems philosophy.

The Whole Earth Index is an archive of Whole Earth as downloadable PDFs, hosted by the Internet Archive.

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002. They are made available here for scholarship, education, and research purposes.

Today’s version of the WEC I suppose is the zeitgeist conversation of anon accounts on Twitter. But there’s something special about an eclectic, visual, curated guide to a world of interesting things.

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Areopagus →

August 23, 2023 • #

If you don’t follow Cultural Tutor on Twitter, I’d highly recommend. One of the few threadposters who consistently sends me down unrequested-but-fascinating rabbit holes. Architecture, classical history, music, art — always something interesting.

And if you like the social media feed, check out Areopagus, his weekly newsletter that goes deeper on a few topics each week.

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The Case for Muddling Through →

April 18, 2023 • #

Read any news that intersects with politics, culture, technology, or economics, and you’d believe we’ve come to the end of the road. You find the occasional optimist pointing out how things aren’t so bad, or that they’ve also been real bad in the past (definitely true!).

Brink Lindsey paints his own bleak picture of our current set of crises — of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – but acknowledges a fear of overblowing the threats presented by these issues. In this piece he offers some hope here with confidence that we can muddle through with solutions as we have to past challenges. I think I’d largely conform to this view. Even though we’re cooking a nasty stew of intertwined problems in all of these areas, our culture has been more resistant to destroying itself than doomsayers have predicted every time in the past so far. I think we’ll muddle through like we always have. Crises precipitate change, and change hurts, but we can come out on the other side at least comfortable with a new status quo.

Relatedly, I recently read Brink Lindsey’s excellent book on cronyism, stasism, and regulatory capture, The Captured Economy, which he wrote in 2017 with co-author Steven Teles.

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Architecture from Every Country

September 12, 2022 • #

This was a fantastic thread from The Cultural Tutor — so simple, but had me on an epic Wikipedia / Google Maps rabbit hole.

Some of my favorite examples:

Kind of sad to see so many overbearing modernist structures in here, but some of them are nothing if not impressive, at least.

His newsletter, Areopagus, is full of great tidbits on art, history, classics, architecture, rhetoric. Well worth a subscribe.

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Weekend Reading: Readwise's Next Chapter, Reviewing Revolt of the Public, and the Helicopter State

September 17, 2021 • #

📚 The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App

Great to see this evolution of Readwise to enter the “read-later” app space. None of the options out there seem to be thriving anymore (Pocket, Instapaper, etc.), but some of us still rely on them as essential parts of our reading experience.

The Readwise team has been moving fast the last couple years with excellent additions to the product, and I can’t believe they were also working on this for most of 2021 along with the other regular updates. Impressive.

🪧 Book Review: The Revolt of the Public

Scott Alexander reviews Martin Gurri:

People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn’t how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the “CAUSE MIRACLE” button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!

Revolt of the Public was published in 2014, a time when most of his diagnosis of political discontent was prescient. But as SA points out, most of the subject matter is received wisdom in 2021.

I still highly recommend Gurri as a writer, and RotP for its analysis of root causes more than its predictions of things to come. More on Gurri here and here, and give a watch to his Revolt of the Public in 10 Minutes talk to get the precis on his work if you’re unfamiliar.

🏛 The Helicopter State

Jonah’s G-File is one of the rare read-every-issue newsletters, and this one is one of my recent favorites:

The government can’t love you, and when it works from the premise that it can, folly or tyranny follow. We need people in our lives, not programs. Because people give us the very real sense that we are part of something, that we’re needed and valued. Programs treat us like we’re metrics in some PowerPoint slide.

Helicopter parenting has a negative perception, as it should, but it’s still done all the time. Helicopter governing should be treated the same, but is also promoted and defended far too often.

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Weekend Reading: NBA Bubble, Digital Homesteads, and Amateurs vs. Professionals

October 10, 2020 • #

🏀 What I Learned Inside the NBA Bubble

A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.

I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy that I remember from recent seasons. As of writing, the Heat have pulled back to 2 games to 3 against the Lakers.

🌾 Homesteading the Twittersphere

Alex Danco on scarcity and gift culture:

Status is clearly scarce, and in a gift culture like the free software community – or on Finance Twitter – the way you earn status is by putting in real effort, and then giving away the fruits of that effort.

Of course, the effort you put in has to actually be valuable, and recognized as such by your peer group. So the optimal thing for you to do, whether you’re an open source software developer or a Twitter armchair analyst, is to figure out your specialty zone that’s simultaneously useful, but unique – and then homestead it. Establish and cultivate it, like a garden or a plot of land, that you’re tending for the communal benefit of everyone. People come to associate that little plot of land with you specifically, and think of you whenever they go near it.

🏆 The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

A solid list from Farnam Street:

Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence.

Amateurs see feedback and coaching as someone criticizing them as a person. Professionals know they have weak spots and seek out thoughtful criticism.

Amateurs focus on being right. Professionals focus on getting the best outcome.

Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.

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The Prophet of the Revolt →

September 30, 2020 • #

Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.

That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).

This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:

I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually true, but I wouldn’t use those words. I would say that our institutions are structurally (and, I believe, catastrophically) maladapted to the new information environment, and that the people who run them are both unable and unwilling to reform them.

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Weekend Reading: Looking Glass Politics, Enrichment, and OSM Datasets

July 18, 2020 • #

🐇 Looking-Glass Politics

On private emotions being thrown into the public sphere:

People escape the Dunbar world for obvious reasons: life there appears prosaic and uninspiring. They find a digital interface and, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, enter a new realm that glitters with infinite possibilities. Suddenly, you can flicker like a spark between the digital and the real. The exhilarating sensation is that you have been taken to a high place and shown all the kingdoms of the world: “These can be yours, if. . . .” If your video goes viral. If you gain millions of followers. If you compose that devastating tweet that will drive Donald Trump from the White House. There is, however, an entrance fee. Personal identity must be discarded.

🏭 The Great Enrichment

Deirdre McCloskey on the boom of progress over the past 200 years:

The Great Enrichment came from human ingenuity emancipated. Ordinary people, emboldened by liberalism, ventured on extraordinary projects—the marine chronometer, the selective breeding of cotton seed, the band saw, a new chemistry—or merely ventured boldly to a new job, the New World, or going west, young man. And, crucially, the bold adventurers, in parallel with liberations in science, music, and geographical exploration, came to be tolerated and even commended by the rest of society, first in Holland in the 17th century and then in Britain in the 18th.

🗺 OSM-ready Data Sets

A partnership between Esri, Facebook, and the OpenStreetMap community to polish up and release datasets readily compatible with OSM (tagging and licensing).

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The Heaving Sea of Twitter →

July 16, 2020 • #

Great piece from Tanner Greer on the evolution of online discourse from the early days of the internet to today’s firestorm of Twitter.

First, a fond look back on the early days of online conversation — the days of the blog, the forum, the pseudonymous publisher, the rule of the idea and its impassioned, argued defense:

There were two aspects of this older internet ecology that set it apart from the current get up. The first was its clear division into hundreds of separate communities. This was most explicit in the forums, which usually did not allow users to comment unless they created a log-in and agreed to very specific community rules. But this was true even of the blogs that anyone could view or comment. No blog was island—or if an island, each was part of an archipelago, a constellation of commentators interested in a specific topic or problem. Perhaps you cared a great deal about the Iraq War, or peak oil, or New Atheism. You would find people blogging about it, read their posts, write your own posts in response to what they were typing, and try to leave incisive comments in the threads attached to posts you liked.

On the devolution of this discourse with the expansion of Twitter, and its absorption of much of the older communities of conversation:

But if writers were to have people read their blogs, then their blogs had to be good. This was the price of participation. On Twitter, anybody who can think up a snarky 140 characters retort can contribute to the “conversation.”

And finally, a couple of choice descriptions of Twitter in 2020:

Twitter is an undifferentiated mass of writhing souls trying to inflict their angry opinions on the earth

The users of Twitter are one great mass. The ponds and lakes of the blogosphere have emptied into a heaving sea. In this sea, Twitter users are linked together, but linked weakly. They are unmoderated, unorganized, atomized—but stuck all together.

Twitter can be a great place, but it takes conscious effort and maintenance to make it so. The resurgence of independent publishing, newsletters, and podcasts makes me optimistic that sane communities of interesting conversation can break free of the mega-platform, shallow oceans of noise. Lets revive the exciting days of the internet in 2005, but maybe with fewer forum flame wars. Perhaps the 2020 version of blog comment thread toxicity can stay behind on Twitter.

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Cultures That Build →

June 24, 2020 • #

Mark Andreessen’s piece from a couple months back drove a flood of response, both in support and disagreement.

This piece from Tanner Greer agrees with Andreessen’s sentiments in general, but more interestingly dives into why American progress has slowed so dramatically, tying the root causes to change in the culture of ownership, self-reliance, and self-organization.

We live in a culture today of management hierarchy, bureaucratic approvals, designs-by-committee, taking little risk without consensus, and regulatory restriction (and, just as dangerous, regulatory capture). None of these are to blame entirely — it’s a team sport. And this isn’t a complete list of our ailments by any stretch.

I thought this was an insightful observation comparing this current American position to the early 20th century Progressive Era:

I mention the progressive era to highlight a fundamental contrast: in the America of the early 20th century, the default solution to any problem encountered was to assemble a coalition of Americans to defeat it. This was true regardless of the level of society in which the person operated. It was the default response in small towns and in large cities, at the federal center and at frontier’s edge, in the world of the businessman, the social reformer, the minister, and the politician. Americans had faith that building things worked. To be sure, politics and perverse incentives existed. They could and did lead to all sorts of disastrous outcomes. But the baseline assumption of the American people of that time was that free associations of Americans working towards a common goal could get hard things done—and that it was their responsibility to get those people associating.

Also a contrast from de Tocqueville on the America he observed in the 1830s:

Anyone living in the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to combat the ills and obstacles of life; he looks across at the authority of society with mistrust and anxiety, calling upon such authority only when he cannot do without it. This begins to become apparent when school starts and children, even in their games, submit to the rules they have established and punish offenses following their own definitions. The same spirit prevails in all the affairs of social life. Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted, neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has though of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed…. [In America] there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.

Doesn’t sound much like today’s environment.

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Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Cultures →

March 20, 2020 • #

This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand from Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast. It mostly covers the subject of her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, on the differences between “tight” vs. “loose” cultures — think Singapore or China vs. Spain or Italy. It’s a timely subject in this time of global response to a pandemic, seeing how different cultures respond to the crisis.

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Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles

January 18, 2020 • #

🥩 The Internet of Beefs

Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works:

The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs between charismatic celebrity knights loosely affiliated with various citadel-like strongholds peopled by opt-in armies of mooks. The vast majority of the energy of the conflict lies in interchangeable mooks facing off against each other, loosely along lines indicated by the knights they follow, in innumerable battles that play out every minute across the IoB.

Almost none of these battles matter individually. Most mook-on-mook contests are witnessed, for the most part, only by a few friends and algorithms, and merit no overt notice in either Vox or Quillette. Beyond a local uptick in cortisol levels, individual episodes of mook-on-mook violence are of no consequence.

🎭 The Curse of Culture

I have a working draft post on this topic for sometime in the future. This is one of my favorites from the Stratechery archives — on corporate cultures and how they impact company strategy:

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.

📚 Book Review: Secular Cycles

The Slate Star Codex review of Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which seeks to understand patterns in technological and social development, and underlying causes for expansion and stagnation periods.

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Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells

November 23, 2019 • #

🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works

An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the same document, in real time).

🌾 Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture

A fascinating paper. This research suggests the possibility that group-conforming versus individualistic cultures may have roots in diet and agricultural practices. From the abstract:

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

An interesting thread to follow, but worthy of skepticism given the challenge of aggregating enough concrete data to prove anything definitively. There’s some intuitively sensible argument here as to the fundamental differences with subsistence practices in wheat versus rice farming techniques:

The two biggest differences between farming rice and wheat are irrigation and labor. Because rice paddies need standing water, people in rice regions build elaborate irrigation systems that require farmers to cooperate. In irrigation networks, one family’s water use can affect their neighbors, so rice farmers have to coordinate their water use. Irrigation networks also require many hours each year to build, dredge, and drain—a burden that often falls on villages, not isolated individuals.

🦠 Cells That ‘Taste’ Danger Set Off Immune Responses

I’ve talked before about my astonishment with the immune system’s complexity and power. This piece talks about tuft cells and how they use their chemosensory powers to identify parasites and alert the immune system to respond:

Howitt’s findings were significant because they pointed to a possible role for tuft cells in the body’s defenses — one that would fill a conspicuous hole in immunologists’ understanding. Scientists understood quite a bit about how the immune system detects bacteria and viruses in tissues. But they knew far less about how the body recognizes invasive worms, parasitic protozoa and allergens, all of which trigger so-called type 2 immune responses. Howitt and Garett’s work suggested that tuft cells might act as sentinels, using their abundant chemosensory receptors to sniff out the presence of these intruders. If something seems wrong, the tuft cells could send signals to the immune system and other tissues to help coordinate a response.

Given the massive depth of knowledge about biological processes, anatomy, and medical research, it’s incredible how much we still don’t know about how organisms work. Evolution, selection, and time can create some truly complex systems.

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Hamilton

February 24, 2019 • #

Today we got to see the touring production of Hamilton in Tampa. It’s every bit as good as the hype.

I’m a history nerd already, so the subject matter is right up my alley. I read the book a couple of years ago and enjoyed it tremendously. I hope that the level this has reached in popular culture has increased peoples’ interest and respect for American history.

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Cargo Cult Science →

February 3, 2019 • #

The physicist Richard Feynman’s famous 1974 commencement address on theories that pretend to be scientific:

“But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”

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