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| Published in 2012 & current still today |
Does evolution have a direction? Was human-level intelligence the inevitable, or at least a likely, result of the evolutionary process? And, most interestingly, if evolution has a direction, where is it headed? These questions are alive again in the intellectual currents of culture.
Great intriguing questions. Query: is this topic considered differently today?
Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new.
An evolutionary view?
Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.
Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Lecture, 2009
Courtesy of Nicholas Gruen, an Australian economist with broad interests. Ostrom won the Nobel for Economics as a political scientist. A return to "political economy"?
Elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict is, thus, one of the chief causes of political instability. Two other causes are popular discontent resulting from falling living standards, and fiscal crisis. These three causes interact in producing conditions ripe for political violence.
Sound familiar?
It [stress that’s having a major effect on humanity’s collective mood . . . called by some scholars “normative threat”] arises partly from economic inequality and insecurity and perhaps from the arrival in one’s homeland of large numbers of migrants, but also from rapid urbanization and greater information connectivity, both of which allow ideas to propagate quickly, especially new beliefs and values about traditionally contentious issues like sexuality, religion, and women’s status. Together, these changes can make some people feel as if their society’s essential fabric of culture, moral values, and shared beliefs, myths, and practices— the fundamental “normative order” that constitutes their society’s continuity— is being torn apart.
This is one of four major stressors identified by Homer-Dixon. My summary: the human herd is spooked--by more than one source. It's like a lightning strike, attacking wolves, gunshots, and drunken rustlers all hitting the herd at once. You're gonna have a stampede. Not good.
A meme is said to be a replicator of cultural information that one mind transmits (verbally or by demonstration) to another mind, examples being ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’9 and other concepts, ideas, theories, opinions, beliefs, practices, habits, dances and moods, ultimately, and inevitably, including the idea of God – the Dawkins delusion.
He employed neither logic nor reason but sheer passion, while physically embodying the feelings of his audience like a medium.
Who is "he"? Take a wild guess. Hint: he's not alive. He died in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. But who might this description apply to today?
Missing from the hard right’s appeal or well down its list of promises are liberalism’s twin demands for protection from power and respect for all, whoever they are. Order and security have always mattered to conservatives, but for liberal conservatives, not at any price.
There are two distinct types of feedback processes: reinforcing and balancing. Reinforcing (or amplifying) feedback processes are the engines of growth. Whenever you are in a situation where things are growing, you can be sure that reinforcing feedback is at work. Reinforcing feedback can also generate accelerating decline—a pattern of decline where small drops amplify themselves into larger and larger drops, such as the decline in bank assets when there is a financial panic.
A man-made border that does not match a natural frontier zone is particularly vulnerable.
The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who've maximized 1 or 2 strengths.
