Life on the curve

Something wrong with the world

In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus prods Neo to think about his emotions over the course of his lifetime. Hadn't he always felt out-of-place? Hadn't he always felt that something was not quite right?

Of course, the answer was yes.

I think this is a common feeling among thoughtful people. But I'm not sure Morpheus had the right answer.

When Isaac Newton looked up at the night sky, he must have been confounded by what he saw. How did it move? Why did it move? What complexity governed the placement of objects in the heavens?

The Singularity: Why the Future is Closer Than You Think

This past Saturday, Ryan Hogan, John Yates and I delivered a presentation and panel discussion on the future of accelerating change at Nashville Podcamp. The session went well, and we had a lot of great questions and discussion from the audience. We mainly used our slides as a jumping-off point for discussion, but they should give you a bit of the flavor of that discussion.

Aliens among us

I believe there are aliens among us.

That is, I believe that there are non-human creatures deeply involved in our own existence. Of course, you believe in them too. You may call them things like schools, corporations, markets, religions, fads, or technologies. But they are very definitely creatures - and they have their own desires, impulses, and motivations.

The Flip

When you flip a coin, it's customary to ask the other person, "heads or tails?"

That choice is meaningless.

You picking "tails" doesn't change the probability of you getting what you want. It could just as easily have been assigned to you by someone else. But what it does do, is establish buy-in.

From the moment you call "tails", you've bound yourself to abide by the result of the flip. And that's really the point - nobody cares whether you're heads or tails, they just care that you agree to it.

The Morality of The Rational, and How We Shape Meaning from The Void

I was recently talking to someone about how uncertain everything is. There are different opinions on everything - from what's really happening in politics to the healthiest diet to follow. With so many different opinions, we could easily become overwhelmed, and decide that since we can never really know, we should just stop trying.

The Solipsist's Fallacy

Solipsism is the belief that you can never truly know if anyone else is real.

This is a common endpoint for philosophy, the reductio ad absurdum at the end of long chains of reasoning. It's what Descartes was trying to get around when he wrote "I think therefore I am", though that may in fact be the purest expression of solipsism ever.

The Skulls, Bones and The Power of Law

The Skulls is a fictitious movie based on Yale's notorious secret Skull and Bones society. It follows the path of a new initiate through the process of getting picked, going to clandestine meetings, engaging in rituals and tests of dedication, until finally being ushered into membership, complete with all its lucrative privileges.

Wisdom

I need wisdom.

More than anything in my life, I need to be able to see my way forward, to evaluate the choices ahead of me. I've always been a consumer of knowledge, someone who couldn't leave well enough alone, who had to tease apart the inner workings of things. That process leaves me with a huge gap - the gap between what is and what could be. And that gap requires wisdom.

The Vast Economy

Increasingly, I have come to believe that the world is best understood as a Vast Economy, an ecosystem encompassing all the small economies we know about and measure, utilizing our every choice, from the individual to the society at large, for its own ends and purposes. In this Economy, nothing is ever wasted, nothing is lost, and everything follows a brilliant and sinister logic.

New year's resolve: change

This year, my only resolution is to change.

I've made my share of resolutions, goals, and ambitions, and so my relationship with such things is firmly in the "it's complicated" category. I may talk more about that later, but for now, let's admit that change is what we can expect from the world, and trying to stay the same is what we can expect from ourselves.

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