Author: linas

An acquaintance wrote: don’t be an asshole I am thinking through a “don’t be an asshole” theory of public behavior. It seems to me that problems of social interaction don’t arise from opinions (or guns or drugs or …) but from people having some idea of entitlement to expressing the asshole in their nature. Maybe.…

tl;dr:  Meaning is provided by ancient and deep neural circuitry. The “crisis of meaning” (for humans) is the inability to find ‘meaning’ for issues deemed ‘important’ by other neural circuits. Anxiety and psychological distress arises from a feedback loop searching for meaning. This feedback loop manifests both as “Culture War” and is of concern for…

This is a list of interesting reads dealing with network theory, social media, and political crises. Stuff like algorithmic propaganda, memetics and the epidemiology of memes, as inflamed by social media. This provides footnotes and references for claims that I make in the other blog posts. This is a complement to the Capitalism Reading List…

Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m misreading. That I’ve misunderstood what was being said. That I misunderstood the intent.  Because surely, surely, the Texas Public Utilities Commission cannot possibly be so stunningly, overwhelmingly incompetent, as they were during this week’s electricity crisis.  Perhaps the biggest electricity crisis Texas has ever had. Because I read…

Well, actually, paying for creative talent. The old model was capitalism – get a job, get paid for it. The newer model is Open Source – Wikipedia, Linux – volunteer, do it for free. Obviously(?) this is not sustainable; in the end, you have to have money to buy groceries. Where does this money come…

With regards to distributed ledgers and alternative credit/IOU systems, Mixmix wrote: Might be interesting to look into mana – in te ao Māori (the Māori world) one aspect of mana is like respect / honour, and decisions are made based on whether it increases the mana of all involved. Really interested because it’s not zero-sum…

Do you mind if I lecture a bit? I’ll try to keep this short. Search for any terms you are not familiar with. (Cross-post from #securescuttlebutt.) Bacteria use small peptides to “talk to each other”. Search “quorum sensing in bacteria“. Tree roots and fungi do this too. Slime mold can solve the two-armed bandit problem:…

(I posted this on #scuttlebutt yesterday, in response to a discussion about revolution.) The current reality that I am faced with is almost half of the US and A voted for Trump and I don’t see how any amount of revolutionary fervor will change that. The reality is that these people live in a different…

As a physicist, I get to think about free will just like the rest of ’em.  I was recently prompted to set my thoughts to writing on the talk page of the Wikipedia article free will theorem. I think I can string together a few more pieces, and clarify how it actually “all works”. Caution:…

This is a collection of supporting articles and footnotes for some of the other blog posts here. It focuses on biochemistry, neuroscience and the physics and mathematics of phase transitions in networks. It is meant to be a complement to the Social Network Crisis Reading List, which describes social media (facebook, youtube) as networks, and …