Excellent article! Sounds like you may have read Zimmerman's "Family & Civilization" where he writes about the atomistic family and moral decay. I like how you expand your view to the truth provided by the laws of physics & math. Your phrase "patterns of concentrations" remined me of "the birthday problem" (1), a prime example showing that truth is often counterintuitive to humans.
A big picture view I have long held is that populations cannot, for long, handle the lack of grave adversity. Without this intense and long lasting adversity, populations begin wallowing in superficialities and become weak, leading to some catastrophic event which causes them to become strong again. Unprecedented government borrowing has kept us from experiencing much adversity that we would have worked to solve in advance of this predicted event.
I was also reminded of John B. Calhoun's famous "rat utopia" experiments and how the various rat behaviors creepily predict what is happening today. With the rats, overcrowding was the problem but with humans, other researchers have looked at the intrusion of society into a person's mind, as a possible parallel (2). And unfortunately, some researchers offer the wrong solutions to the problems they document.
Also, I've tried to explain to friends why a corporation mostly has to give people what they want, compared to a government, which is much more able to deceive them. This is because we can easily discern the value of a product for sale, but no one has time to read all the bills that are voted on, so we have to rely on what politicians or media say. And only 3.4% of journalists are republicans. (3)
I'm also a big fan of seeing spectrums as opposed to seeing all or none. Spectrum thinking gets closer to the truth most often, in my view. People are creatures of incentive, and how they view occurrences, affects their reactions.
Thank you for the insightful article and keep up the good work!
I love comments like these! Thank you for taking your time to write this.
I've not read Zimmerman's work, but now that you mention it I think I will. I don't understand the parallel with the Birthday problem, though? Here's the context: "In society, we see a repeating pattern of large concentrations of power into single entities, such as governments, cultures, religions and companies."
Are you basically saying that these things result basically from some sort of inevitability due to probability distribution?
The rat utopia is so interesting. Some people think that it's not fair to compare, but I think it is. We see the same patterns happening in the West. People are getting fatter, lazier and the average person has less friends than even in the 90s now. On top of all this, of course the fertility rate is falling below replacement rate. The US is only at replacement rate because of immigration at the moment.
You have a realistic view of corporations. What can we gather from this? I suppose we find that corporations only change when people change. People will complain about things, about products, about experiences, about pay, but yet they still interact with the things they hate. It's behavior that determines markets, not sentiments.
I do find it sad that only 3.4% of journalists are republican. I'm not sure if you know of https://christopherrufo.com/ but he's an excellent conservative voice. I think that conservatives tend to focus on their own families whereas liberals tend to be concerned with society at large.
Each one has their advantages and blind spots. That partially explains why there are so few of them though, because they are busy focusing on building their families, rather than intellectual ambitions.
As a conservative, I'm quite disappointed with the modern republican party and how poor of a job it does of connecting with the youth. Vivek gives me some hope. I'm a big fan of trump although he's not perfect. The rest of the "republican" party though..? They are too rigid to make a difference in the world, and they don't understand young people.
Chris Rufo talks about the idea of "progressive conservatism" which seeks to take the good things from the old republican party, but also use some bits of the playbook from the left, rather than letting them leave us in the dust. There's a progressive right-wing rebellion movement growing amid the broken republican party in this country, and it's not a bunch of brain-dead socialists. I'm so here for it man.
Excellent article! Sounds like you may have read Zimmerman's "Family & Civilization" where he writes about the atomistic family and moral decay. I like how you expand your view to the truth provided by the laws of physics & math. Your phrase "patterns of concentrations" remined me of "the birthday problem" (1), a prime example showing that truth is often counterintuitive to humans.
A big picture view I have long held is that populations cannot, for long, handle the lack of grave adversity. Without this intense and long lasting adversity, populations begin wallowing in superficialities and become weak, leading to some catastrophic event which causes them to become strong again. Unprecedented government borrowing has kept us from experiencing much adversity that we would have worked to solve in advance of this predicted event.
I was also reminded of John B. Calhoun's famous "rat utopia" experiments and how the various rat behaviors creepily predict what is happening today. With the rats, overcrowding was the problem but with humans, other researchers have looked at the intrusion of society into a person's mind, as a possible parallel (2). And unfortunately, some researchers offer the wrong solutions to the problems they document.
Also, I've tried to explain to friends why a corporation mostly has to give people what they want, compared to a government, which is much more able to deceive them. This is because we can easily discern the value of a product for sale, but no one has time to read all the bills that are voted on, so we have to rely on what politicians or media say. And only 3.4% of journalists are republicans. (3)
I'm also a big fan of seeing spectrums as opposed to seeing all or none. Spectrum thinking gets closer to the truth most often, in my view. People are creatures of incentive, and how they view occurrences, affects their reactions.
Thank you for the insightful article and keep up the good work!
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636191/
(3) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/study-finds-that-just-34-of-american-journalists-are-republicans/ar-AA1m6Tf6
I love comments like these! Thank you for taking your time to write this.
I've not read Zimmerman's work, but now that you mention it I think I will. I don't understand the parallel with the Birthday problem, though? Here's the context: "In society, we see a repeating pattern of large concentrations of power into single entities, such as governments, cultures, religions and companies."
Are you basically saying that these things result basically from some sort of inevitability due to probability distribution?
The rat utopia is so interesting. Some people think that it's not fair to compare, but I think it is. We see the same patterns happening in the West. People are getting fatter, lazier and the average person has less friends than even in the 90s now. On top of all this, of course the fertility rate is falling below replacement rate. The US is only at replacement rate because of immigration at the moment.
You have a realistic view of corporations. What can we gather from this? I suppose we find that corporations only change when people change. People will complain about things, about products, about experiences, about pay, but yet they still interact with the things they hate. It's behavior that determines markets, not sentiments.
I do find it sad that only 3.4% of journalists are republican. I'm not sure if you know of https://christopherrufo.com/ but he's an excellent conservative voice. I think that conservatives tend to focus on their own families whereas liberals tend to be concerned with society at large.
Each one has their advantages and blind spots. That partially explains why there are so few of them though, because they are busy focusing on building their families, rather than intellectual ambitions.
As a conservative, I'm quite disappointed with the modern republican party and how poor of a job it does of connecting with the youth. Vivek gives me some hope. I'm a big fan of trump although he's not perfect. The rest of the "republican" party though..? They are too rigid to make a difference in the world, and they don't understand young people.
Chris Rufo talks about the idea of "progressive conservatism" which seeks to take the good things from the old republican party, but also use some bits of the playbook from the left, rather than letting them leave us in the dust. There's a progressive right-wing rebellion movement growing amid the broken republican party in this country, and it's not a bunch of brain-dead socialists. I'm so here for it man.