jmcmichael

The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis →

This short theoretical paper elucidates a plausible theory about the Global Financial Crisis and the role of senior financial corporate directors in that crisis. The paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for.

Cognitive Biases in Times of Uncertainty →

We live in a world of increasing pressure and uncertainty, driven in large part by digital technology infrastructures. These marvelous infrastructures bring us unprecedented connectivity and opportunities to better ourselves.

That is a core paradox of our life in the 21st century: our new infrastructures create both opportunity and pressure. The pressure comes from intensifying competition as people previously marginalized in our global economy master these infrastructures and compete for jobs and markets that were previously secure franchises. More importantly, the pressure also comes as those in the core of our economy cling to practices and institutions that were designed for another world and struggle to remain successful in a world that requires new practices and institutions. The turmoil we see around the world today is a vivid illustration of this paradox.

- John Hagel III

The Evolution of the American Dream →

“Remember the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and their sloganeering? In the beginning of the story, when they overthrow the humans, they lead with the chant, “four legs good, two legs bad!” By the end, they’ve  become human-corrupt, and lead the chant, “four legs good, two legs better!”

Just one word changed, and the new and old words both begin with b, bolstering the illusion of continuity and natural evolution.

Let’s call such a slowly shifting narrative, simple enough to be captured in a slogan, and designed to help a small predatory class dominate a larger prey class, a Pig Narrative.  The American Dream is a Pig Narrative.”

-Venkatesh Rao

Authority Creates Stupidity →

A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave “intelligently.”

The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist’s nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (Things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.

- Robert Anton Wilson, quoted by Kevin Carson in the linked article

Adventures in Depression
by hyperbole and a half

Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect →

“If you are only used to driving cars, it is hard to appreciate just how huge a force drag can be. The reason is that drag increases as the square of speed, so an object will experience 100 times the drag at 300 mph as it does at 30 mph. Not 10 times.

In  Physics Can Be Fun, Soviet popular science writer Ya Perelman provided a dramatic example of the consequences of drag. With drag, a typical long-range artillery shell travels 4 km. Without drag, the same shell would travel 40 km.

Or 10x further. Which brings me to the famous 10x effect in software engineering.

If you haven’t heard of it, the 10x effect is the anecdotal observation that great programmers aren’t just a little more productive than average ones (like 15-20%). They tend to be 10 times more productive. A similar effect can be found in other kinds of creative information work.

Can you transform yourself into a 10x person? If you meet certain qualifying conditions (by my estimate, maybe 1 in 4 people do), I think you can.”

-Venkatesh Rao

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they’re going ‘this is an individual writing with his own point of view’.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can. It’s as true for any area of the arts, not just writing. Perhaps it’s true for life.

—  A bit of writing advice from Neil Gaiman

(Source: faramirs)

A Message To Women From A Man: You Are Not “Crazy” →

“You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!”

Sound familiar?

If you’re a woman, it probably does.

Bandwagon Timing verus Biding Your Time →

“There are two basic types of timing: bandwagon timing and biding your time. They are the extremes of a spectrum. Most people focus on the first extreme. A minority focus on the second extreme. Successful timing requires a synthesis. Only a tiny fraction of people achieve synthesis.

We use different kinds of language to talk about each type.

Do People Panic/Riot/Rampage During Disasters?  →

The conventional wisdom is that people panic during disasters.  Worse, it’s assumed that many people immediately become feral looters when disasters hit.  Widespread panic has become the government’s worst nightmare.  The boogey man that is trotted out to explain why governments need to lie (in order to keep people from panicking) or why military intervention/curfews are necessary.

However, as with stampeding crowds, the conventional wisdom on this is wrong.  Rebecca shows in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, that people don’t typically panic when they find themselves at the ground zero of a disaster (after the immediate danger is over).  Through the use of detailed research on a number of extreme disasters, she shows that in most cases people are very practical when confronting disaster.  Better yet, they are often more courteous and much more likely to help each other when things fall apart than they are normally.  They come together to survive.

In contrast to the people on the ground, she shows that the only people that actually do panic during disasters are the elites — from those with wealth to those running the government’s response (I’m not talking about the first responders actually on the ground doing good work).  They panic over the loss of control a disaster brings.  This often results in extreme actions that only serve to make things worse: from martial law authorized to use deadly force against looters (often just people trying to survive the situation) to arbitrarily hearding people into locations that aren’t able to support large groups of people.

- John Robb, describing the book Disaster Utopias and Elite Panics