why we should

This blog started out as a multi-voice poem nine years ago one easter. Well, laying it out by hand with coloured pencil in a highlight-coding for each 'voice'. The nine year old FB post said I am a year in at this stage. Before that is was just a ‘unsplit’ univocal poem. Or notes. I have lots of notes. The…

Below is a reworking of a comment at J. N. Nielsen’s Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon on the post ‘A Thought Experiment in the Aggregation of Civilizations’. This post is also the third on Reading Joseph Henrich see ONE and TWO. As such my comment used the terminology found in that post and my own favoured herbs and spices…

Preamble In ONE I discussed some of my reading of Joseph Henrich’s books, and this morning I am riffing within the same books on the idea of the individual as a social institution. Or at least the interplay between the acknowledgment and the possibility of the individual as social institution. This is some more exploratory & metaphoric work on the implication…

This avenue of reading began like my discovery of the creator or promoter of the umbrella term ‘Man the hunter’ in two ways. It was a family hand-me down book and it was the writer’s second book. See Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative (substack.com). In Joseph Henrich’s case the second book has made a bigger splash than the first, and…

"Machine learning maps social learning not individual intelligence" may appear as not saying very much, especially if social learning is unknown or just hard to notice because it is like water to fish, essential but taken for granted. Social learning is a grab-all term for deliberate, emergent & surprising processes, intentional or unintended, that arise as humans organize their lives…

Recently I’ve been dipping more widely into general anthropology discourses, and learning how much there is to cover. A recent quick take on a paper meant looking harder at prosociality, and here I’ll be looking at another term I have not spend time to do a proper background check on. This may develop into an ongoing series, and will be…