narcissism ⁽¹⁹⁾

My main concern is not that a structure* is judged to be good/bad/X, or is good/bad/X because it is a structure, but that certain agents live and move through the world to suit themselves without negotiating their way, thus producing structures that suit the common moves narcissists make, even performing or doing 'structures' that can be in a confounded conflict…

A major thread running through The Ideological Brain, by Leor Zmigrod, a detail of Charles Darwin’s intellectual biography. His marriage to Emma provided Charles with a distinct contrast to his scientific work, and that emotional commitment provided much of the delay in the ideas of natural selection and its implications being published. For Charles had made an agnostic commitment to Emma not…

We read. Douglas, Mary, and Steven Ney. 1998. Missing Persons: A Critique of the Social Sciences, The Aaron Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy. Berkeley : New York: University of California Press ; Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN 978-0-520-20752-3 Douglas, Mary. 1996. Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste. London: SAGE publications. This deals with the changes in the ritualistic use of conspiracy theories…

Skin in the game & Agent Nassim Nicholas Taleb's journey in the new world [Originally posted at Substack.com in March 2024] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life mentions that in ‘teh’ west we have trained ourselves to contrast the individual and the collective, so much so, we miss out noticing the grey tiers in…

I’ve been reading someone else’s copy of Iris Murdochs’ Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 9780701139988 (article) over the last few weeks. By “someone else’s copy” I mean it has pencilled marginalia like Astute Observation and as I have met the previous owner, these words read themselves aloud in his voice. It’s been slow going, not…

Originally posted on substack.com in August 2023. Evidence for global cultural diffusion post at Vectors of Mind spurs the raising of the question in the comments by Little Kenny, “[…] I am trying to imagine what might have been some of the more fundamental worldview changes and social practices triggered by recursion. Maybe they're now so embedded into our behavioral norms and unrecognized priors that we…