Border Collie and Russian Wolfhound — the Great Game continues
Well, here you go! I’ll likely revisit this and edit some of the descriptions, but this isn’t a bad start. I graded all my COVID posts for your amusement. Some I got right. And some I sure didn’t!
Written at about the end of my period when I thought lockdowns would work and were a good idea. This was a month into it – and nope, I didn’t get it all correct. But history demands honesty.
This piece was solid reasoning for the time – about asymptomatic spread. But no one really investigated rates of asymptomatic -> asymptomatic, so we were left only with the fear component. And we still have poor estimates of natural immunity. I’d give this, in hindsight, a C+.
This piece looks at rate dynamics of COVID vs. other viruses, and how COVID got the jump on the health care profession. History will likely show this piece as insightful for the containment stage of the pandemic (when it was written) but not good enough when COVID became widespread, and people started building immunity toward it without illness. B+
No apologies – good for the point in time it was written, but obviously incredibly wrong for the current level of knowledge. As hard as it may be to believe, we were struggling to get anyone to wear a mask that wasn’t of Asian descent. D+ for ignoring past research.
Written in the context of the time, this one is still not bad – IF you change the circumstance regarding updating the knowledge used to make decisions. OTOH – if I knew then what I know now. B
Still relevant and solid. But here’s the other point – hospitals didn’t fail. Some level of supply and demand, even in our messed up health care system, worked to create the right amount of capacity. B+
Deep-rooted value memes will dictate how societies react in crisis. This piece is not nearly as hard on China and its chronic gaslighting of everyone else as it should be, but considering when it was written, it shows the power of understanding societal values as coordination mechanisms. A-
Written at the beginning of interest in psychedelics as treatment for trauma. My thinking has evolved on this a bit – I can now see some mechanisms where psychedelics might really help reset folks who are messed up. But this piece is still solid.
A great post that develops the idea of knowledge complexity around two axes. I also introduce the idea of a ‘hierarchy of responsibility’ as opposed to a ‘hierarchy of status.’
This is a good one – showing how validity grounding, relational structures, and appropriate scaffolding of concepts and theories all matter in actually figuring out whether two data sets are connected. This piece was the start of a lot of my thinking on closed and open systems.
Explains how values create different social structures. This is one of my most forwarded posts for people attempting to understand how values matter in terms of knowledge structure.
Understanding exactly why Malcolm Gladwell says 10K hours to mastery, and what knowledge structure it applies to is what this post is about. As well as attempting to re-explain all my other knowledge structure work, and why most larger hunks of knowledge can be reconstructed from a basis set of structures.
A more how-to applications manual for the philosophy of metamodernism. Also written by two of my favorite people/philosophers. I can’t wait to see what these two produce at the end of their careers.
Tearing apart the Performance v-Meme forms of protests against the CCP in Hong Kong. Utterly fascinating to watch how all forms of human interaction can evolve.
Attempting to understand and contextualize the numerous environmental crises happening in the Amazon and adjacent river systems, and figuring out who exactly is really causing the damage. A blend of dissection, as well as my own observations from visiting Brazil.
A good piece – one of my first attempts at writing about how coherence (and the downstream paradigm of inter-agent coordination) was developing in my brain. Some good examples.
Intro piece to a 25 page simplified explanation of empathy. Very useful and highly recommended for blog beginners. But be forewarned – the good stuff is in the memetics.
After an awesome week of big-wave surfing with some of the best in the world, I wrote this explainer to show how the different headings of social/knowledge/empathy/neural wiring really are connected.
Tearing apart the various ‘experts’ that are quick to go to the “child’s play” model for where creativity comes from. Hint – it’s more complex than being a kid.
A bedrock piece on my blog, actually written to explain to the author of Conway’s Law, Mel Conway, how different social structures and their empathy levels create knowledge. A must-read.
An intro to my empathetic leadership book, and a takedown of appealing, yet fundamentally authority-based thinking in the social sciences. If more social scientists read this post, and actually understood the implications (that most stuff in the social sciences is essentially made up and primed for confirmation bias) we might be able to fix that 50% irreproducibility rate in their journal articles.
A trip report from a 3 week journey to West Papua with my son, Braden. West Papua is one of the most remote countries on Earth, and let’s just say the different v-Memes are alive and well.
A review of academia after Associate Professor Donna Strickland’s Nobel Prize award. Good for those that really don’t understand the sausage factory that is academia.
Walking up the v-Memes, and how different societies organize themselves. This is a fundamental post, and if you understand this one, others will make far more sense.
MHC is one of the fundamental advances in understanding knowledge complexity – and Michael Lamport Commons is a fan of my work (as I am of his.) Here’s a start.
In case anyone wants to hold up China as leading the way to a more empathetic world – well, read this post. And how things like the 36 Strategems are fundamentally antithetical to a just, complex world.
A quick profile of one of my favorite diet folks – Dr. Jason Fung, and how most of the cancer (and nutrition) folks simply don’t have the social structure to figure out how cancer manifests.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 
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