The Great Thing About Crummy

Is War An Inevitable Outcome Of Competing Interests In A Complex Society? In Other Words, Would War Be The Same Even If Human Nature Were Very Different? There Are Mathematical Models Of Large Groups Working Together That Lead To Conflict On A Reliable Basis. So There's A Whole Other View Of War That Is Not Psychological At All.

Style Used To Be An Interaction Between The Human Soul And Tools That Were Limiting. In The Digital Era, It Will Have To Come From The Soul Alone.

A Fashionable Idea In Technical Circles Is That Quantity Not Only Turns Into Quality At Some Extreme Of Scale, But Also Does So According To Principles We Already Understand. Some Of My Colleagues Think A Million, Or Perhaps A Billion, Fragmentary Insults Will Eventually Yield Wisdom That Surpasses That Of Any Well-thought-out Essay, So Long As Sophisticated Secret Statistical Algorithms Recombine The Fragments. I Disagree. A Trope From The Early Days Of Computer Science Comes To Mind: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

It's As If You Kneel To Plant The Seed Of A Tree And It Grows So Fast That It Swallows Your Whole Town Before You Can Even Rise To Your Feet.

Human Beings Either Function As Individuals Or As Members Of A Pack. There's A Switch Inside Us, Deep In Our Spirit, That You Can Turn One Way Or The Other. It's Almost Always The Case That Our Worst Behaviour Comes Out When We're Switched To The Mob Setting. The Problem With A Lot Of Software Designs Is That They Switch Us To That Setting.