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Thought Architecture

stuff On making chaos into meaning

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Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.

Aesthetics are facts too

Article

Facts are just a special kind of belief… Because there isn’t really anything tangible that distinguishes a belief from a fact. Cultural and aesthetic beliefs are facts too, in a certain light—we’re tracing the fuzzy boundaries of our religions, theories, and convictions to put certain meaningful aspects of the world at the centre. They’re just as true as the facts that are more stable, and objective. They’re just centring on something different.
Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.
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collective-architecture gratification on-aesthetics on-being-fruitful on-culture thought-architecture

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BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.

BDSM as a lazy ideology

Article

I write a lot about ideologies here. Rituals of thought and behaviour that come out of our need to automatically solve predictable problems of a complex world. I also point out that ideologies ‘stack’. They all sort of ‘stick together’, making these bundles of beliefs and behaviours. Most of these are lazy: stacks of ideologies we adopt just because they’re there. I reckon BDSM might be just one of these. It might be an ideology stack that people gravatate to, not because it’s the most efficient way of expressing some core human need, but because it’s just the most common. Let me explain what I mean.
BDSM is an ideology stack—a collection of behaviours borne of a culture that surrounds some core set of human needs. But is it lazy? Hard to tell. It seems easy to explain away parts of it as hormone hijacking and socialisation, but there is something deeper there.
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connection gratification on-(un)happiness on-culture on-love somatic-architecture thought-architecture

article

Bias reduces noise—if you know <em>roughly</em> what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.

Bias is good

Article

If you haven’t heard of System 1 and System 2, you’ve probably heard one of its analogues. People who say ‘don’t let your amygdala hijack your frontal lobes’, or ‘get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system’, or ‘something something vagus nerve’ are using pseudo-brain science to get at the same thing. But the thing everyone seems to have taken away from this book is the thing we always take away—System 1 stuff, a.k.a. bias is a bad thing. This is not what Kahneman was going for. Kahneman was trying to show us how both System 1 and System 2 have their place.
Bias reduces noise—if you know roughly what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.
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betterment gratification on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

article

The ‘naming’ problem, where by naming something we feel we have explained it, the ‘language’ problem, where the words we use stop others from understanding, and the ‘question’ problem, where we fail to find the right questions, are common and funny.

There are no levels

Article

Today I want to tell a story. It’s one of my favourites. Certainly my favourite ‘when I was a consultant’ story. Hopefully, we’ll laugh a little, and then I’ll use it to point out three ‘problems’ that often get in the way of us solving other problems. I won’t really have a solution. I just think it’s amusing.
The ‘naming’ problem, where by naming something we feel we have explained it, the ‘language’ problem, where the words we use stop others from understanding, and the ‘question’ problem, where we fail to find the right questions, are common and funny.
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betterment gratification on-being-fruitful on-culture on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture

article

The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.

Great Spirits of History

Article

There’s this quote that floats around sometimes. It goes something like:‘If you don’t do the thinking, the thinking will be done for you’. This is usually presented like a bad thing, but really it’s often the only way to navigate the complexity of the world. Here’s one little tool for doing just that.
The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.
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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-culture on-politics-and-power on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture
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