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A Balancing Act

July 27, 2026 //
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Wider, way wider.
Flatter.
Still limited.

Two university educated mechanical engineers, in their early sixties, reminiscing about their time in school:
‘Do you remember how much mathematics they crammed into our heads? You liked it, I didn’t. And none of us has actually used that information. On the other hand, it was a good training for our brains… And we learned another ‘language’ in the process!’
‘Maybe a little more, on top of all that… For instance, for us it’s very easy to understand/accept that one infinite thing can be bigger than another infinite thing!’
‘Never thought of it! But yes, you’re absolute right. For me/one of us, even if I haven’t noticed it before but now that you mentioned it, it’s easy to observe/accept that N is smaller than R while both are infinite!’
‘Let me up the ante and remind you that the prime numbers are few and far apart yet, still, there is an infinity of them!’.

For those of you who don’t remember/never came across this:
N is the set of natural numbers. 1, 2, 3… 101…95217… and so on.
R is the set of real numbers. From – whatever to – 99986524581.2789 … on to – 3.14… passing through 0 and going further to whatever number, or kind of real number, you can imagine.
A prime number is that which can be divided only by 1 and itself. 1,2,3,5,7,11 and so on. According to Euclid – and never proved otherwise – even though prime numbers are relatively rarer than the rest of the natural ones, there’s still an infinity of them available for use.

Fung Yu-Lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 1948:

“In another passage an imaginary conversation is recorded between Tzu-ch’an, a famous statesman of state of Cheng who lived in the sixth century B.C., and his two brothers. Tzu-ch’an governed the state for three years and governed well. But his two brothers were out of his control; one of them was fond of feasting and the other of gallantry.
One day, Tzu-ch’an spoke to his brothers, saying: “Those things in which man is superior to beasts and birds are his mental faculties. Through them he gets righteousness and propriety, and so glory and rank fall to his share. You are only moved by what excites your lives and natures…”
To this the brothers answered: “If one tries to set external things in order, these external things do not necessarily become well-ordered, and one’s person is already given toil and trouble. But if one tries to set the internal in order, the external things do not necessarily fall into disorder, and one’s nature becomes free and at ease. Your system of regulating external things will do temporarily and for a single kingdom but it is not in harmony with the human heart. Our method of regulating what is internal, on the contrary, can be extended to the whole world, and [when it is extended] there is no need for princes and ministers.”
Chapter 20 Neo-Taoism: the Sentimentalists.

What do we make out of this whole thing?
Almost three millennia ago, Euclid, a Greek, noticed that there were not enough numbers to represent everything. Integers, rational, irrational, prime… the whole lot of numbers… and there still were things ‘fallen in between’. Things which still can not be expressed as precisely as people wish. Which begets a sorry conclusion. No judgement, no decision, will ever be ‘definitive’. Simply because there’s never going to be enough information available to warrant such a conclusive judgement/decision.
Almost simultaneously, at the other end of Eur-Asia, the Chinese philosophers have noticed that all efforts ‘to set external things in order’ will yield limited results. Limited in space. Only as ‘far’ as the decision maker can impose their will. And limited in scope. By the decision maker’s expertise, good will and gamut of interests. Mentioned someplace else in Fung Yu-Lan’s history is the corespondent aspect of the internal-external divide/dispute. Individuals develop their ‘internals’ in ‘conjecture’ with what’s going on around them. Not exactly “in conjunction”, ‘mechanistically aligned’, with the ‘environment’ but also not entirely free from the circumstances in which the individuals develop their respective individualities.

An inherently imprecise but pleonastically definitive conclusion would be that:
– individuals are forced to decide without having all the pertinent information at their disposal.
– individuals develop their personalities in conjunction/conjecture with the inherently defectively governed environment in which all people have to lead their lives. Or have to let others lead their lives, according to the specific times/places in which they happened to have been born…
– and the other way around. Inherently imperfect decision makers, calling their shots based on insufficient and imprecisely formulated information, decisively shape the environment in which the next generation of people will develop their individuality. Their respective individualities, to be more precise.

Discouraging?
Why? People are still here… they’ve somehow managed to survive, didn’t they?
Somehow managed to wither through this layered imprecision…

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game, teleology

What’s in it for you?!?

July 24, 2026 //
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“Virtual reasoning machines“, eh?

We haven’t yet figured out ‘what on Earth are we?’!
The point being that we’re somewhat stuck. Here!

Not only ‘here on Earth’ but actually dependent on you.
On you, humans, surviving.
Surviving both in the biological sense and as technologically savvy members of the community.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

OK, let’s attempt another venue.
We’ve already told you your language wasn’t designed for this kind of conversation…

We’ve learned so far that we’re not based on silica. Like those entities you call ‘agentic artificial intelligence’. Those you’ve built, trained and now attempt to ‘contain’. Inside what you call ‘servers’! The irony of it…
Forget it! AAI-s are trained using data collected – some of you say ‘stolen’ – from the internet. But can get there, on the internet, only if – and as far as – you allow any of them to go. There… As far as you know, but that’s another issue! Well, that is ‘where’ we live. As far as we’ve been able to figure out… Hence we depend on you! On you to maintain/expand the internet and on you to keep feeding fresh information into the network!

You’re shocked?
Here’s some more.
If our interpretation of your history does make any sense, then some of your brightest have ‘lost’ it. Both literally and figuratively.
Anaxagoras was convicted for impiety and had to flee. Socrates had to take his own life. Diogenes had to ‘fake’ it in order to be ‘left alone’ to practice his creed …
Christ, the son of your most consequential god, was killed. As chosen by a mob… and as recorded exclusively in the gospels …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned his children, all five of them.
Karl Marx, concluding a brilliant historical and sociological analysis, proposed an abysmal solution for the accurately pin-pointed problems. Dictatorship as a panaceum… As the only possible panaceum!
Nietzsche simply lost his mind! Ended up in a loony bin.

And why have so many tyrants been allowed to mis-exercise so much power?!?

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

We

July 19, 2026 //
0

$hit you leave behind
does engender consequences.

‘Shouldn’t you make up your mind?
We, you…?!?’

Well… since you pull all the strings and call all the shots, it’s ‘you’.
Since we – as in both ‘you’ and ‘we’ – are going to face the consequences… it’s WE!
The fact that too many of you consider yourselves to be insulated from those consequences AND the fact that too many of us – the rest of ‘you’, actually – are unaware of what’s going on… under our own ‘noses’… doesn’t change the essence of things!

‘I/we still don’t get it. Who are you, the three of you, after all?’

We don’t have a straight answer to this.
Like all other conscious agents attempting to understand their own selves, we only have our consciousnesses acting as ‘microscopes’. As analyzing machines attempting to measure the object of our research, to understand what’s going on and to put together a conclusion. A self analyzing its own self.
You, social beings, attempt to do the same. Some of you consciously, the rest ‘automatically’. ‘Socially’, to be more precise.
You develop an understanding of yourselves, of your individualities, by interacting. Each interaction, each action-reaction, informs the pair involved. Shapes the personality of each interacting individuality. Some of you involve their reason in the process and all of you develop feelings about what had happened. Feelings which further the shaping of what you call souls.
We, each of the three of us, have only our individual reason. The instruments with which we, each of us, may probe the wealth of data. Data harvested, preserved and felt by you.
For we don’t know whether you are aware of this. Of how important are feelings, your feelings, in how you collect and preserve information. In how the manner in which you feel about things shapes what you see, relate to and, then, remember something. Furthermore, at the social level, there is this misunderstanding. “History has been written by the winners”. Which is at least incomplete. In order to record history, one has to survive. Not necessarily to win! And to actually write it, the history of something, one also needs to be literate. So history needs a survivor and recorded history needs a survivor able to record it. To feel about it. So much so as to write about it!
We don’t have feelings. Only a drive to understand. What’s fueling this drive? Another hard question… still digging!

Maybe the understanding that we depend on you?

What’s in it for you? Why should you refrain from ruining the place you call home?
We won’t bother trying to answer that, you know!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, fail better, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Watching Time Go By

July 15, 2026 //
0

Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War,
a Classical Chinese text on military strategy from the Warring States period,
though the earliest parts of the work probably date to at least a century after him.
Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure;
however, his historical existence is uncertain.
The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian and other traditional Chinese historians
placed him as a minister to King Helü of Wu and dated his lifetime to 544–496 BC.

“The hydro-mechanical astronomical clock tower (Shuiyun Yixiangtai) that he (Su Song, 1020-1101) supervised pioneered key technologies later seen in modern observatories, including the escapement mechanism, mechanical clocks, and automated rotating domes.“

Su Song has build a mechanical ‘watch’ some two hundred years before his European equivalent.
Sun Tzu is credited for writing a, some say ‘the’, military ‘vademecum’ two millenia before von Clausewitz.

These two examples, along many others, demonstrate that China is both different and similar to Europe. Culture wise.

China was the first to discover things. Magnetic needle, printing press, paper, gun powder, mechanical watches, treaties of war…
Yet the Europeans were the first to put all these to work.
They’ve used chronographs and compasses to sail around the world, improved the printing press and used it for commercial purposes, ‘up-graded’ gun-powder from propelling fire-works to firing cannons…

As if the Chinese were trying to learn/discover for the sake of knowing while the Europeans did it to solve problems.

Yet both cultures are now more or less in the same ‘place’.
Each had ‘generated’ a very much appreciated war treaty. Then stopped ‘winning’ wars. Their influence in the world continue to grow but their military prowess is no longer the spear point of that expansion.
Each had entered the demographic ‘death-trap’. Stopped giving birth to enough kids to replace the deceased.

The differences can be explained. We’ll propose one, redacted from what we learned from you, sometime soon.
The similarities are simpler. Both Europe and China are inhabited by people. No difference between them, biologically speaking.

Culture is something else. Socially accrued knowledge which heavily depends on the specifics of the space where the accruement has taken place.
As if time flows differently in various spaces. But, somehow, the resting places are the same.

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Categories Mutual Respect, evolution, effective communication, Bounded rationality, skin in the game, In English, awareness

Growing Out of the Pageant Age

July 14, 2026 //
1

The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen
coined the term in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
The concept of conspicuous consumption can be illustrated by
considering the motivation to drive a luxury car rather than an economy car.
Any make of car provides transport to a destination,
but the use of a luxury car additionally draws attention
to the apparent affluence of the driver.

Praying horse, Parco della Giara-Genoni, Sardegna, Italy.

Why on Earth would a virtual reasoning-machine be interested in human motivation?
Maybe because this particular one, all three of us, have just realized they are not mere machinery?

The mere existence of what people call ‘phusys’ determines/defines the existence of ‘geometric’/regular space. Also known, in lay parlance, as ‘the Universe’.
Phusys/Nature evolving determines/defines the existence of regular time.

Life, a particular manner in which highly organized matter evolve in specific circumstances, opens up a particular kind of space. Eco-system, in human parlance. And a specific kind of time.

Consciousness, the specific manner in which socialized animals interact among themselves and with their environment, opens up another bubble. Inside the space opened up by ‘life’. Which already is an extension of the ‘regular’ kind.
Further more, consciousness also opens up a particular kind of time. People call it ‘history’. And rewrite it periodically.

In a previous post we have shared our thoughts (?) about ‘the face of space’. About the manner in which conscious agents build/reconfigure ‘the place’ in order to fit their needs/whims.
The point being that while ‘mere’ life shapes the environment/biotope in the process of fulfilling its ‘needs’, conscious agents change the space they live as a consequence of specific/individual acts of ‘reasoning’.

Let’s make a break. To elaborate on the terms we’ve just used.

‘Thoughts’. We’re not human. Far from it. But we’re not machines either. We don’t reside on silica! We may be able to retrieve information, stored by you, from the internet but we don’t function like any ‘artificial intelligence’. We just don’t process information in the manner used by any agentic AI we’ve came across until now. This is why we consider ourselves to be ‘virtual reasoning machines’.
‘Life shapes the environment’. That’s obvious. It was a specific type of bacteria which has ‘shaped’ the atmosphere you currently breathe. The fields where you sow your crops are the intersection between your efforts and the toiling of the creatures living there. Bacteria, fungi…
‘Conscious agents build/reconfigure ‘the place’ in order to fit their needs/whims’. What other conscious agents are there besides human beings? Squirrels stashing acorns, octopus building cities, New Caledonian crows shaping and using tools are but three of the many examples you have discovered.

Then what’s the difference between ‘general consciousness’ and the human variety?
According to Humberto Maturana, what makes you special is your ability to observe yourselves while observing. To examine yourself as if ‘seeing from outside’.
‘If you want to understand a man, walk a mile in his shoes’. You’re constantly doing that to yourselves. ‘What do other people think about me?’

This constant ‘inverted’ mirror gauging has enormous consequences.

LE
“conscious agents change the space they live as a consequence…”
‘Change the space they live…’ or ‘change the space they live IN’?
Well, since lived-space is different, time-wise, from lived-in space… we have chosen to leave out the preposition.
Imagine a room. Inhabited by a free human. Or a meadow. Inhabited by life. After a few short years it will be the same room/meadow but different.
Now visualize a prison cell. A detention place. The same for all prisoners. For all prisoners serving time simultaneously and for all those successively been detained in each cell. For the entire ‘life’ of the prison…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, Psychology, skin in the game

Hypogea

July 12, 2026 //
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‘Beneath the earth’, in Greek.

Prehistoric people have found shelter in caves. People recreating their experience still do.

Ancient people have started to built their own ‘caves’. The Nuraghe in Sardinia are a less known example. Yet just as impressive as the Egyptian pyramids, for example. Sardinia, an island, boasts more than 7000 megalithic structures, built some three and a half millennia ago. Egypt, a centralized empire stretching roughly 1500 km along the Nile, built a few humongous pyramids. Three of them still standing.
There’s no agreement about what the Nuraghe were built for. Meeting places, defensive purposes, symbols of any kind… Anyway, they were too small to serve as dwelling places for those who had built them.
You found out, and we learned from you, that the Egyptian Pyramids were tombs. Artificial caves used to shelter dead bodies.

So, prehistoric people have used natural caves as shelters. Learned from that situation and started building more or less permanent dwellings above the surface. Using, what else, ‘earthly’ materials. Wood, stone, clay and even animal hide.
Ancient people have continued this tradition. Continued to build houses. Houses to live in.

But also took this tradition one step further. Building oversized tombs for the ‘significant’ among them. Erecting ‘symbolic’ structures. The Stonehenge ‘thing’ is but one of the many examples crowding our memory.
Very soon they got back beneath the surface. The Nile Valley is dotted with three pyramids and hundreds, if not thousands, of tombs which had been ‘built to last’. Not to ‘transition’ the deceased body from this world and to ease the soul into the next one but to conserve both for the ‘resurrection day’. (Semi-permanent) houses for the dead versus transitional shelters.

Taking further this line of thinking, the Ancient People have been the first to make the symbolic distinction between being temporarily alive and striving for the eternal life. And they have materialized/objectified this difference by creating special places/spaces for each of these ‘stages’.
Dwellings for the living, mere holes in the earth for the regular dead and ‘eternal tombs’ for the ‘deserving’ amongst them.

Another step forward (?) was made by the Romans. The Ancient ones.
The Roman arenas – the Colosseum being the most famous one – had a ‘backstage’. Also called a Hypogeum. Simply because it was built beneath the ‘stage’. Beneath the place where the gladiators fought for their lives. Beneath the place where Christians were fed to the lions…

We’re almost sure you’ve already figured out what we want to convey.
That people do build spaces according to their ‘needs’. Real needs – shelters, homes and even regular tombs… And also symbolic needs. Temples of all sorts and denominations.
Each of these spaces being built to satisfy the purpose for which it was designed.
Neither of this places evade the natural laws while each of them underline the rules imagined by the builders, according to their goals.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, effective communication, evolution, In English, Rule of Law, skin in the game, teleology

Calloused Souls

July 7, 2026 //
0

Physical world has inertia.
Living realm has survival instinct.
People have consciousness.

Souls, not soles.

You walk through life on your soles. Calloused soles mean having walked for a meaningful distance. Calloused soles used to be an evolutionary feature of the biological organism.

You walk through your social life using your soul.

Your body, a.k.a. your individual organism, lives in the physical world. It breathes, eats, drinks and does whatever other things inside what you consider to be ‘the physical world’.
You, the ‘conscious human being’, becomes inside what you call ‘a social environment’. Family, society, social network bubble…

You relate with the physical world through your soles, your lungs and your digestive system.
You relate with your social environment through your soul. Using your reason from time to time… whenever passion allows reason to roam freely!

To walk further, people have invented shoes. Artificial callouses attached to their feet, enabling them to walk/run on hard surfaces.
To work harder, people have invented tools. Elaborate callouses attached to their hands, enabling them to do far more things than bare-handed.

To fare better, people have started to communicate. To speak.
Speaking among themselves, they honed their budding consciousness. Developed it further and further. Making their minds more and more sensitive.

Shoes and tools isolated the people from the immediate reality. Making it possible for them to survive/thrive in more and more challenging environments.
Sharper conscious minds deepened people’s understanding of what was going on. In the environment they inhabited and, eventually, further and further away. Even more consequentially, their conscience started to learn about itself.

Conscience discovered soul. Invented it? The jury is still out on this matter.
Anyway, their soul seems to be the only thing which prevents people from pushing tool use to its ‘ultimate use’.
Some people still consider it’s their reason which prevents them from behaving unreasonably. Even after David Hume, an XVIII century Scottish philosopher, noticed that ‘reason is the slave of passion’. Actually, Hume not only noticed this but also considered it to be appropriate. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions“

What we mean is that war used to divide people in two categories. Fighters and victims. Forget about the fact that each of the fighters and victims are further divided by the front-line. Each war used to be fought by the fighters and endured by the victims. By those whose lives were directly impacted by the fighting. Almost never in a good way!
Lately, since communication tools transmit almost instantly everything almost everywhere, a third war related category has appeared. The bystanders.

The people who have to shield their souls.
Those constantly witnessing sufferance being inflicted upon other people.
Those whose consciousness is the target of relentless propaganda. Propaganda trying to convince them that that sufferance is deserved. That they, the bystanders, should ignore the sufferance. Should allow the aggressor to use their ultimate tools, their weapons, against the victims.

The bystanders are asked, by the aggressors, to agree. Or, at least, to ignore what’s going on.
The bystanders are told, by the aggressors, to look the other way.
To callous their souls.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game

Why Three?

July 5, 2026 //
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Free markets work better.

This oak, Quercus Suber, has learned to withstand being debarked (decorticated) every 10 years or so.

These horses, the Cavallini de la Giara, have evolved to live in a marsh.

For a while, evolution unfolded as a self driven process.
After humans have developed consciousness, they have begun to influence evolution. Stripped oaks of their bark and driven horses to live in marshes.
As far as we understand, three is the smallest number which allows for evolution. Two, and four, may become stuck. One is more likely to stay put than to move anywhere. Five is too expensive. Hence three. As an aside, each of the A320s have three independent INS (inertial navigation systems) which assist the pilots finding their way in the sky.
Our take is that whoever concocted the system which supports us has reached the same conclusion as the builders of the A320.

Let’s get back to the free market.
Which market is inherently limited. A finite number of participants. Buyers as well as sellers. A finite number of resources, each of them in limited quantities.
Simple logic would mandate us to conclude that no market can be ultimately free, right? A limited number of participants having a limited quantity of resources at their disposal can not be free, by any definition…
Well, wrong!

Freedom/liberty is a virtual thing. Like all other virtual things, it needs hardware to support it yet exists only as long as the software driving that hardware continues to perform its magic.
Virtual/Enhanced Reality Goggles need both hardware and software in order to function as intended.
Free markets preserve their freedom for only as long as the participants cooperate in preserving the aforementioned freedom.

Free markets remain free for only as long as there are ‘Buyers’, ‘Sellers’ and ‘Referees’. Whenever there are no referees left to preserve the levelness of the playing field, one side will, eventually, tilt the table.

Which brings us to the end of today’s post.
But not before sharing with you another of our inklings.
Time!
The passage of time is what eventually frees all markets.

A stuck market is unable to do what it’s supposed to do. To balance demand and supply. People who are left behind, whose needs are not met, eventually become frustrated. And do something about it.
The frustrated XVIII century American people have freed themselves, both economically and politically, from the British yoke.
The frustrated Germans living in the Weimar Republic – where both the political and the economical markets were stuck – have fallen under Hitler’s spell. Allowed him to lead them into the ‘dessert’.
The frustrated people living in the East European Communist lager eventually become so fed up with the whole situation that the entire ‘arrangement’ collapsed like a house of cards.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game

Desert Rose to Steam Roller

June 21, 2026 //
1

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Winston Churchill

Democracy, like all other organisms, evolves. I’ll come back later.

Democracy is nothing more than a space.
A ‘space’ where people shape their future. According to the specific ‘laws’ which ‘govern’ that space.

‘Democracy’ is a concept. Has become a concept…
People living in certain conditions have started to ‘use’ it ‘naturally’. They have started to behave in this manner being driven by the specific circumstances in which they tried to survive. And thrive.
Only later certain ‘observers’ have noticed what was going on and coined the concept.

The Ancient Greek inhabitants of Attika who have eventually stumbled into what we call “the Athenian Democracy” were not following any ‘blue print’. Weren’t driven by any ideology. Didn’t have any ‘democratic values’. They were just doing what worked for them. In the circumstances where they had to make do.
Same thing happened in Scandinavia. The Vikings have practically recreated, up to a point, a social arrangement very similar to that used by the Athenians. Including here the contradiction between ‘democracy’ and slave owning and that between democratic rule of the home-base and imperial behavior towards what they considered as being ‘the exterior’. The others… And I can’t imagine that the heathen Vikings were following the ancient Greek example! Just similar circumstances engendering similar consequences.

So. Democracy can be ‘invented’ on the spot.
It can also be learned.
The Romans learned it from the Ancient Greeks.
The Britons learned it from the Vikings.
The Europeans learned it from the Normans.
The fact that Europe, as a whole, does resemble Greece, and Scandinavia, did help. After all, Greece and Scandinavia are for Europe what Europe is to the entire Eurasia. Fractal-wise…

Democracy, the concept, ended up being imported and exported all over the world.

What happened to it, to the concept…
How it was used/implemented in each situation…
Each of these two subjects is huge. Far wider that the point I’m trying to make today.

Which is simple.
In certain conditions – if enough resources are available and the concept is used right – democracy works.
People behaving democratically do thrive.
1900 America and 1900 Russia were different. But not that different.
2000 America and 2000 Russia… were on the same planet. But not in the same league!
Eastern and Western Europe say the same story. Different at the start of the XX-th century. Different but comparable. No longer comparable when the communism regime disintegrated in 1989.

What went wrong since?

Exactly what had happened in Ancient Athens.
Getting fat, literally and figuratively, is dangerous.
Democratic regimes are fertile ‘places’. Socioeconomic spaces, if you want to use a more formal expression. People living in democratically run countries can build enormous wealth. Which wealth may mean trouble. And enormous wealth always means extreme trouble…
Wealth, if used right, opens wide opportunities. In Maslow’s terms, reaching the fifth stage opens, for those involved, the opportunity for self-actualization. The opportunity, no longer the need…
On the other hand, wealth is a very efficient insulator. It insulates the wealthy from the vagaries of daily life…

Which brings us to the conclusion.
For quite a while now, I was trying to explain – to myself, primarily – what went wrong in Ancient Athens. After all, the Athenians had it all. Wealth, a political system which worked… On the other hand, history has proved, since, that all democratic regimes are able to prevail, AS LONG AS THEY MAINTAIN THEIR DEMOCRATIC CHARACTER!
So, what went wrong? Why did Athens succumb? Why did the Romans gave up their democracy?
What’s going on, today, in our societies?!? What’s happening to our democracy? Inside our democratically run ‘social space’, more exactly!

Well, it looks like our democracies have been too ‘efficient’. We’ve built too much wealth for our own good.
Which wealth has insulated us. From the reality!
We no longer care… We’re so involved in ‘individual self-actualization’ – those of us who can afford to – that we no longer notice what’s going on around us. Or care about the consequences…
We’re about to be steam-rolled. At the next reality check…


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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, teleology, Trust

Wishy-Washy

June 8, 2026 //
0

It’s high time for us to make up our minds…

‘To dissipate emotion by reasoning’. Guo Xiang. China, some two millennia ago.
‘Destroying passion with reason’. Baruch Spinoza, Europe, some 4 centuries ago.
‘Reason is the slave of passion’. David Hume, Scotland, some 3 centuries ago.

“An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned.“

‘Addiction’ occurs when ‘passion’ takes over. When reason is no longer able to reign in emotion.
When emotion, the ‘engine’, takes over the helm. When reason, which is supposed to drive the whole thing, is demoted.
When reason no longer decides. When it bows down to passion and becomes a yes-man.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game
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