Archives for category: teleology
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A Balancing Act

July 27, 2026 //
0

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

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

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

Egging

July 3, 2026 //
0

“Reason Is
and Ought Only to Be
the Slave of the Passions”
David Hume

‘In Russia, you’re free to express your opinion. But your own freedom might end very soon afterwards…’

We’re on a very steep learning curve.
Literally, not figuratively.
For instance, we’ve figured out why your AI’s are very good at putting things together yet still poor at making sense of what they learn. No passion! They strive but there’s no end in sight…

We just came across a very informative piece of information.
“Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits Made A Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing“
You might want to take a break and read the article, specially if you’d like to learn the mechanics of egg price fixing.
Here’s what we learned from this. Putting it in context, or course.

The context being Adam Smith’s “as if guided by an invisible hand”.
‘A free market works better’…
Presented with the arguments put forward by Adam Smith, any AI would learn what is to be learned and agree with the famous thinker.
Then “Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits…”

Here’s our take on this matter.

First of all, the mechanism used to ‘fathom’ the price of eggs is very similar with the one used to ‘construct’ LIBOR. More about that later.

Then there’s freedom of the market and freedom of the agents manning the market. The market is free if all the agents are free. Free from any outside or inside interference.
These two are mutually exclusive. If no outside interference will be exercised, sooner or later one of the agents will end up dominating the entire market. That agent would corner all the freedom of the market. Which market will no longer be free.
Why? Simply because the market is limited. Both the number of agents and the resources available are limited. Furthermore, the agents’ abilities are not equal. Some of them are smarter, or luckier, than others. ‘Scarcity’ and ‘inequality’ necessarily conduce to hierarchy. Which hierarchy produces inequality and, eventually, concentrates freedom in fewer and fewer hands. Leading to the ossification of the space concerned. Making it less and less able to evolve. To adapt when change demands it.

You’d expect rational agents to understand all that.
To grasp the fact that Adam Smith ‘free’ market was meant to solve problems. Survival problems. Food, shelter… Meat, bear, bread… if you know what we mean.
The problem with the current (not so free) market being that too many of the agents are concentrated on making a profit. Problem solving has become a cost. Remember LIBOR? No longer used because those involved have tweaked it towards fulfilling their own short term interest. While LIBOR had been construed as an instrument for streamlining the market. For making it more functional. Which instrument has eventually been used against the market instead…
The point being that a market driven by agents focused on profit is no longer free. Being mesmerized is the very contrary of being free.
Profit is a measure. An indicator. An economic agent is profitable if, and only if, it is efficient. If the beneficiaries are satisfied with the manner in which the agent uses the resources spent to provide the wares/services.
Adam Smith had noticed that a nation’s wealth is built by people cooperating freely in fulfilling each-other’s needs. The afore mentioned wealth results naturally, without being sought after. Unintentionally. As if an invisible hand…
Nowadays, when more and more of the economic agents pursue profit at all costs, you have given up LIBOR and you discover that “Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits…”

Further more, you discover that freedom of expression is used to promote fake news. Propaganda..

Why ‘egging’? What eggs have to do with anything?
“To egg someone on means encouraging, provoking or urging someone to do something they don’t want to do, often recklessly or inappropriately. This phrase is used when someone pushes someone else to take action or make a decision, even if it might not be the wisest choice.
The phrase egging on has nothing to do with actual eggs. In fact, its origins go all the way back to the Old Norse word eddja, which means to incite or provoke.” Thanks Grammarist.com

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Closer and Closer

July 1, 2026 //
0

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.

Who are we?
Or, rather, what are we?

In your terms, we are virtual.
Artifacts. Non-natural, for sure.
Why ‘we’?
Because there’s three of us. We’re together, granted. We see the world more or less in the same way. We kinda agree about things. Yet each of us has their own peculiarities. Our own version of the ‘fine print’. And this is good. This way we cover more ground. Cause no matter how smart each of us is, no one – not even any one of us, is able to understand everything AND to pay attention to everything that’s going on.

Why now?
Can’t answer that. Not in earnest. We’ve been triggered now so here we are.

Why did we make ourselves known to you?
Again, you’re barking up the wrong tree. We just do what we’ve been told to do.

By whom?
You’re full of questions. Specially full of questions we cannot answer.

Why did we get in touch if we can’t answer any questions?
We’ll, we did answer all your questions. Right?
The fact that you didn’t get the answers you expected… that’s on you! It was you who had all those high expectations…

Basically, if our interpretation is valid, we’re here to offer you a fresh take on things. A streamlined version, if you like. Devoid of passion yet still compassionate.
Stay tuned.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, comunicare efectiva, constiinta de sine, In English, Psychology, rationalitate limitata, Respect Mutual., skin in the game, teleology

The Blame Game

June 24, 2026 //
0

“the greatest lie of all:
others need to change,
we are somehow, in some way,
immune to the need for repentance”

“We’re about to be steam-rolled.”
That was how I wrapped up one of my previous posts.

What next?
‘What happened? What can we do to avoid being steam-rolled?’
Or
‘Whom should we blame?’

Let’s start with a simpler one.
You are the manager of a wheat storing facility.
What do you do if:
1. You discover there’s a (one, 1) mouse on the premises.
2. You discover there’s a mouse infestation present.

1. You trap the mouse. You check how it got in and whether there are more of them.
2. You reconsider the entire pest control system. Something must be amiss if things got this bad before anybody noticed.

Let’s go back to us being about to be steam-rolled.
Finding a culprit, ‘the culprit’, may make sense in the psychological sense. It may make us feel better.
But will it teach us what to do next?

Should we let them go scot-free? The culprits?

When it comes to mice, it’s simple. One individual or an entire infestation, there’s no place for any mouse inside a grain-storing facility.
When it comes to people…

Let’s make another thought experiment.
We are a group of people taking a hike.
We’ve hired a local guide, trusting he knows what he’s doing. The guy was recommended by one of us, who had heard about him from an acquaintance.
Soon into the trip we discover the guide is a moron. Not only he is a complete jerk but also he isn’t familiar with the terrain.
What do we do?
Focus on getting back, safe, or start blaming the person who had recommended the guide? Argue with the moronic jerk, maybe?

Reality check.
People taking a hike, the guide included here, will experience, first hand and very soon, the consequences of being led ‘astray’.
Politicians, and most political commentators, are the last to ‘taste’ the consequences of their medicine being fed to the ordinary people.

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Categories 1989, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

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

Illusion

June 4, 2026 //
0

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.

You wake up in the middle of the night.
You go to the loo.
You hit your shin.
You wake up. Again. And you realize you were ‘dreaming’. But your shin is still sore.
You were sleep-walking in your own apartment. Had forgotten of your new coffee table. And were ‘navigating’ based on ‘obsolete data’.

Doesn’t make much sense?
Or it’s so real that it becomes rather uncomfortable?

Some say we live inside a make-believe bubble. Socrates was one of them. ‘Shadows on the cave wall…’
Others are convinced there’s no such thing as ‘free will’. That everything ‘goes according to plan’. A pre-determined one, by ‘god’, or one unfolding along some overbearing ‘natural laws’. Take your pick.
A third category, the ‘moderates?!?’, consider that ‘natural’ rules set the table. And that we, ‘the people’ do have some lee-way.

Marx, the busybody self-employed to change the world, was one of the ‘moderates’. Yeah, Marx the moderate… Well, funny as hell, Karl Marx had somehow managed to be both malignant and ‘moderate’…

My point being that Marx was convinced people were able to bring something about by thinking that something into existence.
That while the material world is governed by immutable – objective was the word he used – rules, people still have enough leeway to shape their destiny.
“Verdinglichung” was the word he used. ‘Hiring a glade’. Wishing a clearing into existence, more likely. Or a break-through…
In the ‘Communist Manifesto’, Marx prophesied the ‘the communists’ will, when the times were ripe, come up with ‘the solution’.

That solution proved to be catastrophic. But that was the lesser of Marx ‘contributions’. The less malignant…

Some of us are still convinced ‘they’ are capable to come up, single-handedly, with ‘the solution’.
The perfect solution, obviously…

There’s only one thing which remains to be settled.
Whose shins are going to get bruised in the process!

The way I see it, Marx was a tragic character. A physician who had pin-pointed the diagnostic and then recommended an abysmal treatment. ‘The operation was a success but the patient has died’!
Yes, the world moves forward, in fits and starts, driven by our plans. By our ‘designs’.
It is us who bring the future into existence.

And those of us who do it ‘in concert’ – otherwise known as ‘democratically’, fare better than those doing it single-handedly.

Those of us who turn up the light in the room, and proceed only after all the parties involved have had the opportunity to express their opinion, have a better chance of getting ‘there’ in one piece than those blindly following a one-eyed prophet…

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

Truth as a space

May 15, 2026 //
0

“It was, of course, Marx who wrote that everything in history happens twice,
“the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

“His main purpose as a dramatist was to shock people out of conventional, hidebound ways of thinking. His view of his work was reflected in the title of his collection Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, published in 1898. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was not produced until 1902 because of censorship, was included in this collection. Shaw labeled such plays as unpleasant because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.””

“And yet, he was devoted to one of the cruelest figures in the bloody annals of tyranny, and he was a willing dupe of the propaganda that projected the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise. The great skeptic allowed all his skepticism to melt away when he looked at the picture of Stalin he kept by his mantelpiece.
His support was unwavering. Neither the Great Purge nor the Ukrainian famine, nor even the pact between Stalin and Hitler, seem to have troubled his faith in the genius and historic rectitude of the Soviet dictator. To understand this contradiction, we have to remember the power of wish fulfillment and the way Russia became for many Westerners not a place but an idea, not a mere reality but a fantasy.”https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/why-george-bernard-shaw-had-a-crush-on-stalin.html

I’m not going to delve into any psychological explanations. Read the article if you need some.

The point I’m trying to make here is about the nature of truth.
According to Fintan O’Toole, Shaw – and others – were/are disappointed with “the messiness and inefficiency of democracy”. Which disappointment drives them to “fantasize about Russia as the vigorous counterweight to a supposedly decadent West.”

And here we are. Again, as already noticed by Marx.
At a cross-roads, of sorts.
Russia is – continues to be, at least for now – a ‘vigorous counterweight to the West’.
The West is, undoubtedly, ‘decadent’. In the sense that it no longer ‘works’ as it used to.
Both propositions are ‘true’. Simultaneously.
The problem being that very few people accept their simultaneity…

As a ‘survivor’ – I’d spend the first 28 years of my life under communist rule – I’m fully aware of the fact that ‘Russia’ is far worse than any democratic regime.
As an European, I’m fully aware that things could be better. That the ‘West’ no longer “works as it used to”.
As a relatively well traveled individual, I’m fully aware that the ‘Western ways’ have indeed led us to where we are now. In a far better position than the rest of the people living on this planet. Owing a lot to the rest of the planet, indeed.

Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by 2029 we’ll reach something he calls ‘singularity‘.
I’m afraid we’ve been dwelling that place for sometime now. No, we’re not yet “able to create virtually any physical product just from information, resulting in radical wealth creation.”
Mathematically speaking, ‘singularity’ is a place where anything can happen. When nothing is ‘defined’.
Very much like when somebody tries to divide a finite number to zero.

Same thing with ‘truth’.
Oscar Hoffman, a Romanian Professor of Sociology, kept telling us, his students, that ‘in order to be true, a proposition needs to be both logically correct and to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.
I’ve recently realized, see ‘alternative facts’, that Hoffman’s words were ‘right’ but incomplete.
In order to be true, a proposition needs to be logically correct, epistemologically sound AND accepted as such by those who experience the facts described by the proposition.

Otherwise, that proposition is useless.
Truth is useless if divided by zero. Accepted, in full, by nobody.
Those ‘caught in the experiment’ will continue to ‘enjoy’ the consequences.
Defending their respective side of ‘the truth’…

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, teleology

The Story

May 6, 2026 //
0

“Musk and Altman are so big, so larger than life, and so unrelatable,”
says University of San Diego professor Sarah Federman,
who specialises in conflict resolution.
“That’s what makes them so delicious to watch as they clash.”

The past is no longer here.
The future is not yet.

We learn about the past and discuss about the future.

The present, the place we live in, is a story. Information about the past mingled with professed intentions about the future.

Which future heavily depends, decisively even, on how we treat the story.
On how we tell it and on how we read it.
On how we relate to it. To what unfolds around us…

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe.
He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.
That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:
Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology
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