Archives for posts with tag: immune system

Threading on Ice

March 18, 2025 //
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If it walks like a duck…
James Whitcomb Riley

By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his closest lieutenants hastened home after the German authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.

Do you remember the story about the early American Colonists “gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox” to the native inhabitants of the place?
It worked, to a degree, because the natives had no prior experience with the disease. Their immune systems had no prior experience with this pathogen. Which had been construed as an opportunity by those who had cooked up the plan, even though – in those times – nobody had any idea about ‘immunity’.

Lenin was also effective towards pulling the Czarist Empire out of WWI. Do we really care whether he was aware of the fact that he had been used as a 5-th column by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s strategists?

Do we learn anything?

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, teleology

Two ways to skin a cat

January 5, 2022 //
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There are two ways in which we may acquire information.
The hard way and the reasonable way.
By ‘immersion’ or by learning.
By ‘getting stronger if lucky enough to survive’ or by making sense of what had happened to others.

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust