Death ised to work differently in the past. “another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End
This series will be good. I can feel it. “We are used to thinking about this question in terms of individuals, but this is a modern framework, both culturally and economically. As a cultural notion, modern societies tend to be… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part I: Households
Good principles for life. “Before you proceed with memorizing individual facts and rules, you need to build an overall picture of the learned knowledge. Only when individual pieces fit to build a single coherent structure, will you be able to… Read More »Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
Diplomacy has changed many times in the past. Why should it stay the same now? “A new chapter started with a bang. In 1814, the Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich was convinced that diplomacy had to make a… Read More »We need a planetary system of diplomacy for the 21st century
I tend to agree with most stuff in the article. “Let me pick the quality and fuck off with your auto bandwidth quality. My internet speed is sufficient to stream a 4k Blu-ray so don’t further mangle the quality of… Read More »Shut The Fuck Up
How technology spreads. “For a given technology, Rogers identified five crucial factors that influence adoption rates: relative advantage (the perceived benefits of using a new technology over existing alternatives), compatibility (alignment of the technology with existing social values and needs),… Read More »The Diffusion Dilemma
Nice explainer how encyclopedias in general are supposed to work. “If Wikipedia had been available around the sixth century BC, it would have reported the view that the Earth is flat as a fact without qualification. It would have also… Read More »Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat
As my high school teacher used to say, not everything is on the internet, because I have not put it there. “For many people, GenAI is becoming their primary way to learn about the world. A large-scale study published in… Read More »Generative AI has access to a small slice of human knowledge
History is fun.
Good tips to get yourself educated. “My recommendation is to pick three very different historical periods that you find fascinating. They can be any three, really, but ideally they will be a bit separated from each other in space, time,… Read More »A Study Guide for Human Society, Part I