Category: links

Reviewing my twitter feed for the year (as part of writing a review of the year), I found some links that I’d posted which didn’t receive the wild endorsement I thought they deserved, so I’m reposting them here.

• Pokemon Go is a mass demon summoning that’s destroying our reality. Occult readings of behaviour change are too rare IMO
• A Certain Gesture: Evnine’s Batman Meme Project. A social media art project! Philosophy performing itself!
• Dino Dana is 9 year old who loves dinosaurs and is generally awesome. Recommend (if you have kids)
• Do Credit Card Companies Screen for Behavioral Biases?. tl;dr you betcha they do!
• In which @clnichols6 argues that portraying reciprocal behavioural adaption is a compelling novelists’ trick
• The white flight of Derek Black incredible story of belief revision
• “The things I want to do are strange, simple, and unprofitable”. Paul Ford’s meditation on 20 years of blogging and the web that once was

Alex says “Google Reader took over web feeds, shutting that down was a crime and basically killed reading stuff on the web. The www has been so much poorer ever since, facebook and twitter suck so much in comparison to the real thing.”

Maybe 2018 is a year to get back into read blogs rather than twitter. Recommended from the comments, Flym news reader for Android.

An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment—an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then “abolished”? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But no theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

B.F.Skinner, last words of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)