Asabiyyah
Asabiyyah: The Hidden Engine of Community Survival Peter Turchin extended a concept first developed by the 14th-century Arab polymath Ibn Khaldun . The term Khaldun used is asabiyyah , which Turchin adopts in his work on cliodynamics . At its…
Tainter’s theory of complexity and collapse
Tainter’s Theory of Complexity and Collapse Joseph Tainter has developed a theory of why civilizations collapse. He describes this idea in a book entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies. Very briefly, human societies continuously adapt to solve emergent…
Cynicism vs happiness
The Cynicism Trap: Why Thinking the Worst Doesn’t Make You Smarter I read an article in The Washington Post on cynicism, entitled “Cynical people are often seen as smarter. Here’s why that may not be true.” When exploring why that stereotype isn‘t…
The Citadel of Besançon
I visited the Citadel of Besacon in September 2026. [The Frence has the c with a tail in the name, but I’ve ignored that here. It’s pronounced “buh-zahn-sohn”] You might ask what is a citadel and how does it differ from a castle. You might ask google,…
Auxerre cathedral
I was in Auxerre, so I went to the cathedral. I take pictures of a lot of churches, because they are interesting to look at and there are a lot of them. The cathedrals are especially amazing. This particular one is named for Saint Stephen and is in Auxerre,…
Sainte Anne d’Auray
I decided to do some touristing and settled on something a few minutes down the road from Auray, the sanctuary of Sainte Anne d’Auray. But first, another stone. Just hanging about in a parking lot, nothing to see here, but a stone that was put in place something…
Models and the mind
A Trick of the Mind A trick of the mind, by Daniel Yon, is a book about how the mind works. The basic idea is that we don’t see the world “as it is”, but a combination of the inputs and the mental models we hold of it. Mental models and neural networks Many…
Free will in a material world
Is free will compatible with the clockwork universe? The thinking in physics is that the world is either deterministic or random. It’s random (so far as we can tell) at the quantum level, but deterministic at scales larger than the nanometer. As a side note,…
Gemini and the Turing test
LLMs of today and the Turing test The Turing test To quote wikipedia: The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing to assess a machine ‘s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human by imitating interactive dialogue . The…
Carnac
The standing stones at Carnac I went to see the standing stones at Carnac recently. Full disclosure here — I didn’t set off to see the standing stones. I set off to get my teeth cleaned. I had an appointment with the dentist, so I had my day planned to leave…