When someone claims that everyone knows something, either they are short-cutting and specifically mean ‘everyone in this well-defined small group where complex common knowledge of this particular thing is something we have invested in,’ they are very wrong about how the world works, or much more commonly, they are flat out lying. Saying that everybody knows is almost never a mistake. The statement isn’t sloppy reasoning. It’s a strategy that aims to cut off discussion or objection, to justify fraud and deception, and to establish truth without evidence.
Tag: culture
Cockatoo Culture
Even when residents in these areas weigh down the tops of their bins with bricks or stones, cockatoos have figured out how to knock these heavy objects to the ground. Once that barrier is removed, the hungry birds can crack the lid open with their beak, prop it on their heads and walk it back until it fully flips on its hinges, as the videos show below. This unique skill has now become so widespread in Sydney, researchers think the parrots are imitating and learning from one another – a sign of cultural evolution.
Post-Revolution
This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.
NYC Gems
This is a pretty great and comprehensive list of what makes the city awesome.
Following up our master list of 160 secrets of New York City, we bring to you 160 hidden gems of New York City! Every one of these hidden gems are places for you to discover. Some show the uniqueness and quaintness of New York City’s architecture, others reveal the infrastructure that supports New York or the history hidden in plain sight. Some are simply off-the-beaten path. All, we believe, are hidden gems in their own right. The majority are publicly accessible although some only on limited occasions. Some come from our book about the secrets of Brooklyn, but this list covers all 5 boroughs of the city. Many others come from the archives of Untapped New York and some come from exciting user-generated submissions on our Facebook page. So without further ado, here are the hidden gems of New York City!
Ramen Changed in US
White boys trying K-Pop
the philosophical questions in the video are very interesting. in a global culture, things will get blurry.
Shopify interview
You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when I worked for… well, I can’t talk about the broader company, but a specific part of Siemens, in a specific office. The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it’s almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world. So that was really, really helpful.
Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren’t dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.
They really taught everyone that, regardless of your gender, creed, or background, you should basically emulate the same 60-year-old lawyer in persona. Effectively, your career was dependent on whether you got this right, and to me, that just seemed insane. This is infantilization, but the funny thing is that they call this professionalism. To me it is the exact opposite. It’s infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don’t trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.
Legibility
the idea to change a complex system to make it “easy” to understand, like straightening rivers or removing underbrush from forests, with predictably bad results.
Organizational Metaphors
NOBL Academy
Machine: an organization is a series of connected parts arranged in a logical order in order to produce a repeatable output
Organism: an organization is a collective response to its environment and, to survive, must adapt as the environment changes
Brain: an organization is a set of functions designed to process information and learn over time
Cultural System: an organization is a mini-society, with its own culture and subcultures defined by their values, norms, beliefs, and rituals
Political System: an organization is a game of gaining, influencing, and coordinating power
Psychic Prison: an organization is a collection of myths and stories that restrict people’s thoughts, ideas, and actions
Instrument of Domination: an organization is a means to impose one’s will on others and exploit resources for personal gains
Flux and Transformation: an organization is an ever-changing system indivisible from its environment
Automated bestsellers
What is Barack Obama Book? It’s not a book, exactly. It’s an SEO ploy by a shadowy company that has scores of $2.99 knockoffs ready to be downloaded. But it’s also not not a book, in the sense that it is words on pages, bound by covers or delivered to your Kindle. I don’t think Barack Obama Book was written by a human being, but I do think the A.I. that excreted it made some decent points about Barack Obama. University Press has churned out 55 books since February 2019, and I like to imagine the hardworking A.I. behind these titles holed up in a hotel room somewhere, chain-smoking, downing coffee, and furiously digesting every single extant fact about, say, Queen Elizabeth. Then the A.I. compacts all that information into a small, dense slab of readable prose and sends it out into the world. “To knowledge!” University Press toasts at night, watching the royalties flood in. Sometimes it invites over friends like Birthday Song, who performs 100s of versions of the birthday song personalized for individual names on Spotify, or Videogyan, who creates iterative animations of babies doing ordinary tasks and has nearly 10M YouTube subscribers. Perhaps a bit sloshed, University Press lectures its friends long into the evening: “Ultimately,” it intones, “Barack Obama is just a human being with considerable charisma and charm who used his abilities to help him become President of the United States.” Its friends raise their glasses. “Happy Birthday Barack,” sings Birthday Song.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 