Tag: culture

Do Traditions still matter?

1 way to ensure survival is high-fidelity adherence to traditions + ensuring that the inherited ancestral environment/context is more or less maintained. Adhering to ancient traditions when the context is rapidly changing is a recipe for disaster. No point in mastering seal-hunting if there ain’t no more seals. No point in mastering the manners of being a courtier if there ain’t no more royal court. Etc. And the problem is that, in the modern world, we can’t simply all mutually agree to stop changing our context so that our traditions will continue to function as before because it is no longer under our control.

The Secret Of Our Success

Our mouths are the size of the squirrel monkey’s, a species that weighs less than 1.3 kg. Chimpanzees can open their mouths 2x as wide as we can and hold substantial amounts of food compressed between their lips and large teeth. We also have puny jaw muscles that reach up only to just below our ears. Other primates’ jaw muscles stretch to the top of their heads, where they sometimes even latch onto a central bony ridge. Our stomachs are small, having only a third of the surface area that we’d expect for a primate of our size, and our colons are too short, being only 60% of their expected mass. Compared to other animals, we have such atrophied digestive tracts that we shouldn’t be able to live. What saves us? All of our food processing techniques, especially cooking, but also chopping, rinsing, boiling, and soaking. We’ve done much of the work of digestion before food even enters our mouths.

Lehman Trilogy

The Lehman Judges Judge The Lehman Trilogy

The judges decamped to a wood-paneled room and sat sipping seltzer under portraits of bewhiskered officers. “For us, who have the experience of what happened after the play ended, it really isn’t a beautiful story of America. The bankruptcy worked, but should it have happened in the first place? Were we just left to clean up after the elephants? I think maybe we were.”

“I had trials for employees who had all their retirement money in Lehman stock and lost everything. And now we have a President who proudly talks about all his bankruptcies. It’s just bizarre.” She stood up and said goodbye; she had to rest up before her next Lehman hearing, on Monday morning.

Chinese Burner

Although Mr. Miao and Mr. Yang might have been let down by the Burning Man Festival, I trust that this experience opened them up to new ways of thinking. Mr. Miao gradually came to accept the idea that people can walk around naked or make out with strangers if they are willing. Mr. Yang made friends with one neighbor who was sharing marijuana cookies and had a long conversation with another, who happened to be an IT engineer. I also met some founders of leading Chinese tech companies who thought more deeply about these issues after experiencing the festival. “In this utopian community, we can experience cultures or principles that have been discarded or distorted in the civilized world. If you take certain things back with you, they’ll make your daily life more creative and more powerful.”

Fortnite Concert

People have gathered in virtual worlds for decades. People have attended virtual concerts for years. Yet the Fortnite event represented something different by many orders of magnitude. By one (unsubstantiated) estimate, 10M concurrent users attended the show in the game’s “Showtime” mode. In other words, this was something much more than a concert. It was a peek, albeit a short one, at what an AR- and VR-suffused future looks like: connected congregations of embodied avatars, in mass-scale events that still manage to feel personal.

Superb Owls

This Sunday, the subreddit /r/superbowl will host a gathering of hoo-ligans. They’ll be fans of the Nocturnal Flying League. Real birds of a feather. The Superb Owl community will kick off an Ask Me Anything with biologist James Duncan, who has spent his entire adult life studying owls and a mere 3 weeks playing football.