via Osfoora
]]>The secrets to Coco’s success, and the dozens of girls that have come before and will surely come after her, have much less to do with Coco the person (or the body) than with the social context of an unstable market. There is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens— when dealing with symbolic goods like “beauty” and “fashionability,” we would be hard pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, social processes are at work in the fashion modeling market to bequeath cultural value onto Coco. The social world of fashion markets reveals how market actors think collectively to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. And this social side of markets, it turns out, is key to understanding how investors could trade securities backed with “toxic” subprime mortgage assets leading us into the 2009 financial crisis.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/how-supermodels-are-like-tox...
A fascinating look at how imitation and groupthink, the desire to be fashionable by being like all the other fashionable people who are like all the other fashionable people, helps explain investors buying toxic assets when they knew better. Because they base what they do on what other people do and might think they end up magnifying a few bad choices made by the “right” people. This also has profound effects on individual choices when people want to be accepted by a group. Do we base our actions and words based in what other people perceive as beautiful? Do we act like Christians or like what other people think of as Christian? Do we base our walk on our convictions, or what other people would think looks spiritual?
]]>To equate a way to describe the natural world through objective means with simply inserting one’s own opinion in the gaps of our knowledge and chalk both up to belief is an absurd assertion that can only be made by people who don’t understand the nature of science and can’t wrap their minds around the fact that it’s simply a >methodology by which people accumulate and connect facts, not a set of answers to questions or ready made opinions.
http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/10/10/if-you-believe-in-science-youre-doin...
An atheist explains why believing in science is ludicrous without seeing the cognitive dissonance. I don’t agree with his position on the origin of life at all, but he makes a very good point about science simply being a way to describe reality and not something to believe in. Unfortunately he makes the leap of equating unprovable cosmology with describing reality. Atheist, thy name is irony.
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Social Status and the Malleability of Personality
http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/07/social-status-and-the-malleability-of-personality/
An insightful article on the malleability of who we are, really, who we pretend to be. We're always trying to be something or someone for the benefit of those around us so we can be accepted and I bet most of us don't even realize it. I've actually noticed traits and mannerisms change in my own personality depending on who I'm around. This is exactly similar to how people notice their friends change when they get a boyfriend/girlfriend; they do change, and it's natural that they do, we just get rather cheesed at them because they've just showed that *neither* of those are the *real* them and they've just been playing an aspect all along. But everyone does the same, no one stays the same always. As Shakespeare said, we are all actors on the stage of existence. How right he was.
]]>“ALWAYS REMEMBER, WE DO NOT LIVE IN A MERITOCRACY. NOBODY GETS AHEAD BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD. THE SPOILS GO TO THOSE WHO BUILD THE STRONGEST NETWORKS. EVERYTHING HAPPENS, HAPPENS NOT BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU CAN DO, BUT BECAUSE OF WHO YOU KNOW. THE WHOLE WORLD IS CORRUPT, AND ONLY THOSE WHO ACKNOWLEDGE ITS CORRUPTION FIND THEIR TRUE PLACE IN IT.”
Trufax.
Merlin Mann is a genius.
This is all about why I'm leaving Facebook and breaking my online persona up over several services and setting up the blog for meaningful sharing. Because I control it. Completely. Not someone who's trying to make money off of my information.
He also has a great idea for a social network/blogging/journal site.
But one of the biggest take aways was the concept of stock and flow.
Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not
even that much of an a-ha. There are two kinds of quantities in the
world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the for
est. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or
three-thousand tooth picks a day. Easy. Too easy.
http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890
The concept of stock and flow is key to understanding how to manage yourself/your content output online. It's also key to social networking, and one of the reasons I'm moving away from flow-heavy Facebook to a more stock emphasis blog and managing flow through Twitter. Just something to chew on.
]]>Obama does not want this mess remedied. He wants it to become so big and so disastrous that no one will allow oil drilling again. He just can’t be this incompetent. He cannot be this stupid. It’s simply not possible. It has to be intentional.
'DrJohn' makes a case for the administration's lack of drive in the Gulf Oil Crisis; it's deliberate. I say: Hanlon's Razor.
I was born in the year of the ColecoVision. This isn't that unusual or interesting until you factor in that my mother was a VP at Coleco at that time. OK, well, it's still probably not that interesting unless you're me and trying to figure out the defining moments that turned you into a "geeky" adult.
Veronica Belmont tells the story about how she grew up geek and hammers home one of my enduring points about geekdom: It's about obsessing about something enough to learn all you can about it. That's what a geek is, and the something is different for everyone.