coherent worldview

20 results back to index


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Instead, we have a state of radical and irreducible contingency that requires-if it is to be comprehended sufficiently to allow effective engagement with its implications-simultaneous contemplation of many different and perhaps conflicting worldviews. Thus does the anthropogenic world resulting from the Enlightenment, and its industrial and scientific revolutions, seem to create a strong and necessary commitment to the development of internally consistent and coherent worldviews and ideologies, even as it demands the philosophic flexibility necessary to respond to complex systems unrolling in unpredictable and Complexity, Coherence, Contingency 119 uncertain majesty. In short, in a complex world, the intelligible and the rational may often conflict; Level III rationality-a capacity to link cognition to desired outcomes in the world via action-can only emerge from a commitment to confronting and working with (we would say "managing," but it isn't clear that we can actually do that in any strong sense with such complex and powerful systems) that which is incomprehensible.

So long as the Greenland weather behaved like European weather, the Christian and European cultural worldview served the settlers well: they were in a Level I and Level II world. But when climate changed, they were thrown into a Level III situation-highly unpredictable and contingent-and failed to adjust. The intellectual confusion that occurs when one applies Level I and Level II coherent worldviews to a Level III condition is quite evident today in the climate-change arena and in the infatuation with "carbon footprints."lo For example, a professor writing in the Medical Journal of Australia recently called on the Australian government to impose a carbon charge of $5,000 on every birth, to charge annual carbon fees of $800 per child, and to provide a carbon credit for sterilization. 11 Articles in New Scientist have suggested that obesity is mostly a problem because of the additional carbon load it imposes on the environment,12 that a major social cost of divorce is the additional carbon burden resulting from splitting up families, and that pets should be should be eliminated because of their carbon footprints ("Man's best friend, it turns out, is the planet's enemy").13 A recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming. 14 ("Women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men, and thus considerably less climate change.")

Yet, as we have emphasized, the cognitive networks we inhabit, and the systems we are seeking to understand, are not out there waiting to be revealed in ever more detail; they are created by the very queries we pose to the system, and the very cognitive network within which we gather data and process knowledge. Any framework or model that can be understood, and that is based on a coherent worldview, is by definition at best only a partial truth. Once could almost say "If you can understand it, it isn't True; and if it is True, you can't understand it." Meaning, truth, and values, therefore, do not arise from first principles; they are functions of the state of the cognitive network-of our ordering of information and knowledge-and thus are contingent and continually regenerated in a reflexive dialog between cognitive systems posing queries to, and thus generating configurations of, external complex systems.


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

Though it lacks theological trappings, it actually owes a great deal to Jesus, who was a libertarian avant la lettre prophesying the final triumph of the individual soul and its inner experience over the domination of traditional communal bonds and illegitimate religious authority. The new orthodoxy brought a perfectly coherent worldview that makes sense of the human condition (we are bodies that are born and die alone), of what lies beyond (nothing), and of what we need to be happy (carpe diem). And it also, not insignificantly, keeps the peace, since war is bad for business. The new catechism has not reached everyone, and resistance in certain regions is strong and sometimes armed.


pages: 150 words: 45,389

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese

coherent worldview, delayed gratification, medical residency, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, stem cell, time dilation

One of my junior residents came up to me and said, “I just heard from the bosses—if they hire you, you’re going to be my faculty mentor!” “Shhhh,” I said. “Don’t jinx it.” It felt to me as if the individual strands of biology, morality, life, and death were finally beginning to weave themselves into, if not a perfect moral system, a coherent worldview and a sense of my place in it. Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

They may or may not be relevant to our main work. They materialize in various stages of development. I try to capture, record, review, refine, and publish (on my blog) as many of these fringe thoughts as I can. Besides making you a better conversationalist, organizing your fringe thoughts is one way toward a more intellectually coherent worldview. Among the various repositories and lists for such thoughts should be “New Business Ideas.” Each time you see something that could be done better, write it down on this list. Don’t be careful. Recording fringe thoughts is an exercise in creativity, and research shows that the minute we try to add a filter to our thinking—for coherence, approval, or completeness— is the minute the ideas tap goes cold.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

He suggests there’s a cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s lovers, with the implication being that there’s scores of women who’ve had the former Secretary of State’s tongue in their birth canals. He says that Clinton is old and sick and that there’s a cover-up about her impending death. He claims there are 80 million illegal immigrants living in the US. Things are different than back in 1997 AD. The coherent worldview has changed and encompassed some very dubious thoughts. There’s an edge in this interview that’s nowhere to be seen in the early days. This is a person who knows that he’ll never be understood. While Michael Kinsley sneered at Drudge for an hour in 1997 AD, he was wrapped in a delusion about the nature of his job.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

He goes, ‘That’s amazing, brother.’” Although neither of them could have had any inkling of where they would end up, Bannon would provide Trump with two great services in the years ahead—services without which Trump probably wouldn’t be president. First, he supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed “America first” nationalism. One aspect in particular that preoccupied Bannon—the menace of illegal immigration—was something Trump would use to galvanize his supporters from the moment he descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to declare his candidacy.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

The vote for Brexit has unlocked possibilities for her and created an opportunity, she believes, for a new political economy. It was Brexit that opened the door of 10 Downing Street to her, not least because the alternatives – Boris Johnson, Andrea Leadsom, Michael Gove – were so wayward and divisive. Unlike Johnson, who seems to have no consistent or coherent world-view, May believes in an interventionist, even moral, state. ‘The key thing about her is her belief in the efficacy and, so to speak, compensatory function of the state, the important positive functions – you might even say the moral functions of the state,’ said the philosopher John Gray. * * * When I visited Theresa May one morning in her office in Downing Street, we discussed her trip to Davos, Switzerland, in January 2017.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

They are usually strongly concerned with social justice and unfairness, and also suspicious of appeals to religion, tradition or human nature to justify any departure from equal treatment—differences between men and women, for example, are regarded as almost entirely cultural rather than biological. This is also what some people call the secular liberal baby boomer worldview in particularly pure form—and it is in many ways an attractive and coherent worldview. It is also, for historical reasons to do with empire and post-imperial guilt, unusually ingrained in the British cultural and political elite—the default position in much of higher education and significant parts of the media. But it is very unlikely ever to become a majority worldview. Most traditional societies are ‘sociocentric’, meaning they place the needs of groups and institutions first.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

So if something that seemed so obvious turned out to be wrong, what else that we believe to be self-evident now will seem wrong to us in the future? Once we start to examine our own beliefs, in fact, it becomes increasingly unclear even how the various beliefs we espouse at any given time fit together. Most people, for example, consider their own views about politics to be derived from a single coherent worldview: “I’m a moderate liberal” or “I’m a diehard conservative,” and so on. If that were true, however, then one would expect that people who identify as liberals would tend to espouse the “liberal” perspective on most matters, and that conservatives would espouse a consistently different view. Yet research finds that regardless of whether people identify themselves as liberals or conservatives, what they think about any one issue, like, say, abortion, has relatively little relation to what they believe about other issues, such as the death penalty or illegal immigration.


pages: 353 words: 110,919

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Cass Sunstein, coherent worldview, David Brooks, desegregation, digital rights, Donald Trump, follow your passion, George Santayana, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, New Journalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, you are the product

Boswell was an epicurean and an acolyte and knew Johnson only in his old age. Boswell’s Johnson is anything but wretched. He is joyful, witty, complete, and compelling. In Boswell’s account we find a man who has achieved some integration. But this was a construction. Through writing and mental effort he constructed a coherent worldview. He brought himself to some coherence without simplification. He became trustworthy and dependable. Johnson also used his writing to try to serve and elevate his readers. “It is always a writer’s duty to make the world better,” Johnson once wrote, and by maturity he had found a way. Humanism How did he do this?


pages: 384 words: 105,110

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

Observing this does not mean that men don’t nurture, or that women don’t explore, but these population-level differences have evolved because of the underlying differences between the sexes. Pretending otherwise puts us all at risk—ask people to believe things that are patently untrue and they will be ever less likely to form a coherent worldview, one based in observation and reality, rather than fantasy. Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that is different. Sexual Selection in Humans The moose’s antlers, and the fights that they have, and the fact of female choice—these are all sexually selected characters.


pages: 384 words: 118,572

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

And the reason it happens—and often happens to the most intelligent of people (note, Sullivan would say, the typical cult recruit: young, smart, sophisticated, savvy)—is that human nature is wired toward creating meaning out of meaninglessness, embracing belief over doubt. “There are certain essential things we all have in common,” Sullivan said. “There’s a deep desire for faith, there’s a deep desire to feel there’s someone up there who really cares about what’s going on and intervenes in our life. There’s a desire to have a coherent worldview: there’s a rhyme and reason for everything we do, and all the terrible things that happen to people—people die, children get leukemia—there’s some reason for it. And here’s this guru who says, ‘I know exactly the reason.’” It’s the reason behind all cons, from the smallest to these, the deepest.


pages: 382 words: 117,536

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

Presumably you remember it from the playground, where Gove-like figures peeped over bullies’ shoulders, urging them to violence from a position of cowardly safety, the Richard Hammond/Jeremy Clarkson dynamic, an eternal archetype, replayed in Trump’s golden office, framed Playboy covers reflected in the smeared lenses of Gove’s steamed-up spectacles. Is it just me or is it hot in here? Gove may be a slave but he is not an idiot. He knows there is no point setting any store by anything Trump says. Trump’s comments do not add up to any coherent worldview. Each emerges in the moment, suitable for that second, and that second alone. In his Gove interview Trump said he hoped to scale down his nuclear arsenal. But as recently as 22 December, in his famous ‘Let It Be an Arms Race’ series of 140-character treatises, Trump declared: ‘The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability.’


pages: 364 words: 119,398

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

I became used to seeing women referred to as foids, barely registered the incitements to initiate misogynistic massacres, skimmed over posts about rape, because they were just so common. Finally, one day, I read a post about giving a foid the violence she deserved, in order to avoid being cucked, and I realised that I understood every word. In short, I got used to it. Or, rather, Alex did. The sense of a coherent worldview and a shared language may be deeply appealing to those who hold extreme prejudices but don’t feel able to express them offline in face-to-face conversations, warns Dr Sugiura, who has studied incel and other manosphere communities. These forms of hatred, she notes, have long pre-dated the internet, but: Online communities and virtual platforms provide the means for these ideas to take shape, take hold and spread.


pages: 405 words: 130,840

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Their world was unaligned, and they could not b e c o m e vitally engaged in the larger but ignoble mission of gaining market share at any cost. . . C R O S S - L E V E L C O H E R E N C E T h e word "coherence" literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. A coherent profession, such as genetics, can get on with the business of genetics, while an incoherent profession, like journalism, s p e n d s a lot of time on self-analysis and self-criticism.33 Most people know there's a problem, but they can't agree on what to do about it.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

In the process it demonstrates the superior cost-effectiveness of inverted totalitarianism over the crude classic versions. This underscores the contribution of the “public ideology” being promoted by elected Republicans and pseudoconservative ideologues. Although ideologies profess consistency and boast of their coherent “worldview,” there is typically a suppressed, or downplayed subtext in the message. The suppressed component of the prevailing ideology is the political status of corporate power. While the public ideology celebrates economics in the form of “entrepreneurship,” “small start-ups,” and “free enterprise,” it ignores the political significance and power of the corporation.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

During the course of the political struggles of the 1950s and 1960s over race and war, strategies came to focus increasingly on how to create the right impression. The totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Nazism attempted to demonstrate in practice the suggestibility of the broad masses to political formulas devised by a privileged elite. They sought deliberately to insert coherent worldviews into the consciousness of whole populations and enforce their dictates, sliding over the evident anomalies and inconsistencies and gaps that developed with lived experience. Their success, moreover, owed much to the fearful consequences of any shows of dissent, doubt, or deviation from the party line.

Dover Area School District court case decided against intelligent design on the grounds that it was insufficiently distinctive from creationism to deserve a place on the science curriculum.19 The case demonstrates the difficulty with the “paradigm” paradigm. Neither evolution nor intelligent design referred to fully coherent world-views. Among evolutionary biologists there were substantial differences but no sense of crisis: evolution was accepted as a powerful theory that kept on pointing researchers in fruitful directions. In Kuhn’s terms, within the dominant matrix there were still a number of exemplary paradigms under challenge.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

From the actually rather limited June Uprising of 1953 until the upheavals of 1989, there were no mass protests which might Page 267 warrant the term 'opposition'. There were individuals opposing Ulbricht's and Honecker's policies from within, although these posed little serious challenge from the late 1950s to the 1980S; there were also expressions of a range of coherent world-views which differed explicitly from official Marxist-Leninist ideology and which might be categorized as 'dissent' in one form or another. These views included the humanistic Marxism of a number of intellectuals pursuing what has been called the tradition of the 'Third Way'; the religious views of the relatively large number of practising Protestants and the smaller group of Catholics living in the GDR; and, eventually, the diffuse but unorthodox views of a growing number of peace activists, environmentalists, and adherents of an 'alternative' culture in the 1980s.


pages: 511 words: 139,108

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

We must take them seriously, not merely as pragmatic foundations for their respective fields but as explanations of the world. And I believe that we can achieve the greatest understanding if we consider them not singly but jointly, for they are inextricably related. It may seem odd that this suggestion - that we should try to form a rational and coherent world-view on the basis of our best, most fundamental theories - should be at all novel or controversial. Yet in practice it is. One reason is that each of these theories has, when it is taken seriously, very counter-intuitive implications. Consequently, all sorts of attempts have been made to avoid facing those implications, by making ad hoc modifications or reinterpretations of the theories, or by arbitrarily narrowing their domain of applicability, or simply by using them in practice but drawing no wider conclusions from them.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

In so doing, they restored a bipolar and hierarchical opposition between the haves and have-nots that had not existed since the eighteenth-century dichotomy between polite and impolite society had eroded earlier in the nineteenth century under pressure of rapid urban growth, the expansion of the wealth and size of the upper class, and the appearance of a middle class. Together with a set of ideas about urban leadership, economic development, poverty, and immigration that had been around for several decades but that until now had never coalesced into a coherent worldview, the memory of the draft riots cemented the emergence of a moral community that was led by the upper class but encompassed the middle class and respectable workers. The upper class emerged from the Civil War with two intertwined roles: as the bulwark against the social volcano and as agents of a paternalistic society that would give the lower orders enough of the rudiments of civilization to defang them.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once—rules written into national laws and trade agreements, as well as powerful unwritten rules that tell us that no government can increase taxes and stay in power, or say no to major investments no matter how damaging, or plan to gradually contract those parts of our economies that endanger us all. And yet each of those rules emerged out of the same, coherent worldview. If that worldview is delegitimized, then all of the rules within it become much weaker and more vulnerable. This is another lesson from social movement history across the political spectrum: when fundamental change does come, it’s generally not in legislative dribs and drabs spread out evenly over decades.


pages: 993 words: 318,161

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Which works, because they have an orderly sheep-based economy in which the rules of the game are clear and everyone can agree on basic ideas such as ‘If our animals eat more grass we have a better time of it.’ But those people, the people across the river, are in a very unsettled state and nothing really makes sense to them, and so trying to get them to buy into a coherent worldview of any sort is a mug’s game.” Julian translated: “Bronze Age shepherds may have been just one step above cavemen, but at least they were reality based.” “Very much so,” Enoch agreed. “And that goes on being more or less true for quite a while. Now, theater, and later movies, eventually get us into the realm of shared hallucinations.