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Accidental Civilisation

[article] Hydraulic Despotism — 1 Dec 2025
Control the water, control the people. Today’s water is energy, social media, infrastructure. We’re coerced through convenience, not malice. There are many vectors for control—we don’t need to hand them over.
[article] When groups go bad — 3 Jan 2025
Without more tasteful social behaviours to sample from, we’re liable to attach very strongly to the behaviours of our group. Add a hostile environment, normalised physical and emotional violence, and a lack of mental and physical resources, and you have the ingredients for atrocity.
[article] Mob mentality is fine — 20 Dec 2024
You could think of a collection of group dynamics like ‘groupthink’ or ‘deindividuation’ or whatever are bad. Or you could consider that our social identity is formed by making the distinctions between in- and out- groups clear. Then it all makes sense.
[article] Catastrophic leadership is actually really hard — 13 Dec 2024
For group dynamics to produce really bad behaviour, you really need to work at it. You have to train your authority figures to be cruel, prevent dissent or disengagement, and intervene all the time to stop people fixing things. It’s <em>hard</em>.
[article] Great Spirits of History — 6 Sep 2024
The ‘Great Man’ theory of history has the history of ideas moved forward by individuals. But by thinking of these as ‘Great Ideas’, or better ‘spirits’ of ideas, we’re encouraged to examine their motivations, which is surprisingly effective.
[article] Why do people kill themselves? — 16 Aug 2024
Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
[article] It's not social media, life is just worse — 2 Aug 2024
Social media use probably isn’t the problem. Social media use is probably just the most obvious manifestation of lots of problems. And in fact, social media could probably be a solution. It’s up to you.
[article] Ideologies stack — 15 Jun 2024
Fringe theories always seem to cluster together. It seems weird, but mainstream theories also do, we just don’t often examine them. Examining why different theory stacks arise reveals much about our biases, ideologies, and the influence of community-based knowledge.
[article] Problems with p-values — 24 Oct 2023
P-values are no gold standard. The way we use them today means p-values have a probability distribution. Just one could be an outlier, and the way publishing works, probably is. It’s the reason for so many ‘too good to be true’ findings—they are.
[article] Saving the planet is an illusion — 15 Apr 2023
Sustainability discussions often prioritise saving the planet, missing the fact that the planet doesn’t care about climate change. Maybe we should focus on the imminent death and disease instead of the planet’s feelings.
[article] Everything is Choice Architecture — 12 Jan 2023
Nudging doesn’t work because people aren’t thinking hard enough. Everything is choice architecture, so look to the way you build things in the first place or turn to our deepest motivations—our communities.
[article] The origin of insight — 20 Feb 2022
Lightbulb moments are one crucial key to creativity, and though they appear elusive, there are many ways to encourage the happy accidents that bring them into being: we must bring together the unfamiliar and the familiar.
[article] Solving the Paradox of Tolerance — 24 Feb 2021
Every now and then a proponant of ‘tolerance’ will cite political philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’ to justify their suppression of the tolerant. Shame Karl Popper didn’t see it as much of a paradox, then.