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Collective Architecture — On the structure of collectives

[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] Mechanical Ethics — 1 Oct 2025
Vincent’s S-CALM model describes the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical behaviour. Mechanistic thinking helps explain how those factors might operate, and thus, where we might intervene on them.
[article] Sacrificing the Self — 4 Apr 2025
When we want to identify with a group, we bias ourselves to filter out all theother ways we could be. It helps us cut down all our competing priorities to the group. The trade-off is the benefit in diversity of thought.
[article] Language is a barrier to communication — 28 Feb 2025
Our brain clusters things that are similar to each other together. This includes ideas and the words we attach to them. If your words are attached to the wrong ideas, you’re going to struggle to make the connection for them.
[article] Aesthetics are facts too — 21 Feb 2025
Cultural and aesthetic ‘facts’ are as real as any ‘objective’ truths. They’re just centred on different kinds of meaning. Trivialising them because they ‘go against’ the evidence is failing to recognise what evidence they care about.
[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] Useful groups are biased groups — 27 Dec 2024
The strength of our attraction to a group is a function of how different a group is from other groups in ways that we feel like we are, or like we want to be. Our participation in the group depends on how we see it benefitting us, and see us benefitting the group. The stronger both are, the stronger our biases to stay engaged.
[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 hard.
[article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. III — 27 Sep 2024
This book is basically, “men are terribly emotionally fragile, and they can make small steps to be better, but women need to just stop bothering them with all their pedantry and just let them be who they are.”
[article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II — 20 Sep 2024
I guarantee, no matter how sexy traditional gender roles are to you, that you do not want to be like Gray’s ‘men’.
[article] Men and women are from earth, fool pt. I — 13 Sep 2024
Not only is there is absolutely no difference between men and women in how they complain or offer criticism, but the ‘men’ Gray describe could be used as textbook example of people with social anxiety.
[article] The value of violence — 9 Aug 2024
The utility of violence isn’t in the violence itself, but only in the threat of it. It creates immediate behaviour change, but only for so long as the threat is active.
[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] Active listening is misleading — 11 Jan 2024
Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.