banality deconstructed

In academic circles, being average (or below) is often given a bad rap. This tendency to map folks onto a linear (ordered) manifold has well-documented shortcomings, not just in academia.

Perhaps a healthier approach is to expect mediocrity, but to go beyond that to embrace its diversity. After all, average behaviors are inevitable by definition, but it takes a wide range of skills and perceptions to support the communities in which we live.

"Jerry Springer" worlds

One way to slow down population-growth may be to get folks to step back from our developing tradition of taking responsibility, as individuals, for all 6 layers of subsystem-correlation that look in/out from skin, family & culture, and instead to focus on unhinged bad-mouthing not just of individuals (thanks to Jerry) but whole subsets of our species (many more deserve thanks here), while distributing among them (to "ensure their safety") as many guns and bombs as our arms manufacturers can produce.

Electronic media, needless to say, helps to this end, but I'm hoping that there is a better path toward sustainability. What do you think?

no payout gambling

Folks buy a lottery ticket for a chance at a prize. If no prize is awarded, regardless of whether or not the prize money is used to sell additional tickets for a future contest award, isn't that false advertising?

How is it legal for folks to sell tickets on prize money they plan not to award, so that they can sell tickets on it again next week? Not awarding of course increases the profit margin of those selling the tickets, but what does it do to the odds that the ticket you bought will pay off?

The standard approach is to fix the odds of winning at much less than one out of the number of entries. This has the added advantage that sequential "failures to award" can bump the prize money for a new entry up, creating interest in the game. The fact that it's a bad investment is old news, while a billion dollar pot is today's news.

neolithic media

New media sometimes elicits inappropriate neolithic responses, like fear and xenophobia, from crowds first exposed to it. A classic contemporary example of course is the role of radio in 1930's Germany.

Did development of the printing press play a role in religious intolerance on or around the Renniasance in Europe? More importantly, is the internet playing a similar role in the emergence of "conservative" extremism across the globe today?

beyond social

A media-focus on what nature is saying, rather than only what people are saying, might help.

2-paddle solutions

All these "one oar in the water" narratives about regulation of antibiotics, climate-change, abortion, herd-immunity with vaccines, guns, population, etc. might be seen as classic model-selection problems. For instance, the need for a "smoking gun" e.g. to connect a specific individual pig to a specific individual microbe to a specific illness of a specific individual person may be organism-centric fantasy -- if you drop back to a robust data/model analysis strategy, like agreeing to focus on models that are least-surprised (in a technical sense) by incoming data, folks may be able to work together to tackle these problems understandably while moving their boat along with paddles on both sides of the canoe.

replicable codes

Digital data is the DNA of culture. It deserves to be created & handled with care & respect.