Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
We all know that the mobster kleptocracy has been catastrophically miscalculating at least in part due to a narrative dependency of getting high on its own supply of disinformation but in the monumental strategic blunder that this invasion represents they display the kernel core of a neurotic psychological pathology. An implicit orientation towards the positive […]
The whole sorry mess of this conflict strikes me as a psychological (as much as ideological) pathology that endlessly reproduces itself, not as a function or measure of its successes but as the heroic recharacterisation (as you reflect, above) of its failures and suffering. It is perhaps a little like a gyroscope that follows its […]
The mystery here is that what makes AI so eminently useful is its ability to do what we can not in ways we do not in all cases need to understand. There is something of a resonant psychological pathology here: we seek at all costs to invoke generally intelligent autonomous systems that significantly surpass our […]
Context: Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us I do wonder if the adversarial and tribal biases that so readily percolate through (for instance, but not only) online social networks have a tendency to reflexively cultivate and incentivise a bundle of pathological personality traits. In this sense, the technologically-mediated self-propagation of inflammatory and provocative narrative […]
Imagine, if you will, a king. A mighty ruler, a keen follower of Machiavelli and thus feared much more than loved and very clever indeed. Of course, being clever is only ever measured by the breadth and depth in which intelligence is defined and this king had come to live in a half-mirrored world of […]
The essence of a human life is in so many ways its natural orientation towards anything and everything other than death, negation, extinction and the oblivion of forgetting or of being forgotten and yet so many of our actions, behaviours and mental abstractions lead and leave us so perilously close to the abyss. There is […]
The fault and flaw that at times percolates to catastrophic ascendance likely runs deep within our nature as the biological entities we are; conditioned by, through and as reflexively competitive complex information and energy-processing systems biased towards a primitive archetype of individuation and survival. If the intelligence and sophistication measured by technological civilisation to any […]
On the topic of autocratic ideology, it is no long stretch of the imagination to understand that good ideas sell themselves, bad ideas require a little more persuasion but it is only the truly ugly ideas that kick in your door and point a gun at you.
As an authoritarian regime always and implicitly depends for self-validation upon the presence of external and internal threats, where it does not find them it will manufacture them. This is a narcissistic pathology, writ large. The essential and interior psychological surface as self-definition of an individual (or organisational system as political abstraction of nation) is […]
Interesting to note, perhaps, that many if not most (although not necessarily all) political, ideological and/or strategic designs have an inadvertent – arguably unconscious – bias towards generating precisely the kinds of errors that optimally reproduce and self-validate themselves. The ways in which this error-encoding occurs and the sophistication with which it is engaged is […]
Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to act in spite of fear. Only a fool knows no fear and were it not that we demonise emotional experience in the ways we all do and as a function of the constructive paranoia that binds us all into one writhing mass of […]
Daedelus Kite 