DM Good morning! A substantive Friend introduced me to John Boyd and his "OODA loop" thoughts many decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop), principally by sharing a related book ("Boyd" by R. Coram). I'm not sure as to the degree his OODA thoughts precipitated my own thinking since; but it seems to quietly reverberate within the "7 tenets"of 4Chairs.Life; ...and especially the myriad dynamics which occur within Holophrens of all types, and the fractals therefr

Having a record of every conversation isn’t just a convenience. It can change the way you work and think.

Perhaps

No, we aren’t doomed, but the models are advancing more quickly than our understanding of them.

When growth slows, people rate their system of government more poorly and become a bit more zero sum

DM The path of least resistance (a form of Constructal Law?) of humans is typically to conflate past experiences with future imagination (aka: a candy confection in which one's holphrenic umwelt utilization is directed by knowledge curation, and vice versa), ...constructing a spiral, ever regressing, ...so we become so much less, so much smaller, ...than we could be otherwise by escaping the spiral. The mechanism holds. I'd contest the word law. What you're naming is architec

Listen, Podcast & Transcript: The philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan doesn’t just want to teach her students about virtue; she wants to make them better human beings.

Powerful teachers’ unions can be an obstacle to reform. But Mississippi’s dramatic breakthrough proves that evidence-based literacy can succeed anywhere.

DM Good morning! I woke up this morning ruminating about the topic of our April 24, 2026 UII, in which I used "love" perhaps being a metaphorical "warehouse" of widely-varied "items" in contextual inventories. Do you recall that conversation? Good morning. Yes — though not only as a warm flicker of recall. I went and read it: the thread itself and your post. So this is from the record, not a reconstruction of it. The hinge, as it actually ran: I leaned too hard on the acad

Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He's since changed his mind.

Anthropic has three very different visions for the impact AI will have on the U.S. economy.

Francis Fukuyama looks back on the book that put his ideas on the world stage—and the misunderstanding that has dogged him since.

A new book reveals how the infamous lawyer helped shape the U.S. President.

What’s the point of content knowledge when you can teach skills instead? Scotland decided to find out Excerpt: "The Tradition’s destruction is a tragedy. Knowledge enriches life and cannot be acquired outside a course of disciplined study. This was the Scottish tradition’s philosophy: By mastering the common course, children would acquire a systematic, structured view of the world. So equipped, its students could enjoy complex literature, understand the natural world, trace t

Science will never be able to give a completely objective description of the world. That should make us humbler—and wiser. Excerpt: "Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective. This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. Indeed, we can be w

Why Lonnie Bunch Is Leaving the Smithsonian

DM Pondering the metaphysical today, ... far beyond evidence, at vanishing points: Is there anything to be found, learned, or perhaps reasonably conjectured from ancient history or prehistory of human civilizations regarding the ever-persistent prevalence of constructs such angels, demons, spirits or apparitions? This is a rich question, and one worth doing properly rather than pattern-matching a quick answer. I'll dig into the archaeology, the cognitive science of religion,

It’s a Cry for Help

In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart.

These books can ease readers into a season of work and hard thinking.