Thane Thomson
Psychology and philosophy have fascinated me since I was a kid, and I’ve read tons of material on these subjects over the years. I’ve also seen quite a few articles over the years talking about online privacy, and how easily we give up private information via social media (for some random examples, see
Every day we use numbers – they form the fundamental language of science, which has allowed us to gain a tremendous amount of practical insight into our world and how to exploit it to improve our lives. But is it possible to use them to not only understand the relationships between things, but what things [...]
This past Monday evening I had the pleasure of finally attending an information session on the infamous Network 21 – it was pleasurable because I could finally confirm my suspicions as to their flawed value proposition and can now fully justify my prejudice against their model.
To their credit, their value proposition is actually twofold:
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Nearly everyone I know seems to think that democracy is flawed, but the problem is that we don’t have a viable, practical alternative. What would it take though to develop a practical alternative to democracy? I’m not completely sure, but I’m quite positive about there being potential to find such alternatives. This essay was inspired [...]
This morning I thought I’d do some digging to try and find what people think about why Facebook became so successful. Most answers that I found didn’t really capture what I thought about the issue (not even Zuckerberg’s own opinion), so I decided to give a bit of an alternative perspective on it.
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It seems as though I tend to only really gain insight into things that I’ve read quite some time after I’ve finished reading them, after I’ve had some time to chew on them and reflect their content against my existing mental frameworks. Mulling over SuperCooperators by Martin Nowak, it dawned on me that [...]
We have this tendency to want to make our lives easier – perhaps this is a built-in biological mechanism to conserve energy? So we’ve been constructing systems for ages now: all the way from cars to supercomputers to money-making “systems” that we call organisations. Many people who give advice to entrepreneurs tell them to try [...]
After having passed the “secrecy bill” through parliament yesterday, and with the Mac Maharaj fiasco, a whole range of ridiculing, “naming-and-shaming”, gossip-like articles and public comments/jokes have been popping up:
“Black Tuesday”: There’s more where that came from Evading the questions with Big Mac Info bill: who voted how [...]
In digging around for different people’s understandings of social constructionist philosophy for my thesis, I discovered this great journal article by Steinar Kvale (1995) entitled The social construction of validity. What I was trying to do in my thesis was get back to some of our fundamental assumptions about social phenomena, and in [...]
In trying to understand business in new ways, it seems as though a variety of authors (academic and non-academic) have been trying to apply perspectives from a relatively new “branch” of science that is still busy taking shape: that of emergence. The concept of emergence comes from a variety of different streams of thought.
Jeffrey [...]
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May 2012 M T W T F S S « Apr 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Posts
