11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Mental Unity of Crowds
Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression,...Folksonomies: sociology
Folksonomies: sociology
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notes
notesPeople behave differently as individuals than when they are working in a group.
23 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
The Argument Against Man Being a Social Animal
From the time of Aristotle it had been said that man is a social animal: that human beings naturally form communities. I couldn't accept it. The whole of history and pre-history is against it. The two dreadful world wars we have recently been through, and the gearing of our entire economy today for defensive war belie it. Man's loathsome cruelty to man is his most outstanding characteristic; it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous and cannibalistic origin. Robert Hartmann pointed ou... 1 notes
notesMan kills for fun, Dart argues, which no other animal does. This is not exactly true.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
We Need Experimental Societies
Our instincts and emotions are those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of a
million years ago. But our society is astonishingly different from that of a million
years ago. In times of slow change, the insights and skills learned by one generation
are useful, tried, and adaptive, and are gladly received when passed down to the
next generation. But in times like today, when the society changes significantly in
less than a human lifetime, the parental insights no longer have unquestioned
validity... 1 notes
notesSociology is too complex to accurately predict how we should manage our society; we need to conduct experiments in order to determine the best path forward. In America, the States could serve as such laboratories.
30 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
Political, Social, and Scientific Values Should be Mathem...
[P]olitical and social and scientific values … should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its... 1 notes
notesHenry Brooks Adams argues there should be some mathematical formula to describe social and political forces.
08 FEB 2011 by ideonexus
Distinguishing the Meme Content from the Meme's Effect on...
[Cloak] defined the i-culture as the instructions in people's heads, and the m-culture as the features of people's behaviour, their technology and social organization. he explicitly likened his i-culture to the genotype and m-culture to the phenotype... in The Extended Phenotype [Dawkins] says 'Unfortunately, unlike Cloak... I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its "phenotypic effects" or "meme products" on the other' (D... 1 notes
notesA survey of different scientists exploring varying metaphors to express the difference between the meme as an idea and the manifestation of the meme in society.
