“If only AI had worked out better.” is one of the favorite sayings of a contempary and fellow traveler thru the 80s AI boom. There are so many problems in life that a bit of effective AI ought to be able to solve. Coordinating the time of a meeting, or calling up the cable company [...]
The nice thing about P2P content distribution systems is how they lower the barriers to entry for content producers. When things are working then the cost of distributing content to N consumers drops for the producer from N to 1, and the cost for the consumers rises from 1 to 2 (see here). In theory [...]
Thru direct mail and radio advertising (on my local NPR station) a church here in town has been campaigning to make me curious about them. I’m a very secular fellow. But I happens to know a lot about abusive cults and so my first question was is this one of those large abusive cult churchs [...]
There a lot of fun “statically improbable phrases” in this paper (sadly hidden behind a garden wall) about religiosity in brand communities. It’s about the Newton community, which like the Lisp community, can be described as “operating in a threatened state.” Like all communities these brand communities have rituals, including stories. And when the community [...]
This article give a just just amazing example of group forming. … excitement died down, Wallace, now living by himself, was overcome with loneliness and ennui. On a whim, he took out a classified ad asking people to “join” him and send him their passport photos. That was it. “I was just interested to see [...]
Friday, February 18, 2005
Ted’s post on Finding your Tribe reminds me that I’ve been meaning to see if I could hack something together to say about scale and groups. How many groups is a person typically a member of? If we ask the various social sciences -anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, demography, physiology – do they have answer for [...]
My love affair with Textually.org continues: In a court case which has fascinated Sweden with its intoxicating mix of sex, death and the workings of an obscure religious sect, a Swedish pastor has been jailed for life for faking text messages from God to get his nanny-lover to murder his wife and try to kill [...]
The first parts of this paper (pdf) are a readable gloss of the “marketing techniques” used by cults. The second part is much more rough, and it’s certainly not sufficiently tongue-in-check about applying these vile methods to product marketing. p.s. We love you!
Thursday, February 12, 2004
As my fellow citizens in Massachusetts are hard at work protecting their culture from a plague of excessive marriage I am reminded of our history. Joseph Palmer’s exuberance lead him to wear a beard. His fellow citizens, outraged, tossed him in the slammer. Amusingly Joseph was a butcher, but latter moved in with Alcott to [...]
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
This is the ever useful BITE model of how to recognize or run a cult. That’s from this excellent book on the topic. Of which I was reminded by this posting on How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World”
Fresh Links…