If that sounds strange, bear with me. Clearly beliefs are important — one might say fundamental — to any particular religion. My claim is that beliefs are unimportant (or worse, a distraction) if your goal is to understand the phenomenon…

Sports, especially team spectator sports, are an orgy of synchronized moods and behaviors — near-perfect rituals for producing harmony and solidarity in a throng of fans. Think of the vast crowds that gather in stadiums, wearing the same colors, singing…

BTW, I've been cross-posting on Quora for a little while now. Same content, different ecosystem. You can now follow my articles there, on my board/blog thing: Kevin's Blog. Or here — I'll continue to post on Melting Asphalt for the…

Here in the West, we model the relationship between our minds and our bodies like this: The mind, according to this view, is like a little person inside our heads, sitting in the control tower, receiving data from the outside…

Today I'd like to explore rituals that influence the way we think about the social world around us. Previously we saw how humans bond with each other through rituals of sacrifice. The basic idea is that human groups (religions, nations, tribes,…

Spiritual experiences, listening to live music, taking LSD, the state of flow. Becoming absorbed in a story, spending time alone in nature, singing in a choir. Staring into a bonfire, dancing at a rave, falling in love, meditation. What do…

Lately I've been thinking about professional growth, or how to avoid stagnation in the workplace. It's not the biggest issue we're facing right now at Palantir, but the stakes are high enough (as Rands puts it, bored people quit) that…

Without microscopes, telescopes, or computers, humans of the recent past had few ways to experience reality at scales much different from everyday life. Looking up at the sky, out at the ocean, or across a canyon gave us an appreciation…

As I've written about before, the idea behind ecological thinking is that complex systems have niches, and it’s often more productive to think about behavior as a property of the niche rather than the actors who inhabit the niche. Let's…

Last week Peter Sobot posted an article about startups as bands for hackers. While that metaphor explains a lot of the startup experience, I think a deeper metaphor is to view startups as frontier communities. Consider this story of life…