In an ecosystem, all productive agent behavior falls into one of two modes: exploration or exploitation. If an agent isn’t acting randomly, it’s either gathering information about its surroundings (exploration) or extracting resources from a niche (exploitation). From the perspective…

In this post, I'd like to explore the relationship between social status and personal space. I’ll show that people often conceptualize status as space — more specifically, as territory — and that this helps explain a wide range of phenomena.…

The idea in my previous post 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. In this post, I'd like…

Don't hate the player, hate the game Recently I've been thinking about the world in ecological terms. It’s an interesting change in perspective — not just a shift (viewing the same thing from a different angle), but an inversion. In ecological…

As inspiration for Melting Asphalt, and to get things started with a nod to Venkat, allow me to re-present one of my all-time favorite ribbonfarm posts, "Ancient Rivers of Money." The idea of money as water is nothing new. Like…

It's been a while since I blogged. Let's give it another go! As I was thinking about starting this blog, I looked back at all the sites I've made during my time on the web. I've been here for 15+…