Saturday, April 20, 2019

Violence Control and the Mutual Recognition Cartel

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Modern states are a cartel that mutually recognize each other's right to hold a monopoly on violence within their territory. The prospe...
Thursday, March 28, 2019

Evidence for Coordinated Labor in Agriculture Hypothesis of Early State Formation (CLAHSF)

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Early states tended to emerge in places that were actually somewhat marginal for agriculture , quite counterintuitively. ( Most recent disc...
Thursday, March 21, 2019

The Three Ways of Dealing with Outsiders: Sub-Humans, Ignorance, or Evangelism

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Humans have so far fully developed only three ways of dealing with outsiders: remaining ignorant of them (or feigning ignorance) consideri...
Sunday, March 17, 2019

A Morbid Calculation: Conquest Rate of the Americas and Cultural Assimilation Rates

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The first European set foot on what would later become the United States in 1513. The last uncontacted indigenous person was captured in...
Saturday, March 9, 2019

How Do People Decide Which Experts to Trust?

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A summary of the aim of modern propaganda is this: dictators don't do propaganda so people believe something but so they believe nothin...
Sunday, February 24, 2019

Predicting When a State Will Centralize

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A 2015 paper by Koyama, Moriguchi and Sng (KMS) builds a model based on modern China and Japan's different experiences, suggesting a mec...
Friday, February 15, 2019

The Death of Subculture: Gibson's Failure and Chapman's Explanation

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If you're a geek of a certain age (i.e., middle) you've read Neuromancer. And lines from this novel may occasionally come back to y...