Trilemma

Trilemma is a difficult choice from three options, each of which is (or appears) unacceptable or unfavourable. There are two logically equivalent ways in which to express a trilemma: it can be expressed as a choice among three unfavourable options, one of which must be chosen, or as a choice among three favourable options, only two of which are possible at the same time. The term derives from the much older term dilemma, a choice between two or more difficult or unfavourable alternatives. 

Covert hypnosis

Covert hypnosis is an attempt to communicate with another person's unconscious mind without informing the subject that they will be hypnotized. It is also known as conversational hypnosis or sleight of mouth. It is a term largely used by proponents of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a discredited approach to communication and interaction. The objective is to change the person's behavior subconsciously so that the target believes that they changed their mind of their own volition. When or if performed successfully, the target is unaware that they have been hypnotized or that anything unusual has occurred. Arguably there is a debate about what hypnosis is, and how covert hypnosis should be classified. "Standard" hypnosis requires the focus and attention of the subject, while covert hypnosis seems to focus on "softening" the subject by using confusion, fatigue, directed attention, and interrupted sentences. This is most similar to salesmen talking to customers when they are tired. Critical thinking and questioning of statements likely requires mental effort. The theme of "covert hypnosis" appears to be along the lines of causing the subject to enter "down time". Regardless of if "covert hypnosis" is "hypnosis" by a standard definition, fatigue does appear to make critically thinking more difficult. This might explain why interrogation and cult-recruitment practices prefer to deprive their new-recruits of sleep.

Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion (sometimes shortened as XR) is an international social movement that aims to drive radical change, through nonviolent resistance, in order to avert climate breakdown, halt biodiversity loss and minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.
Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in 2018 with about one hundred academics signing a call to action and launched at the end of October. In November 2018, various acts of civil disobedience took place in London. The movement is unusual in that a large number of activists have pledged to be arrested and are prepared to go to prison, similar to the mass arrest tactics of the Committee of 100 in 1961. Citing inspiration from grassroots movements such as Occupy, Gandhi’s independence movement, the Suffragettes, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Extinction Rebellion intends to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown. The Government must tell the truth about the climate and wider ecological emergency, reverse inconsistent policies and work alongside the media to communicate with citizens.
The Government must enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 and to reduce consumption levels. A national Citizens' Assembly to oversee the changes, as part of creating a democracy fit for purpose. "We have a shared vision of change – creating a world that is fit for generations to come. We set our mission on what is necessary – mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – using ideas such as momentum-driven organising” to achieve this. We need a regenerative culture – creating a culture which is healthy, resilient and adaptable.
We openly challenge ourselves and this toxic system – leaving our comfort zones to take action for change. We value reflecting and learning – following a cycle of action, reflection, learning, and planning for more action. Learning from other movements and contexts as well as our own experiences. We welcome everyone and every part of everyone – working actively to create safer and more accessible spaces. We actively mitigate for power – breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.
We avoid blaming and shaming – we live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame. We are a non-violent network – using non-violent strategy and tactics as the most effective way to bring about change. We are based on autonomy and decentralization – we collectively create the structures we need to challenge power. Anyone who follows these core principles and values can take action in the name of RisingUp!

Reversal test

The reversal test is a heuristic designed to spot and eliminate the status quo bias.
The reversal test was introduced in the context of the bioethics of human enhancement. Given that humans might suffer from irrational status quo bias, how can one distinguish between valid criticisms of proposed increase in some human trait and criticisms merely motivated by resistance to change? The reversal test attempts to do this by asking whether it would be a good thing if the trait was decreased: An example given is that if someone objects that an increase in intelligence would be a bad thing due to more dangerous weapons being made etc., the objector to that position would then ask "Shouldn't we decrease intelligence then?" "Reversal Test: When a proposal to change a certain parameter is thought to have bad overall consequences, consider a change to the same parameter in the opposite direction. If this is also thought to have bad overall consequences, then the onus is on those who reach these conclusions to explain why our position cannot be improved through changes to this parameter. If they are unable to do so, then we have reason to suspect that they suffer from status quo bias. Ideally the test will help reveal whether status quo bias is an important causal factor in the initial judgement. A similar thought experiment in regards to dampening traumatic memories was imagining whether aliens naturally resistant to traumatic memories should adopt traumatic "memory enhancement". The "trip to reality" rebuttal to Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (where one's entire current life is shown to be a simulation and one is offered to return to reality) can also be seen as a form of reversal test.

Olivo Barbieri

Olivo Barbieri (born 1954 in Carpi, Emilia-Romagna) is an Italian artist and photographer of urban environments.
He is recognized for his innovative technique creating miniature still photography from actual landscapes by simulating shallow depth of field via the use of tilt-shift lens photography. Barbieri's technique simulates the shallow depth of field effect of macro photography by tilting the lens's angle to the back plane of the camera, which creates a gradual blurring at the top and bottom edges, or left and right edges of the filmed image. The technique is called selected focus and the effect is that a picture of an actual city looks like the picture of a model.

Choreomania (dancing mania)

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John's Dance and St. Vitus's Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion.
Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania. The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, in which physical symptoms with no known physical cause are observed to affect a group of people, as a form of social influence.
"Dancing mania" is derived from the term "choreomania", from the Greek choros (dance) and mania (madness), and is also known as "dancing plague.":The term was coined by Paracelsus, and the condition was initially considered a curse sent by a saint, usually St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, and was therefore known as "St. Vitus's Dance" or "St. John's Dance". Victims of dancing mania often ended their processions at places dedicated to that saint, who was prayed to in an effort to end the dancing; incidents often broke out around the time of the feast of St. Vitus

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT[A]) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT supports human extinction primarily because, in the group's view, it would prevent environmental degradation. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources required by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation. VHEMT was founded in 1991 by Les U. Knight, an American activist who became involved in the environmental movement in the 1970s and thereafter concluded that human extinction was the best solution to the problems facing the Earth's biosphere and humanity. Knight publishes the group's newsletter and serves as its spokesman. Although the group is promoted by a website and represented at some environmental events, it relies heavily on coverage from outside media to spread its message. Many commentators view its platform as unacceptably extreme, though other writers have applauded VHEMT's perspective. In response to VHEMT, some journalists and academics have argued that humans can develop sustainable lifestyles or can reduce their population to sustainable levels. Others maintain that, whatever the merits of the idea, the human reproductive drive will prevent humankind from ever voluntarily seeking extinction

The Pacman Conjecture

The Pacman Conjecture holds that durable-goods monopolists have complete market power and so can exercise perfect price discrimination, thus extracting the total surplus. This is in contrast to the Coase Conjecture which holds that a durable goods monopolist has no market power, and so price is equal to the competitive market price.
If each consumer could be relied upon to buy a good as soon as its price dipped below a certain point (with different consumers valuing goods differently, but all pursuing the same "get-it-while-you-can" strategy), then a monopolist could set prices very high initially and then "eat his way down the demand curve," extracting maximum profit in what Bagnoli et al. called "the Pacman strategy" after the voracious video-game character. Specifically, Bagnoli et al. state that "Pacman is a sequential best reply to get-it-while-you-can," a result they call "the Pacman Theorem". Their proof, however, relies strongly on the assumption that there is an infinite time horizon.

Choice architecture

Choice architecture is the design of different ways in which choices can be presented to consumers, and the impact of that presentation on consumer decision-making. For example, the number of choices presented, the manner in which attributes are described, and the presence of a "default" can all influence consumer choice. As a result, advocates of libertarian paternalism and asymmetric paternalism have endorsed the deliberate design of choice architecture to nudge consumers toward personally and socially desirable behaviors like saving for retirement, choosing healthier foods, or registering as an organ donor. These interventions are often justified by the fact that well-designed choice architectures can compensate for irrational decision-making biases to improve consumer welfare. These techniques have consequently become popular among policymakers, leading to the creation of the UK's Behavioural Insights Team and White House "Nudge Unit" for example. While many behavioral scientists stress that there is no neutral choice architecture and that consumers maintain autonomy and freedom of choice despite manipulations of choice architecture, critics of libertarian paternalism often argue that choice architectures designed to overcome irrational decision biases may impose costs on rational agents, for example by limiting choice or undermining respect for individual human agency and moral autonomy. The choice architecture term was originally coined by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Thaler and Sunstein have endorsed thoughtful design of choice architecture as a means to improve consumer decision-making by minimizing biases and errors that arise as the result of bounded rationality. This approach is an example of "libertarian paternalism", a philosophy endorsed by Thaler and Sunstein that aims to "nudge" individuals toward choices that are in their best interest without limiting choice. Libertarian paternalism may also be described as soft paternalism. Behavioral scientists have grouped the elements of choice architecture in different ways. For example, Thaler, Sunstein, and John P. Balz have focused on the following "tools" of choice architecture: defaults, expecting error, understanding mappings (which involves exploring the different ways that information presentation affects option comparisons), giving feedback, structuring complex choices, and creating incentives. Another group of leading behavioral scientists has created a typology of choice architecture elements dividing them into those that structure the choice set and those that describe the choice. Examples of choice set structuring include: the number of alternatives, decision aids, defaults, and choice over time. Describing choice options include: partitioning options and attributes, and designing attributes.

Takis Fotopoulos

Takis Fotopoulos born October 14, 1940 is a political philosopher and economist who founded the Inclusive Democracy movement, aiming at a synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He was an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles,. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature) and is the author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy (1997) in which the foundations of the Inclusive Democracy project were set. His latest book is The New World Order in Action: Volume 1: Globalization, the Brexit Revolution and the "Left"- Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations (December 2016). Fotopoulos is Greek and lives in London.

Global brain

The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more information, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a brain for the planet Earth. Proponents of the global brain hypothesis claim that the Internet increasingly ties its users together into a single information processing system that functions as part of the collective nervous system of the planet. The intelligence of this network is collective or distributed: it is not centralized or localized in any particular individual, organization or computer system. Therefore, no one can command or control it. Rather, it self-organizes or emerges from the dynamic networks of interactions between its components. This is a property typical of complex adaptive systems. The World-wide web in particular resembles the organization of a brain with its webpages (playing a role similar to neurons) connected by hyperlinks (playing a role similar to synapses), together forming an associative network along which information propagates. This analogy becomes stronger with the rise of social media, such as Facebook, where links between personal pages represent relationships in a social network along which information propagates from person to person. Such propagation is similar to the spreading activation that neural networks in the brain use to process information in a parallel, distributed manner. Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and were written about by many others before him, the term “global brain” was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain. How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.
Reviewing the strands of intellectual history that contributed to the global brain hypothesis, Francis Heylighen distinguishes four perspectives: “organicism”, “encyclopedism”, “emergentism” and “evolutionary cybernetics”. He asserts that these developed in relative independence but now are converging in his own scientific re-formulation. In the 19th century, the sociologist Herbert Spencer saw society as a social organism and reflected about its need for a nervous system. Entomologist William Wheeler developed the concept of the ant colony as a spatially extended organism, and in the 1930s he coined the term superorganism to describe such an entity. This concept was later adopted by thinkers such as Gregory Stock in his book Metaman and Joel de Rosnay to describe planetary society as a superorganism. The mental aspects of such an organic system at the planetary level were perhaps first broadly elaborated by palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In 1945, he described a coming “planetisation” of humanity, which he saw as the next phase of accelerating human “socialisation”. Teilhard described both socialization and planetization as irreversible, irresistible processes of macrobiological development culminating in the emergence of a noosphere, or global mind. The more recent living systems theory describes both organisms and social systems in terms of the "critical subsystems" ("organs") they need to contain in order to survive, such as an internal transport system, a resource reserve, and a decision-making system. This theory has inspired several thinkers, including Peter Russell and Francis Heylighen to define the global brain as the network of information processing subsystems for the planetary social system. In the perspective of encyclopedism, the emphasis is on developing a universal knowledge network. The first systematic attempt to create such an integrated system of the world's knowledge was the 18th century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. However, by the end of the 19th century, the amount of knowledge had become too large to be published in a single synthetic volume. To tackle this problem, Paul Otlet founded the science of documentation, now called information science. In the 1930s he envisaged a World Wide Web-like system of associations between documents and telecommunication links that would make all the world's knowledge available immediately to anybody. H. G. Wells proposed a similar vision of a collaboratively developed world encyclopedia that would be constantly updated by a global university-like institution. He called this a World Brain, as it would function as a continuously updated memory for the planet, although the image of humanity acting informally as a more organic global brain is a recurring motif in other of his works. The inventor of the World Wide Web, too, was inspired by the free-associative possibilities of the brain for his invention. The brain can link different kinds of information without any apparent link otherwise; Berners-Lee thought that computers could become much more powerful if they could imitate this functioning, i.e. make links between any arbitrary piece of information. The most powerful implementation of encyclopedism to date is Wikipedia, which integrates the associative powers of the world-wide-web with the collective intelligence of its millions of contributors, approaching the ideal of a global memory. The Semantic web, also first proposed by Berners-Lee, is a system of protocols to make the pieces of knowledge and their links readable by machines, so that they could be used to make automatic inferences, thus providing this brain-like network with some capacity for autonomous "thinking" or reflection.
This approach focuses on the emergent aspects of the evolution and development of complexity, including the spiritual, psychological, and moral-ethical aspects of the global brain, and is at present the most speculative approach. The global brain is here seen as a natural and emergent process of planetary evolutionary development. Here again Pierre Teilhard de Chardin attempted a synthesis of science, social values, and religion in his The Phenomenon of Man, which argues that the telos (drive, purpose) of universal evolutionary process is the development of greater levels of both complexity and consciousness. Teilhard proposed that if life persists then planetization, as a biological process producing a global brain, would necessarily also produce a global mind, a new level of planetary consciousness and a technologically supported network of thoughts which he called the noosphere. Teilhard's proposed technological layer for the noosphere can be interpreted as an early anticipation of the Internet and the Web.

Bid rigging

Bid rigging is a fraudulent scheme in procurement auctions resulting in non-competitive bids and can be performed by corrupt officials, by firms in an orchestrated act of collusion, or between officials and firms. This form of collusion is illegal in most countries. It is a form of price fixing and market allocation, often practiced where contracts are determined by a call for bids, for example in the case of government construction contracts. The typical objective of bid rigging is to enable the "winning" party to obtain contracts at uncompetitive prices (i.e., at higher prices if they are sellers, or lower prices if they are buyers). The other parties are compensated in various ways, for example, by cash payments, or by being designated to be the "winning" bidder on other contracts, or by an arrangement where some parts of the successful bidder's contract will be subcontracted to them. In this way, they "share the spoils" among themselves. Bid rigging almost always results in economic harm to the agency which is seeking the bids, and to the public, who ultimately bear the costs as taxpayers or consumers.

Exquisite corpse

Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis), is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun." as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge.") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. This technique was invented by surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching.

Syncretism

Syncretism (/ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/) is the combining of different beliefs, while blending practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism involves the merging or assimilation of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive approach to other faiths. Syncretism also occurs commonly in expressions of arts and culture (known as eclecticism) as well as politics (syncretic politics).

Enantiosis

Enantiosis, synoeciosis or discordia concors is a rhetorical device in which opposites are juxtaposed so that the contrast between them is striking. Examples include the famous maxim of Augustus, festina lente (hasten slowly), and the following passage from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians:

“ By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true;
As unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed;
As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things. ”
Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779) defined discordia concors as "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. (...) The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together

Exploding head syndrome

Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is a condition in which a person experiences unreal noises that are loud and of short duration when falling asleep or waking up. The noise may be frightening, typically occurs only occasionally, and is non serious in nature. A flash of light may also occur. Pain is typically absent.
The cause is unknown. Potential explanations include ear problems, temporal lobe seizure, nerve dysfunction, or specific genetic changes. Potential risk factors include psychological stress. It is classified as a sleep disorder or headache disorder. People often go undiagnosed.
There is no high quality evidence to support treatment. Reassurance may be sufficient. Clomipramine and calcium channel blockers have been tried. While the frequency of the condition is not well studied, some have estimated that it occurs in about 10% of people. Females are reportedly more commonly affected. The condition was initially described at least as early as 1876. The current name came into use in 1988.
Exploding head syndrome is classified as a parasomnia and a sleep-related dissociative disorder by the 2005 International Classification of Sleep Disorders and is an unusual type of auditory hallucination in that it occurs in people who are not fully awake. Individuals with exploding head syndrome hear or experience loud imagined noises as they are falling asleep or waking up, have a strong, often frightened emotional reaction to the sound, and do not report significant pain; around 10% of people also experience visual disturbances like perceiving visual static, lightning, or flashes of light. Some people may also experience heat, strange feelings in their torso, or a feeling of electrical tinglings that ascends to the head before the auditory hallucinations occur. With the heightened arousal, people experience distress, confusion, myoclonic jerks, tachycardia, sweating, and the sensation that feels as if they have stopped breathing and have to make a deliberate effort to breathe again. The pattern of the auditory hallucinations is variable. Some people report having a total of two or four attacks followed by a prolonged or total remission, having attacks over the course of a few weeks or months before the attacks spontaneously disappear, or the attacks may even recur irregularly every few days, weeks, or months for much of a lifetime. Some individuals mistakenly believe that EHS episodes are not natural events, but are the effects of directed energy weapons which create an auditory effect. Thus, EHS has been worked into conspiracy theories, but there is no scientific evidence that EHS has non-natural origins. The cause of EHS is unknown. A number of hypotheses have been put forth with the most common being dysfunction of the reticular formation in the brainstem responsible for transition between waking and sleeping.