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Just as mimesis and metaphysical desire can make people conform they can also make people divide: Breaking away from the group to carve your own path can also be socially determined, s howing up with a cheap shirt to a dinner where everyone is wearing expensive suits is in some sense also a power play, y ou are so much better than the rest of them ... See more

As I will use the term, then, a sermon is any message designed to change or reinforce what a group of people value. It might take the form of explicit exhortation, full of shoulds and shouldn'ts , oughts and mustn'ts . Or it may be entirely implicit, like the story of a selfless act that saves the day, huzzah! Commencement speeches, TED talks, pres... See more

There are many traps, both logical and emotional, that can get in the way. Steve Jobs’s philosophy is one school of thought that can be misapplied ––“Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.”

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt . Every link dou... See more