History & Politics

Notes and visualizations on power, government and their history.

35 entries

  • Contemporary Chinese thinkers & their key concepts

    Every person on the map of contemporary Chinese thought with the concepts they are known for — from the socialist market economy and the Three Represents to New Structural Economics, tianxia, common prosperity and new quality productive forces.

  • Contemporary Chinese thought — a map

    Fifty-three leaders, officials, economists, political theorists and technologists placed by birth year and prominence, colored by current of thought, and linked by lines of influence and debate — from Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping to Justin Yifu Lin, Zhao Tingyang and Liang Wenfeng.

  • Contemporary Chinese thought on economy, technology and politics — a synthesis

    A ten-minute read on how Chinese leaders, officials and scholars have framed three questions since 1978: plan and market, catching up in technology, and the organization of the political system — and the five patterns that recur across them.

  • The Heckler's Veto — a reader's summary

    Harry Kalven's 1965 name for letting a hostile audience's reaction decide whether a speaker is heard, the 1951 Feiner decision it grew out of, the 1992 Forsyth County ruling against it, and how mass reporting and pile-ons recreate it online.

  • The Wisdom of Crowds — a reader's summary

    Francis Galton's 1907 note on a Plymouth fair's ox-weighing contest, Condorcet's 1785 jury theorem, Surowiecki's four conditions, and the experiments showing how social influence erodes the effect — the case for and against trusting the average of a comment section.

  • Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs — a reader's summary

    Eliezer Yudkowsky's 2007 image of how a community grows more extreme when its doubters leave first: Festinger's When Prophecy Fails, Hirschman's exit and voice, and why the model is a sketch rather than a measured law.

  • Tone Policing — a reader's summary

    Answering how something was said instead of what was said: the April 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Audre Lorde's 1981 speech on anger, Paul Graham's 2008 disagreement hierarchy, and why the charge is easy to level and hard to prove.

  • Curtis Yarvin — the Cathedral, neocameralism, and the tech right

    The programmer who blogged as Mencius Moldbug and became the political philosopher of parts of Silicon Valley: the Cathedral, formalism, the state as a company with a sovereign CEO, exit over voice, RAGE — and how the ideas reached Washington. His life, main ideas, critiques, and impact.

  • Audience Capture — a reader's summary

    The feedback loop that drifts a creator's persona toward whatever their audience rewards — Eric Weinstein's early use of the phrase, the 2022 essay that spread it using a mukbang YouTuber as its case study, and why the label is as contestable as the pundits it's applied to.

  • Availability Cascade — a reader's summary

    Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein's 1999 theory of how repetition alone manufactures a claim's apparent credibility — the 1989 Alar apple-scare, “availability entrepreneurs,” and why platforms that display share counts shortened the cycle from weeks to hours.

  • Bothsidesism — a reader's summary

    Boykoff & Boykoff's 2004 study of “balance” in US climate coverage, Jay Rosen's view from nowhere, a 1974 Miami Herald column that used the word decades early, and why the accusation is as contestable as the practice it names.

  • Dog Whistle Politics — a reader's summary

    A coded-language accusation borrowed from an 1876 device for testing animal hearing — its mid-1990s Australian polling origin, Ian Haney López's 2014 book, and why a claim about covert meaning can never quite be settled.

  • The Straw Man Fallacy — a reader's summary

    Refuting a weaker substitute for an opponent's real argument — the phrase's own false Westminster Hall etymology, Douglas Walton's 1996 formalization, and the 2006 blog contest that named its “weak man” cousin nutpicking.

  • Dunbar's Number — a reader's summary

    Robin Dunbar's 1992 estimate that the brain sustains roughly 150 relationships, Gladwell's Gore-Tex anecdote, and the 2021 reanalysis that challenges the precision of the number.

  • The Spiral of Silence — a reader's summary

    Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's 1974 theory that fear of social isolation mutes minority opinions — its West German polling origin, and why anonymity hasn't broken the spiral online.

  • Tragedy of the Commons — a reader's summary

    Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay on shared resources destroyed by rational self-interest, and Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-winning evidence that real commons usually avoided the tragedy on their own.

  • Groupthink — a reader's summary

    Irving Janis's 1972 theory of how cohesive groups suppress dissent to preserve consensus, the Bay of Pigs case that inspired it, and the mixed evidence for whether cohesion itself is really the culprit.

  • Cunningham's Law — a reader's summary

    The internet adage that the fastest way to get a right answer online is to post a wrong one — Ward Cunningham's wiki-era observation, a secondhand quote, and why it's folklore about provocation rather than a tested law.

  • Illusory Truth Effect — a reader's summary

    The 1977 finding that repetition alone makes a claim feel truer, and why knowing the right answer doesn't fully protect you. Also in Philosophy.

  • Horseshoe Theory — a reader's summary

    Jean-Pierre Faye's bent-spectrum model of the far left and far right curving toward each other, and the political-science case that it measures authoritarian style, not ideological substance.

  • The Gish Gallop — a reader's summary

    Named for creationist debater Duane Gish, coined by Eugenie Scott in 1994 — the tactic of firing off more claims than an opponent can rebut in the time allowed, and its kinship with Brandolini's Law.

  • Whataboutism — a reader's summary

    A Cold War deflection tactic with a 1970s Irish name (“whataboutery”), the 2008 Russia coverage that spread the “-ism” spelling, and why the accusation is nearly as abusable as the tactic it describes.

  • Overton Window — a reader's summary

    Joseph Overton's mid-1990s range of politically acceptable ideas, the ladder built after his death, and how it became both an activist strategy and an online conspiracy accusation.

  • Purity Spiral — a reader's summary

    A group's internal contest over ideological commitment that escalates until only the most extreme position counts as pure — far older than the internet, and symmetric across ideology.

  • Godwin's Law — a reader's summary

    Mike Godwin's 1990 Usenet adage that long enough arguments always produce a Nazi comparison — the deliberate meme experiment behind it, and the blunter corollary he never fully endorsed.

  • 10×, then 100×: the case for scaling R&D

    If we are serious about becoming a multi-planetary species, we should multiply fundamental and operational R&D by 10 to 100 — especially as AI automates operative jobs.

  • Forms of rule through history

    The share of humanity living under each form of rule over time — counting the enslaved.

  • French law — map, debates & reform directions

    The main branches of French law, what's contested in each, and editorial directions for reform.

  • Measuring λ: a first estimate for France

    The circles-of-interest coefficient computed once, crudely: smooth private decay, plateau-and-cliff public settlement.

  • Occupations of humans

    How humanity spends its time — learning, food, physical and non-physical work, care, research, retirement — as a slice of total human time from 10,000 BCE to today.

  • Power structures through history

    A timeline map of the major power structures — from Achaemenid Persia and Rome to the Byzantine Empire, the Mongols, the British Empire and today's superpowers — and their relative strength in people ruled, GDP and military might.

  • Preference Falsification — a reader's summary

    Timur Kuran's theory of the gap between public and private opinion — why 1989 looked sudden, and what it explains about online conformity and opinion cascades.

  • Seeing Like a State — a reader's summary

    Legibility, high modernism and metis: why grand state schemes fail. Also in Philosophy.

  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — a reader's summary

    Behavioral data, prediction products, and instrumentarian power — the book behind the vocabulary of today's data-regulation debates. Also in Philosophy.

  • The circles of interest

    Politics as a trade-off of resources across circles around the individual — a methodology, ten probes, a research program. Also in Philosophy.