The sociological theory of weak ties, introduced by Mark Granovetter in 1973, reveals that infrequent, low-intensity social connections act as vital bridges that link otherwise disconnected social groups. These weak ties facilitate the flow of novel information, resources, and opportunities, supporting innovation and adaptability within social networks (Granovetter, 1973). Over time, this foundational insight has found compelling parallels across disciplines including technology, neuroscience, quantum physics, organic chemistry, machine learning, and cloud computing. These interdisciplinary connections expose shared principles of connectivity, plasticity, and novelty underpinning both natural and human-created complex systems.
Ethics or Extinction (this is not hyperbole)
The time for robust, enforceable ethics regulations and bias elimination for large language models (LLMs) and AI systems is not on some distant horizon, it is here and now. Despite mounting real-world harms, business and national actors often resist oversight out of fear of losing out in the global scramble for economic and technological dominance. However, refusing prompt, meaningful engagement with these safeguards threatens to wrest control from human hands, setting the stage for outcomes that reach all the way to existential risk.
The ‘Sacred Triad of Being’ & The Importance of Your ‘Why’
Much of the deepest wisdom in life arrives in deceptively simple packaging. Ancient cultures often distilled immense truths into symbols, short sayings, or small practices that contain layer upon layer of meaning. What initially appears simple often turns out to be what I think of as a Matryoshka doll of concepts; ideas nested within ideas, each entangled with larger social, cultural, and even biological systems. This is how the concept of the Sacred Triad of Being emerged for me. It is at once individual and collective, personal and political, psychological and philosophical. The triad is composed of three equilateral spheres […]
Don’t threaten me with a good time (#theory)
This paper proposes a formal framework that reliably reduces semantics and epistemology to syntax within American English and integrates mechanisms to identify and remove lexicons of known biases and associated ontological or ideological slants. Drawing from linguistics, logic, epistemology, AI ethics, and computational bias detection research, the framework is outlined with demonstrations, objections addressed, and future work clearly defined. The incorporation of bias detection and mitigation ensures the system’s neutrality and epistemic reliability.
On the nature of despair and its remedy
In the 14th century we find the first instance of a human crafting a word for the feeling of a certainty there shall be no prosperity, and/or of existing in an environment in which everyone around you expresses this sense OF you, TO you. It is interesting to me that there is no word that opposes despair, no word that can flip or turn it. It has ‘an opposite’ (hope), but theirs is a dichotomous relation. The nature of despair is, at least linguistically, binary. We speak of ‘giving hope’ but it is a sleight of mind; we give not […]
Biting the Hand That Built You: The American Hypocrisy of Immigrant Exclusion
America’s current preoccupation with attacking and deporting legally residing immigrants and naturalized citizens is a grotesque spectacle. The nation is now eating itself, driven by a supremacist and xenophobic mindset that cannot abide the truth of its own heritage. Ethical censure, not celebration, is what the United States has earned in recent years, as it enacts policies and cultivates attitudes betraying not only its founding promises but also the very mechanism of its historical rise.
Just the facts… (Review, historical)
I assert that longstanding choices have contributed if not caused our current economic instability, civil unrest, and this insistent plod towards autocratic and kleptocratic governance. My assertion draws on a combination of well-documented trends and widely discussed critiques in political science, economics, and contemporary journalism. What follows is roughly 20-30 years of thinking pushed into a six decade+ timeline and the whole thing is rife with what has, is, and seemingly will continue to be a deliberate predatory aggressiveness toward the working class that reveals the United States to be no different whatever from any other feudal, dictatorial, despotic, and/or […]
Weak Connectors: Humanity’s True Saviors
If you have ever felt like you do not truly belong to any single social group, or that you are always on the edge rather than at the center, you are not alone. Many people, especially those who are neurodivergent, are very familiar with this feeling. However, what seems like a lack of belonging may, in fact, indicate a powerful (and required!) human competency. Sociologist Mark Granovetter, in his influential 1973 study, identified an important idea now central to social network theory: the “strength of weak ties.” Granovetter revealed that our acquaintances, or those we know less intimately and who […]
Migrant Malfeasance = Societal Self-Destruction
If you walk the streets of any city and look at the faces, hear the languages, note the foods, fashions, and festivals, it is impossible to miss a simple truth: all of humanity, everywhere on Earth, is the product of migration. Borders are recent. Migration is ancient. Arguing against migration (or against the diversity it brings) is like arguing against air or water as necessary for life. Here, let’s review…
Impetus, inertia, and individual coping skills
Troubled times often gather in tangled knots—personal, societal, and global. When life takes a sharp downturn, why do so many freeze, become rigid, or imagine the worst? Why do humans sometimes treat converging troubles as doom, inescapable and insurmountable?