(no subject)

[watertank]

...when Confucius, the most famous and revered East Asian teacher, was asked by his students to tell them the meaning of athoritative personhood or jen - the conceptual pivot of his entire philosophy - he refrained from ever giving them a a definition. In diametric opposition to the Platonic insistence on defining essences, Confucius related paradigmatic stories. Knowing what a word means is not knowing what it signifies, but how to conduct oneself in situations where it is used.

Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock .p. 6

see also Eleanor Rosch, http://psychology.berkeley.edu/faculty/profiles/erosch2007.pdf

Comments

[watertank.livejournal.com]

Control establishes a current - a kind and direction of movement in our narration - that speeds some of us to our desired ends and against which others of us will either vainly struggle or capitulate.

== cf. early adopters, early majority, etc.

[watertank.livejournal.com]

"artificially high volume of our wants".

== also kinds of wants, i.e. if a want is a payload, then who controls the flow of our wants?

[watertank.livejournal.com]

In the marketplace, wealth and power can be accumulated most rapidly when the market is furthest from equilibrium or financial entropy. That is, when the market is most volatile, there is plenty of economic energy and attention to be selectively diverted.
..
One of the reasons fads are so profitable for the corporate world is that they produce remarkably intense singularities of wanting throughout a population - curvatures of social and economic space that greatly accelerate the flow of wealth and thus afford significanly increased "handling" ability for those in a position to direct the resulting current. p. 143

===
cf. transition in control points: from a cool product to the control of the pace of system evolution.

cf. political "technologies". cool idea - movement.

disruption -> disequilibrium.

technology disequilibrium - cf S-curve.