• for: titling elections, voting - social media, voting - search engine bias, SEME, search engine manipulation effect, Robert Epstein
• summary
  • research that shows how search engines can actually bias towards a political candidate in an election and tilt the election in favor of a particular party.

• for: search engine manipulation effect, SEME, voting, voting - bias, voting - manipulation, voting - search engine bias, democracy - search engine bias, quote, quote - Robert Epstein, quote - search engine bias, stats, stats - tilting elections
• paraphrase
• quote
  • In our early experiments, reported by The Washington Post in March 2013,
    • http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/could-google-tilt-a-close-election/2013/03/29/c8d7f4e6-9587-11e2-b6f0-a5150a247b6a_story.html?ref=hackernoon.com
  • we discovered that Google’s search engine had the power to shift the percentage of undecided voters supporting a political candidate by a substantial margin without anyone knowing.
  • 2015 PNAS research on SEME
    • http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.full.pdf?with-ds=yes&ref=hackernoon.com
    • stats begin
    • search results favoring one candidate
    • could easily shift the opinions and voting preferences of real voters in real elections by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups
    • with virtually no one knowing they had been manipulated.
    • stats end
    • Worse still, the few people who had noticed that we were showing them biased search results
    • generally shifted even farther in the direction of the bias,
    • so being able to spot favoritism in search results is no protection against it.
    • stats begin
    • Google’s search engine 
      • with or without any deliberate planning by Google employees 
    • was currently determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the world’s national elections.
    • This is because Google’s search engine lacks an equal-time rule,
      • so it virtually always favors one candidate over another, and that in turn shifts the preferences of undecided voters.
    • Because many elections are very close, shifting the preferences of undecided voters can easily tip the outcome.
    • stats end

• for: Hiliary Clinton could have won, voting, democracy, voting - social media, democracy - social media, election - social media, facebook - election, 2016 US elections, 2016 Trump election, 2016 US election, 2016 US election - different results, 2016 election - social media
• interesting fact
  • If Facebook had sent a "Go out and vote" message on election day of 2016 election, Clinton may have had a boost of 450,000 additional votes
    • and the outcome of the election might have been different

• for: early adopters, social tipping points, wide bridges
• question
• paraphrase
  • who are the envisioned early adopters?
    • there are numerous experiments going on everywhere
    • new digital currencies
    • new types of democratic systems
    • new kinds of economic system proposals
    • existing communities may have a few thousand members, but can be exponentially grown to hundreds of millions
    • lots of small prototypes being built right now, we find the optimal ones and scale those

• for: societal design, designing societies, societal architecture, transforming society, whole system change, SSO, social superorganism, John Boik

The seven main ideas for societal design: 1. societal transformation - is necessary to avoid catastrophe 2. the specific type of transformation is science-based transformation based on entirely new systems - de novo design - 3. A practical way to implement the transformation in the real world - it must be economical, and doable within the short time window for system change before us. - Considering a time period of 50 years for total change, with some types of change at a much higher priority than others. - The change would be exponential so starting out slower, and accelerating - Those communities that are the first to participate would make the most rapid improvements. 4. Promoting a worldview of society as a social superorganism, a cognitive organism, and its societal systems as a cognitive architecture. 5. Knowing the intrinsic purpose of a society - each subsystem must be explained in terms of the overall intrinsic purpose. 6. The reason for transformation - Transformation that improves cognition reduces the uncertainty that our society's intrinsic purpose is fulfilled. 7. Forming a partnership between the global science community and all the local communities of the world.

• for: Social Superorganism, SSO, reform vs transformation
• comment
  • John distinguishes between
    • reform and
    • transformation.
  • In the simplest terms,
    • reform deals with changes to an existing paradigm whilst
    • transformation deals with fundamental structural changes of an existing paradigm - a paradigm shift.
  • John views societal systems as
    • a social superorganism (SSO) and the major cognitive architectures as SSO systems such as
      • legal,
      • economic,
      • social,
      • governance,
      • education, etc
  • as cognitive architectures of the SSO. -The theoretical question being asked is:
    • There is an optimization problem. Of all possible variations, which one has the best fitness to the function of a society that operates within earth system boundaries?

• for: communications, TPF, STP
  • community radio
    • KDNA
    • WGXC

• for: polycrisis, collapse, tweedledums, tweedledees, wicked problem, social mess, stuck, stuckness, complexity
• title
  • Is This How Political Collapse Will Unfold?
• author
  • Dave Pollard
• date
  • Aug 3, 2023
• comment
  • thought provoking
  • honest, diverse, open thinking
  • a good piece of writing to submit to SRG / Deep Humanity analysis for surfacing insights
  • adjacency
    • complexity
    • emptiness
    • stuckness
      • this word "stuckness" stuck out in me (no pun intended) today - so many intractable, stuck problems, at all levels of society, because we oversimplify complexity to the point of harmful abstraction.

• definition

  • Tweedledums

    • This is a Reactionary Caste that believes that salvation lies in a return to a non-existent nostalgic past, characterized by respect for
      • authority,
      • order,
      • hierarchy,
      • individual initiative, and
      • ‘traditional’ ways of doing things,
    • governed by a
      • strict,
      • lean,
      • paternalistic elite
    • that leaves as much as possible up to individual families guided by
      • established ‘family values’ and
      • by their interpretation of the will of their god.

  • Tweedledees

    • This is a PM (Professional-Managerial) Caste that believes that salvation lies in striving for an impossibly idealistic future characterized by
      • mutual care,
      • affluence
      • relative equality for all,
    • governed by a
      • kind,
      • thoughtful,
      • educated,
      • informed and
      • representative
    • elite that appreciates the role of public institutions and regulations, and is guided by principles of
      • humanism and
      • ‘fairness’.
  • references
  • Aurélien
    • https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/reality-would-like-a-word
  • source
  • led here by reading Dave Pollard's other article
    • https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2021/09/13/something-better-than-democracy/
    • which was the result of a Google search on "better than democracy"

• for: social tipping point, STP, social norms, 35% threshold, 25% threshold, TPF
• question
  • is this result contradicting Centola's 25% threshold finding?

• for: social tipping point, STP, TPF, social norms, complex contagion, lowering threshold
• policy changes can lower tipping point thresholds

• for: social tipping point, STP, tipping point, social norm, complex contagion
• study findings
  • Two factors can help hasten beneficial change
    • common understanding of the benefits from change due to:
      • events that attract attention
      • opinion polls that aggregate information
      • finding an angle on an issue that appeals to a broad demographics
    • perserverence
      • leaders who persevere even at great cost

• for: social tipping point, STP, 25% threshold, 35% threshold, social norms, complex contagion, TPF
• title
  • Social tipping points and forecasting norm change
• authors
  • Nikos Nikiforakis
  • Simon Siegenthaler James Andreoni

• for: social-climatic tipping points, tipping points,
• title
  • An interdisciplinary framework for navigating social–climatic tipping points

• for: social tipping point, social tipping points, leverage point, leverage points, STP, 25% STP threshold

• title

  • Climate change can drive social tipping points – for better or for worse
• source
  • https://theconversation.com/climate-change-can-drive-social-tipping-points-for-better-or-for-worse-210641
• date
  • July 31, 2023
• author
  • Sonia Graham
• reference
  • https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10516

• for: social organization - evolutionary purpose,
• paraphrase
  • human social organization exists to maximize
    • the extraction of energy from the environment to the group and individual (X), and
    • the efficiency of the conversion of extracted energy into offspring (E). -This is identical to the claim that
    • social organization exists to maximize the fitness of the group (Wilson and Sober 1994) and/or the individuals which compose the group (Nowak et al. 2010),
  • given an energetic definition of fitness.

• for: social tipping points, STP, social tipping point, leverage point, Sirkku Juhola

• title

  • Social tipping points and adaptation limits in the context of systemic risk: Concepts, models and governance
• authors
  • Sirkku Juhola
  • Tatiana Filatova
  • Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler
  • Reinhard Mechler
  • Jurgen Scheffran
  • Pia-Johanna Schweizer
• date
  • Sept 21, 2022

• abstract

  • Physical tipping points have gained a lot of attention in global and climate change research to understand the conditions for system transitions when it comes to the atmosphere and the biosphere.
  • Social tipping points have been framed as mechanisms in socio-environmental systems, where a small change in the underlying elements or behavior of actors triggers a large non-linear response in the social system.
  • With climate change becoming more acute, it is important to know whether and how societies can adapt.
  • While social tipping points related to climate change have been associated with positive or negative outcomes,
    • overstepping adaptation limits has been linked to adverse outcomes where actors' values and objectives are strongly compromised.
  • Currently, the evidence base is limited, and most of the discussion on social tipping points in climate change adaptation and risk research is conceptual or anecdotal.
  • This paper brings together three strands of literature -
    • social tipping points,
    • climate adaptation limits and
    • systemic risks,
  • which so far have been separate.
  • Furthermore, we discuss
    • methods and
    • models
  • used to illustrate the dynamics of
    • social and
    • adaptation tipping points
  • in the context of cascading risks at different scales beyond adaptation limits.
  • We end with suggesting that further evidence is needed to identify tipping points in social systems,
    • which is crucial for developing appropriate governance approaches.

• reference

  • https://www.rifs-potsdam.de/en/news/social-tipping-points-spotlight

• for: social tipping point, social tipping points, leverage point, STP

• reference

  • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontiersin.org%2Farticles%2F10.3389%2Ffclim.2022.1009234&group=world

I'm afraid this is one of those sentiments that should absolutely be tossed in the because of lack of user control category

This, I particularly hate and hope desperately I did not contribute to.

This I would very much like to learn more details about... I've been unable to find comprehensive documentation of Bluesky's API thus far.

-for: awe, wonder, Deep Humanity, inner transformation, transition, inner/outer transformation, social tipping point, individual tipping point - Awe / wonder (getting in touch with the sacred) is evolutions solution to helping us transition into the unknown - This is in alignment with the essence of the open source Deep Humanity praxis - helping individuals to rediscover the sacred, to transform life back into a living experience of awe and wonder - Deep Humanity's purpose is to rekindle awe so that - we may bring about an individual tipping point, and collectively, - collective tipping point in global society to accelerate the transition out of the polycrisis

...moving from the scared back to the sacred

Meador, Jake. “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church.” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/christian-church-communitiy-participation-drop/674843/.

Meador looks at how churches might offer better community as a balm to W.E.I.R.D. lifeways and toxic capitalism.

Why must religion be the source for these communal and social supports? Why can't alternate social structures or institutions handle these functions?

Is this why the religious right is also so heavily opposed to governmental social support programs? Are they replacing some of the needs and communal desires people in need have? Why couldn't increased governmental support programs be broader and more holistic in their leanings to cover not only social supports, but human contact and community building as well.

Do some of these tensions between a mixed W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D Americans cause a lot of the split political identities we see in the last few decades? What is the balm for this during the transition?

Why can't these community activities be done in a religion-free environment? Is God actually needed here? What else could serve as the glue? Or is community itself the glue.

It's really saying something that in paragraph 2 the "sell" for religion is the health and social benefits and outcomes rather than the love or support of god(s)!

• for: social tipping point, social tipping points, STP, Tim Lenton, positive tipping points

• for: social tipping points, STP

• for: system change, social tipping point
  • if theology can change so radically, so too can economics

Applying the WEF meme about pods and bugs to Threads inspiring Bluesky and one Mastodon app to push algorithmic feeds.

We can encourage intended behaviours in end users by showing them just in time reminders. For example a quick popup reminding users about moderation rules on a site they are about to post to

People who are about to break a rule are less likely to do so if they are reminded that they should behave themselves at the time of temptation.

People will cheat and do questionable stuff as long as they can convince themselves that those things are still within their own moral belief system.

• for: social tipping point, STP
• title
  • Creating Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
• guest
  • Damon Centola
• description
  • a very clear exposition of how complex contagion works and what must be done to spread complex behavior change
• comment
  • this is particularly important for rapid whole system change and mobilizing a bottom-up movement to deal with our current polycrisis

• Key finding
  • when the size of the committed minority reached ~25% of the population,
    • a tipping point was triggered, and the minority group succeeded in changing the established social convention.

• The Buddha taught that everything is
  • connected and
  • constantly changing.
• These fundamental observations of the world are shared by
  • ecology and
  • evolution.
• We are living in a time of unprecedented rates of extinction.
• Science provides us with the information that we need to address this extinction crisis.
• However, the problems underlying extinction generally do not result from a lack of scientific understanding,
  • but they rather result from an unwillingness to take the needed action.

• I present mindfulness and meditative aspects of Zen practice that provide the deeper “knowing,” or awareness that we need to inspire action on these problems.

• comment

  • emptiness is interdependency and change
  • in Deep Humanity praxis, it is equivalent to
    • human INTERbeing and
    • human INTERbeCOMing

I don't understand how you could audit this, unless you had to force a default of chronological presentation of posts etc.

• Third great separation

  • industrial agricultural revolution

    • Farming was a community affair, by necessity.
    • Nearly everyone in the United States lived on a farm, had lived on a farm, or knew someone who lived on a farm.
    • There was still a sense of connectedness to the land, the earth, through food and farming.
    • But ​“times changed” in rural America.

    • The industrialization of agriculture removed the necessity for community-based farming.

    • Farmers eventually lost their sense of connectedness to

      • their land,
      • to each other and
      • to their communities.
    • Consumers no longer know
      • who produces their food,
      • where it was produced, or
      • how it was produced.
    • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.
    • Food for family gatherings and religious holidays are of economic importance to the food industry,
      • but have little social or spiritual significance beyond following cultural traditions.
    • The dependence of humanity on the Earth for food is no less than during the early times of hunting and gathering,
      • but the sense of connectedness between the eater and the Earth has been lost.

• quote

  • Farming was a community affair, by necessity
  • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.

the folly of endless bla, bla bla, people viewing the mind as a big boy, while in reality, it is a little boy who is undisciplined and goes on random rants and tangents, liking and disliking everything it sees on social-media

Babylon Bee article with made up Mark Zuckerberg quote touting the virtues of Threads. This is some of the Bee's finest writing and not at all inaccurate.

Simple social sharing made the product take off

(14:20-19:00) Dopamine Prediction Error is explained by Andrew Huberman in the following way: When we anticipate something exciting dopamine levels rise and rise, but when we fail it drops below baseline, decreasing motivation and drive immensely, sometimes even causing us to get sad. However, when we succeed, dopamine rises even higher, increasing our drive and motivation significantly... This is the idea that successes build upon each other, and why celebrating the "marginal gains" is a very powerful tool to build momentum and actually make progress. Surprise increases this effect even more: big dopamine hit, when you don't anticipate it.

Social Media algorithms make heavy use of this principle, therefore enslaving its user, in particular infinite scrolling platforms such as TikTok... Your dopamine levels rise as you're looking for that one thing you like, but it drops because you don't always have that one golden nugget. Then it rises once in a while when you find it. This contrast creates an illusion of enjoyment and traps the user in an infinite search of great content, especially when it's shortform. It makes you waste time so effectively. This is related to getting the success mindset of preferring delayed gratification over instant gratification.

It would be useful to reflect and introspect on your dopaminic baseline, and see what actually increases and decreases your dopamine, in addition to whether or not these things help to achieve your ambitions. As a high dopaminic baseline (which means your dopamine circuit is getting used to high hits from things as playing games, watching shortform content, watching porn) decreases your ability to focus for long amounts of time (attention span), and by extent your ability to learn and eventually reach success. Studying and learning can actually be fun, if your dopamine levels are managed properly, meaning you don't often engage in very high-dopamine emitting activities. You want your brain to be used to the low amounts of dopamine that studying gives. A framework to help with this reflection would be Kolb's.

A short-term dopamine reset is to not use the tool or device for about half an hour to an hour (or do NSDR). However, this is not a long-term solution.

Why do governments and some so-called education leaders ask about how to best help (academically) children from "poor circumstances" in such a way that improving their circumstances is never part of the equation despite it being the immediate root of their problem?

other things that came to mind:

• social/collective annotation like Hypothesis
• publishing notes online through digital gardens, etc
• online journaling

Social Network activities measurement: Writing materials. Sharing Photos Contributing rankings and reviews of products or services Creating tags of content Posting comments on 3rd party websites or blogs Posting comments on other websites Using twitter or other status update features Creating or working on a personal website Creating or working on blog Taking online material and remixing into a new creation

• Quote worthy
  • "“Protracted immaturity and dependence on paternal care
    • is not an unfortunate byproduct of our evolution
    • but instead a highly adaptive trait of our species,
    • which has enabled human infants to
      • efficiently organize attention to social agents and
      • learn efficiently from social output,”
  • “The evolutionary goal of altricial species is
    • not to become highly competent as quickly as possible
    • but rather to excel at learning over time.”
• Authors
  • Michael Goldstein,
  • Katerina Faust,
  • Samantha Carouso-Peck
  • Mary R. Elson

• Title
  • The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species,
• Journal
  • The Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, - -
• Publication Date
  • Dec, 2021
• Authors
• Michael Goldstein,
• Katerina Faust,
  • Samantha Carouso-Peck and
  • Mary R. Elson

https://nostr.com/

Peter Kominski likes this generally.

From late 2022

https://trakt.tv/dashboard

https://atomicbooks.com/pages/john-waters-fan-mail

John Waters receives fan mail via Atomic Books in Baltimore, MD.

Them: So what are we really talking about here?

Me: Do you want the cosmic answer?

Them: Sure.

Me: OK. We're in the process of creating a planetary nervous system.

https://firesky.tv/

Critique of Perusall as about right or wrong versus the social construction of knowledge.

friendliness definitely needs to be explicitly defined here.

Have you seen the goddamned art? lol

Now just imagine the equivalent on the scale of an entire server and you've got the story of Mastodon's incredibly centralized, swift expulsion of Gab's influence. Here's The Verge's version for the moment.

"Most contemporary psychological scientists define approach motivation as the impulse to go toward positive stimuli, where stimuli are external goal objects (Lang & Bradley, 2008)."

Abstract

Publish (on your) Own Site, Spam Everywhere

This is... an extremely strange conclusion to come to regarding Social Web account migration, to say the least.

Taking Mastodon as the handy example...

The only reason to use the (extremely competent, bizarrely fast) process of redirection is that one... would like to have the "required" redirect on the original server. If a user intends to move to a different Mastodon instance and does not want to leave a redirect, that step is just... removed from the process.

lmao no

Calckey is a very near fork of Misskey if I'm not mistaken.

Even since I highlighted this, some years ago, the actual tragedy of the Periscope story got so much worse...

(Including Bekypour reap Periscope for parts to build Twitter Spaces and then forget for some 10 straight days after the public commitment date to actually put it out of its misery.)

proceso de constitución histórico social de la infancia

social bookmarking option. not open source. freemium

reply to u/bestlunchtoday at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/12gadut/benefits_of_sharing_permanent_notes/

I love the diversity of ideas here! So many different ways to do it all and perspectives on the pros/cons. It's all incredibly idiosyncratic, just like our notes.

I probably default to a far extreme of sharing the vast majority of my notes openly to the public (at least the ones taken digitally which account for probably 95%). You can find them here: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich.

Not many people notice or care, but I do know that a small handful follow and occasionally reply to them or email me questions. One or two people actually subscribe to them via RSS, and at least one has said that they know more about me, what I'm reading, what I'm interested in, and who I am by reading these over time. (I also personally follow a handful of people and tags there myself.) Some have remarked at how they appreciate watching my notes over time and then seeing the longer writing pieces they were integrated into. Some novice note takers have mentioned how much they appreciate being able to watch such a process of note taking turned into composition as examples which they might follow. Some just like a particular niche topic and follow it as a tag (so if you were interested in zettelkasten perhaps?) Why should I hide my conversation with the authors I read, or with my own zettelkasten unless it really needed to be private? Couldn't/shouldn't it all be part of "The Great Conversation"? The tougher part may be having means of appropriately focusing on and sharing this conversation without some of the ills and attention economy practices which plague the social space presently.

There are a few notes here on this post that talk about social media and how this plays a role in making them public or not. I suppose that if I were putting it all on a popular platform like Twitter or Instagram then the use of the notes would be or could be considered more performative. Since mine are on what I would call a very quiet pseudo-social network, but one specifically intended for note taking, they tend to be far less performative in nature and the majority of the focus is solely on what I want to make and use them for. I have the opportunity and ability to make some private and occasionally do so. Perhaps if the traffic and notice of them became more prominent I would change my habits, but generally it has been a net positive to have put my sensemaking out into the public, though I will admit that I have a lot of privilege to be able to do so.

Of course for those who just want my longer form stuff, there's a website/blog for that, though personally I think all the fun ideas at the bleeding edge are in my notes.

Since some (u/deafpolygon, u/Magnifico99, and u/thiefspy; cc: u/FastSascha, u/A_Dull_Significance) have mentioned social media, Instagram, and journalists, I'll share a relevant old note with an example, which is also simultaneously an example of the benefit of having public notes to be able to point at, which u/PantsMcFail2 also does here with one of Andy Matuschak's public notes:

[Prominent] Journalist John Dickerson indicates that he uses Instagram as a commonplace: https://www.instagram.com/jfdlibrary/ here he keeps a collection of photo "cards" with quotes from famous people rather than photos. He also keeps collections there of photos of notes from scraps of paper as well as photos of annotations he makes in books.

It's reasonably well known that Ronald Reagan shared some of his personal notes and collected quotations with his speechwriting staff while he was President. I would say that this and other similar examples of collaborative zettelkasten or collaborative note taking and their uses would blunt u/deafpolygon's argument that shared notes (online or otherwise) are either just (or only) a wiki. The forms are somewhat similar, but not all exactly the same. I suspect others could add to these examples.

And of course if you've been following along with all of my links, you'll have found yourself reading not only these words here, but also reading some of a directed conversation with entry points into my own personal zettelkasten, which you can also query as you like. I hope it has helped to increase the depth and level of the conversation, should you choose to enter into it. It's an open enough one that folks can pick and choose their own path through it as their interests dictate.

Introducing Substack Notes<br /> by Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi

Substack slowly adding features and functionality to make them a full stack blogging/social platform... first long form, then short note features...

Also pushing in on Twitter's lunch as Twitter is having issues.

...who thought this was a good idea??

I realized after fully digesting this document that it effectively outlines a mechanism of anti-discovery.

True again. Many websites, this one included has 10+ visual graphics in the form of; videos, images and gifs. Unfortunately, they end up annoying most viewers than engaging with them if their aim is to read.

link to https://hypothes.is/a/U95jEs0eEe20EUesAtKcuA

Is this phenomenon of "complex narratives" related to misinformation spread within the larger and more complex social network/online network? At small, local scales, people know how to handle data and information which is locally contextualized for them. On larger internet-scale communication social platforms this sort of contextualization breaks down.

For a lack of a better word for this, let's temporarily refer to it as "complex narratives" to get a handle on it.

moss sponging by chmpanzees - is a phenomena observed by researchers - in which the distinction between<br /> - individual and - collective learning - is fuzzy - Sponging is a technique of wild chimpanzees - in which they use chewed up plant material - as a sponge to soak up water - One individual wild chimpanzee - named by the researchers as KW - picked up a discarded sponge used by another wild chimpanzee - which happened to have moss in it - and so developed a sponge for water specifically from moss - KW did not learn it socially from another chimpanzee - yet if it weren't for - the behavior of other chimpanzees in the group - cultural artefacts they left behind - niche construction that resulted to changes in the environment - the individual learning of KW would never have produced moss sponging

individual and social are deeply entangled

• This primate example demonstrates an ambiguity between individual and social learning.
• The problem with this way of defining things exclusively as either
  • individual or
  • social
• is that we ignore the fact that,
  • even when acting in a manner
  • that appears to involve no direct interaction with other creatures,
• organisms nonetheless develop and learn in environments
  • that have been affected by the prior actions of their conspecifics (and not just their conspecifics).
• This is precisely the sort of phenomenon
  • stressed by the proponents of the niche-construction approach to evolution,
  • and it is also stressed by developmental systems theorists [40,41].
• Organisms grow in environments that have been constructed
  • by the actions of previous generations:
    • in that way, what an organism learns
    • can be profoundly affected and enhanced
    • by the collective activities of individuals it may never meet.
• In other words, we should not assume
  • that there is any good distinction
  • between
    • individual learning and
    • what we might call ‘social transmission’.
• The latter can be achieved via the former.