Iran’s Perilous Preference Cascade
Posted: September 1, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: economics, self-determination Leave a commentAnalyze how Iran’s inability to respond to either internal economic or external military challenges will undermine the “inevitability” autocratic regimes depend on, by making the fact they are “out of cards” into common knowledge.
ChatGPT Prompt
September 1, 2026
For six months, Iran has demonstrated something autocratic regimes are often surprisingly good at: surviving conditions that outsiders assume must be unsustainable.
Its military infrastructure has been battered. Oil exports have been constricted. Inflation has surged. The Iranian rial has fallen through two million to the dollar on the parallel market. And yet the Islamic Republic remains standing.
That fact has encouraged a familiar conclusion: Iran is resilient.
Perhaps.
But resilience is a dangerous thing to extrapolate in an autocracy. Such regimes can maintain the appearance of inevitability for a very long time—right up until the moment that appearance breaks.
Iran may now be approaching precisely such a moment.
A. The Rial Is Saying Something New
Read the rest of this entry »ROC the V: Voting on Valence
Posted: May 30, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: affect, consciousness, economics, systems, values 1 CommentSequel to Do Nematodes Feel?
Write the skit where Nico Frijda + Lisa Feldman Barrett + James Russell judge Antonio Damasio/Karl Friston‘s valence theory of Risk/Opportunity/Cost(Value) as a rock battle.
ChatGPT Prompt
A Battle of the Bands at the Annual Congress of the Society for Affective Science
Scene 1: Opening
MC:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first annual…
ROC THE V!
Tonight’s question:
Read the rest of this entry »Is valence merely positive versus negative…
Or is it secretly a three-dimensional vector of Risk, Opportunity, and Cost?
Narrative Self Café V9: The NART of War (Towards Antifragile Economies)
Posted: January 8, 2026 Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: economics, politics, systems 2 CommentsSequel to Narrative Self Café V8: The Upside of Idiocy
Write the no-holds-barred skit with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s trademark dry wit, about No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing (a la Chaos Monkey) applied to political and economic systems.
ChatGPT Prompt
I. Opening Monologue — Taleb Enters (Dry, Unimpressed)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
(looking at the audience, not smiling)
Welcome. If you came here to hear how to make society stable, you’re in the wrong room.
Stability is what you get right before you blow up.
Today’s topic is NART — No-Notice Adversarial Readiness Testing.
It’s what armies do when they’re serious.
What engineers do when they don’t want to be paged at 3 a.m.
And what economists avoid because it hurts their feelings.
Ultimate Harmony
Posted: August 16, 2020 Filed under: Governance Reform | Tags: culture, economics, education, health, philosophy, politics, psychology, reform, religion, systems, transformation Leave a commentThe ultimate purpose and measure of mental, emotional, and spiritual health is a Harmonious Self, where each Part relates constructively to the Other.
The ultimate purpose and measure of political, economic, and cultural health is a similarly Harmonious Society.
The ultimate purpose and measure of parenting, education and religion is our ability to become Harmonious Selves who co-construct more Harmonious Societies. Read the rest of this entry »
8 Design Principles for Self-Governance
Posted: November 2, 2016 Filed under: Governance Reform | Tags: commons, economics Leave a commentFrom Elinor Ostrom via Evonomics.
Eight core design principles:
- Clearly defined boundaries
- Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs
- Collective choice arrangements
- Monitoring
- Graduated sanctions
- Fast and fair conflict resolution
- Local autonomy
- Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance).
Radical Centrism 