Recommended Reading

Information Dissemination – US Naval Institute Official Announcement on Mission Change and The Mission of the U.S. Naval Institute by Rear Admiral Tom Marfiak (ret)

Campaign War Room – The dynamic nature of public opinion 

Inkspots –Some thoughts on LTG Caldwell’s probably-legal-but-still-wildly-inappropriate influence operations 

Eide Neurolearning Blog –Made to Stick Learning

SEED – Humans, Version 3.0

….Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended-i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.

American Scientist – Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

…Premodern humans-often described as “archaic Homo sapiens“-were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.

….The idea of an archaic-to-modern human transition in Homo sapiens arises, in part, from this narrative tradition. All this makes for a satisfying story, but it is not a realistic framework for understanding the actual, complex and contingent course of human evolution. Most evolutionary changes are relatively minor things whose consequences play out incrementally over thousands of generations.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Conversations with History – Ian Morris on Why the West Rules for Now

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