Democracy

Arenas of Influence: Shaping Belief in the Digital Age 1 Arenas of Influence – Part 1: The Politician's Playbook 2 Arenas of Influence – Part 2: You Are What You Buy 3 Arenas of Influence – Part 3: The Lies We Tell Ourselves ← Series Home Emotion Primary driver of political decisions Political psychology Rationalization Brain resolves data-desire conflicts Neural activity studies The Primacy of the Gut: Why Reason Buckles The prevailing vision of democracy—a dispassionate electorate weighing evidence and rationally calculating costs and benefits—bears almost no relation to how the mind actually works during a campaign. When the American public votes, the decisions are invariably driven by emotion and deeply rooted psychological networks, not by dispassionate reasoning. This is true not only for the politically unengaged but also for the most informed partisans. Political persuasion, therefore, operates not in the marketplace of ideas, but primarily in the far more potent marketplace of emotions. ...

Bio-Inspired Resilience: Nature's Blueprints for Adaptive Systems 1 Bio-Inspired Resilience - Part 1: The Wood Wide Web-How Electrical Signals and Fungi Create a Forest Brain 2 Bio-Inspired Resilience - Part 2: Ant Colonies as Superorganisms-When Simple Rules Create Stabilizing Hysteresis 3 Bio-Inspired Resilience - Part 3: Bee Democracy-Balancing Speed and Accuracy Through Quorum Sensing 4 Bio-Inspired Resilience - Part 4: Coral Reefs-The Built-in Redundancy of Nature's Symbiotic Cities 5 Bio-Inspired Resilience - Part 5: Applying Biomimicry to Human Systems-Building Robustness from Nature's Blueprint ← Series Home The Conundrum of the Queenless Choice In late spring, a honeybee colony casts a swarm—a mass exodus involving the old queen and about 10,000 workers—to found a new daughter colony. This crowd clusters, and its scout bees embark on a life-or-death mission: choosing a new home. This decision is not merely about comfort; colonies that choose poorly—such as a cavity too small to store the 20+ kilograms (45+ lb) of honey needed for winter—will perish. The central paradox is that this critical, multi-attribute decision is made by hundreds of tiny-brained scouts acting collectively, without the queen, who is merely the “Royal Ovipositer,” serving only as a genetic anchor. The swarm’s success hinges on solving a “best-of-N” choice problem: accurately selecting the single best option from dozens of possibilities discovered by noisy, independent scouts. ...