How Network Analysis Fits into My Research Network analysis is a part of graph theory and is useful to sociologists for modeling the relationships between social actors. Networks are composed of nodes representing the actors and vectors representing the relationships between them. We’re careful not to call the nodes “people” because not all of them are human actors. Some of these nodes we can call “texts”. A text can be anything that is created by an author (a book, a video,…
The Identity Industrial Complex | the blasé attitude Last week, I introduced a piece called “The Identity Industrial Complex”, which laid out the broad themes of Simmel’s essay on the sociology of metropolitan life. Simmel focuses his analysis of modernity on the city because we can see all the characteristics of modern life – all its peculiarities and neuroses – in their most concentrated and crystalline forms. This essay examines a few key points of Simmel’s sociology at a…
This Post has been Brought to You by the Acorns Investment App When I decided it was time to start saving for my future, I did the idiot boomer thing and significantly limited my consumption and saved greater portions of my paychecks each week. Once I had a few months of rent saved up, I took the excess and started direct stock purchasing plans with various companies. For almost two years I invested 50 to 200 dollars per month building a portfolio of high yield dividend…
The Love of Conquest The first thing I do each morning when I wake up is go for an all-out heavy workout. No dicking around. No breakfast. Just get up and go. Some mornings it’s a 3-mile run, others it’s weightlifting. I love the feeling of the hot, rich blood coursing through my body. A couple of nights a week I go to the boxing gym and work on my striking precision and hitting harder than I have before. It’s in these moments of fully exerting myself that I feel I’ve…
Introducing the Traditionalist School The idea of progress, that ideas and material culture accumulate in a manner that improves the lives of people across time, is one that is taken for granted. Even those students who have not taken philosophy in college have at least heard the name Hegel, and some of them might even know the crude formulation of his idea that history moves towards some final realization. Very few of those students would recognize the name Frithjof Schuon,…
Vicious Feedback Loops | Thinking about thinking You know that sound when you hold a microphone to the speaker it’s hooked up to? That’s feedback. In electronics-speak, they say the input from the mic is its own output from the speaker—the sound of recording sound. The sound that came in through the mic comes out the speaker and back into the mic again. It goes on like this until those frequencies build up into a scream. Our brains experience the same feedback phenomena. For…
This is Why You Suck at Trading Most deaths in the United States are from diseases of abundance – from the consequences of an easy, sedentary life with immediate access to your any and every craving. Yet, if you only ever see the world as generated by the pixels on your screens, you get an inverted world full of shootings and is constantly on the verge of collapse. Across the globe, deaths at the hands of communicable diseases, by accidents, and by violence are going down.…
Buddhism, on Suffering and the Force There’s an old story in the Buddhist canon about a student who asks his master, “It is terribly hot, how can we escape the heat?” “Go right down into the furnace,” replied the master. “But in the furnace,” said the student, “how do we escape the scorching fire?” “No further pains will harass you.” Of course, it wasn’t the heat that was bothering the student, and the master knew this. His master knew that his dissatisfaction was a symptom…
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