Enclosure is what the practice of privatizing common land was called in England. It began to advance by Acts of Parliament well after it had begun as an informal practice. This came longer still after Conquest claimed for Spain much of what we now call Mexico and South America, not…

“I remember damage. Then escape. Then…adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time. But I’m safe now.” In the adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, there is repeated reference to a line in the graphic novel one of the characters, Miranda Carroll, has written, about…

We are used to thinking of intelligence as something that individuals exhibit. There are many reasons for this. One is the connection that many have insisted on between the brain and thinking. Another is a theory of mind that focuses narrowly on the identity of isolated individuals. “I think, therefore…

The idea that our thinking operates in two distinct modes, one fast and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate, emerged from the lifelong work of two Israeli psychologists, Amos Taversky and Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman immortalized their insights in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). …

System 3 thinking can emerge spontaneously in all kinds of conversations, from casual to purposeful. But how can we bring groups together and enable them to activate System 3? …

We’ve been inundated with “miracles” lately, as people discovered first Midjourney and DALL-E and then ChatGPT. There’s been a steady stream of amazement and wonder as people post examples of output generated from prompting these AI systems with “creative” suggestions. Don’t get me wrong, I am impressed, too. In fact…

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is fascinating on many fronts, but this last summer, as I was doing some extensive research on meetings and other purposeful conversations, I noticed something about AA that had never occurred to me before. I had been thinking about the complex of problems that drive all kinds…

System 3 is, I think, a good example of boundary object: “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites…They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds…

Since people began to imagine the possibility of intelligent machines, they have believed that chess playing would be one of the ultimate tests of that achievement. Why? Of course, part of the answer is that the game of chess is demonstrably and mathematically complex. …