Social Inertia

Another social phenomenon, which I first observed (or moreso interpreted) whilst out with a drunken group of freinds and trying to leave the pub to move to the next one.

The polite thing to do is to let everyone know that you're going after this drink and then get ready to leave. Two hours later, your still there, sans pint and becoming increasingly frustrated. I don't like this limbo, I feel very passionately about either being somewhere or going somewhere, this existance of perpertual leaving, where starting a new conversation or beer is pointless creates anxiety as I worry about hassling people or whether it's rude just to fuck off and leave them.

Social inertia can be applied to any large group, I'm more a big picture man than the details so i'll let someone else work out the formulas. But essentially the principles are similar to normal inertia - the larger the social mass (number of people), the harder a group is to get moving (or more importantly to give direction), and conversely the harder it is to stop.

Other factors that affect social inertia are - Booze (the opposite of lubrication in a normal inertia model)
Social gravity - Larger groups genertate their own pull especially in bars as increased chances of bumping into friends and increasing mass (if other group is also large then there is an increased counter pull).
Pretty girls - see above - these have a larger gravity, and should be your key tool should you wish to shepherd your group quickly.

Due to this Pub crawls should only ever be completely anarchic, or restricted to a small number of friendless freinds. Either that of have a hotty in your pocket that everyone wants to follow...

Emotional Osmosis

We absorb the emotions of those around us which in turn affect our own feelings and behaviours. Some of us are more susceptable then others, but we all suffer from this process, much as we may find it an abhorant assualt to our rationality.

To find reason cast aside on a wave of emotion and diluted, lost in a sea of contemporary outrage.

For examples of this phenomenon, note how even one persons bad mood can bring a room down. How stress can infect and spread, go to london at rush hour and try not to hurry or threat, to not shop in hong kong or in town in the run up to christmas.

Note this is more than mere empathatic understanding, it is a force, an invasion permeating our barriers and overiding our individual emotions.

Look at the behaviour of crowds, the atrocities perpetuated by otherwise ordinary peoples. Emotional osmosis is a social force. We must recognise these forces at play within our collective mindset if we are to ensure that the future path of humanity is governed by reason and not swept along by emotional tides.

Knowledge Distillation

How many books, concepts and ideas can be surmissed far more concisely than they are.

Whilst there is beauty to be found in expanding an argument, and justification and evidence is required. Do we all need to read all the evidence for everything? We already take so much as read and this process already happens, undertaken by journalists, and also by society as it's natural course. This should not replace books or the desire to gaze deeper, but allow us to understand the concepts into which we would like to peer more closely, and not live in ignorance of those we wish to understand but lack the time to research.

Imagine if rather than trying to shroud what we know in know in endless verbosity, we tried to distill important concepts into a sentence or paragraph in which the beauty of truth can be recognised. A haiku version of knowledge. As part of this lexicon, this is what I try to do, if two words suffice then I will use no more, so from now if the title serves the purpose you will hopefully draw your own conclusion, an idea forming before you even need to read this. If it doesn't then write your own and let me know.