Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace
Tartle Best Data Marketplace

What’s Your Money Worth?

Today, we’re facing a money paradox. The cost of goods and services increase while your salary stays the same. On top of that, the quality of the goods and services that you can afford is decreasing. How many times have you taken a trip to the local supermarket and found yourself contemplating the cost of moldy fruits? 

When you look at global logistics and supply chains, it’s tough to think of how delays in one area can affect an entire ecosystem. But it’s the reality we live in today. The Suez Canal blockage of 2021 halted supply chains for a week, but the effects of that delay are expected to last for months. Crop production and shipments affected by the Omicron outbreak and climate chaos have limited the availability of French fries around the world, particularly in Southeast Asian fast food chains.

So what do we have to do? It’s time for the government to step in. Time to take out more debt to pay for these delays. But this is only a band-aid solution to a bullet wound. It’s one thing to have a shortage of good products in your local supermarkets and restaurants. But if your pay and purchasing power is not increasing alongside the price of goods and services as well, something is wrong. 

Stepping Into the Future

This episode is scheduled for release on May 26, 2022. Here are Alexander and Jason’s fearless forecasts for the year ahead.

  1. The global supply chain will continue to experience delays for the rest of the year. 
  2. Prices will remain high. Inflation rates will rise to 10 or 15 percent.
  3. Asset prices increase.
  4. The world starts transitioning to micro manufacturing.

The last forecast is particularly noteworthy because it’s the start of a new system. People will stop relying on a fragile way of doing things and start creating smaller, more robust networks.

One challenge to having an incredibly interconnected network was that people started relying heavily on others to conduct business. While this meant that products could be manufactured faster and cheaper, it compromised their quality. 

And beyond the products themselves, it also affected our capability for self-sustenance.

The resurgence of craftsmanship isn’t coincidence. The idea is that today’s generation wants to feel a sense of community and identity. They want to know that when they purchase products, they were created locally and their decision to purchase is supporting local communities as well.

It’s the same with TARTLE. You own 100 percent of your work and you are completely responsible for the creation and sharing of that information. 

If you want to be a part of the next wave of craftsmanship, community, and technology - you can sign up for TARTLE here.

As a buyer, your first priority is making sure that you’re doing what’s best for your business. So what’s stopping you from jumping into TARTLE’s data packets? If you’re still having doubts about investing in our platform, let’s talk about the benefits you get from ethical data sourcing.

Create Direct Relationships With Your Customers

In the traditional data sourcing setup, a lot of the information that you buy is incredibly biased. This is because you’re buying them off of third parties that observe human beings, and not the human beings you’re serving themselves. Every middleman you entertain in your data sourcing gives room for misinterpretation and corruption of their information.

So remove the guesswork. Half of the headache in growing a business is figuring out what makes your customers tick—that’s why we all shell out so much towards marketing campaigns. But with TARTLE, you can invest in facts. Making the move toward ethical data sourcing means that you don’t have to make assumptions about your customers, because you can reach out to them whenever you need to.

What Your Commitment to Ethically Sourced Data Symbolizes

TARTLE is where the world goes to buy and sell data. And if you're not ethically sourcing your information through TARTLE, you're not getting your information properly and you're not getting the best information possible. - Alexander McCaig

When you come to TARTLE, you are taking on a commitment. You want to ensure that your values, actions, and business align with one another. This is an active decision to care about the future of your company, the planet, and the people who support your products and services. 

It can be overwhelming to think of ways that you could make change happen. After all, movements take decades to build up the momentum they need to succeed. So if you can’t find the time to commit to so many other things just yet, commit to this one step. 

Commitment to TARTLE symbolizes a commitment to human beings who want to establish consensual relationships and share truthful narratives of their lives.

Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.

We are used to thinking that the universe revolves around us. That nothing superior to humanity could ever exist. But realistically, our time is only a small fraction in the billions and trillions of years that the universe has been in existence.

In this episode, Dr Avi Loeb returns to the podcast for a deeper dive into what the universe has to offer—and how human ego is preventing our capacity for human progress.

You Are Not That Special

Once upon a time, the biblical story of Abraham and Lot was written. The lives of these two coincided with the arrival of a meteor that obliterated the entire region. 

Religious narrative explains that this was a manifestation of God’s wrath. The city of Sodom was destroyed because of the sinfulness of its inhabitants. But the alternative is that it could have just been about a meteor that happened to hit that city.

Dr Avi Loeb’s point is that the narrative does not necessarily put humans at the center of a big event. This rock was heading for a collision course with Earth long before Sodom was constructed and inhabited by people who sinned.

For people to deserve punishment, we must assume that free will is a possibility. But how does this align with the reality that the meteor was already on its way to Earth millions of years before these people were even conceived? 

These are interesting contradictions to think about. They are borne out of humanity’s desire to assign meaning and purpose to these events, with us at the center of everything.

A Small Blip on an Infinite Timeline

Consider this: our recorded history only covers the past 10,000 years.

The amount of time it took for humans to create, develop, and launch rockets to the nearest star spans 50,000 years.

And stars were formed billions of years before the sun.

What does this tell you? It means that humanity is grappling with vast distances and incredibly long time scales. If there are other alien civilizations out there, it’s presumptuous to assume that they are the same as us.

What’s likelier is that they may not be synchronized with our progress, not just temporally but in terms of tech advancement as well. It wouldn’t be wise to assume that our existence has a massive impact on the entire timeline of the universe.

Is Superiority the Root of All Evil?

Human history has shown that groups of people are consistently trying to become superior over others. You only need to look at the results of the Second World War and the Nazi regime to see how destructive it can be to feel superior. 

So what would help unite us and prioritize our equality?

Dr Avi Loeb believes we need to accept that we are not the smartest kid on the block. If there are alien civilizations, it’s more than possible that they have progressed faster and further than we have. 

All our genetic differences are insignificant and meaningless. The Nazi doctrine, and other radical ideologies that seek to discriminate, will lose meaning.

“We will perhaps have more respect towards each other and regard all of us as equal members of the human species because there is a smarter kid on the block. How can you brag if there is someone much better than you are?” Dr Avi Loeb points out.

Closing Thoughts on Science and Human Progress

What good is our technology if we only use it to advance a particular niche that does not help the totality of human understanding? Take a closer look at what’s being developed and you’ll notice that the benefits of these innovations are not always aligned with humanity. We need to stop advancing technology just for the sake of making bigger and better-looking technologies.

To guarantee our preservation, we need to humble ourselves and bring our focus back to humanity. We won’t progress if we don’t unite. We won’t know more if we’re too afraid to disprove the theories we hold so close and dear to ourselves. And we won’t know how to empower ourselves if we think that we already have the answers, by some misplaced idea that we are at the center of the universe.

In this episode, Dr Avi Loeb returns to the podcast for a deeper dive into what the universe has to offer—and how human ego is preventing our capacity for human progress.

Sign up for TARTLE through this link here.

Follow Alexander McCaig on Twitter and Linkedin.

What’s your opinion on sex, love, and infidelity? Your answer can vary wildly depending on where you live, how you’ve been raised, and your social circles. The bedroom has always been off-limits in polite discussions, but this time we’re challenging you to deep-dive into the issue with us.

In this episode, Alexander McCaig sits down with David Buss, who is considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. The pair have a comprehensive discussion on what it means to be monogamous, the evolution of sexual psychology, and the institutions we’ve built that enshrine our shared perspective of what a perfect relationship should be.

Do We Experience Desire Differently?

One theory David Buss discusses in this episode is that sexual violence against women happens because we do not understand our desires. David Buss explains that women and men have different sexual psychologies. 

It’s certainly a controversial opinion—but one David Buss is firm on defending. 

For example, the amount of time you let elapse before seeking sex, or the emotionl investment required before seeking sex—these are differences that recur over time and differ largely between the two sexes. 

In this case, men eventually evolve and adapt to influence or manipulate women, and women do the same thing. It’s a co-evolutionary arms race.

Analyzing Evolutionary Psychology in Modern Cultural Institutions

How effective are our cultural institutions in defending values we consider important to a healthy monogamous relationship? For example, it is illegal to marry two people in the United States—and yet, infidelity rates are high. According to Alfred Kinsey, an estimated 50% of infidelity rates are committed by males, while 26% are committed by females.

This indicates that people do engage in what David Buss calls, “serial mating.”

There are many ways to understand how we institutionalize or normalize our evolved psychology. One way is to look at the cultural institutions that reflect it. Another is that because mating is inherently a competitive process, mates are always in short supply.

This can be observed in countries where there are vast differences in male-female population. When a society has more men than women, violence committed by men and rape rates tend to go up. And according to David Buss, it’s also a place where polygamous culture can be a problem.. For example, cultures here one man can have four wives creates a large pool of young males who do not have sexual access to females. As a result, these repressed feelings become bottled up and explode in sexual violence. 

This doesn’t just happen out of a desire for sexual variety, but also for things that David Buss calls “mate value discrepancies.” If one person pursues another who is significantly more attractive than him, they will get angry when their attempts are unsuccessful. But even if the pursuit is a success, the mate value discrepancy means that she has opportunities to trade him up for someone better. As a result, she is more likely to leave him or be sexually unfaithful.  This can also hold true if the man is deemed as more attractive than the woman.

Empowering Women By Understanding Sexual Psychology

If you are alive today, you are an evolutionary success story. And one interesting point about our species is our mating system, which calls for a long-term commitment. This arrangement only occurs in about three to five percent of mammalian species. 

David Buss theorizes that due to the tremendous amount of commitment that goes into starting a family, males have evolved sexual jealousy. This is otherwise known as male sexual proprietariness, coined by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. This jealousy machinery is designed to keep partners faithful and to ward off rivals. 

With this in mind, David Buss believes that his book can be valuable for women because it outlines predictors of when they might be in a dangerous situation as a result of male sexual jealousy. Verbal insults, isolation, and obsessively monitoring her time are statistical predictors that a man will engage in physical violence. This, in turn, can also be a form of sexual violence, because it curtails her ability to choose when, where, and with whom she has sex.

Pretending that the two sexes are identical just continues to perpetuate sexual violence. Understanding how our mindset and psychology has evolved with regards to sex helps us put our desires into perspective. When we have a better grasp of how it affects us, we can help promote safe relationships, particularly for women, and continue to respect their capacity to choose. 

Sexual violence against women is at the core of the issue. It also takes on more forms than we think. Deception on internet dating, conflict within relationships, stalking in the aftermath of a messy break-up, intimate partner violence, financial infidelity, sexual infidelity, revenge porn…all of these occurrences, David Buss argues, is united when the partner seeks to bypass female choice. This also happens to be the first law of mating.

While we should celebrate how we are products of a large and complex ancestral system, we also need to acknowledge the problems in sexual psychology that may have made our existence possible in the first place. We owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to future generations.

Face-to-Face With Sexual Double Standards

Sexual double standards go beyond the sexes. It’s not just about whether it’s “more justifiable” for men to cheat than women. David Buss believes that one exists between the self versus the partner as well. 

For example, he poses this interesting thought experiment, where the audience is invited to put themselves in the shoes of a married man: would it be okay if I were sexually attracted to my neighbor’s wife? What about if my wife is attracted to the neighbor’s husband?

“We engage in a lot of moral hypocrisy in the sexual domain, where the morals that we espouse publicly are those, often, for other people to follow, and we don't always follow them ourselves,” David Buss explained.

Alexander McCaig calls for listeners of this episode to reflect on whether they’re experiencing a psychological imbalance. If you’ve condemned someone for having multiple sexual partners, but believe that you yourself have good reason to, then it may be a sign for you to reassess how you think about sexuality. 

People need a natural understanding that attraction is well within the bounds of our biology. However, it does not necessarily mean that this attraction warrants jealousy. After all, one interesting aspect of relationships is that even in happy ones, men and women still have the capacity to find other people sexually attractive.

Lust, Intimacy, Love in the Online Space

The dramatic proliferation of online dating and digital pornography is presenting a new challenge to our sexual psychology.

Previously, we would only ever have access to a few dozen potential mates in our entire lifetime. Now, we can leaf through thousands or millions of options through internet dating sites and applications. In addition, technologies like virtual sex, sex dolls, and sex toys are becoming increasingly realistic. 

Even here, the differences in our sexual psychology is evident. For example, pornography differs depending on whether it is meant to be viewed by a male or female audience. 

“With males, for example, it's multiple partners, it's no context, no emotional involvement. It's basically, woman comes into the room, sex starts happening right away. Whereas women's pornography, there's more context, plot, emotional involvement, psychological investment, and so forth,” David Buss explained.

Alexander McCaig raises the concern that the dopamine hit created by pornography can make it difficult for people to see how these interactions and relationships are built with hard work and effort in the real world. 

Due to the convenience, people are spending more time on online pornography. This means that sexual relationships have declined in real life, and marriage rates as well. What do these trends point towards, and is it something we should celebrate?

Closing Thoughts

Changes in the way we love, bond, and attach to people take one set of mechanisms. Changes in desire for sexual variety and sexual psychology as a whole are an entirely different set. It’s time we open up to our partners and to ourselves about how we truly feel. Let’s break free from living a proverbial life of quiet desperation.

We owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to be more open about such a human part of ourselves. 

What’s your data worth? Sign up and earn through the TARTLE Marketplace here

If you are reading this while living under an authoritarian regime and you need help, blink twice now.

Hopefully, you’ll be one of many people who can just brush off this awkward attempt at a joke and laugh. But realistically, you may also be one of many more who are living in countries that are experiencing a steady decline in freedom—if not a total absence, in the first place.

The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a heavy blow on democracy. While this report by the Freedom House pinpointed the start of the decline to be in 2006, freedom has faced heavy losses in 2021 amidst the economic and political stability caused by COVID-19.

Now, more than ever, we need a platform where we can unite under a common cause. 

Illiteracy Under Dictatorships

According to Jason Rigby, there are three main issues you can look at to understand whether or not the place is under an authoritarian regime: illiteracy, fraud, and health.

Authoritarian regimes have a vested interest in keeping their people illiterate because if their people don’t learn, then they don’t know that they deserve any better. This is a strategy that has been tried and tested in the past. Book burning and art destruction have been carried out by the Nazis, and African-American slaves were banned from reading books.

And it’s a reality that persists today. Through TARTLE, our goal is to give oppressed individuals an opportunity to rise above that system. Sign up, work, and learn as you go. TARTLE is the antithesis for authoritarian regimes.

It’s All About the Money

Fraud is also commonplace in authoritarian regimes. After all, when you are invested in maintaining a position and status that harms the quality of living for everybody else, there is little you wouldn’t do to make money. War, strife, and suffering are all opportunities to keep the wealth gap wide and the funds in abundance.

With TARTLE, fraud does not exist. The platform has been developed to make everything transparent. All the transactions are on the blockchain and recorded in a huge public ledger so that no one can make pseudo-copies of your information.

It is not possible for others to take credit for your work, or to give different prices according to where you are located. On the marketplace, we are all human beings and we are all priceless.

(Your) Health is (Their) Wealth

Finally, the last prevalent issue in authoritarian regimes is health. People living in a regime struggle not just because they don’t have immediate access to medical support, but also because of scarcity in food supply. These are only available for the one percent, who have all the power and control over the market. The rest of the country will have limits.

We need to take strong and direct action that can help the people on the ground. When you sign up for TARTLE, you have the opportunity to use your personal data to help these people by selling it to organizations that provide humanitarian aid.

Closing Thoughts

We are just giving you the facts. You have the free will and the opportunity to live. Most of us have been taught that we can only care for ourselves and the people we love, one day at a time. With TARTLE, you can be a part of a greater movement. It is possible, here, to make a difference and leave an imprint on the rest of humanity. This is where authoritarian regimes fall.

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through our link here.

Have you ever felt like you could dedicate yourself to a cause that would span generations? It could be anything: a business, an infrastructure, even an idea. If you have, then you’re one of the lucky few.

If you haven’t, consider why you don’t have the time, energy, or money to put into finding your passion. When you are working a regular 9-to-5 and still struggling to make ends meet on a day to day basis, thinking long-term can seem nonsensical. 

That’s what living under our current economic system does to us. Why bother coming up with any energy for multigenerational thought and purpose when the here and now is taking up all that space?

In this episode, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby highlight the importance of eliminating the middleman in wealth creation—and how you can use the TARTLE Marketplace to sell your data.

It’s Time to Take Control of Your Data

Currently, the methods we use to source data are unreliable. We don’t know where it’s from, who’s touched it, and whether it is ethically sourced. There is an urgent need for a data marketplace that can facilitate the exchange of information in a transparent and accessible manner.

In addition, people on the ground like us don’t realize the potential of taking control of our data because the default is to just give it away to big tech companies on a regular basis. Yes, your personal information is being tracked and sold by your favorite social media and e-commerce sites. Now, we dare to ask the question: are you ready for the opportunity to profit from your data? Your personal thought processes and life experiences?

With TARTLE, this is possible. As a seller, you can transact directly with organizations that you believe in so that you have unmediated access to further that cause. The Marketplace is currently capable of ingesting satellite data, data from your Apple Watch, and more.

In the future, we’re working on expanding into other data sets for a more personalized experience. Imagine a world where you, and only you, have the power to sell data from your bank accounts, ancestry accounts, genetic code, health records, and audio information. At first glance, it looks like a massive responsibility—but doesn’t it also sound liberating? To know that you are at the forefront of data management?

Stop relying on a middle man when it comes to your information when you can have buyers get that data directly from you.

Bring Back Humanity in Wealth Creation

In the grand scheme of evolutionary development, the habit of creating wealth can only be cultivated when people are driven to seek these opportunities. The CEO of TARTLE, Alexander McCaig, shares in this episode how he actually grew up poor. Part of TARTLE’s mission is to help alleviate those in poverty. We know that we can make this happen when we give those in marginalized communities access to the tools and learning experiences they need to grow.

The devastating reality is that our current system takes away the humanity aspect of wealth creation. One example discussed in the episode was how winemakers may feel pressured to cut corners just to keep up with demand. This includes adding water to their wine, using cheaper produce, tampering with fermentation time, and more. In the long run, they continue to maintain an image of high quality while interfering with the true potential of their product.

With TARTLE, we want to help you rediscover humanity. These old systems are slowly detaching us from the reality of what is occurring. So we want you to challenge yourself to reattach to human beings. Create real relationships. Help people create real value in their lives by realizing your value in yourself. In the long run, choosing TARTLE is choosing to support the world.

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through the link here.

Can bad ideas spread like a virus? Are we susceptible to making the wrong decisions? What separates us from the radicalists that terrorize society today?

As it turns out, not much. 

Today’s guest, Andy Norman, takes us through a comprehensive introduction on cognitive immunology. This is an emerging science of the mind that looks into how people start sliding down the slippery slope to fake news, misinformation, and disinformation in today’s post-truth society.

Understanding Today’s “Infection of the Brain”

According to Andy Norman, the average flat earther is extremely gullible in certain respects but also hypercritical in others.

Their train of thought begins with this vague idea that the world may truly be flat and that everybody else is just intentionally misinterpreting the truth. Since not everyone is educated to fact-check and test ideas in the right way, they start going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and conspiracy websites. 

They become increasingly intrigued by the feeling that they’re in on this big secret. As a result, they start isolating themselves in echo chambers of their own making. Soon they have an airtight community of fellow believers who believe in the same sentiments they do—and we are the ones looking in.

These people have hardly done due diligence and they are feeding off of incredibly unreliable information. In this sense, the mind has become “infected” with bad ideas, and these ideas spread like parasites.

If we want humanity to evolve for the better, we need to strengthen our immune systems so that we are not vulnerable to these parasites. While it will eventually call for systemic change to address how our perspectives are largely shaped by the way we grew up, we can only kickstart this on a personal level.

Bringing Back the Socratic Method

To better equip humanity against all the fake news and misinformation, Andy Norman suggests bringing back the Socratic Method. This is a method of learning which focuses on a dialogue between teachers and students, furthered by the teacher continually asking probing questions.

The constant questioning is an effort to explore the underlying beliefs that shape the student’s views and opinions. In many ways, this is a good technique to engage in dialogue with others who do not have the same mindset as you do. Today, there are so many different world views and perspectives.

Amidst this, it may become difficult to reach out to one another because we are afraid of coming across as offensive, insensitive, or dismissive. Conversely, it may also be difficult for people to reach out when we start considering our ideas as a part of who we are.

Our ideas of how to view the world should be fluid, and held only within the boundaries of reason. It is when we convince ourselves that we need to defend ideas to an absolute value that we turn into radicalists, which exist on both sides of all spectrums: politically, religiously, and socially. 

Approaching from a Place of Understanding

It’s important to hold your ideas at a distance. Yes, the feeling of being a part of a community can be all-encompassing. Knowing that you are affirmed by others who hold the same ideas can be empowering. But if this is taken too far, it will only serve to isolate you from others.

We can only move forward when we move forward together. The alternative is to accept that we are not our ideas. Our ideas will reach limits, and we must part with them then. We should only entertain ideas within certain bounds while holding true to our values. 

Hold your beliefs loosely. Be ready to part when someone raises a sufficiently good reason, an opportunity to question: is it worth still believing in this idea if it means that holding onto it isolates me from humanity?

Closing Thoughts: Containing the Mental Contagion

Here at TARTLE, we are invested in the evolution of humanity. The next step forward will take data-driven measures at reaching the truth in a post-truth era. With that said, we need to look out for each other and hold ourselves accountable for our ideas.

Ask questions. Help your loved ones reach conclusions. Keep an open mind and be slow to take offense. A line of inquiry is not a personal attack, but an attempt at getting to the bottom of the ideas you hold about yourself, the society, and the world. 

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through the link here.

How much information is too much? Information fatigue is a very real phenomenon, especially when we’re being fed so much on a regular basis. At this point, is it still beneficial for us to receive reports on the state of the world without opportunities to take concrete steps towards changing it?

In this episode, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby discuss the urgency of taking action in our deteriorating world.

Walking the Talk

According to Alexander McCaig, modern space satellites and ancient Egyptian mythology shared one thing in common. The sun god Ra was often shown with a hawk head, symbolizing how Ra was constantly the eye in the sky. Modern satellites have a similar design, with a huge “eyeball” in the front and wings at the side in the form of solar panels. 

The main difference between Ra and these satellites is that the sun god never came down and told people what they needed to do. The priests of old were the ones who started claiming that they had sole access to the word of God.

Today, progress in technology has allowed machine learning to fine tune climate models, giving us the opportunity to receive incredibly detailed reports on the state of the world. However, this information can only do so much if it is not accompanied with movement.

There are limits to the amount of change you can make when you are only focused on raising awareness. We need to be ready to take action. 

Using Technology to Take Action

There are plenty of problems in the world right now. Aside from climate change, we are struggling with poverty, corruption, and discrimination. In many cases, these issues become intertwined with one another and more difficult to resolve.

It’s already clear that we have a lot of challenges that we need to face. Modern technology has given us the opportunity to understand just how big of a problem we’re facing here. But at some point, we have to cross that line between just knowing there’s a problem and deciding to act on that problem.

As Alexander McCaig explains, it isn’t just about observing outcomes but about taking actions on the catalysts as well.

Closing Thoughts

The harmful part about placing so much emphasis on using technology to raise awareness is that its evolution continues to go down that road exclusively. We have the opportunity to go beyond with TARTLE. Fill out data packets on the platform so that you can help researchers understand your behavior, waste patterns, plans for the future, and consumption of resources.

Your effort will go to people who are invested in making a positive change. One example is the 5 Gyres Institute, which focuses on cleaning up all the downstream waste humanity creates in our oceans.

There are plenty of other causes that you can support through the TARTLE marketplace. Your data will play a valuable role in helping us save our world.

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through the link here.

Finding the Path

Since the dawn of time, people have been trying to make others go the direction they want. Whether a simple path in the grass or specifying people’s place in society.

One of the earliest documented examples of this kind of idea at work is Plato’s Republic. Socrates’ student laid out a society in which all of humanity would be divided up into specific castes, with the philosophers at the top (any time anyone tries to plan a society, his class is always at the top), the warriors next and then workers. Breeding was to be strictly controlled so that the correct offspring would be produced in arguably the first large scale eugenic plan. 

Plenty of others have tried to plan societies from the top down. Every socialist country represents an attempt to do this, always to disastrous results as the failure of the rulers to consider any number of variables results in famines and economic stagnation. China is considered by many to be an exception, but if you follow them at all, you know that they currently are running concentration camps and have been backing off their one child policy for years now, most recently allowing couples to have three kids as they realize they are on the verge of a demographic collapse. This reflects a remarkable lack of foresight.

It doesn’t even work on a small scale. The Puritans who came over on the Mayflower were originally organized in an overly planned way, dictated by those who financed their burgeoning colony. It was a very communal structure and had little incentive for people to work on their own terms, leading to the near death of the entire colony. It was only when they abandoned the plan and let people find their own path that things turned around. 

How to Deal With Society

Why is that? Why do the plans so seldom work? Most top down plans are simply too rigid. You can have a general layout for a village, or guardrails to keep people from falling off a cliff, but if you get much more granular than that you tend to run up against human nature. 

Here’s the deal, when you try to control people too closely you get one of three responses. One is that people are cowed and lose all motivation to better themselves and the world around them. They become broken by the system. Or people become enamored of the system and their whole life becomes about promoting the system. When the system is too controlling it doesn’t wind up producing anything good, just more people absorbed by it. Finally, there are those who rebel against the control and you wind up with violence against the system, leading eventually to some kind of revolution. 

The same principles apply even down to a very micro level, down to keeping people off the grass. When you just put paths arbitrarily through the grass, it can be very difficult to get people to stay on them. This is something that Princeton University learned the hard way. No matter how much they tried to keep people off the grass, they wouldn’t listen. People walked wherever they wanted and thus tended to ruin the grass. Finally, the university came up with a novel solution – they paid attention to where people were walking on their own. As it turned out, people tended to find their own, more efficient paths when left to themselves. Princeton then set about making new paths to fit what people were doing on their own. That simple change, of backing off and letting people find their own way of doing things and working with that rather than trying to direct it meant a whole lot fewer headaches for the groundskeepers. It also illustrated that trying to wedge people into particular paths doesn’t work all that well. 

Having paths of course is good. And there will always be a need for the occasional guardrail to keep people from doing something stupid. However, most of the time, working with people rather than forcing them will lead to better and more efficient results. All because rather than wedging people into a system, someone observed, gathered the relevant data and adjusted their plans around people, instead of adjusting people around their plans.

What’s your data worth? Sign up for the TARTLE Marketplace through this link here.