Civilization increases the set of easy choices, this is why it can increase freedom. However this is not a guarantee, without proportional increase of self-discipline easy choices lead to tyranny of hedonism for the individual and tyranny in general for the society.

"When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order."

Sidney Herbert Sime - Illustrative Design of Fountain and Figures.

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music nature.com/articles/s41562-0…

This is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever learnt.🤨😦🤯 We’ve been so conditioned to think in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions that our intuition basically lives there, but once you step into high dimensions even something as basic as distance starts behaving in a way that feels wrong. In a high-dimensional ball, almost all the volume lives in a thin shell near the boundary...shrink the radius just a tiny bit and you’ve thrown away almost everything, so random points don’t sit in the middle at all, they’re crushed into a microscopic halo at the edge. That’s one of the reasons distance, nearest neighbours, and geometric intuition start acting so weird in high-dimensional Machine Learning spaces. High-dimensional geometry is quietly telling you your low-dimensional brain is lying to you. 🤯 #HighDimensionalSpace #MachineLearning