Thoughts 24 Dec. 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Criticism seeks to engage in conversations and identify error; canceling seeks to stigmatize conversations and punish the errant. Criticism cares whether statements are true; canceling cares about their social effects. Criticism exploits viewpoint diversity; canceling imposes viewpoint conformity. Criticism is a substitute for social punishment (we kill our hypotheses rather than each other); canceling is a form of social punishment (we kill your hypothesis by killing you socially). Criticism reflects the values of the Constitution of Knowledge, seeking to inquire and learn. Canceling reflects the values of propaganda, seeking to manipulate the information environment.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

If the differences that are bitterly dividing American politics are ultimately about bedrock values and core identities, what could possibly induce these opposing camps to compromise with each other? Why, for example, would postmodernists want to compromise with fiscally conservative modernists who are seen as destroying the environment and oppressing workers? Or why would traditionalists want to compromise with liberal modernists who are seen as suppressing religious freedom and murdering innocent fetuses? Indeed, why would socialistic postmodernists and theocratic traditionalists ever deem to compromise with each other when their respective moral systems seem to be diametrically opposed?

The answers to these questions are vital to our collective well-being.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

What general lessons can we learn from the historical study of catastrophes? First, it may simply be impossible to predict or even attach probabilities to the majority of disasters. From earthquakes to wars to financial crises, the major disruptions in history have been characterized by random or by power-law distributions. They belong in the domain of uncertainty, not risk.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Callousness has always been the besetting sin of Realpolitik, and it is not difficult to find examples of almost brutal coldness in Kissinger’s record. “It’s none of our business how they treat their own people,” he said of Moscow’s policy toward Soviet Jews. “I’m Jewish myself, but who are we to complain?” Actual human beings could get lost as power was being balanced.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

Happiness is something you notice you are feeling later… after you’ve been in action for a while.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

Thoughts for the Day: 14 December 2020

 

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

Taoism concerns itself with unconventional knowledge, with the understanding of life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational thinking.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Sometimes components in a highly connected system are tightly coupled. This means that a change in one component has rapid, multiple effects on other components of the system. The change branches out through the web of components, producing distant and often unexpected results.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

C. D. Broad, who had paraphrased Bergson’s ideas about the eliminative function of the brain. Broad had written that “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” Were the brain not to reduce or “edit” this universal awareness—or “cosmic consciousness,” as the psychologist R. M. Bucke, a little known secret teacher, called it—we would be swamped, Broad said, with a “mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge.” As it is, our inner editor does a very good job of providing us with only that very small selection of reality “which is likely to be practically useful.”

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[C]ompared to even a few decades ago, our species now has a much greater ability to innovate in answer to our problems. That’s because human social systems— whether community associations, municipal councils, societies, or planet-spanning institutions and corporations— are all instances of what scientists call “complex adaptive systems.” They learn and adapt by exploiting the power of combination— a power that’s essential, as we’ve seen, to our recursive imaginations— as they join together bits and pieces of existing ideas, institutions, technologies, and practices in new ways to meet new challenges.

Our modern global connectivity gives us the potential to supercharge this “combinatorial innovation.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Thus my first problem was how to write historically about something—totalitarianism—which I did not want to conserve but, on the contrary, felt engaged to destroy. My way of solving this problem has given rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did—and what I might have done anyway because of my previous training and the way of my thinking—was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary. That is, I did not write a history of totalitarianism but an analysis in terms of history; I did not write a history of anti-Semitism or of imperialism, but analyzed the element of Jew-hatred and the element of expansion insofar as these elements were still clearly visible and played a decisive role in the totalitarian phenomenon itself.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Inference in history proceeds not from data given in advance, but from secure answers to productive questions.