Thoughts 30 Dec. 2021

 

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

A money economy takes the disconnection, and therefore the failure, one step further. The higher the level of economic development, the more money tends to become an abstraction rather than a counter for something concrete. Thus the economy can boom as the ecology disintegrates. This is particularly true if the society resorts to currency debasement or loose credit as a way to evade encroaching physical limits and foster an artificial prosperity, for then the economy becomes completely unhinged from concrete ecological reality. Overshoot and collapse is the inevitable result.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Propaganda is a campaign to influence public opinion without regard for truth, often (but not always) conducted by a state actor seeking some political outcome. It can exploit misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and what has recently been called mal-information (information which is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

As America has become more unequal over the past five decades, its levels of trust have declined sharply. African Americans feel, with great justification, that they live in a separate and unequal world, one that is subject to different laws, standards, and attitudes than the world of White Americans.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The amount of ingenuity we require to achieve a given goal depends critically on two things: first, the intrinsic difficulty of achieving the goal and, second, the kinds and amounts of resources that we have available and that we can manipulate to achieve the goal.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Any food is a dessert if any form of sugar is one of the first three ingredients. Trader Joe’s Beef and Broccoli (32 grams of sugar) is a dessert. Chinese chicken salad is a dessert. We, and especially our kids, are eating and drinking dessert all day long. It captivates our brain’s reward center . . . , similar to drugs, so kids get hooked on sugar early.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The Fed was a competent, high-functioning piece of the U.S. state apparatus. As such, it had unsurprisingly attracted Trump’s ire in the years prior to 2020.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Many ancient authors extolled the virtues of experiment and observation.9 But the Alexandrians, for all their research grants, found it a good deal harder to learn from experience than to praise doing so. The fields in which the careful recording of observational data perhaps went furthest in antiquity were divination and astrology. Cicero reports the Stoic arguments for divination and their replies to the Skeptics. It is an important passage both for its suggestion that in sciences without certainty a reasonable level of mistakes can be tolerated without that making the science worthless, and also for its use of random phenomena similar to dice throwing as a model of uncertainty.

Thoughts 29 Dec. 2021

 

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Disconfirmation. The system does all sorts of things, but it is tuned for what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, call “institutionalized disconfirmation.” Individuals, of course, work hard to confirm their own viewpoints, and try hard to persuade others. But they understand that their claims will and must be challenged; they anticipate those challenges and respond; they subject their scholarship to peer review and replication, their journalism to editing and fact-checking, their legal briefs to adversarial lawyers, their intelligence to red-team review.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

Madison was aware of the general problem, which he knew had sunk democracies of the past. He called it the problem of factions—what today we often call special interests. “By a faction,” he wrote in Federalist No. 10, “I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

What, then, is the best course for the real experts? To help the public understand how their field works, in particular how science works. Most Americans think of science by its endpoints—a discovery or breakthrough or invention. They look at dazzling pictures of galaxies and read of miracle drugs. But science is really all about the process of learning and discovering, with many failures and disappointments.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

But fundamentally Just America ["progressives;" "social justice warriors;" "anti-racists"] is about race. Everything else is adjunct.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

Spread across priorities ranging from childcare to the energy transition, that was far too little to effect a transformation of American society or to put the United States on course to climate stabilization. Especially with regard to the energy transition, they appeared to rest on optimistic assumptions about the private investment that would be triggered by modest public stimulus combined with regulatory change. When it came to long-term policy, Bidenomics was a continuation of the public-private, blended finance, Frankenstein policies that had been so typical of the crisis-fighting in 2020.

Thoughts 28 Dec. 2021

 

Published in November 2021; one of my Christmas presents! 

The journey matters – because it is the arrival. This means that while, for some, every succeeding view will disclose some new aspect of an always changing landscape with which at every turn they become better acquainted, for others the landscape will appear to be, unrewardingly, always the same landscape.

Get used to reading quotes from this book; I'm just getting into it & it's excellent. 

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

McGilchrist argues [in his book The Master & the Emissary] that since the Industrial Revolution, this power-sharing agreement has broken down, with the left brain assuming an increasingly dominant position. It was at this point that the “Emissary” usurped power from the “Master.” The situation is rather like that of the Gnostic creation myth, in which the demiurge, or craftsman, employed by the “true God” to create the world, comes to believe that it is really in control, that it is the supreme deity, and enacts a coup d’état, with disastrous consequences. The left brain likes to deal with what is familiar, with what it knows, and in modern times it has been busy turning the world around it into what it knows best: a machine.

From McGilchrist's first great work.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The old saying I learned as a child, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” is not literally true, as even a child knows; what it teaches is that we have agency in reacting to words. When someone says I am sick or sinful or shameful, I can steer myself toward feeling tedium rather than trauma.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

As evolution proceeds, complexity increases. It’s a fascinating piece of data, but why is it true?

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Scientists master nature in their laboratories so that engineers can build arsenals and factories, manufacturers can make arms and goods, and soldiers and merchants can dominate the lands and markets of the world.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that “the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”

Compare with the quote above.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

If the experts tell us that our modern economic and social system is systematically generating disease risk, what do we do about it?

The answer, I fear, is "not much."

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Nutrition is not the same as food science. Nutrition is what happens to food between the mouth and the cell. Food science is what happens to food between the ground and the mouth.

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 23 Dec. 2021

 

The Uninhabitable Earth

David Wallace-Wells

In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

If the transhumanist [e.g., Ray Kurzweil] represent one extreme in the diversity of evolutionary visions in this book—the transcend-at-all-costs, techno-positive, biology-is-for-wimps, let’s-engineer-the-universe sense of optimism—then [Thomas] Berry represents perhaps the other side of the picture, a corrective argument for a radically biocentric approach to the future, a deconstruction of human arrogance, and a deeper embrace of our immanent spiritual connection with the natural world.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

In the last few years, the conventional wisdom has emerged that eating animal products results in a greater contribution to greenhouse warming of the planet than does eating plants. Because we worry with good reason that global warming is a major threat to planetary health and humanity’s future, we believe we should do whatever we can personally to mitigate it. This has led newspapers to publish analyses of “how to shop, cook and eat in a warming world,” as The New York Times did in April 2019, and to suggest that the fewer animal products we consume (and certainly the less beef, lamb, and dairy, as these seemingly have the greatest climate footprints), the healthier the planet will be.

This may indeed be true. While acknowledging that livestock can be raised in ways that are relatively climate friendly and much of it is (in the United States, for instance, more, say, than in Brazil), the implication is that the most climate-friendly eating pattern is one that omits these foods—a vegan diet—and that that’s how we should eat. For those who don’t think they can become a vegan, the Times suggests, then “another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.”

The problem, of course, is that this thinking once again assumes that the conventional healthy diet—or even an unconventional and arguably unnatural diet, per Geoffrey Rose’s thinking, like the vegan diet—is indeed healthy for all of us. It builds on a foundation of the bad science in nutrition research of the past fifty years, and it shows little concern for the absence of clinical trials that might actually test it. It’s also the lean person’s perspective. If those of us who are predisposed to be insulin resistant, obese, and/or diabetic in the modern food environment get fat or stay fat eating beans, legumes, and grains, we have a conflict that must be resolved.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Love and Saint Augustine

Hannah Arendt, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott (Editor), Judith Chelius Stark (Editor)

“It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.”

Thoughts 22 Dec 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

[Henry, if I'm recalling correctly] Ford was channeling the attitude of [Herbert] Hoover’s recently reassigned Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, who had advocated a response to the Depression that amounted to financial nihilism: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness from the system…people will work harder, live a more moral life.” That had been [Frederick] Hayek’s position in his attack on A Treatise on Money. A bust was the inevitable consequence of a reckless boom, and any government sugarcoating of the necessary losses would only make matters worse.

To wit, burden everyone with a depression to purge the system; pre-Keynesian economics performing the work of 18th-century physicians: don't have a cure? Then bleed the patient! No wonder Hoover (who didn't buy into Mellon's extremism) didn't win re-election with advisors like Mellon! 

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Feedback can be positive or negative. By “positive” feedback, complexity theorists don’t mean that the feedback is always a “good” thing. Instead, they mean that the feedback reinforces or amplifies the initial change, and in the process it creates a virtuous or vicious circle.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

“Briefly, what I am proposing,” [Clare] Graves writes in the article that first introduced [Don] Beck to his work, “is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change.”

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

A long process of trial and error has weeded out the bad innovations, leaving behind what has stood the test of time. The result may not be perfect, but it is probably the best that can be accomplished with the materials at hand. Evolution or ecology should not be used to justify wealth and privilege or inherited evils, but it does imply a Burkean stance toward change. There is a kind of wisdom contained in the system—biological or social—that we would be wise to study and understand before we launch “reforms” based on our “progressive” ideas.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Even today, now that it has achieved stability and strength (if on the bodies of millions of victims), it is not clear that the leaders in Beijing accept the Westphalian concept of a community of nations in which each country is left alone to pursue its own national interest as long as it does not upset the world order by threatening others.

Philosophical Intimations

James Hillman

Caponigri, Time and Idea, 131: “ ‘Ricorsi’ appears in Vico, in the first instance, as a methodological notion. It designates a methodological device for making effective his discovery of the primacy of poetry and, with this, of the genuine time-structure and movement of history. It consists in the employment of the categories of poetic wisdom for the interpretation of the cultural and social structures of post-poetic times. By this employment there is determined abstract contemporaneity between time-form structures.” In other words: archetypal persons transcend historical limitations even as they manifest themselves in historical time. These poetic figures are the ultimate categories for understanding human existence.