Spent the last week dealing with bureaucracy and various paperwork. Given it was the week of both Canada Day and Independence Day, this seemed like a good time to reduce posting.
Regular posting will resume this coming week.
In the meantime, feel free to use this as an open thread.
The fundraiser is over. All goals were met.
Feel free to use this as an open thread.
The $1,000 in matching donations has now been met.
The fundraiser will continue till Friday midnight, and any donations will be more than appreciated, but they won’t be matched.
A sincere thank you to the matching donor, and to everyone who has donated.
The 16 reviews and the booklet on how to think will be written.
FINISHED
The matching donations are now met, thank you to everyone who donated!
A donor has generously offered to match all donations, up to a total of $1,000 or till Friday midnight (the end of the fundraiser.)
When we’ve reached the total, if we do before the end, I’ll put up a post, subject to vagaries of being awake and at a computer.
My sincere thanks to this donor, and everyone who has given.
A lot of commenters have off-topic stuff, so here’s an open thread. Enjoy.
We have raised $9,353. That means we’ve reached the first two milestones, and I’ll write sixteen reviews of books with useful information.
The final milestone is at $11,000, and is to be a booklet, “How To Think: Understanding the World.”
The fundraiser will end at midnight this coming Friday, June 28th.
I deeply appreciate all the subscriptions and donations. They will make a difference to my life. So thank you to those who have given. (And ongoing subscriptions are counted in the donation total, at three times the monthly amount.)
Let’s talk a little more about the booklet, in case we make it to the $11,000 milestone.
One of the great problems with thinking clearly is that it’s anti-survival and anti-inclusion.
It is safest in almost all circumstances, and certainly best for one’s career and better for staying good with one’s social circle, to simply agree with the beliefs of whatever groups we belong to.
If you are wrong in the same way as other people around you, and especially as important people, then you will not be blamed when things go wrong.
So to think accurately it helps to be an outsider, or to cultivate an outsider’s mindset.
At the same time, to think well about social issues, you also have to understand insiders, people who rarely have a thought or belief that is different from their social groups.
This is tricky psychologically. Generally, people who grew up or live in a society but who feel like outsiders have the best chance of pulling it off. They still have to live in that society, so for their own protection and survival they need to understand the in-groups, but the lack of identity gives them distance and some objectivity, if they aren’t too bitter.
Relatedly, in the same way that we often understand other people better than we do ourselves, there are times when we can see other societies more clearly than most people who live in or have more knowledge of that society. Because we are outside, we can see the forest.
And then, sometimes, lack of knowledge does trip us up. It’s hard. And adjusting the telescope/microscope to find the right scale is one of the tricks of analysis and understanding.
Also important is identifying what scales you’re good at, and places where you are unable to take the outside or inside view. You can then find ways to compensate, if possible, or you can simply stop trying to understand if you decide it’s not worth it. (For example I’ve simply accepted that I’m not very good at predicting elections any more. I know why, and I could try to calibrate, but it’d be a lot of work, I might not be successful, and it’s not important for me to be able to predict elections because I have very little ability to influence them or take advantage of that sort of prediction.)
At any rate, if the booklet is funded, we’ll deal with issues like this and many others.
If you want to see it written, please subscribe or donate.
Today has been one of those days dedicated to jumping through an intricate combination of bureaucratic hoops, so, alas, no proper post.
Use this post to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts, and remember that I have a fundraiser going on, with nifty goals and a determination of how much I’ll write in general, if you care to give.
We have now raised $6,278. That means we have made the goal of ten reviews at $5,000 and are $1,722 from the second goal of six reviews. We’re $4,722 from the final goal of a booklet meant to teach how to think better about society, world events and the future.
I want to talk a bit about the book reviews I will be doing. Our 2016 fundraiser included reviews as well. Then I emphasized books which had been fundamental to forming how I think about the world. Jane Jacobs, the great sociologist Randall Collins—patterns and ways of thinking, more than specifics, though there were some specifics as well.
This time I want to introduce books which are more about specifics, though specifics should, as I think always be examined to understand how they illustrate or arise from more fundamental rules.
So, for example, a book on China’s economy, because there are facts about that economy most Westerners don’t know. One, that floored me when I learned it, is that China is the most decentralized major economy, and it isn’t even close. Chinese central planners actually give more money and freedom in spending to provinces and municipalities than Western governments do.
This isn’t emphasized anywhere, and it’s extraordinary, and it contradicts much of what we assume about China. If you don’t know this, you can’t actually understand China.
A specific book I want to review, probably in more than one article, is Peter Hall’s Cities In Civilization. It’s almost 20 years old now, and it’s a massive doorstopper made up of huge chapters on cities golden ages: artistic, technological, administrative and so on. So there’s Athens and Elizabethan England and Paris, but there’s also Silicon Valley and Berlin (the premier electrical city in the world, a fact forgotten after WWII broke it in half) and Tokyo. There’s Rome, and so on.
There’s a lot there. For example, a real history of Silicon Valley (half entrepreneurial, half government support); the fact that some tech golden ages are government driven (Tokyo/Berlin) and some are largely private (Manchester and Detroit , and so on.
What nurtures artistic golden ages? What causes technological ones? How do great cities handle their massive growth?
All good stuff. Just as interesting is that the book is older. It is written just before the internet take-off. Seeing how major players in Tokyo missed the boat, despite having understood the strategy, is fascination.
In addition to such big picture books, I want to discuss a few more intimate books, about how we think and act as individuals.
So those are the ideas behind this year’s book reviews.
Finally, I should note that I fundraise for two reasons. First, I need the money. For many years, I didn’t raise money because I didn’t need it. But food and rent are like taxes and death, alas. The second reason is related to the first: how much people give, both in these fundraisers and thru the year, is something I have to take into account when I decide how much to write for the blog.
‘Cause that food and rent.
In any case, if you value my writing, and you aren’t having money issues, I hope you’ll give.
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