203 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. To achieve the next great civilizational advance, towards a cosmo-local world order, we will need to bring those two worlds together!

      for - desilo web 3 / Blockchain and localisation via cosmolocal strategy for generating a cosmolocal world order - from Substack article - The Cosmo-Local Plan for our Next Civilization - Michel Bauwens - 2024, Dec 20

      // - need to move from web 3 to web 4 by adding 'people-centered' to 'decentralized'.

      //

    1. the experience of spaciousness and the empty nature of phenomena are related in the following way. As our mind lets go of reification, phenomena arise as continuously interconnected and interdependent, yet without ground in essence.

      for - key insight / adjacency- Dzogchen practice - the experience of spaciousness and emptiness of phenomena - neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's question about the newborn classifying the world - from Medium article - Heart Sutra and the nyams of Dzogchen - Aleander Vezhnevets - 2022, Sept 7

      key insight / adjacency - between - Dzogchen practice - the shi-ne experience of spaciousness and emptiness of phenomena - Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's question - how does a newborn learn to classify an undivided world of phenomena? - new relationship - As the mind lets go of our habitual tendency to reify and create artificial independent things - phenomena begin to appear to arise as continuously interconnected, interdependent, yet without ground in essence - This gives us a sense of space where every phenomena is arising inter-relatedly. - This is related to Gerald Edelman's question of - how a newborn is able to start classifying a world that is undivided - Does shi-ne training take us back to our first experience of reality as a newborn, when - there was not even any inter-relationships because there were no separate objects to be in relation with each other

    1. At the heart of Chinese philosophy is a belief in the innate goodness of humanity. This principle is encapsulated in the ancient phrase: “Man on earth, good at birth. The same nature, varies on nurture.”

      for - adjacency - quote - inherent sacred - Chinese saying - (hu)man on earth, good at birth. The same nature, varies on nurture - building a regenerative world - Post Growth Institute - Man Fang - Deep Humanity - Common Human Denominators - rekindling the sacred in an age of crisis - chinese meme

      adjacency - between - Chinese saying - (hu)man on earth, good at birth. The same nature, varies on nurture - building a regenerative world - Post Growth Institute - Man Fang - Deep Humanity - Common Human Denominators - rekindling the sacred in an age of crisis - chinese meme - adjacency relationship - This ancient Chinese philosophy saying is a good summary of a key claim of the Stop Reset Go open source Deep Humanity praxis, namely - we are all sacred but we forget that as we become enculturated - The Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) and the tree metaphor depicts diagrammatically how we can find a way to return to the sacred later in life - even though we have had it obscured - The existential crisis requires awakening the sleeping giant of the billions of people who no longer have a living experience of the sacred - This strategy is like moving from the branches of the tree of great diversity back to the common trunk of the sacred that supports all this diversity, - using the BEing journey as the strategic tool to bring back wonder, awe and a living experience of the sacred

  2. Dec 2024
    1. Did you know that learning about the time from just before you were conceived until after you were born, could improve the quality of your life?

      for - adjacency - TED Talk - From womb to the world - The Journey that shapes our Word - Anna Veerwal - benefits of knowing what happened to us during conception and birth - Deep Humanity - reminding us of the sacred

      adjacency - between - benefits of knowing what happened to us during conception and birth - TPF - Deep Humanity - reminding us of the sacred - adjacency relationship - Could this kind of exercise help to rekindle the sacred in adults? - If so, it could rekindle the feelings of the sacred for powering the great transition of humanity

    1. Drawing on ancient wisdom can help co-create systems that prioritise ecological reverence and community over individualistic domination

      for - post - LinkedIn - How Chinese Philosophy Offers Pathways to a Regenerative Future - Man Fang - Post Growth Institute - to - Medium - Rediscovering Harmony: How Chinese Philosophy Offers Pathways to a Regenerative Future - By foregrounding relationships — between individuals, communities, and the natural world — we can build systems that prioritize wellbeing and resilience - Post Growth Institute - Man Fang

      to - Medium - Rediscovering Harmony: How Chinese Philosophy Offers Pathways to a Regenerative Future - By foregrounding relationships — between individuals, communities, and the natural world — we can build systems that prioritize wellbeing and resilience - Post Growth Institute - Man Fang - https://hyp.is/a2HCSrlTEe-um4thfDGo-A/medium.com/postgrowth/rediscovering-harmony-how-chinese-philosophy-offers-pathways-to-a-regenerative-future-07a097b237a0

    1. for - climate crisis - Medium article - climate communication - how climate change is framed to disempower you - Joe Brewer - 2024, Dec 4 - from - post - LinkedIn - climate crisis - climate communication - climate change discourse has been framed to disempower us - changing the story - so that grassroots, bottom-up initiatives can restore health to ecosystems - Joe Brewer, 2024, Dec 4 - from - Resilience article - A 'Transcender Manifesto" for a world beyond capitalism. A seed.

      summary - A good article that offers an explanation of how language has potentially led the public to rely on top down actors to provide solutions to the climate crisis - Joe Brewer draws on his background as a frame analyst to analyse the role language and cognitive linguistics has played in framing the discourse on the climate crisis - He claims that this has led the public to look to elite top down actors to provide the solutions - This had led to a disempowerment of the public in actively participating in contributing too solutions - Indeed it could be why we have a sleeping giant - Reframing the story could have the opposite effect of inspiring people's to wake up and take action to regenerate nature within and surrounding the communities where people live.

      from - post - LinkedIn - climate crisis - climate communication - climate change discourse has been framed to disempower us - changing the story - so that grassroots, bottom-up initiatives can restore health to ecosystems - Joe Brewer, 2024, Dec 4 - https://hyp.is/yvHstLfVEe-cyRN4sq09Ow/www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-brewer-4957925_earlier-this-week-i-lived-into-an-important-activity-7270035170328494080-E7Cq/ - from - Resilience article - A 'Transcender Manifesto" for a world beyond capitalism. A seed. - https://hyp.is/0NOdtLiREe--pwPfB1SmdA/www.resilience.org/stories/2024-04-18/a-transcender-manifesto-for-a-world-beyond-capitalism-a-seed/

    1. Utopian Civic-Mindedness: RobertMaynard Hutchins, MortimerAdler, and the Great BooksEnterprise

      Born, Daniel. “Utopian Civic-Mindedness: Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and the Great Books Enterprise.” In Reading Communities from Salons to Cyberspace, edited by DeNel Rehberg Sedo, 81–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308848_5.

    2. what mightbe taken as the symbolic passing of the torch from Mortimer Adler toOprah Winfrey, a number of the Penguin classics chosen by Oprah forher Book Club have carried on their covers the seal with the words,‘Recommended for Discussion by the Great Books Foundation’.

      Daniel Born places Oprah and her book club into the tradition of Adler & Hutchins' The Great Books of the Western World.

    3. reframing a crucial question: is commitmentto the Great Books the enemy of progressive education (the scholarlyconsensus that has largely followed Dewey), or in fact a foundation forit?
    1. neoliberalism and its predecessors of industrial capitalism and even proto capitalism were based on separation from the natural world. And and we can we call it sort of separation or dualism

      for - key insight - neoliberalism and industrial capitalism were based on Descarte and our separation from the natural world - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - adjacency - materialism, science and neoliberalism - will technology save us? - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - to - The Three Great Separations

      key insight / summary - neoliberalism and industrial capitalism were based on Descarte and our separation from the natural world - Post Capitalist Philanthropy Webinar 1 - Alnoor Ladha - Lynn Murphy - 2023 - FIrst, Descarte separated the mind from the body. We have the paradox of: - godlike mind housed in - animalistic bodies - (incidentally, this sets us up for the exageration of the existential crisis of the denial of death in modernity - Ernest Becker) - Then we impose separation of external vs internal world - Then, we have separate categories of mind and nature, and we begin othering of: - women - other (indigenous) cultures - What Alnoor and Lynn forgot to mention was that there is another separation that preceded the industrial revolution, the separation of people into distinct classes of: - producer - consumer - Then with the advance of Newtonian physics and the wild success of materialist theory applied to create a plethora of industrial technologies, a wedding occurred between: - dualism and - materialism - Materialism decomposes everything into subatomic particles that a rational mind can understand - To those who think science and technology can save us from the crisis it helped create - the deeper understanding reveals that science and technology are themselves agents of separation.

      to - See the three great separations - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world

    1. If you’re just sitting in a cave for nine years, desire intelligently doesn’t seem to come into play very much. But if you’re in the world with other people and you’re living a life, how do you desire, how do you connect, how do you attach without greed, without trying to control other people in order to not lose them or lose their love? We have to learn to attach, to desire intelligently, to hold lightly.

      for - desire intelligently - without greed - without trying to control - in the real world - not in a cave - Zen - Barry Magid

  3. Nov 2024
    1. our universities aren't aren't doing that you know none of our institutions are doing that the conference merry go around of climate negotiations and and academics flying around the world that's not doing it know none of us are doing this it's a scam

      for - climate crisis - hypocrisy - example - colonialism - academics flying around the world to conferences - Kevin Anderson

    1. As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.

      Is this a possible reason why reading great books in youth is so useful?

    1. the reason why the United States is so hegemonic why it can afford to be the big bully around the world is because of the Monopoly of the payment system

      for - quote - the US is hegemonic and the world bully because it has a monopoly on the payment system - it is the world's reserve currency - Yanis Varoufakis

    1. science points to the fact that the world is psychoid that we are that the outer world is the collective unconscious it's like that literally it's like literally the world it's literally matter you know it's like the shadow is literally out there

      for - question - clarification - the outer world is collective consciousness - John Churchill

      question - clarification - the outer world is collective consciousness - John Churchill - This is an obvious statement on the surface that - the inner world is individual consciousness and - the outer world is collective consciousness - What does he mean by "it's literally matter and it's like the shadow is literally out there"?

  4. Oct 2024
    1. Erstmals wurde genau erfasst, welcher Teil der von Waldbränden betroffenen Gebiete sich auf die menschlich verursachte Erhitzung zurückführen lässt. Er wächst seit 20 Jahren deutlich an. Insgesamt kompensieren die auf die Erhitzung zurückgehenden Waldbrände den Rückgang an Bränden durch Entwaldung. Der von Menschen verursachte – und für die Berechnung von Schadensansprüchen relevante – Anteil der CO2-Emissione ist damit deutlich höher als bisher angenommen https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-almost-wipes-out-decline-in-global-area-burned-by-wildfires/

    1. Finnland hatte sich beim Ziel der CO2-Neutralität 2035 darauf verlassen, dass große Mengen von CO2 von Wäldern, Böden und Feuchtgebieten absorbiert werden. Inzwischen ist das Land dort keine Kohlenstoffsenke mehr. Dazu trägt die globale Erhitzung selbst bei, durch die viele Bäume sterben, aber auch die Abholzung des Waldes. Finnland ist ein Beispiel für die Schwächung der ländlichen Kohlenstoffsenken, von der viele Länder betroffen sind. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/finland-emissions-target-forests-peatlands-sinks-absorbing-carbon-aoe

    1. 2023 haben Böden und Landpflanzen fast kein CO2 absorbiert. Dieser Kollaps der Landsenken vor allem durch Dürren und Waldbrände wurde in diesem Ausmaß kaum vorausgesehen, und es ist nicht klar, ob auf ihn eine Regeneration folgt. Er stellt Klimamodelle ebenso in Frage wie die meisten nationalen Pläne zum Erreichen von CO2-Neutralität, weil sie auf natürlichen Senken an Land beruhen. Es gibt Anzeichen dafür, dass die steigenden Temperaturen inzwischen auch die CO2-Aufnahmefähigkeit der Meere schwächen. Überblicksartikel mit Links zu Studien https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe

    1. the rulers are no longer Kings presidents or prime ministers but the market economy for the B this is the first time that the ruler is an economic agent instead of a political one

      for - adjacency - the largest companies in the world have more capital than many countries - the society of the spectacle - lobby industry

      adjacency - between - the largest multi-national companies in the world have more capital than many countries - the society of the spectacle - adjacency relationship - It is a well publicized fact that the world's largest multi-national companies have more capital than many countries - This fact is a prime example of the conclusions of the society of the spectacle, - Governments are coopted to serve the needs of the multi-nationals through corporate lobbyists - In fact, multi-national corporations are called "multi-national" precisely because they are so large that they exceed the boundaries of nation states, they are LARGER than nation states - Advertising, movies and products all flow trans-nationally across political boundaries - Military weapons developed by the military industrial complex and sold to nation states make modern warefare between them exponentially more harmful - In the end, the elites within such corporations benefit from the most from the consumption - The diversion is towards maximizing their profits at the expense of all else: - people - the environment - life on earth

  5. Sep 2024
    1. for - The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability - Camilo Mora et al. - 6th mass extinction - biodiversity loss - question - 2024 - Sept 13 - how do we reconcile climate departure with quantification of earth system boundary biodiversity safe and just limit? - to - climate departure map - map of major cities - 2013 - to - researchgate paper - The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability - 2013 - Camilo Mora et al

      paper details - title: The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability - author: - Camilo Mora, - Abby G. Frazier, - Ryan J. Longman, - Rachel S. Dacks, - Maya M. Walton, - Eric J. Tong, - Joseph J. Sanchez, - Lauren R. Kaiser, - Yuko O. Stender, - James M. Anderson, - Christine M. Ambrosino, - Iria Fernandez-Silva, - Louise M. Giuseffi, - Thomas W. Giambelluca - date - 9 October, 2013 - publication Nature 502, 183-187 (2013) - https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12540 - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12540

      to - https://hyp.is/0BdCglsHEe-2CteEQbOBfw/www.researchgate.net/publication/257598710_The_projected_timing_of_climate_departure_from_recent_variability

      Summary - This is an extremely important paper with a startling conclusion of the magnitude of the social and economic impacts of the biodiversity disruption coming down the pipeline - It is likely that very few governments are prepared to adapt to these levels of ecosystemic disruption - Climate departure is defined as an index of the year when: - The projected mean climate of a given location moves to a state that is - continuously outside the bounds of historical variability - Climate departure is projected to happen regardless of how aggressive our climate mitigation pathway - The business-as-usual (BAU) scenario in the study is RCP85 and leads to a global climate departure mean of 2047 (+/- 14 years s.d.) while - The more aggressive RCP45 scenario (which we are currently far from) leads to a global climate departure mean of 2069 (+/- 18 years s.d.) - So regardless of how aggressive we mitigate, we cannot avoid climate departure. - What consequences will this have on economies around the world? How will we adapt? - The world is not prepared for the vast ecosystem changes, which will reshape our entire economy all around the globe.

      question - 2024 - Sept 13 - how do we reconcile climate departure with quantification of earth system boundary biodiversity safe and just limit? - Annotating the Sept 11, 2024 published Earth Commission paper in Lancet, the question arises: - How do we reconcile climate departure dates with the earth system boundary quantification of safe limits for biodiversity? - There, it is claimed that: - 50 to 60 % of intact nature is required<br /> - https://hyp.is/Mt8ocnIEEe-C0dNSJFTjyQ/www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00042-1/fulltext - a minimum of 20 to 25% of human modified ecosystems is required - https://hyp.is/AKwa4nIHEe-U1oNQDdFqlA/www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00042-1/fulltext - in order to mitigate major species extinction and social disruption crisis - And yet, Mora et al.'s research and subsequent climate departure map shows climate departure is likely to take place everywhere on the globe, with - aggressive RCP decarbonization pathway only delaying climate departure from - Business-As-Usual RCP pathway - by a few decades at most - And this was a 2011 result. 13 years later in 2024, I expect climate departure dates have likely gotten worse and moved closer to the present

      from - Gupta, Joyeeta et al.(2024). A just world on a safe planet: a Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations. The Lancet Planetary Health, Volume 0, Issue 0 - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelancet.com%2Fjournals%2Flanplh%2Farticle%2FPIIS2542-5196(24)00042-1%2Ffulltext&group=world

      to - climate departure map - of major cities of the world - 2013 - https://hyp.is/tV1UOFsKEe-HFQ-jL-6-cw/www.hawaii.edu/news/2013/10/09/study-in-nature-reveals-urgent-new-time-frame-for-climate-change/ - full research paper - researchgate

    1. for - The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability - Camilo Mora et al. - 6th mass extinction - biodiversity loss - to - climate departure map - of major cities around the world - 2013

      Summary - This is an extremely important paper with a startling conclusion of the magnitude of the social and economic impacts of the biodiversity disruption coming down the pipeline - It is likely that very few governments are prepared to adapt to these levels of ecosystemic disruption - Climate departure is defined as an index of the year when: - The projected mean climate of a given location moves to a state that is - continuously outside the bounds of historical variability - Climate departure is projected to happen regardless of how aggressive our climate mitigation pathway - The business-as-usual (BAU) scenario in the study is RCP85 and leads to a global climate departure mean of 2047 (+/- 14 years s.d.) while - The more aggressive RCP45 scenario (which we are currently far from) leads to a global climate departure mean of 2069 (+/- 18 years s.d.) - So regardless of how aggressive we mitigate, we cannot avoid climate departure. - What consequences will this have on economies around the world? How will we adapt? - The world is not prepared for the vast ecosystem changes, which will reshape our entire economy all around the globe.

      from - Nature publication - https://hyp.is/3wZrokX9Ee-XrSvMGWEN2g/www.nature.com/articles/nature12540

      to - climate departure map - of major cities around the globe - 2013 - https://hyp.is/tV1UOFsKEe-HFQ-jL-6-cw/www.hawaii.edu/news/2013/10/09/study-in-nature-reveals-urgent-new-time-frame-for-climate-change/

    1. In June 2019, we (Bret, Luke, Josh, Paula, Omar, Weiwei) collected all of our Dynamicland-related photos and videos onto a "documentation drive".  The media was organized both by date and by Realtalk project or topic.  We also also made a giant table in Notion of all notable Realtalk projects, with notes and page numbers.  In early 2020, I got media from Toby and Glen, and added the subsequent media from Luke, Josh, and Omar.Last week, I made some Realtalk pages to scan the collection, assign every file an "accession number" of the form DL2018-01-31-debb83.mov(where 2018-01-31 is the date the photo/video was taken, and debb83 is the first six digits of the file's md5), tag the files based on their old directory names and filenames, generate a new directory structure of the form, archived-media/originals/2018/01/DL2018-01-31-debb83.movgenerate thumbnails of the form archived-media/thumbnails/2018/01/DL2018-01-31-debb83.jpgand print out an album.

      Interesante esta mezcla de digital a análogo y las herramientas que en el domino digital continúan usando (drives, Notion, etc). Por supuesto, el grupo está enfocado en la segunda parte y sus innovaciones (Realtak, etc) y no en las innovaciones en la primera (drive, Notion). Dado que nosotros sí nos enfocamos en esta gestión alterna de conocimiento en lo digital, usando infraestructuras de bolsillo, metaherramientas y programación intersticial, cómo esto podría tener una contraparte y puente en análogo, lowtech, similar a Hypertalk in the world

    1. Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.

      for - unpack - key insight - with the postulate of consciousness as the foundation, it makes sense that this is - an inner reality made of qualia - and an outer reality made of shareable symbols we call matter - Federico Faggin - question - about Federico Faggin's ideas - in what way is matter a symbol? - adjacency - poverty mentality - I am the universe who wants to know itself question - in what way is matter a symbol? - Matter is a symbol in the sense that it - we describe reality using language, both - ordinary words as well as - mathematics - It is those symbolic descriptions that DIRECT US to jump from one phenomena to another related phenomena. - After all, WHO is the knower of the symbolic descriptions? - WHAT is it that knows? Is it not, as FF points out, the universe itself - as expressed uniquely through all the MEs of the world, that knows? - Hence, the true nature of all authentic spiritual practices is that - the reality outside of us is intrinsically the same as - the reality within us - our lebenswelt of qualia

  6. Aug 2024
    1. I want to start with that idea of kind of a bidirectional Conformity that it's not only the mind is conforming to the world but the world is conforming to the mind of course you might get tired of me doing this this is a neoplatonic claim right and this is the idea this is this is this is sort of the central idea behind what I call participatory knowing

      for - participatory knowing - mutual conformity - mind and the world partcipate - John Vervaeke - responding to Michael Levin

    1. I have no idea. But what I do know is that it's not a, um, this is not a philosophical, uh, thing that we can decide arguing in an armchair. Yes, it is. No, it isn't. No, you have to do experiments and then you find out.

      for - question - does the world have agency? <br /> - answer - don't know - but it's not philosophical - it's scientific - do experiments to determine answer - Michael Levin

    2. Does the world have agency?

      for - question - does the World have agency? - Michael Levin

    1. the number one issue is to get world leaders  immediately to sit down together and, recognize that we need to urgently get back  into the safe space of planetary boundaries.

      for - planetary emergency - top priority task - get world leaders to meet and develop a plan to return to the safe operating space

    1. for - climate crisis - psychology - wrong approach

      summary - Climate scientist professor Mojib Latif explores why our best efforts at rapid intervention to deal with the climate crisis are failing - Near the end of the program, he interviews professor Henning Beck, a neuroscientist who suggests that human brains have evolved to be rewarded for securing more. - Dopamine is released when we get more and we have not designed our intervention strategies aligned with this basic property of our brains

  7. Jul 2024
    1. We now know that the world has existed for billions of years,

      for - perspectival knowing - example - age of the world - number of galaxies

      perspectival knowing - example - age of the world - number of galaxies - This may be truth for one person, but not another - Our writing reveals our perspectives, and also determines who will or will not resonate with it

    1. There is for himno royal road to order. Knowledge andright will a r e indispensable. This doesnot mean that the world will heed, andeducate its feelings and thoughts forthe sake of self-preservation. But quiteproperly, Mr. Wells should not care.He has diagnosed the ailment and pre-scribed the sensible dose. The patientis always a t liberty to pass out in self-conceit or with the aid of quacks.PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORGELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

      relationship to Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and modern politics?

      relationship to the Great Books idea in 1942-1952 and beyond?

      repeating history...

    1. although is by no means the only place agriculture has been invented from scratch in probably at least half a dozen places around the world at least

      for - agriculture was invented in at least a dozen places around the world

  8. Jun 2024
    1. An anonymous review in The Atlantic touched on the samesnobbish fear addressed by Barzun:Mr. Adler’s notion that “almost all of the great books in every fieldare within the grasp of all normally intelligent men” seems to usto need a deal of sifting. We do not know what he means by “nor-mally intelligent,” but if he means the average run of intelligencein our population, or in the student body of our schools and col-leges, we believe he is deplorably wrong. So also . . . the book’s sub-title, “The Art of Getting a Liberal Education,” savors strongly ofquackery. 39

      Compare this with the ideas of intelligence and eugenics of the time as well as that of class in Isenberg's White Trash.

      Presumably this anonymous author would have been seeing things from a more dominant eugenics viewpoint at this time period of 1940.

      See also: The Eugenics War (American Experience) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/

    2. Those larger goals highlighted edu-cation for good citizenship; to them great books were more of anantidote than a contributor to that bland, conformist mass culturefeared by mid-century critics (left and liberal and conservative) anddescribed by cultural historians.

      How, if at all, did the great books idea contribute to the idea of Manufacturing Consent for the 20th century?

    3. Jacques Barzun

      Jacques Barzun wrote a review of of the Great Books when they came out in 1952.

      Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

      See notes at: https://hypothes.is/a/8o-z3DHLEe6_PMtDOvwCmg

    1. we're disconnected from the physical 00:04:07 world at the same time as being intricately and desperately connected

      for - answer - why is the world in crisis?

      answer - why is the world in crisis? - We're disconnected from the physical world at the same time as - being intricately and desperately connected - We take resources away and - produce a lot of waste very rapidly - due to our capacities through science and technology

    2. why is the world in crisis

      for - question - why is the world in crisis? - Planet Critical

    1. "No artist has ethical sympathies," Oscar Wilde once wrote. "An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. All art is quite useless."
    1. when babies are born right they are just naturally taking in the world right before they have language they don't seate things 00:35:27 into little things and label them

      for - adjacency - Entangled World host comment - Gerald Edelman observation - neonates do not separate the world

      adjacency - between - Entangled World podcast host comment - Gerald Edelman observation - neonates do not separate the world - adjacency relationship - Entangled World podcast host commented that - neonates do not separate the world using language - This is similar to the observation the late neuroscientist Gerald Edelman made when he said - when a baby is first born into the world, the biggest puzzle is how that baby begins to separate the world when there was no separation to begin with

    1. The foregoing examples illustrate various forms topics take according to thedifferent kinds of subjects they propose for discussion. Some deal with the natureof a thing or its definition, some with its qualities or attributes, some with itscauses, and some with its kinds; some deal with distinctions or differences, andsome with comparisons or contrasts; some propose a general theory for considera-tion, some present a problem, and some state an Issue. Some— such as the lastthree above —are difficult to characterize by any formula.

      The complexity of the topic is determined by the content of the discussion the topic is about.

    2. It is easier to say what a topic is not, than what it is or should be. If it mustalways be a less determinate expression than a sentence, and if it must usually be amore complex expression than a single word or pair of words (which are theverbal expression of terms, such as the great ideas), it would seem to follow thatthe proper expression of a topic is a phrase— often, perhaps, a fairly elaboratephrase involving a number of terms and signifying a number of possible relationsbetween them. This general description of the grammatical form of a topic docsnot, however, convey an adequate notion of the extraordinary variety of possi-ble phrasings.

      To me, it seems that Adler et al., are arguing that a topic should be stated as a phrase with varying degrees of complexity, determined by ?

    3. For example, “The ideal of the educated man’"(Education la) is a simple topic; “The right to property: the ownership of themeans of production” (Labor 7b) is a complex topic; and “The use and criticismof the intellectual tradition: the sifting of truth from erroi; the reaction againstthe authority of the past” (Progress 6c) is a more complex topic.

      Some examples of topics that are formulated and used in the original syntopicon.

    4. The topics are the basic units of the Syntopicon. They perform a doublefunction. The Outline of Topics in each chapter is the analysis of a great idea,setting forth its various meanings, its themes and problems; and the individualtopics serve as the immediate headings under w^hich are assembled the referencesto the discussion of each particular subject in the great books. The topics are themajor subdivisions of the discussion in the sphere of each of the great ideas, as theideas are the main divisions of the whole discussion in the great books. As eachidea represents a general field of discourse— a domain of learning and inquiry—covering a variety of related themes and problems, so, under each idea, the varioustopics represent the themes and problems which are the particular subjects ofdiscussion in that field.

      It seems as though an idea is very broad and a "sub-topic" is more granular, though also determined based on the overall content and related to the primary idea.

    5. The two mfasi^rfs of intrinsic greatness — scope and significance

      It seems that most of the ideas were chosen based on scope and significance.

    6. The reason which operated against such multiplication of chapters was(as already stated) the desire to avoid excessive duplication among topics andreferences.

      Adler et al. operated from a state of efficiency in the sense that they did not want the book to become too long (even though, or maybe because of, the fact that the end result became already two volumes each more than a thousand pages)

    7. Both the great books and the great ideas were chosen to represent the unity andcontinuity of the tradition of western thought. The great l^ks are those whichdeal imaginatively or intellectually with the ideas which arc fundamental through-out this whole tradition. Any important work -ancient, mediaeval, or modern-will necessarily be concerned with these ideas in some uay. What distinguishes thegreat books is the originality, the profundity, and the scope of their treatment ofthese ideas. Other books, important in some special field of learning, may havethese qualities with respect to one idea or even to several related ideas, but thegreat books possess them for a considerable range of ideas, covering a variety ofsubject matters or disciplines; and among the great books the greatest arc thosewith the greatest range of imaginative or intellectual content.

      Adler explains the distinctive factor determining which authors and works were included in the list of the Great Books of the Western World.

      Basically, they were works that were influential, written excellently, and had applicability to a considerable amount of ideas processed by the whole.

    8. The great majority of terms eliminated were those which did not appear to ,receive extensive or elaborate treatment in the great books. They were terms thatdid not seem to have a lively career —a continuous and complex developmentthroughout the three-thousand-year tradition of the great books.The editors usedthe actual content of the great books as the test whereby to separate a small set oftruly great ideas from a much larger number of important concepts or notions.The reader can apply this test himself by comparing the 1800 concepts listed inthe Inventory of Terms, with the 102 ideas that are treated as the principalterms in the Syntopicon.

      The ideas were chosen on the basis of coverage within the Great Works.

  9. May 2024
  10. Apr 2024
    1. So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true.So speaking as I think, alas, I die

      Perhaps the letting go of one's responsibilities, one's expectations and civility (as a woman) leads to her death, meaning that all life shallowly is, is the battle between ourselves and society's imposing constructs, and once this conflict is overcome, we are at peace -- we can ascend into heaven. This alignment between our inner clarity and our actions is what leads her to die "peacefully".

  11. Mar 2024
    1. Theindexer will want a feel, before they begin, for the concepts that willneed to be flagged, or taxonomized with subheadings. They mightskim the book – reading it in full but at a canter – before tackling itproperly with the software open. Or they may spend a while, as apreliminary, with the book’s introduction, paying attention to itschapter outline – if it has one – to gain a sense of what to look outfor. Often, having reached the end of the book, the indexer will returnto the first few chapters, going over them again now that they havegained a conceptual mapping of the work as a whole.

      It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.

      Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.

  12. Feb 2024
    1. Die Selbstverpflichtungen der Regierungen zur Dekarbonisierung reichen bei weitem nicht aus. Ein Bericht, der von den Vereinten Nationen als Grundlage für die kommende COP28 publiziert wurde, ergibt, dass 2030 etwa 20 bis 23 Gigatonnen mehr CO<sub>2</sub> emittiert werden sollen, als mit dem 1,5 °-Ziel verträglich wäre. Zum ersten Mal wird in einem offiziellen UN-Dokument das Ende der Nutzung fossiler Brennstoffe gefordert. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/un-report-calls-for-phasing-out-of-fossil-fuels-as-paris-climate-goals-being-missed

      Bericht: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/EMBARGOED_DRAFT_Sythesis-report-of-the-technical-dialogue-of-the-first-global-stocktake.pdf

      Bericht: https://unfccc.int/documents/631600

    1. To what extent in this process is the client reconfiguring and refocusing on their relationship with those around them? Does the past have absolute process (in the Zulu incarnation)? It obviously may not in the Western practice, but perhaps the client may more easily come to terms with those around them as a result, and this is more beneficial than a "truer" outcome?

  13. Jan 2024
    1. for - Rainbow body - Deep Humanity - superorganism - multi-level communication - adjacency between - contemplative practice - direct experience of body's cellular activity

      summary - Father Tiso and his catholic lineage combined with scholarship in Tibetan studies places him in a unique position for interfaith dialogue - His research interest in investigating the extraordinary and unexplained Tibetan meditation phenomena of Rainbow Body manifested by the greatest practitioners at the time of death (including contemporary ones) sheds light on the Rainbow Body phenomena in many spiritual traditions and challenges the scientific community to come up with an explanation for it. - If scientifically proven true, it offers an extraordinary possibility of human potential - Contemplation could be the practice technique that could directly bridge normal human consciousness with the microscopic world around us, which to date, is only accessible through scientific instrumentation.

      question - Does deep contemplative practice offers a direct access to the microscopic reality? - If so, how does it accomplish this direct communication with human cells, and indeed, even the universe itself? - Father Tiso shares centuries old recorded visual drawings of experiences reported by Rainbow Body practitioners and speculates whether these drawings represent direct experience of the cellular scale of our human form - Indeed, could it even be at the quantum level of experience, since rainbows are an optical phenomenal?

  14. Dec 2023
    1. Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

      How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

      How could one distribute the effects evenly?

      What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

      link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

    2. very carefully assem-bled with the approval of outstandingauthorities in each subject, carefully col-lated and edited, and critically presented.It would be not a miscellany but a con-centration, a clarification and a synthesis.

      Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.

      These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.

    1. Will artificial intelligence create useless class of people? - Yuval Noah Harari

      1:00 "bring the latest findings of science of the public", otherwise the public space "gets filled with conspiracy theories and fake news and whatever".<br /> he fails to mention that ALL his beautiful "scientists" are financially dependent on corporations, who dictate the expected results, and who sabotage "unwanted research".<br /> for example, the pharma industry will NEVER pay money for research of natural cancer cures, or "alternative" covid cures like ivermectin / zinc / vitamin C, because these cures have no patent, so there is no profit motive, and also because the "militant pacifists" want to fix overpopulation this way.<br /> a "scientist" should be someone, who has all freedom to propose hypotheses, which then are tested in experiments (peer review), and compared to real placebo control groups. because that is science, or "the scientific method". everything else is lobbying for "shekel shekel".

  15. Nov 2023
    1. Ask a scientist what the world is made out of, and he or she may talk about atoms or molecules, or quantum mechanical wave functions, or possibly strings or vacuum fluctuations, depending on the level on which one want to focus. Diverse as those answers may be, they all have in common that they borrow elements from descriptions of building blocks of nature, as used already within contemporary physics. Now propose to a scientist that everything could be seen as `made out of experience', or at least, for starters, as `given in experience.'
      • for: what is the world made of, paradigm shift - scientific ontology

      • question

        • what off the world made of?
      • answer ( Phenomenological)
        • experience!
    1. Maybe this will help: [Great Books of the Western World SYNTOPICON changes in 1986 (more info in comments) : ClassicalEducation](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/hlvnkv/great_books_of_the_western_world_syntopicon/)

      reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).

      Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.

      I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.

      As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.

  16. Oct 2023
    1. Alter’s commentary benefits from his allusions to, among others, Freud, Gilgamesh, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Josephus, Joyce, Kafka, Melville, Milton, Molière, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Sophocles. But technical words and phrases often appear without explanation: aleatory device, autochthonous, collocation, deictic, diachronic collage, dittography, durance vile, emphatic anaphora, gnomic, haplography, metonymy, and threnody. (To my knowledge, there is no readily available glossary containing all these words—so you will just have to google one word at a time, dear reader.) Even when Alter offers a definition as an aside, I wonder how many people will benefit from his explanations., e.g., “This pairing is virtually a zeugma, the syntactic yoking together of disparate items” (Isaiah 44:15).

      Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

    1. for me nation is the largest amount of population you can address right now if you want to bring well-being you cannot address the 00:13:15 globe hello you cannot address the whole globe just like that it is not within your means to address the globe
      • comment
        • Sadhguru is making the point that there is so many competing perspectives, many highly polarized that you cannot achieve harmony between all of them
        • Ironically, this is even true at the national level
        • One can, however, appeal to a global subset of people who believe in the same thing
    1. And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.

      A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.

  17. Sep 2023
    1. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

      I read the first edition.

      Hutchins, Robert M. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 1. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

      urn:x-pdf:0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac<br /> Annotation search: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true&addQuoteContext=true&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A0ce8391ed9f9f1cfc78c28b6c923abac

    1. Wills, Garry. “After 54 Great Books, 102 Great Ideas, Now—Count Them !—Three Revolutions.” The New York Times, June 13, 1971, sec. BR. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/13/archives/the-common-sense-of-politics-by-mortimer-j-adler-265-pp-new-york.html

      It's not super obvious from the digitized context (text), but this review is in relation to The Common Sense of Politics (1971) by Mortimer J. Adler.

      Wills criticizes Adler and his take in the book as well as the general enterprise of the Great Books of the Western World.

      There seem to be interesting sparks here in the turn of the Republican party in the early 70s moving into the coming Reagan era.

      • for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
        • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
        • It makes me think of the old cliches:
          • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
          • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
        • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
          • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
          • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
            • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
        • The conversation explores the process of:
          • othering,
          • coopting and
          • abandoning
        • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
        • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
        • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
        • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
        • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
        • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
          • a sense of helplessness,
          • anger emerging from injustice
        • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
        • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
        • Another cliche springs to mind
          • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
          • hence the amplifying role of social media
        • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:
    1. RECOMMENDED READING LIST

      Compare this list to what ultimately became the Great Books of the Western World in 1952. Lots more 20th century writing on it to begin...

    2. Although not all of the books listed are "great" in any of the commonly accepted meanings of the term, all of them will reward you for the effort you make to read them.

      This book was published originally in 1940 and apparently the Great Books of the Western World was hatched in 1943, so this book isn't necessarily a stepping stone to pitching/selling those, though obviously it informs the ideas which led up to its creation.

      Note that it is roughly contemporaneous to his article a year later:

      Adler, Mortimer J. “How to Mark a Book.” Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941.<br /> https://stevenson.ucsc.edu/academics/stevenson-college-core-courses/how-to-mark-a-book-1.pdf

  18. Aug 2023
    1. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    2. This set of books is offered not merely as an object uponwhich leisure may be expended, but also as a means to thehumanization of work through understanding.16

      Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

    1. Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

      Barzun heaps praise on Great Books of the Western World with some criticism of what it is also missing. He finds more than a few superlative words for the majesty of the Syntopicon.

    2. I he fact is that there arc some three thousand subheadings. So persons who feel that an official ceiling of 102 ideas would cramp their style can breathe freely.

      According to Jacques Barzun (and possibly written in the volumes itself), while the Syntopicon has 102 ideas, there are "some three thousand subheadings."

    3. It is not quite a five-foot shelf: 1 make it four feet eight-and-a-half — standard railroad gauge.

      the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

    1. I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

      • Has anyone seen them for sale?
      • Made their own?
      • Interested in commissioning some as a bigger group?
      • Used a third-party company to design and print something?

      In doing something like this for fun, I might hope that the younger kids in the house might show more interest in some more lively/colorful custom covers.

      I'm partially tempted to use a classical painting as a display across the spines (a la Juniper Books collections) perhaps using:

      Other thoughts? suggestions?

      Syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15gv2cz/custom_dust_jackets_for_the_great_books_of_the/

  19. Jul 2023
    1. The Editors wish especially to mention their debt to thelate John Erskine, who over thirty years ago began the move-ment to reintroduce the study of great books into Americaneducation, and who labored long and arduously on thepreparation of this set.
    2. We attach importance to making whole works, as distin-guished from excerpts, available; and in all but three cases,Aquinas, Kepler, and Fourier, the 443 works of the 74 auth-ors in this set are printed complete.

      There are 443 works by 74 authors in the Great Books of the Western World. All of them are printed in their entirety except for Aquinas, Kepler and Fourier.

    3. The final decision on the list wasmade by me.

      Robert Hutchins takes sole responsibility for the final decision on the selection for the books which appear in The Great Books of the Western World series.

      One wonders what sort of advice he may have sought out or received with respect to a much broader diversity of topics and writers with respect to his own time. I reminded a bit of the article The 102 Great Ideas (Life, 1948) which highlights a more progressive stance with respect to women and feminism in the examples used.

      See: LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. Https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

    4. They now have the chance to understandthemselves through understanding their tradition.

      It feels odd that people wouldn't understand their own traditions, but it obviously happens. Information overload can obviously heavily afflict societies toward forgetting their traditions and the formation of new traditions, particularly in non-oral traditions which focus more on written texts which can more easily be ignored (not read) and then later replaced with seemingly newer traditions.

      Take for example the resurgence of note taking ideas circa 2014-2020 which completely disregarded the prior histories, particularly in lieu of new technologies for doing them.

      As a means of focusing on Western Culture, the editors here have highlighted some of the most important thoughts for encapsulating and influencing their current and future cultures.

      How do oral traditions embrace the idea of the "Great Conversation"?

    5. democracyrequires liberal education for all.

      Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.

      The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.

    6. We may havemade errors of selection.

      A great admission to make upfront in such a massive endeavor which one hopes to shape the future.

      What does this mean for ars excerpendi writ large? Particularly when it may apply to hundreds of thousands?

  20. Jun 2023
    1. One) Successful men realize that the most important decision in their life is the woman they choose, because outside of work, this is what they'll be spending most time on. The woman must understand the man's grand ambition, and support them with it. (Cf. Flow & The Intellectual Life as well). Women should be chosen on personality, not looks. Looks fade (attraction as well), personality "stays".

      Two) Everyone deserves an opinion but not everyone deserves a say. Charlie Munger sums this up right: "I don't ever allow myself to have [express] an opinion about anything that I don't know the opponent side's argument better than they do." Or Marcus Aurelius, who says: "The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject." In short: Only state your opinion when you can back it up!; knowledge and experience. The same goes for judging opinion (and advice) from others.

      Three) Successful people buy assets when the money is enough. Assets > Luxury. (See also: Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki). Only buy glamor and other "interests" once your assets are there to secure your financial success.

      Four) Be pragmatic. Do what's practical, not what is "sexy". Notice inefficiencies and solve them. The entrepreneurial mindset.

      Five) The morning sets the tone for the rest of the days. Time is subjective, waking up early doesn't matter as much as waking up later. It depends on the person. Someone who wakes up at 10am can be as successful as someone who wakes up at 6am. Instead, what defines success, is a highly effective morning routine.

      Six) The less you talk, the more you listen. Talking less means less mistakes. In addition, the less you talk, the more people will listen when you do speak. It puts extra weight on your message. Listening means analysis and learning.

      Seven) Pick the right opportunity at the right time. Pick the right vehicle. Do the right things in the right order! The advice "don't do what someone says, do what they do" is bullshit, as you can't do what someone is able to do after ten years of experience.

      Eight) Discipline > Motivation. Motivation, like Dr. Sung says, fluctuates and is multifactorial dependent... When you are lead by motivation you will not be as productive. Don't rely on chance. Rely on what is stable.

      Nine) Once a good career has been made, buy A1 assets and hold on to them to secure a financially successful future.

      Ten) Just because you won, you are not a winner. Being a winner is a continuous process, it means always learning and reflecting as well as introspecting. Don't overvalue individual wins but do celebrate them when appropriate.

      Eleven) Build good relationships with the banks early on. At times you need loans to fund certain ventures, when having a good relation with them, this will be significantly easier. Understand finance as early as possible. Read finance books.

      Twelve) Keep the circle small. Acquintances can be many, but real close relationships should be kept small. Choose your friends wisely. "You become the average of the five people you spend most time with." Privacy is important. Only tell the most deep secrets to the Inner Circle, to avoid overcomplication.

      Thirteen) Assume that everything is your fault. Responsibility. It leads to learning. It requires reflection and introspection. It leads to Dr. Benjamin Hardy's statement: "Nothing happens to you, everything happens for you."

      Fourteen) Work like new money, but act like your old money. Combine the hunger of the new with the wisdom of the old.

      Fifteen) Assume that you can't change the world, but slightly influence it. It prevents disappointments and gives a right mindset. Do everything (that has your ambition) with an insane drive. Aim to hit the stars. To become the best of the best.

      Sixteen) Private victories lead to public victories. The solid maxim is the following: "The bigger the public victory, the more private victories went into it." Work in private. Social media doesn't need to known the struggle. Let your results talk for you. This is also why you should never compare yourself to others, but rather to your own past self.

      Seventeen) After extreme experience, the most complicated task will look elegant and effortless. Unconscious competence.

    1. The men who crafted Great Books programs, most prominently John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Scott Buchanan, promoted the idea that the reading of classics was a task meant for all students, at all levels, even if the works were translated from their original language. At several colleges, the curricula of undergraduate programs came to be based upon the reading of these Great Books.
    1. We live in a society that emphasizes glamour and sex appeal. That is why most of us strive to achieve external beauty, but oftentimes we lose our uniqueness in the process.

      so this passage explicitly mentions "external beauty", BUT if we're to consider beauty in its truest essence, then i wonder if this statement is a bad thing. after all, beauty is essentially harmony and balance (which explains why individuals with symmetrical features are considered attractive). all of us strive for beauty, but in doing so, we may lose what makes us unique because beauty favors uniformity.

      this is fascinating to me because uniformity adheres to a standard, which is important for regulating randomness (opposite of this is pattern and we LOVE patterns because it is discernible which means it is safer), and fostering a shared understanding of the world. and this shared understanding of our world is really important to us as humanity. this is how we evolve together. this collective perception only happens through that concept of beauty (or form and structure, harmony and balance).

      nowadays, we shifted and value individualism more. this excessive individualism has promoted different perspectives on the world which contributes to conflicts. ultimately, extremes on both ends of the spectrum (uniformity or individualism) are detrimental, so striking this balance between them is crucial for progress and unity among people.

  21. Apr 2023
    1. Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

    1. Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

  22. books.google.com books.google.com
    1. Two page spread of Life Magazine article with the title "The 102 Great Ideas" featuring a photo of 26 people behind 102 card indexes with categorized topical labels from Angel to Will.

    2. LIFE. “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog.” January 26, 1948. https://books.google.com/books?id=p0gEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA92&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false. Google Books.

      Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.

    3. Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

      The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".

      It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.


      Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?

    4. A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)

    1. Oakeshott saw educationas part of the ‘conversation of mankind’, wherein teachers induct their studentsinto that conversation by teaching them how to participate in the dialogue—howto hear the ‘voices’ of previous generations while cultivating their own uniquevoices.

      How did Michael Oakeshott's philosophy overlap with the idea of the 'Great Conversation' or 20th century movement of Adler's Great Books of the Western World.

      How does it influence the idea of "having conversations with the text" in the annotation space?

    1. Mental Health State of the World report published by Sapien Labs’ Mental Health Million Project suggests that over recent years we appear to be crossing a global tipping point.

      Annotate this report

  23. Mar 2023
    1. In 1886, during a lecture on the "pleasure of reading," the British scientist, politician, and man of letters John Lubbock spoke of his wish for "a list of a hundred good books"; in the absence of such, he offered his own selection.
    1. In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project).

      the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

    1. This is the Deluxe edition of the Great Books of the Western World. There are three versions of the set. the least expensive was cloth-bound. That was the original version published in 1952. In the 1970's a tan edition was issued that was more expensive. The problem is that the binding tends to chip and crack unless it was kept in a dark, refrigerated closet. This set, which is half bound in black Fabricoid (imitation Morocco leather) and half in cloth was the most expensive of the three, costing upwards of $1800 in the mid-Eighties, and the most durable with gilt tops.

      1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

  24. Jan 2023
    1. https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

      This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

      This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

  25. Dec 2022
  26. Oct 2022
    1. http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

      “The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

  27. Sep 2022
  28. Aug 2022
    1. https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

      Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

      I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

    2. But the real goal of a Great Books reading program is to experience the minds of these authors (something the Schoolmen called connatural knowledge) and imprint whatever value we find there on our souls (i.e. will and intellect). This can only be done through a process of intentional re-reading.
    1. I think we can define an "archival virtual machine" specification that is efficient enough to be usable but simple enough that it never needs to be updated and is easy to implement on any platform; then we can compile our explorable explanations into binaries for that machine. Thenceforth we only need to write new implementations of the archival virtual machine platform as new platforms come along

      We have that. It's the Web platform. The hard part is getting people to admit this, and then getting them to actually stop acting counter to these interests. Sometimes that involves getting them to admit that their preferred software stack (and their devotion to it) is the problem, and it's not going to just fix itself.

      See also: Lorie and the UVC

    1. Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

      If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

      Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

      I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

    1. https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

      Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

      found by way of

      Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

      — Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
  29. Jul 2022
    1. Yes, it’s making it easier than ever to write code collaboratively in the browser with zero configuration and setup. That’s amazing! I’m a HUGE believer in this mission.

      Until those things go away.

      A case study: DuckDuckHack used Codio, which "worked" until DDG decided to call it a wrap on accepting outside contributions. DDG stopped paying for Codio, and because of that, there was no longer an easy way to replicate the development environment—the DuckDuckHack repos remained available (still do), but you can't pop over into Codio and play around with it. Furthermore, because Codio had been functioning as a sort of crutch to paper over the shortcomings in the onboarding/startup process for DuckDuckHack, there was never any pressure to make sure that contributors could easily get up and running without access to a Codio-based development environment.

      It's interesting that, no matter how many times cloud-based Web IDEs have been attempted and failed to displace traditional, local development, people keep getting suckered into it, despite the history of observable downsides.

      What's also interesting is the conflation of two things:

      1. software that works by treating the Web browser as a ubiquitous, reliable interpreter (in a way that neither /usr/local/bin/node nor /usr/bin/python3 are reliably ubiquitous)—NB: and running locally, just like Node or Python (or go build or make run or...)—and

      2. the idea that development toolchains aiming for "zero configuration and setup" should defer to and depend upon the continued operation of third-party servers

      That is, even though the Web browser is an attractive target for its consistency (in behavior and availability), most Web IDE advocates aren't actually leveraging its benefits—they still end up targeting (e.g.) /usr/local/bin/node and /usr/local/python3—except the executables in question are expected to run on some server(s) instead of the contributor's own machine. These browser-based IDEs aren't so browser-based after all, since they're just shelling out to some non-browser process (over RPC over HTTP). The "World Wide Wruntime" is relegated to merely interpreting the code for a thin client that handles its half of the transactions to/from said remote processes, which end up handling the bulk of the computing (even if that computing isn't heavyweight and/or the client code on its own is full of bloat, owing to the modern trends in Web design).

      It's sort of crazy how common it is to encounter this "mental slippery slope": "We can lean on the Web browser, since it's available everywhere!" → "That involves offloading it to the cloud (because that's how you 'do' stuff for the browser, right?)".

      So: want to see an actual boom in collaborative development spurred by zero-configuration dev environments? The prescription is straightforward: make all these tools truly run in the browser. The experience we should all be shooting for resemble something like this: Step 1: clone the repo Step 2: double click README.html Step 3: you're off to the races—because project upstream has given you all the tools you need to nurture your desire to contribute

      You can also watch this space for more examples of the need for an alternative take on working to actually manage to achieve the promise of increased collaboration through friction-free (or at least friction-reduced) development: * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22the+repo+is+the+IDE%22 * https://hypothes.is/search?q=%22builds+and+burdens%22

  30. Jun 2022
    1. (2) The influence of the various concepts for the induction of lateral structure formation in lipid membranes on integral functional units like ionophores is demonstrated by analysing the single channel current fluctuations of gramicidin in bimolecular lipid membranes.
    1. Between 1914 and 1980, inequalities in income and wealth decreasedmarkedly in the Western world as a whole (the United Kingdom,Germany, France, Sweden, and the United States), and in Japan,Russia, China, and India, although in different ways, which we willexplore in a later chapter. Here we will focus on the Western countriesand improve our understanding of how this “great redistribution”took place.

      Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

    1. when Britannica conducted followup research on whether or not the books were actually being read, they found that buyers who really read the books were the exception. The two largest sub-categories among buyers who were more likely to have read the books were housewives and men trained in some sort of technical profession.

      Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.

      Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus

    2. certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

      Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

      Are we training thinkers or doers?

    1. Mortimer J. Adler's slip box collection (Photo of him holding a pipe in his left hand and mouth posing in front of dozens of boxes of index cards with topic headwords including "law", "love", "life", "sin", "art", "democracy", "citizen", "fate", etc.)

      Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

    1. In 1968, he resigned as Secretary of Defense to become President of the World Bank.

      Similarly Paul Wolfowitz was U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense running the U.S. war in Iraq before leaving to become the 10th President of the World Bank.

      McNamara was the 5th President of the World Bank.

  31. Mar 2022
    1. In the Warlpiri Aboriginal language of Central Australia, you do notdescribe positions of things with yourself as the focal reference point.Rather, your position is defined within the world around you. InWarlpiri, my computer is south of me, my cat is sleeping west of meand the door is east of me. It requires you to always know thecardinal directions (north, south, east and west), no matter yourorientation. Any one person is not the centre of the world, they arepart of it.

      Western cultures describe people's position in the world with them as the center, while Indigenous cultures, like those of the Warlpiri Aboriginal language of Central Australia, embed the person as part of the world and describe their position with respect to it using the cardinal directions.

    1. I hope, for the sake of everybody -- Ukrainians, Russians and the whole of humanity -- that this war stops immediately. Because if it doesn't, it's not only the Ukrainians and the Russians 00:11:39 that will suffer terribly. Everybody will suffer terribly if this war continues. BG: Explain why. YNH: Because of the shock waves destabilizing the whole world. Let’s start with the bottom line: budgets. We have been living in an amazing era of peace in the last few decades. And it wasn't some kind of hippie fantasy. You saw it in the bottom line. 00:12:06 You saw it in the budgets. In Europe, in the European Union, the average defense budget of EU members was around three percent of government budget. And that's a historical miracle, almost. For most of history, the budget of kings and emperors and sultans, like 50 percent, 80 percent goes to war, goes to the army. 00:12:31 In Europe, it’s just three percent. In the whole world, the average is about six percent, I think, fact-check me on this, but this is the figure that I know, six percent. What we saw already within a few days, Germany doubles its military budget in a day. And I'm not against it. Given what they are facing, it's reasonable. For the Germans, for the Poles, for all of Europe to double their budgets. And you see other countries around the world doing the same thing. 00:12:58 But this is, you know, a race to the bottom. When they double their budgets, other countries look and feel insecure and double their budgets, so they have to double them again and triple them. And the money that should go to health care, that should go to education, that should go to fight climate change, this money will now go to tanks, to missiles, to fighting wars. 00:13:25 So there is less health care for everybody, and there is maybe no solution to climate change because the money goes to tanks. And in this way, even if you live in Australia, even if you live in Brazil, you will feel the repercussions of this war in less health care, in a deteriorating ecological crisis, 00:13:48 in many other things. Again, another very central question is technology. We are on the verge, we are already in the middle, actually, of new technological arms races in fields like artificial intelligence. And we need global agreement about how to regulate AI and to prevent the worst scenarios. How can we get a global agreement on AI 00:14:15 when you have a new cold war, a new hot war? So in this field, to all hopes of stopping the AI arms race will go up in smoke if this war continues. So again, everybody around the world will feel the consequences in many ways. This is much, much bigger than just another regional conflict.

      Harari makes some excellent points here. Huge funds originally allocated to fighting climate change and the other anthropocene crisis will be diverted to military spending. Climate change, biodiversity, etc will lose. Only the military industrial complex will win.

      Remember that the military industry is unique. It's only purpose is to consume raw materials and capacity in order to destroy. What is the carbon footprint of a bomb or a bullet?

  32. Feb 2022
    1. What actually caused the Maine to explode -- a Spanish mine or an accident in the ship's forward ammunition magazine -- is still a mystery. A Congressional investigation at the time was inconclusive, but that didn't stop the yellow reporting. The first story in Pulitzer's New York World carried a banner headline that left little doubt about who was responsible: ''Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?'' The Journal published a diagram of what it called a secret ''infernal machine'' that struck the ship like a deadly torpedo -- apparently the figment of some journalist's imagination.

      This is a primary example of "yellow journalism". Having an eye catching headline, that includes details that are either exaggerated or non-existent, that could potentially and has caused a domino effect of issues and problems, because of that dramatization.

  33. Jan 2022
    1. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions.

      Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

  34. Dec 2021
    1. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives.

      The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

      This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

      Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

    2. The idea of the great books emerged at the same time as the modern university. It was promoted by works like Noah Porter’s “Books and Reading: Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them?” (1877) and projects like Charles William Eliot’s fifty-volume Harvard Classics (1909-10). (Porter was president of Yale; Eliot was president of Harvard.) British counterparts included Sir John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Best Books” (1895) and Frederic Farrar’s “Great Books” (1898). None of these was intended for students or scholars. They were for adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.

      Brief history of the "great books".

  35. Nov 2021
    1. Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

      This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

      Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

      This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

      This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

  36. Oct 2021
    1. Victor Papanek’s Design Problem, 1975.

      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats.[1] Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.

      Edge Effects

      It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

      Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

      Today, I was reading these words:

      Design for the Real World

      Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

      Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

      Victor Papanek goes on to say:

      It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

      (Page 323)


      Exiles and Emigrés

      The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

      That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

    1. Design for the Real World

      You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

      — R. Buckminster Fuller

      (Page 86)

    2. Design for the Real World

      by Victor Papanek

      Papanek on the Bauhaus

      Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

      No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

      The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

      (Pages 30-31)

    1. Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved this text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion here.)

  37. Sep 2021
    1. Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

    2. Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H. L. Mencken’s benighted boobocracy. They were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America.”

      what a lovely sentence

    3. When asked for his views on which classic works to include among the Great Books, the science historian George Sarton pronounced the exercise futile: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view.”

      How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?

      What do they still have to teach us?

    4. In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act

      Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

      What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

      Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

  38. Mar 2021
  39. Jan 2021
    1. https://outline.com/tan7Ej

      Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

    1. Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

  40. Oct 2020
    1. The great ones have a thought pro-cess, philosophy and habit all rolled into one that overshadows the rest: I am responsible.
    1. "Most Native Americans did not neatly distinguish between the natural and the supernatural. Spiritual power permeated their world and was both tangible and accessible"

      This shows how much more open Natives were to the super Naturaul unlike the Europeans who were more than likely christians.

    2. my first question: is what do they mean exactly by "kinship"?

      My second question is: what does the reading mean by Chiefdoms?

    3. "Food surpluses enabled significant population growth, and the Pacific Northwest became one of the most densely populated regions of North America"

      This is significant because it shows how succesful the natives were before the Europeans showed up and spread native European diseases to Natives.

  41. Sep 2020
    1. But you think sometimes about what the real world is. Just what your brain mixes together from what your senses tell you. We create the world in a lot of ways. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that, when we’re not being careful, we can change it.
  42. Jan 2020
  43. Sep 2019
    1. Americans today are some of the unhealthiest people on Earth

      That is correct, due to the high fatty food, lack of exercises,smoking and other related segments make them unhealthy. So the heart related problems are looming. According to the studies America is on the 10th place

  44. Apr 2019
    1. ​Technology is in constant motion. If we try to ignore the advances being made the world will move forward without us. Instead of trying to escape change, there needs to be an effort to incorporate technology into every aspect of our lives in the most beneficial way possible. If we look at the ways technology can improve our lives, we can see that technology specifically smartphones, have brought more benefits than harm to the academic and social aspects of teenagers lives, which is important because there is a constant pressure to move away from smart devices from older generations. The first aspect people tend to focus on is the effect that technology has on the academic life of a teen. Smartphones and other smart devices are a crucial part of interactive learning in a classroom and can be used as a tool in increasing student interest in a topic. For example, a popular interactive website, Kahoot, is used in many classrooms because it forces students to participate in the online quiz, while teachers can gauge how their students are doing in the class. Furthermore, these interactive tools are crucial for students that thrive under visual learning, since they can directly interact with the material. This can be extended to students with learning disabilities, such as Down Syndrome and Autism,​ research has shown that using specialized and interactive apps on a smart device aids learning more effectively than technology free learning. Picture Picture Another fear regarding technology is the impact it has on the social lives of young adults, but the benefits technology has brought to socializing outweighs any possible consequences. The obvious advantage smartphones have brought to social lives is the ability to easily communicate with people; with social media, texting, and calling all in one portable box there is no longer a struggle to be in contact with family and friends even if they are not in your area. Social media can also be used for much more In recent years, social media has been a key platform in spreading platforms and movements for social change. Because social media websites lower the barrier for communicating to large groups of people, it has been much easier to spread ideas of change across states, countries, or the world. For example, after Hurricane Sandy tore apart the northeastern United States, a movement called "Occupy Sandy" in which people gathered to provide relief for the areas affected was promoted and organized through social media. Other movements that have been possible because of social media include #MeToo, March for Our Lives, #BlackLivesMatter, and the 2017 Women's March. ​

  45. Sep 2018
    1. But in the past year alone, teens have demonstrated that they have the power to change the national conversation and mood.

      It was smart of Snap to add this to their app because teens do use Snapchat a lot and as shown in the quote above teens do have power to change the world how they see fit. So getting more teens to register to vote is very smart of Snap.

  46. Jun 2017
    1. It was August 2011 and “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the absurdly debonair character I played on the Dos Equis beer commercials, had become an international cultural phenomenon.

      Loved him!

  47. Dec 2016
    1. You are preparing to be a contributor in a new set of circumstances. You must have great confidence in your own experience in order to prepare because there will be little agreement around you. Perhaps you cannot define your intent, but that is okay because Knowledge is working within you. You are the forerunner of great change, but the great change will come in the next century, and it will be greater than what you experience now.
    2. new world order
  48. Oct 2016
    1. In the beginning, as far as we know, there was nothing. Suddenly, from a single point, all the energy in the Universe burst forth. Since that moment 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe has been expanding — and cooling down as it gets bigger

      the universe has been expanding and cooling down as its gets bigger

  49. Aug 2016
    1. to America or the Colonies

      As Steve Jones says in my attached article, the 19th century relationship between the US and Britain was actually quite strong. Doyle is using this brief mention of America to display the relationship between the nations at the time. Though America became independent from the UK in 1776, by the 1800's it has become quite reasonable for someone to possibly seek refuge in "the Colonies".

  50. Mar 2016
    1. Steve Ketchel was the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel.

      He was white and beautiful and represents a brighter and more loving side of the hookers, which results in empathy from the bystanders. He is portrayed as a symbol of the hookers more uplifting past.

    2. “Did I know him? Did I know him?

      She never really answers "Yes", so this indicates that she is trying to avoid being specific and giving a straight answer (because she probably did not know him)

    3. as clean and as white and as beautiful

      The use of adjectives such as "clean", "white" and "beautiful", to describe Stanley, says a lot about what qualities she admires in a man.

    4. “It would be impossible for Steve to have said that,” Peroxide declared.

      Implicitely implying something about Steve's character.

    5. Did I know him? Did I know him?

      Needs to convince herself and the others that she knows him and what he stands for

    6. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel
    7. Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?”

      They dont even know his name - this could indicate that the important thing is not what his name is (or Jesus' name) but what he stands for. It could also indicate that she desperately needs to believe in something even though she dont know what that means.

    8. We were married in the eyes of God and I belong to him right now and always will and all of me is his.

      ja yes

    9. “What do you know about Steve? Stanley. He was no Stanley. Steve Ketchel

      The girls do not know his real name which indicates that they probably never really knew him at all. This can be compared to Steve = Jesus, because no one really knows Jesus at all. No one really knew him but everyone claims that they do.

    10. “He was more than any husband could ever be

      ja yes

    11. Peroxide blondes = LIGHT, but fake light.

    12. I loved him like you love God