Indexing the world into a commonplace book, zettelkasten, or other means can create new perspectives on the world in which we live. It thereby helps to prevent the sorts of cognitive bias which we might otherwise fall trap to.

This example of Homes indexing crime gives him a dramatically different perspective on crime in the countryside to Watson who only sees the beauty in the story of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snaHY-vnB-M

Résumé de la vidéo [00:00:00][^1^][1] - [00:58:00][^2^][2] :

Cette vidéo présente le projet de corridor vert de la Septima, une avenue historique et stratégique de Bogota, en Colombie. Le projet vise à transformer cette avenue en un espace public de qualité, intégrant la mobilité durable, l'harmonie écologique et le sens du lieu. Le conférencier, Juan Pablo Caicedo, est le responsable du projet à la mairie de Bogota et il explique les principes, les objectifs, les défis et les opportunités de cette initiative.

Points forts : + [00:03:05][^3^][3] Le contexte et les enjeux du projet * La Septima est une avenue emblématique de Bogota, qui relie le centre historique au nord de la ville * Elle est actuellement en mauvais état, congestionnée, polluée et peu sûre pour les usagers * Plusieurs tentatives de rénovation ont échoué au cours des 25 dernières années, faute de consensus et de vision + [00:10:10][^4^][4] La proposition du corridor vert * Il s'agit d'un projet participatif, qui intègre les besoins et les aspirations des citoyens * Il repose sur trois piliers : la mobilité durable, l'harmonie écologique et le sens du lieu * Il propose de réduire l'espace dédié aux voitures privées, de créer des pistes cyclables et des trottoirs élargis, de mettre en place un transport public électrique et de planter des arbres et des plantes + [00:21:00][^5^][5] La relation avec le concept de ville du quart d'heure * Le conférencier fait référence au concept développé par Carlos Moreno à Paris, qui vise à rapprocher les services et les activités des habitants * Il montre comment le corridor vert peut contribuer à cette vision, en facilitant les déplacements courts et longs, en offrant des espaces publics de qualité et en renforçant la biodiversité * Il souligne l'importance de la participation, de la solidarité et de l'écologie comme principes de la ville du quart d'heure

for - Unherd - Brexit founder - post-left

• UnHerd,
  • a U.K.-based ​“heterodox” opinion website
    • founded by a Brexit supporter,
  • covered the movement in a piece titled ​
    • “Twilight of the American Left.”
• To the post-left,
  • explained contributor Park MacDougald,
• the real U.S. ruling class is a Democratic oligarchy that uses
  • the threat of creeping fascism and
  • white nationalism
• to consolidate power, and deploys
  • “‘identity politics,’ -​‘antiracism,’
  • ​‘intersectionality’ and
  • other pillars of the progressive culture war” as ​
• “mystifications whose function is to
  • demoralize and
  • divide the proletariat.”
• Leftists, in this view, merely serve as that regime’s ​“unwitting dupes.”

unpack - very interesting to unpack from a Deep Humanity perspective.

nazis enforced the creation of aryan archives and forced the destruction of jewish ones, creating an imbalance in how much material there was in order to control the historical narrative

2:00 In the mids of darkness, death, war; humans still can see light, the good, the beauty (stoic philosophy)

Epictetus would say that there are two handle on a situation; you pick the one (see above). This also aligns to the notion that situations are what they are, it is about your reaction.

How do you look at things? Do you only look at the bad, the ugly? Or, do you see the good, the light?

for - talk - David Ray Griffin - time, consciousness and freedom from Whitehead process perspective

This account has a lot of "great men" who were military leaders. I wish there was more on ordinary Americans, like the grunts or the factory workers.

So juvenile delinquency was caused by women working? Couldn't the government have funded good day care programs or have recognized the roles of fathers in raising kids?

Bailey clearly sees strikes as "troublemaking." He praises government leaders throughout. Including more of a "bottom up" perspective would help balance his presentation of US views of the war.

This makes it seem like US intentions were purely selfless. If this was the case, couldn't the US have done more to prevent the Nazis from committing genocide or to prevent Japanese atrocities against the Chinese?

Who is this? What is Bailey's background?

Why does Bailey want to celebrate American democracy so much?

Interesting that Bailey calls the camps "concentration camps" yet he doesn't address the racism that led to the creation of these camps. Was Japanese American loyalty and combat service necessary to prove this was unnecessary?

Calling the Japanese "imperialists" shows that Bailey does not like their actions.

Couldn't one also criticize US colonialism in Hawaii and the Philippines?

Like the "sneak attack" description, calling Pearl Harbor a "treacherous attack" shows how much Bailey dislikes Japan at this time.

origin of the phrase? see: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quot_homines_tot_sententi%C3%A6

apparently from Latin, echoing line 454 of Terence’s Phormio

Or the fuller quotation: - quot homines tot sententiae: suo’ quoique mos - as many men, so many minds: to every one his own way - There are as many opinions as there are people who hold them: each has his own correct way

[[Jorge Arango]] interviews Veronica Erb on Annotating Books

Anecdotal evidence that dyslexia has an overlap with creating links to see a "bigger picture"

• for: perspective shift - modernity to "neo-indigenous"

• question

  • how do you transform fear of the perceived great loss of modernity to the gains of neo-indigenous civilization?
  • we would have to feature the many potential benefits of doing this
  • it can't be just a big loss, but the pros must outweigh the cons

• for: post-modernity - temporary perspective of modernity

• for: reductionism, emptiness, Nora Bateson, complexity, reductionism - Nora Bateson, adjacency, adjacency - reductionism - emptiness

Every book, while holding the same words, will be different based on the context and needs of the individual reader.

• for: transcendent, transcendental, definition - transcendental, Kant - transcendental, phenomenology

• definition: transcendental

  • not what is BEYOND appearances (the usual colloquial meaning of transcend) but what is BELOW appearances
  • in other words, it is the condition of possibilities of these appearances, it is from where appearances appear

• perspective shift: transcendental

  • Until encountering this explanation, I battled with and puzzled over the explanation of the transcendental given by all other authors. I found them overly complex and unintelligible without understanding many other major hidden assumptions
  • In my view, this proves Bilbot's mastery as a an educator on the most profound ideas in philosophy
    • Above all, he has a deep understanding of the salience landscape of his audience, something which almost all other author's and educators miss

Its interesting how it is sharing our own experience. An experience of one self can change the perspective of the world and how one perceives it. Its like a teacher for instance. One could have a terribly behaved 4th grade class and the other could have an exceptional 4th grade class. When placing two classes together you can see an astronomical difference in a multitude of things. Now looking at perspective and experience. One could say, wow I really hate 4th grade and the other could say the opposite. So what could the actually fact on a teachers perspective and what would be relevant or not? due to the experience one may have gone through.

Example of someone (u/HerrRey) who defines zettelkasten as "concept oriented, atomic notes that are linked to each other", but who doesn't use or exclude "IDs or the folgezettel method". Interestingly they feel like they're not getting the "big picture" of their work.

Is there an affordance in these missing pieces that prevents them from seeing the big picture because of what they're missing? Is it just neurodiversity? Are they not creating outputs which connect the small to the big, and thus missing it that way?

Juridical perspective to verify the possibility to consider food as a common good. Being said that Italian constitutional doctrine has not covered this particular aspect. Bringing up the very common, yet taken for granted, concept of 'private' and 'public provided by the constitution into consideration.

3/ Champion your competition’s work<br><br>With his reading list email, on podcasts, in his bookstore, Ryan promotes other books more than his own.<br><br>When asked, he’ll say:<br><br>“Authors think they’re competing with other authors. They’re not. They’re competing with people not reading.”

— Billy Oppenheimer (@bpoppenheimer) August 24, 2022

C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

Reading and studying it all without any regard to the Indigenous culture. Steve Martin is using Western perspectives to attempt to understand non-Western art which has a different basis.

Yates, C., & Feil, E. (2021, February 1). Will coronavirus really evolve to become less deadly? The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-to-become-less-deadly-153817

Explanation of Trungpa Rinpoche's Diamond Sliver

Form and Emptiness need each other to exist and be understood. Let's unpack this. All forms can be broken down further and further into smaller and smaller bits...in the quantum mechanical limits, into emptiness. At the micro level, it is so tiny, it is no longer recognizable as form. And all this quantum mechanical soup is what makes up all forms.

So the above is a statement using science, one perspective, which is also a position so also incomplete.It (science) is also propositional.

Shaping is primarily design work. The shaped concept is an interaction design viewed from the user's perspective. It defines what the feature does, how it works, and where it fits into existing flows.

• what the feature does
• how it works
• where it fits into existing flows

Successful problem solving requires having the ability to adaptively and flexibly focus one's attention with respect to the demands of the work. Having a toolbelt of potential methods and combinatorially working through them can be incredibly helpful and we too often forget to explicitly think about doing or how to do that.

This is particularly important in mathematics where students forget to look over at their toolbox of methods. What are the different means of proof? Some mathematicians will use direct proof during the day and indirect forms of proof at night. Look for examples and counter-examples. Why not look at a problem from disparate areas of mathematical thought? If topology isn't revealing any results, why not look at an algebraic or combinatoric approach?

How can you put a problem into a different context and leverage that to your benefit?

The ultimate value of newsletters is their more direct connection to a specific niche audience for which they curate news or content. The value they provide readers is as a filter of their area with some some useful analysis and perspective.

The Spread of the Omicron Variant and Vaccine Effectiveness—January 11, 2022. (2022, January 11). Leger. https://leger360.com/surveys/legers-north-american-tracker-january-11-2022/

Chen, W., & Zou, Y. (2021). Why Zoom Is Not Doomed Yet: Privacy and Security Crisis Response in the COVID-19 Pandemic. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/mf935

Telenti, A., Arvin, A., Corey, L., Corti, D., Diamond, M. S., García-Sastre, A., Garry, R. F., Holmes, E. C., Pang, P., & Virgin, H. W. (2021). After the pandemic: perspectives on the future trajectory of COVID-19. Nature, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03792-w

A change in perspective can be witnessed in this final stanza. From the first line of the first stanza to the fourth stanza, we can observe the narrator's aggressive and defensive manner against his interlocutor, who seemed to rebuke the narrator's love relationship prior to the composition of this poem. Also, it is spoken in either simultaneous (present) or prospective (future) manner in terms of tenses. However, the final stanza introduces a partially retrospective speech (referencing past events), distinguishing itself from the preceding stanzas. Also, it seems unlikely that the narrator is requesting his deprecating interlocutor to call him "You, whom reverend love .... eyes" (last stanza line 1-7). Thus, we can logically suggest that there has been a shift in addressee, and the possible addressee of the final stanza would be the future lovers who perceive John Donne and his lover as saints of love.

Though, the poem is written in conversational style, the characters other than the narrator are deliberately silenced to give a sense of a dramatic monologue by the speaker.

This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

I don't agree with this viewpoint. Just like Heraclitus' river, the information in an article or book may not change, but there is a contextual change in the reader, in their thinking, their circumstances, and their time that may give them a different reading or perspective of the same material at later dates.

Of course not all material is actually worth reading more than once either. But for some material a second or third reading may help them create new ideas and new links to prior ideas.

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter. (2020). Twitter. Retrieved 27 February 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1339855911796543488

Seth Trueger. (2021, May 3). Https://t.co/mKCwcjQfe3 [Tweet]. @MDaware. https://twitter.com/MDaware/status/1389244959757373441

Constantly asking the question "How can I enter pre-existing conversations or scholarship differently" can be useful and refreshing.

Aarts, A. A. (2021). Psychological Science replicates just fine, thanks. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/h4byg

Paul Szoldra on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 26 February 2021, from https://twitter.com/PaulSzoldra/status/1331295152720076800

PrameelaApr. 15, S. E., 2021, & Pm, 2:00. (2021, April 15). As a Ph.D. student, sharing my perspective on social media felt scary—But it’s worth it. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2021/04/phd-student-sharing-my-perspective-social-media-felt-scary-it-s-worth-it

It took me a while to see this too. Many report that attending law school is really just learning a different way of seeing and approaching the world. IndieWeb has been much like this for me. It provides a different and often useful framing for approaching problems, not just with regard to the web, but to life in general.

To give equal credit to the less "important restaurants" as the one he may be writing this article about, he refers back to more animals, such as a giant panda, which is not important to the ecosystem but is well-known. He gives examples of how famous restaurants have been idle as well, granting a light to the lesser known restaurants which are still important to the New York ecosystem. This metaphor sets up the article in a perspective that is easily understood by readers.

This is also an important thing to remember when reading and evaluating older texts and discoveries.

This critique on English conservatism summarizes the tension between the native and the foreign present through the entire book. It's a critique on the narrow-mindedness of those who conform to social norms without question, and therefore fail to consider perspectives or possibilities which lie outside traditional thought. The missteps in deduction that occur in this book are largely due to arguments on false premises rather than logical fallacies.

How is Franklin so oblivious to the hypocrisy here? What "right" does he have to suspect anybody of being a thief in that case? I believe Collins is trying to push the point that we are quick to take our own knowledge for granted while disregarding this fact for others. Again, another reference to the subjectivity of "truth" and the difficulty in distinguishing it from "belief".

This passage highlights the subjectivity in these narratives as a whole. Franklin believes that everyone would interpret Lucy's actions as that of a madwoman, and it is certainly the case that those whom he surrounds himself with would agree. However, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for Lucy's actions that only women of her and Rosanna's class would know - people who have no voice in these narratives.

The breakdown of these two parts is really important because the narrative itself is written with great detail, but sometimes the medium for it is not as greatly detailed and it sometimes does not turn out as good at the narrative.

In a lot of the movies I have seen, the discourse-time order is very interesting to me. It is interesting to see what happens in the end, in the beginning and vice-versa. Some people might see it as giving away the story first, but I think you're able to connect with the character more than you would in a realistic-time.

By the way, stuff like this is why I can’t quit Twitter even though I’d like to — we get to witness, and be part of, conversations like these between world-class programmers like Yehuda and Sebastian. It’s pretty cool!

Rajkumar, R. P. (2020). Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and Suicide: Conceptual and Practical Considerations [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z7drs

These are good prescriptive questions that social media users should frequently use. (Sadly most will not unless they're forced to by design.)

This was the exact design question I asked recently!

Another question I like to use is "Where do/can I see this within the classroom?

Avery, C., Bossert, W., Clark, A., Ellison, G., & Ellison, S. F. (2020). Policy Implications of Models of the Spread of Coronavirus: Perspectives and Opportunities for Economists (Working Paper No. 27007; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27007

Basu, A., Roy, A., Hazra, A. K., & Pramanick, K. (2020). Analysis of youths’ perspective in India on and during the pandemic of Covid-19 [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4qhgd

Wishart, A. E. (2020). Towards equitable evolution & ecology learning online: A perspective from a first-time instructor teaching evolution during COVID-19. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/8srv3

Riggare, S., Stecher, B., & Stamford, J. (n.d.). Patient advocates respond to ‘Utilizing Patient Advocates…’ by Feeney et al. Health Expectations, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.13087

Boon, Mieke. ‘The Role of Disciplinary Perspectives in an Epistemology of Scientific Models’. Preprint, June 2020. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/17272/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter.

Smith-Keiling, Beverly L., Archana Sharma, Sheritta M. Fagbodun, Harsimranjit K. Chahal, Keyaira Singleton, Hari Gopalakrishnan, Katrina E. Paleologos, et al. “Starting the Conversation: Initial Listening and Identity Approaches to Community Cultural Wellness,.” Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education 21, no. 1 (April 10, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v21i1.2073.

Roberts, D. C. (2020, May 22). Putting the Risk of Covid-19 in Perspective. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-risk-of-covid-19-in-perspective.html

Horton, R. (2020). Offline: Don’t let COVID-19 divert us completely. The Lancet, 395(10236), 1534. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31130-2

Zagury-Orly, I., & Schwartzstein, R. M. (2020). Covid-19—A Reminder to Reason. New England Journal of Medicine, NEJMp2009405. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2009405

Park, J. W., Vani, P., Saint-Hilaire, S., & Kraus, M. W. (2020, April 30). Beneficiaries' Attitudes toward Allies in Social Movements. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/umzk2

"vetocracy"

"As Alex Danco highlighted in his recent article Debt is Coming, it is clear that recurring revenue securitization – the notion of selling your future ARR bookings at a discount – is the future. "

Bernheim, R. G. (n.d.). Public Engagement in Emergency Preparedness and Response: Ethical Perspectives in Public Health Practice. In Emergency Ethics. Oxford University Press. Retrieved April 17, 2020, from https://oxfordmedicine.com/view/10.1093/med/9780190270742.001.0001/med-9780190270742-chapter-5

Fascinating especially in discussing how use of data science allows psychological distancing from the actual task: predatory loaning

Capital One collects $23 billion in interest per year—an average that works out to $181 from each family in America. Of course, not every family has a Capital One account, and most public surveys say roughly half of people with credit cards pay them in full and accrue no interest. So simple math tells you that many families are paying Capital One at least $800 in interest every year.

People at Capital One are extremely friendly. But one striking fact of life there was how rarely anyone acknowledged the suffering of its customers. It’s no rhetorical exaggeration to say that the 3,000 white-collar workers at its headquarters are making good money off the backs of the poor. The conspiracy of silence that engulfed this bottom-line truth spoke volumes about how all of us at Capital One viewed our place in the world, and what we saw when we looked down from our glass tower. This is not meant to offer a broad-brush indictment of business at Capital One; it is hardly the only corporation that has been ethically compromised by capitalism. It is, however, meant to shine a few photons of light on the financial industry in a post-crisis age of acute inequality.

Amid the daily office banter at Capital One, we hardly ever broached the essence of what we were doing. Instead, we discussed the “physics” of our work. Analysts would commonly say that “whiteboarding”—a gratifying exercise in gaming out equations on the whiteboard to figure out a better way to build a risk model or design an experiment—was the favorite part of their job. Hour-long conversations would oscillate between abstruse metaphors representing indebtedness and poverty, and an equally opaque jargon composed of math and finance-speak.

If you were not familiar with the almanac of metaphors—many of which, as I understand it, were specific to Capital One—you would not follow the conversations. The “bathtub,” for example, denotes a loan portfolio, because it’s like water down the drain when you lose customers—either because they have closed their account or were fed up with Capital One or have involuntarily defaulted on their loan. When you spend tens of millions of dollars on marketing, that’s turning on the spigot for new water in your “bathtub.”

It was common to hear analysts say things like, “I just love to solve problems.” But what they were really doing was solving something closer to puzzles. It’s clear to me, for example, that the janitor at my middle school solved problems when she cleaned up trash. It’s far less clear whether analysts at Capital One are solving problems or creating them. In either event, the work culture at this well-appointed lender of dwindling resort is pretty much designed to encourage former students of engineering or math to let their minds drift for a few years and forget whether the equations in front of them represent the laws of thermodynamics or single moms who want to pay for their kids’ Christmas gifts without having to default on their rent or utilities payments.

Before I managed Capital One’s secured card product, I worked on what we called “Mainstreet proactive credit limit increases” or “Mainstreet pCLIP” for short. Mainstreet was yet another piece of euphemistic in-house jargon; it meant subprime. As for proactive credit limit increase, it meant raising the cap on how much someone is allowed to borrow—without getting their permission to raise the cap.

The emails we used to send these “Mainstreet pCLIP” customers would go as follows: “Elena Botella, you’re a valued customer, and we want you to get more out of your card. So recently, your credit line was increased to $6550.00. This gives you more in your wallet, which gives you more flexibility. Thank you for choosing Capital One®. Enjoy your higher credit line.”

At any bank, if you have a low credit score, you’re only likely to get a credit limit increase if you’re getting close to your existing credit limit. So if you got that email, you probably had a few thousand dollars of Capital One credit card debt at an interest rate of at least 20 percent. That implies you were probably paying Capital One around $40 in interest per month or more. You might want or need to borrow more money on top of what you’ve already borrowed, but I always thought it was a little bit sick for us to be telling people to “enjoy” their higher credit line. It felt more than a little like shouting, “Enjoy getting into more debt, suckers!” before disappearing in a cloud of smoke and speeding off in a Tesla.

Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. It’s not so different from how a pharmaceutical company might use a randomized control trial to test whether a new drug is effective, except that the results of the bank’s experiment will never get published, and instead of curing diseases, the bank is trying to extract more money from each customer. The use of experiments is itself an act of psychological distancing; it allows the analysts controlling the experiment to resolutely apply its findings as a profit-maximizing mandate without giving the strategy a name such as, oh, “predatory lending.”

The rise of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence means that you don’t need venal corporate tycoons wearing Monopoly Man hats to grind the faces of the poor into the dirt. Under the data-driven directives of Capitalism 2.0, you can have a bunch of friendly data scientists who don’t think too deeply about the models they’re building, while tutoring low-income kids on the side. As far as they’re concerned, they’re refining a bunch of computer algorithms.

(1) demographics, (2) inequality, (3) access to information

'Summary' (still 30m of reading LOL) of Sapiens; tl;dr: cooking + language + imagination + industrialization => progress/ society => collapse of the family

Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal track, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains.

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.

The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’.

The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order.

The second universal order was political: the imperial order.

The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities. Shortly after factories imposed their time frames on human behaviour, schools too adopted precise timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. Even in places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king. If the shift at the factory ends at 5 p.m., the local pub had better be open for business by 5:02.

This modest beginning spawned a global network of timetables, synchronised down to the tiniest fractions of a second. When the broadcast media – first radio, then television – made their debut, they entered a world of timetables and became its main enforcers and evangelists.

The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’

Anachronisms of the Constitution + consequences of an aging democracy => a legislature/politics built for "show"

In a provocative June 2018 essay in Commentary, the political scientist Yuval Levin posited that 231 years on, Congress had acquired a problem James Madison never anticipated: a reluctance to compete with the other two branches of government in the exercise of power. Partisanship, he concluded, had displaced ambition to legislate. Senators and representatives, he wrote, now “see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience.” Levin didn’t put it this way, but he seemed to be suggesting that Congress had grown decadent, like fin de siècle Vienna, but without the solace of Sacher tortes.

The U.S. doesn’t have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is … uh … 77.

None of this means a septuagenarian can’t function effectively as a political leader. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are 79 and 77, respectively, and by all reports they’re operating at peak mental capacity. But to affirm that not all elderly people are impaired cognitively is very different from affirming that none is.

Wisdom may be more valuable in the digital age than ever before, because the velocity of information and normative judgments on social media, cable news and elsewhere constantly threatens to make glib idiots of us all.

But here’s the rub: The aging of America’s ruling class does not automatically increase its experience level. In presidential politics, notes Brookings Institution senior fellow Jonathan Rauch, political experience, which “used to be a selling point,” has “become a liability. Voters and the public have come to see experience as inauthenticity.”

In a November 2015 Atlantic article, Rauch plotted experience level for presidential candidates from 1960 to 2012. His graph showed a clear increase in experience level among the losers and a corresponding decrease among the winners. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. George H.W. Bush won with more political experience than Michael Dukakis, but four years later lost to Bill Clinton, who had less. John McCain lost to Barack Obama, who’d been in national politics a mere four years.

Donald Trump, who is 73, entered the Oval Office with no political experience at all. The single greatest mental compensation that age provides was therefore unavailable to the oldest president in American history.

Old people really like to vote. In 2016, for instance, 71 percent of eligible elderly voters reported to the Census that they voted. For other age cohorts, the turnout percentages were 67 percent (aged 45-64), 59 percent (aged 30-44) and 46 percent (aged 18-29).

You often hear older Americans complain that the younger generation, with its fixation on social media, can’t distinguish between fact and opinion, making it difficult for them to apply the critical thinking necessary to consume news and be responsible citizens. A 2018 Pew survey found that Americans do indeed experience great difficulty telling these two things apart: Given five factual statements and five statements of opinion, a majority of Americans couldn’t identify them properly.

But younger Americans actually scored better on this test than older ones. Thirty-two percent of 18-49 year-olds were able to identify all five factual statements, and 44 percent were able to identify all five statements of opinion. Among the over-50 cohort, only 20 percent identified all five factual statements correctly, and only 26 percent did the same with the statements of opinion.

The list of the Constitution’s anachronisms and ambiguities is long.

Article One says Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” phrasing that strictly limited the regulation of private business at the federal level until the New Deal, when the Supreme Court reversed itself and concluded the federal government’s power to regulate private business was pretty vast. Had the Founders grasped that the modern economy would all but eliminate purely local commerce—and that it could, unchecked, alter the very climate of planet earth—they might have had more to say on the subject. As things stand, the powers of the regulatory state are the subject of endless legal combat.

Article Two says you must be a “natural born Citizen” to be president, which excludes for no apparent reason Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm, who previously governed two of the nation’s most populous states. The racist “birther” movement that challenged the legality of Barack Obama’s presidency (and that ushered Donald Trump onto the national political stage) wouldn’t have been possible without Article Two.

Article Two also established that presidents be elected through the Electoral College, an antique mechanism borrowed from the Holy Roman Empire that twice during the past two decades delivered the presidency to the popular-vote loser. Some people have a problem with that.

The Second Amendment frames the right to bear arms within the context of “well-regulated” state militias that no longer exist, an ambiguity that the Supreme Court interpreted in 2008 to mean the Constitution protected the right to bear arms, after holding for the preceding seven decades that it did not. Had the Founders known the extent to which the nation would tear itself apart over the regulation of firearms more deadly than they ever imagined, they might have laid down a few broad parameters.

And so on. None of this would matter much if our government were more amenable to reconsidering first principles, but that’s getting harder, too. The Constitution can be amended, and it has been, 27 times. But growing political polarization in recent years has made that difficult. Only two constitutional amendments were ratified during the past half-century (one giving 18-year-olds the right to vote and another, more anodyne amendment that makes it a little harder for Congress to give itself a raise).

"What if most rich assholes are made, not born?"

What if the cold-heartedness so often associated with the upper crust—let's call it Rich Asshole Syndrome—isn’t the result of having been raised by a parade of resentful nannies, too many sailing lessons, or repeated caviar overdoses, but the compounded disappointment of being lucky but still feeling unfulfilled? We’re told that those with the most toys are winning, that money represents points on the scoreboard of life. But what if that tired story is just another facet of a scam in which we’re all getting ripped off?

In New York, I’d developed psychological defenses against the desperation I saw in the streets. I told myself that there were social services for homeless people, that they would just use my money to buy drugs or booze, that they’d probably brought their situation on themselves. But none of that worked with these Indian kids. There were no shelters waiting to receive them. I saw them sleeping in the streets at night, huddled together for warmth, like puppies. They weren’t going to spend my money unwisely. They weren’t even asking for money. They were just staring at my food like the starving creatures they were.

The social distance separating rich and poor, like so many of the other distances that separate us from each other, only entered human experience after the advent of agriculture and the hierarchical civilizations that followed, which is why it’s so psychologically difficult to twist your soul into a shape that allows you to ignore starving children standing close enough to smell your plate of curry. You’ve got to silence the inner voice calling for justice and for fairness. But we silence this ancient, insistent voice at great cost to our own psychological well-being.

When volunteers in their studies placed the interests of others before their own, a primitive part of the brain normally associated with food or sex was activated. When researchers measured vagal tone (an indicator of feeling safe and calm) in 74 preschoolers, they found that children who’d donated tokens to help sick kids had much better readings than those who’d kept all their tokens for themselves. Jonas Miller, the lead investigator, said that the findings suggested “we might be wired from a young age to derive a sense of safety from providing care for others.”

Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Piff monitored intersections with four-way stop signs and found that people in expensive cars were four times more likely to cut in front of other drivers, compared to folks in more modest vehicles. When the researchers posed as pedestrians waiting to cross a street, all the drivers in cheap cars respected their right of way, while those in expensive cars drove right on by 46.2 percent of the time, even when they’d made eye contact with the pedestrians waiting to cross. Other studies by the same team showed that wealthier subjects were more likely to cheat at an array of tasks and games. For example, Keltner reported that wealthier subjects were far more likely to claim they’d won a computer game—even though the game was rigged so that winning was impossible. Wealthy subjects were more likely to lie in negotiations and excuse unethical behavior at work, like lying to clients in order to make more money. When Keltner and Piff left a jar of candy in the entrance to their lab with a sign saying whatever was left over would be given to kids at a nearby school, they found that wealthier people stole more candy from the babies.

Books such as Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work and The Psychopath Test argue that many traits characteristic of psychopaths are celebrated in business: ruthlessness, a convenient absence of social conscience, a single-minded focus on “success.” But while psychopaths may be ideally suited to some of the most lucrative professions, I’m arguing something different here. It’s not just that heartless people are more likely to become rich. I’m saying that being rich tends to corrode whatever heart you’ve got left. I’m suggesting, in other words, that it’s likely the wealthy subjects who participated in Muscatell’s study learned to be less unsettled by the photos of sick kids by the experience of being rich—much as I learned to ignore starving children in Rajastan so I could comfortably continue my vacation.

“What we’ve been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country,” said Piff, “is that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.”

Institutions seeking to justify a fundamentally anti-human economic system constantly rebroadcast the message that winning the money game will bring satisfaction and happiness. But we’ve got around 300,000 years of ancestral experience telling us it just isn’t so. Selfishness may be essential to civilization, but that only raises the question of whether a civilization so out of step with our evolved nature makes sense for the human beings within it.

The browser is the new OS.

And Google controls it

Standardization on something like Chrome/V8 is actually very useful for us, in this sense. We have a pretty good sense of how our Javascript will execute, where and how we can tighten up performance, and simulate the kind of experience most of our users will have.

That said, I’m always conscious that we are living on someone else’s standards. Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.

Google can distribute products on the web better than any other single company. When it placed a callout link to download Chrome right under its search bar, it effectively sealed IE’s demise. Nothing that Microsoft could do would ever reach as many potential users, or drive adoption, at anywhere near the same scale, and they eventually came to understand this.

Google is paying Apple a cool $12 billion in 2019 to remain Safari’s default search engine, because the amount they make from all those searches (and the ads they support) is far greater.