He didn't have the framework to describe it in behavioral economic terms, but Everett Dean Martin's idea of a liberal education in 1926 was to encourage the use of Kahneman & Tversky's system two over system one. It takes more work, but system two thinking can generally beat out system one gut reactions for building a better life.

Is it possible to be above one's own system of beliefs and ideas? Doesn't the system make them a product of it? Evolving from a base at best?

The idea sounds lovely, but is it possible anthropologically?

https://www.youtube.com/@classicalliberalarts/videos

Eine neue Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass die Haltung zu fünf großen Krisen das Wahlverhalten der Europäer:innen in diesem Jahr bestimmen wird: der Klimakrise, der Migrationskrise, der Wirtschaftskrise und Inflation, dem Ukraine-Krieg und Covid. Klimakrise und Migration hätten, wie schon bei den Wahlen in der Niederlanden, ide größte Kraft Wähler zu mobilisieren. Die Autor:innen sprechen von einem "Clash zweier 'Extinction rebellions'". Als wichtigste Krisen werden im Durchschnitt der europäischen Länder die Klimakrise und dann Covid bewertet.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/17/crises-have-split-european-voters-into-five-tribes-survey-suggests

Report: https://ecfr.eu/publication/a-crisis-of-ones-own-the-politics-of-trauma-in-europes-election-year/

• for: insight - conservative vs liberal - speed of sdopting social norm

• insight

  • liberals are voted in to speed up adoption of a new social -
  • conservatives are voted in to slow down the acceptance of a social norm
  • paradoxically, humans have both a conservative and a liberal nature. We naturally have a tendency to both conserve and to try new things.

Snyder, Christopher A. “A Liberal Education in Name Only.” Inside Higher Ed (blog), October 23, 2023. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/23/liberal-education-name-only-opinion.

read Mon 10/23/2023 7:37 PM

reply to Our Journey, Day 84 by Dan Allosso at https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-84

There's already a movement afoot calling for schools who are dramatically cutting their humanities departments to quit calling what they're offering a liberal education. This popped up on Monday and has a long list of cuts: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/23/liberal-education-name-only-opinion I was surprised that Bemidji wasn't listed, but then again there may be several dozens which have made announcements, but which aren't widely known yet. The problem may be much larger and broader than anyone is acknowledging.

Cutting down dozens of faculties into either "schools" or even into some sort of catch all called "Humanities" may be even more marginalizing to the enterprise.

Apparently, the Morlocks seem to think that the Eloi will be easier to manage if there isn't any critical thinking?

• for: Yuval Noah Harari, Hamas Israel war 2023, global liberal order, abused-abuser cycle, And not Or

• summary

  • In this interview, Yuval Noah Harari offers insights on the trap that Hamas's brutality has set for the Israeli army and reflections on the abused-abuser cycle.
  • If Israeli government falls into that trap and inflicts unprecedented collateral damage, it will scupper the chance for peace for generations to come, and Hamas will have succeeded in its goal.
  • Harari identifies a key insight that could help create better empathy between warring parties, to recognize the abused-abuser cycle and how we can be both abused AND abuser at the same time
  • Harari reflects on the breakdown of the global liberal order, offering a simple yet insightful anthropological definition of the global liberal order showing how in spite of its many flaws, fundamentally is biologically humanistic at the core. What is needed is a way to decouple the harmful features the current form of it possesses

• global liberal order, common human denominators, CHD, adjacency, adjancency - global liberal order - common human denominators - Deep Humanity, Yuval Noah Harari

• adjacency

  • between
    • global liberal order
    • common human denominators (CHD)
    • Deep Humanity
• adjacency statement
  • Yuval raised an interesting perspective I've never thought about with respect to the global liberal order
  • He points out that the essence of the global liberal order is that all humans share fundamental features
  • This aligns with Deep Humanity's Common Human Denominators (CHD)
  • The name 'global liberal order' has come to have a polarizing impact (liberals vs conservatives).
  • As pointed out in other places, liberal and conservative polarization is inherently partial truths and unreal abstractions.
    • Most human beings are both liberal AND conservative
  • Given the intractability of the problem, humanity is insufficient to deal with it
    • Nonlinear, alternative ways may have better success, including Deep Humanity, that looks at the Common Human Denominators as the foundational layer we all share as humans

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

Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

Uncommon use of "liberal artist" as one who uses or practices the liberal arts.

Ferguson, Niall. “I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken.” Bloomberg.Com, November 8, 2021, sec. Opinion. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-08/niall-ferguson-america-s-woke-universities-need-to-be-replaced.

Seems like a lot of cherry picking here... also don't see much evidence of progress in a year and change.

Only four jobs listed on their website today: https://jobs.lever.co/uaustin. Note all are for administration and none for teaching. Most have a heavy fundraising component.

Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free.

No acknowledgement here that 2017 was a Republican Presidential administration, which means that a reasonable number of academics left academia to staff the administration. It's a common occurrence that there are reasonable shifts back and forth between government and academia as administrations change. One should look at comparisons from a Democratic presidential administration for a better idea versus Ferguson's cherry picking here.

Also unmentioned is the general disbelief in logic and the underpinning of science on the right in general, a fact which may make conservatives less likely to figure in these sorts of career paths. Are conservatives more likely to take career paths in capitalism-based endeavors than go into academia in the first place given the decrease in regulatory climate in the last half century?

Additionally by only looking at liberal arts institutions, he's heavily biasing the sample from the start. Why not also include the wide variety of non-liberal arts institutions? Agriculture and Mechanical Schools, Engineering Schools, Religious Schools, etc.?

The presumption of liberal profesoriate from the start is also likely to discourage students from considering the profession regardless of their desires and career goals, particularly when the professoriate has significantly shrunk in the last thirty years due to decreased funding. One ought to worry that there are any educators in the business of higher education, much less conservative ones who may be more biased to leave for higher paying careers elsewhere.

There are so many missing pieces of analysis here...

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?

Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?

Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".

Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.

Hugh of St. Victor wrote Didascalicon, a text about what topics should be learned and why. In it, he outlined seven mechanical arts (or technologies) in analogy with the seven liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) as ways to repair the weaknesses inherit in humanity.

These seven mechanical arts he defines are: - fabric making - armament - commerce - agriculture - hunting - medicine - theatrics

Hugh of St. Victor's description of the mechanical art of commerce here is fascinating. He says "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and turns the private good of individuals into a benefit for all" (doublcheck the original quotation, context, and source). This sounds eerily familiar to the common statement in the United States about trade and commerce.

Link this to the quote from Albie Duncan in The West Wing (season 5?) about trade.

Other places where this sentiment occurs?

Is Hugh of St. Victor the first in history to state this sentiment?

Seems like a fundamental tension in education generally and the liberal arts and sciences in particular. The balance between wide-ranging creativity and mastery of content and skill isn't simple.

This could've been a good place to allow liberal arts folx some point of entry. Alas.

This is exactly the intersection that I have seen and thought about for a long time. If David Perell sees this as a gap that intellectuals can fill, then I am definitely onto something.

At the suggestion of Leibniz, parts of Europe began adopting Chinese models of statecraft which had not previously been known or used in Europe.

Definition of a "liberal education"

Insightful critique of 4 quite common progressive pitfalls.

Gugerty, L., Shreeves, M., & Dumessa, N. (2021). Biased belief updating in causal reasoning about COVID-19. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bfw76

Vartanova, I., Eriksson, K., Kirgil, Z. M., & Strimling, P. (2021, April 26). The advent of the COVID-19 epidemic did not affect Americans’ endorsement of moral foundations. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/957zk

Porter, D., & Porter, R. (1988). The politics of prevention: Anti-vaccinationism and public health in nineteenth-century England. Medical History, 32(3), 231–252.

Wenner, A. (2020, May 26). Our Democracy Depends on a Safe Election in November. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/our-democracy-depends-safe-election-november

Arceneaux, K., Bakker, B. N., Hobolt, S. B., & De Vries, C. E. (2020, October 5). Is COVID-19 a Threat to Liberal Democracy?. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8e4pa

(lazy checking)

What if, in fact, we've only just found a local maximum? What if in the changing landscape there are other places we could potentially get to competitively that supply greater maxima? And possibly worse, what if we need to lose value to get from here to unlock even more value there?

Raihani, N., & de-Wit, L. (2020, April 21). Factors Associated With Concern, Behaviour & Policy Support in Response to SARS-CoV-2. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8jpzc

Pieper, D. (2020, May 1). Challenging social systems under the threat of pollution: Replication and extension of Eadeh and Chang (2019). Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/axbj4

Conway, L. G., III, Woodard, S. R., Zubrod, A., & Chan, L. (2020, April 13). Why are Conservatives Less Concerned about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) than Liberals? Testing Experiential Versus Political Explanations. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fgb84

I would like you to focus on:

• The main ideas in the article
• The underlined vocabulary words and any new words to you
• New structures that you could start using in your writing Make sure you write notes including your impression, definitions of words or any questions you might have on the text.

KCD2M33B

Liberal multiculturalism promotes the idea that marginalized communities have to partake in settler colonialism in order to be liberated (whether they realize it or not). In reality, liberation lies outside of settler colonialism.

Churchill famously said "...democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."

Even within this quote it is implicit that there are many others. In some sense he's admitting that we might possibly be at a local maximum but we've just not explored the spaces beyond the adjacent possible.

Total exhaustion?

Or ostensibly, until a strong man came to power in Russia and began its downturn into something else. It definitely doesn't seem to be a liberal democracy, so we're still fighting against it.

Famous last words, right?!

These are the types of statements one must try very hard not to make unless there is 100% certainty.

I find myself wondering how can liberal democracy and capitalism manage to fight and make the case the the small tribes (everywhere, including within the US) that it can, could and should be doing more for them.

"Last" in the sense of a big, modern threat. We're still facing the threats of tribalism, which apparently have a strong pull.

This is the second or third reference to this I've seen now in the past couple of months. I obviously need to read more Lakoff, though the general conceit rings true to me on its face.

p. 75 Two interesting points about mismatch between university and students:

(1) Many of the students who are being processed have little inclination or capacity for the rigours of a liberal education. Fine. But I object to the game of pretending that they would be able to achieve liberal goals within the system we offer, if only they tried harder. That is simply not true, and it does bad things to their psyches to encourage them to believe it. It would be far more honest, and I should think more fruitful, to accept most university education as having different aims from the liberal. Once drop that pretence, in both rhetoric and practice, and you could begin meeting the great bulk of students where they actually are.

(2) Some students at least would be capable of an education far superior to the one the system enforces. They are being positively harmed by their university education, since they have to meet its demands before their liberal (and usually private) pursuit begins. (And before you ask, "Why can't the two coincide?" ask a good student how much of the university's instruction moves him toward the first-hand apprehension of his discipline's coherence and beauty.)

Amen!

Interesting. Not critical, not liberal arts, enough.

I'm somewhat optimistic about this. Of it actually happens...

I could not agree more, but we also need to think about how precisely our curriculum is cultivating habits of respect, empathy, and humility. What specific courses facilitate these virtues, what sorts of assignments ensure they are practiced?

This is exactly right. I've been thematizing it in terms of "ethical imagination."

Group privacy is much more infrequently discussed than individual privacy. At least in Euro-American contexts. Quite likely a very important bias.

A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.

Intellectual property may be a liberal influence on society.