662 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. hume thinks that this is one of those many cases where we've got a word that we suppose corresponds to something in the world or corresponds to an idea but we 01:13:25 don't as though for instance i were to tell sarah hey i just got this really cool toy yesterday it's a round square sarah says what are you talking about 01:13:39 and i say well it's both round and square isn't that cool and sarah would say to me you're using words jay but it sounds like total nonsense to me and she'd be right

      !- David Hume : self illusion - "self" is a nonsense word - only perceptions and sensations are by real - we construct a phantom

    2. ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection

      !- intrinsic fear of death : strong role in creation of a self illusion -Ernest Becker, David Hume, Shanti Devi all regard death as a major reason we create the self illusion - Becker cliams we reify the self as a bulwark against the terror of death - the fear of death is deeply wired in us - the story of a self allows it to posit a symbolic form of eternal life, hence resulting in immortality projects - we know we have fallen under the spell of the illusion of self when we can be insulted, when we get angry, when we feel shame - it is these affects which establish a self, hence why the self imputation is so strong and difficult to dislodge

  2. Dec 2022
    1. David Hume, a great philosopher, in his “History of England” — he wrote a huge history of England — there’s a chapter devoted to Isaac Newton, a full chapter. He describes Newton as, you know, the greatest mind that ever existed, and so on and so forth. He said Newton’s great achievement was to draw the veil away from some of the mysteries of nature — namely, his theory of universal gravitation and so on — but to leave other mysteries hidden in ways we will never understand. Referring to: What’s the world like? We’ll never understand it. He left that as a permanent mystery. Well, as far as we know, he was right.

      !- example : permanent mystery - David Hume and Newton example

  3. Nov 2022
    1. In 1964, after earning four O-levels, including one in art and maths, Eno had developed an interest in art and music and had no interest in a "conventional job".[12]

      When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.

      What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?

    1. The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

      https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-the-midterm-results-and-what-it-means-trumps-role-in-the-gop#transcript

      video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Km_Vyhvww

      David Brooks here (coins?) uses the phrase "normie Republican" to describe Republicans who tend to center rather than to the far right, Christian right, or who are Trump Republicans. Some of those people might describe these normie Republicans as Rhinos (Republicans in name only.)

      Typically I've only seen "normie" used by those who identify as ADHD, Aspergers, or otherwise on the (neurodiverse) spectrum to describe average people who don't display those behaviors.


      Judy Woodruff: So, I just want to be clear. We're using the word normie, as in — this is a David Brooks word, right? (LAUGHTER)

      David Brooks: No, this — I did not invent this. I think two generations below me invented that word. (LAUGHTER)

      Brooks admits he learned the word from others, but he's also using it with a different meaning and context than the original "normie" unadorned.

    1. And David Allen was there at the beginning. He had this idea of full capture where he said all of your tasks should be a trusted system that you review regularly, not in your head. He actually adapted that idea from a previous business thinker named Dean Acheson, unrelated to President Truman’s Secretary of State, same name, different person, who had first developed, I believe in the 1970s, this notion of full capture and David Allen expanded it.

      Reference?

    1. i think so like in social terms the conservatives would say well i like that it benefits from the wisdom of math already invented you're not 00:36:39 throwing anything away you're not you're not throwing it all away and starting over you're taking what we already have and you're you're using it that's great and a libertarian might say i really like that you're free to create as you see fit you can make anything you 00:36:52 want and you're working within this background framework that's minimally invasive it doesn't make a lot of rules for you but it is highly functional i like that it kind of keeps everyone in line while 00:37:03 like satisfying some formal contracts or something while still being uh i'm still free to create and a progressive might say i like about category that theory that everyone can contribute to 00:37:15 making their own world making it more rich adding new ideas uh making it more meaningful understanding connections between things a modern viewpoint would say i like that 00:37:26 it's completely rigorous that it's been used in proving well-known conjectures that people thought were important to prove but also that it's interesting it's useful in science and technology and a postmodern person might say i like 00:37:40 that um that no perspective is right that that there's just all sorts of different categories but that navigating between these perspectives lets you look at problems from all sides or a hippie might say i like that it's 00:37:53 all about relationship and connection or irrelevant i don't know what that means maybe a practical person might say that i like that it's that we can actually use it to organize and learn from big data in 00:38:06 today's world or to manage complexity of software projects that are that are very large and changing all the time i like that you can think about ai and other complex systems with this stuff i think it's relevant and 00:38:19 practical for right now so that's that's my uh tutorial or that's the the part i'm going to record and now i'm going to open it up for questions

      David Spivak discusses how category theory may appeal to different political ideologies for a variety of reasons.

    1. I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.

      — Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.

      — Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

      This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.


      I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.

  4. Oct 2022
    1. Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

      Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

      What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

  5. Sep 2022
    1. David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

      How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

      What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

      Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

    1. https://lu.ma/az338ptc

      Joey Cofone: Are there laws to creativity?

      Joey Cofone, author of the upcoming book The Laws of Creativity, is selling the idea of "float" (in comparison to Mihaly Csikzentmihaly's "flow"), which is ostensibly similar to Barbara Oakley's diffuse thinking framework, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's flâneur framing, and a dose of the Zeigarnik effect.

      I'm concerned that this book will be broadly prescriptive without any founding on any of the extant research, literature, or science of the past. I'll think more highly of it if it were to quote/reference something like Merton and Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science.


      Following on the above:

      David Allen (of GTD fame) indicates that one should close all open loops to free up working memory, but leaving some open for active thought, follow up, and potential future insight creation can be a useful pattern too. (2022-09-09 9:05 AM)

  6. Aug 2022
    1. The narrator considers this as vandalism and finds it hard to believe how anyone "educated enough to have access to a university library should do this to a book." To him "the treatment of books is a test of civilized behaviour."

      Highlighted portion is a quote from Kuehn sub-quoting David Lodge, Deaf Sentence (New York: Viking 2008)

      Ownership is certainly a factor here, but given how inexpensive many books are now, if you own it, why not mark it up? See also: Mortimer J. Adler's position on this.


      Marking up library books is a barbarism; not marking up your own books is a worse sin.

    1. David Quammen on Books

      Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.<br /> —David Quammen (1948 ― ), science, nature, and travel writer in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

      Syndication link: - https://boffosocko.com/2016/08/03/intellectual-wallpaper/

  7. Jul 2022
    1. David Bohm [ 31 ]: “Thinking’ implies the present tense (...) ‘Thought’is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it justevaporates. But thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—atrace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

      !- follow up : David Bohm's ideas on thinking and thoughts * Thinking implies the present tense because it is an act we can only do in the present * When the present act of thinking is finished, it leaves traces in our consciousness * Those traces we refer to as "thoughts" * Thoughts act automatically - this is quite a pithy observation. We become thought automatons because once the thought is associated with all the other ideas, it alters the entire network of other thoughts on its own * "Thinking beyond the image of thought" may mean penetrating the existing automatized associations of thoughts with one that is quite novel and does not necessarily fit in, so is disruptive and can bring about a paradigm shift. * Read the reference to gain clarity

    2. Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

      !- key insight : thought sans image !- definition : thought sans image * human beings are NOT defined by what they are thinking, perceiving or saying as mediated by social symbolic systems * They are also NOT defined by their own narratives or language itself - the symbolosphere is culturally imposed upon the bare human being * That primordial nature is described as the bare human spirit, the preindividual, being-as-becoming (Simondon) * Many spiritual traditions guide practitioners to experience this primordial state, the nondual state, stripped of all cultural embellishments * David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) calls this state thought sans image based on the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze and 4E theory of cognition

    1. when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

      This comment suggests a Color BEing Journey. How can we demonstrate in a compelling way that color is an attribute of the neural architecture of the person and NOT a property of the object we are viewing?

      See Color Constancy Illusion here:

      David Eagleman in WIRED interview https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FMJBfn07gZ30%2F&group=world

      Beau Lotto, TED Talk https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Fmf5otGNbkuc%2F&group=world

      Andrew Stockman, TEDx talk on how we see color: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F_l607r2TSwg%2F&group=world

      Science shows that color is an experience of the subject, not a property of the object: https://youtu.be/fQczp0wtZQQ but what Jay will go on to argue, is that this explanation itself is part of the COGNITIVE IMMEDIACY OF EXPERIENCE that we also take for granted.

    1. so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

      Title: Why your brain thinks these strawberries are red Author: WIRED Date:2022

      Color Constancy

      Use this for BEing journey

    1. This is the paradoxical practice of Zen. How can we take care of the ordinary things and people in our daily life with care and attentiveness and still understand and know their impermanence? In practicing these two views simultaneously, we can come to understand freedom and to completely inhabit our one precious and unique human life. They mutually support each other and yet retain their distinctive qualities. We don’t call something that is white, black and yet we understand that white and black share the same essence. This understanding defines a good Zen practice. We take care of cause and effect from the basis of operation of boundless, timeless, open awareness.

      We straddle the absolute and relative with each step, each action in the simultaneous relative and absolute world. As Dasietz Suzuki said, "The elbow does not bend backwards". The world limits us, but freedom is all around.

    1. and then the deepest level is what's maybe more relevant for our discussion 00:27:04 we call it we call it all pervasive it's a conditioned kind of suffering and it's conditioned by ignorance the ignorance that does not understand reality correctly okay and that's really 00:27:17 what we're that's the opposite of what we're talking about when we talk about you know shunyata or emptiness uh this ignorance is 100 180 degrees opposite um so in that last level of suffering is 00:27:32 really the underpinnings of all the other sufferings okay so if we can address and remove that level of ignorance then all the other sufferings fall away 00:27:43 and you could also see it as all of our attachments that get us into trouble our aversions that can end in anger hatred and now we see so much violence in the world all that and 00:27:55 and our selfishness and our greed and you know on and on all that just falls away when we begin to get rid of this ignorance and we begin to not only intellectually understand emptiness but 00:28:08 we put it into our lives it percolates down and it starts to be part of our attitude the way we think the way we feel it permeates every aspect of our sleep and wake life and when that happens it's 00:28:22 it's like a revolution i don't speak from personal experience because i don't have that but according to the great saints and masters who have it's like a total revolution it's full of joy it's complete love and compassion 00:28:36 there's no moment where there isn't and it's always bathed in this wisdom of emptiness taking things as you said so beautifully in the beginning of your remarks carlo that everything is 00:28:48 in relation there are no discrete entities at all there's no independent existence i think those are the words that were used by david bohm who was a very close friend of his holiest the dalai lamas and as 00:29:01 you know a well-recognized quantum physicist um so those are just some contextual opening remarks to put us in in the in the right ball field if you will uh as a 00:29:15 with an american background baseball field right could be a soccer field

      all pervasive ignorance is the ignorance at the deepest level. When that is removed, all the other more superficial levels of ignorance go away as well.

      There is no independent existence. Everything is in relation.

  8. Jun 2022
    1. the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. 00:11:53 And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. 00:12:22 Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. 00:12:47 (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. 00:13:20 So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) 00:14:06 So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.

      remapping patterns normally experienced in on sensory modality to other sensory modality. This work is like that of Neuroscientist David Eagleman, ie. his vest that translates sound patterns into tactile patterns on a vest and allowing deaf person to "hear" words through feeling corresponding tactile signals.

      Donald Hoffman also advocates for evolutionary fitness as what gives meaning to our perceptions of the world.

  9. May 2022
  10. Feb 2022
    1. Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory –until they are done. That is why we get so easily distracted bythoughts of unfinished tasks, regardless of their importance. Butthanks to Zeigarnik’s follow-up research, we also know that we don’tactually have to finish tasks to convince our brains to stop thinkingabout them. All we have to do is to write them down in a way thatconvinces us that it will be taken care of.

      The Zeigarnik effect is the idea that open or pending tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory until they are done or our brain is otherwise convinced that they're "finished". This is why note taking can be valuable. By writing down small things, we can free up our short-term or working memories to focus or work on other potentially more important tasks. It is named for Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik.

      The Zeigarnik effect is some of the value behind David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system. Writing down to do lists tricks our mind into freeing up space from things we need to take care of. If they're really important, we've got a list and can then take care of them. Meanwhile our working memories are freed up for other tasks.

    2. We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

      Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

      Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.


      Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.


      Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

      Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

  11. Jan 2022
  12. Dec 2021
  13. Nov 2021
    1. In March, Sandra Sellers, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, was caught on camera speaking to another professor about some underperforming Black students in her class. There is no way to know from the recording alone whether her comments represented racist bias or genuine concern for her students. Not that it mattered to Georgetown—she was fired within days of the recording’s becoming public. Nor could one know what David Batson, the colleague she was talking to on the recording, really thought either. Nevertheless, he was placed on administrative leave because he seemed, vaguely, to be politely agreeing with her. He quickly resigned.
    1. Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”

      This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.

      Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.

      A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

      The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.

      Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.

      We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html

      Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.

      Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:

      "Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

      But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.

      To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.

      Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.

      Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.

      At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.

  14. Oct 2021
    1. social evolution

      A Theory of Change

      How did we get here?

      Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.

      It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.

      Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.

      https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/david-graeber-anthropologist-and-author-of-bullshit-jobs-dies-aged-59

    1. journalism historian David Mindich

      The View from Somewhere

      Hallin’s spheres

      At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.

      Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

      Wikipedia: Hallin's spheres

      I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.

  15. Sep 2021
    1. His questioning of the scientific orthodoxy was the expression of a rare and maverick intelligence. He shows us that the nature of reality is infinite and believed in a “hidden” regime of reality – the Quantum Potential – that underlies all of creation and which will remain beyond scientific endeavor, an idea echoed by many mystical traditions.

      “We are all participants and observers in the emergence of a reality…the Observer is the Observed. Bohm shows us that we are all co-producers of a possible future in which personal and global transformation is possible.”

  16. Aug 2021
    1. This observation extends to tables, chairs, scritoires, chimneys, coaches, sadles, ploughs, and indeed to every work of art; it being an universal rule, that their beauty is chiefly deriv’d from their utility, and from their fitness for that purpose, to which they are destin’d.

      «Design» anachronically

  17. Jul 2021
  18. Jun 2021
  19. May 2021
    1. "Ritchie Sacramento" follows the previously shared "Dry Fantasy" and arrives alongside a video from director Sam Wiehl that you can take in below. Mogwai's Stuart Brathwaite shared in a statement that the song "is dedicated to all the musician friends we've lost over the years" in pointing out its connections to prolific composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and late Silver Jews/Purple Mountains songwriter David Berman. Brathwaite explained, "Ritchie Sacramento's title came from a misunderstanding a friend of ours had about how to say Ryuchi Sakamoto. The lyrics were inspired by a story Bob Nastanovich shared about his friend and bandmate David Berman who proclaimed 'Rise Crystal Spear' as he threw a shovel at a sports car."
  20. Mar 2021
  21. Feb 2021
    1. Workplaces are awash with many forms of bullshit that manifest in manydifferent ways, including misrepresentation, where leaders make statementswithout knowing the facts; meaningless job titles (Graeber, 2018); fake andshallow company slogans (e.g. Lee et al., 2020); and workplace puffery suchas resume padding (Grover, 2005). Under some circumstances, organizationalbullshit, usually referred to as “banter”, “badinage” or “joshing” can be harm-less, often creative, and even contribute to a congenial atmosphere in an orga-nization. Organizational bullshit may even have a positive effect when leadersarticulate inspiring futuristic, but largely uncertain visions, that are meant toinspire others to act (Christensen et al., 2019). On the other hand, other scholarshave outlined a number of detrimental effects of bullshit. McCarthy et al.(2020), while acknowledging there can be positive effects of organizational bull-shit, also caution that it can result in lower job satisfaction among the organ-ization’s members, increased distrust in leadership, a reduction in productivity,and ultimately a negative impact on overall performance (McCarthy et al.,2020)
  22. Jan 2021
  23. Dec 2020
    1. Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect

      The Dunning-Kruger effect is undoubtedly important, but since stupidity has always existed, this doesn't explain why the problem has become worse in recent years.

      I think David Riesman hinted at it in his 1959 The Lonely Crowed. Specifically, the transition from a production-oriented economy to a consumption-oriented one has increased the distance between personal experience and expertise that has consequences.

      Once there were many workers whose jobs involved listening to and excepting expert guidance. An auto mechanic knew the wrong kind of oil would ruin an engine; a railroad worker knew some steels work better as rails in difference circumstances; a seamstress knew there were important differences between different thread materials. They received expert advice, and saw what happened when it was ignored.

      The vast majority of expertise can be denied without any consequence at all to the individual. Even when there are consequences -- such as with the brain-surgeon example from the article -- the denying individual isn't likely to learn any lesson. Honestly, how often can a patient actually see the consequence of that doctor's advice, when alternative narratives are pervasive?

      This is a large part of a more general trend towards individualized epistemology, based on each individual's tribal affiliations and social identification.

      Education could overcome it, but that requires winning the coordination game that has always crippled education.

  24. Oct 2020
    1. The current buzz about open pedagogy got kick-started in David Wiley’s 2013 blog post. Wiley defined open pedagogy as any approach or technique that would not be possible without the “5Rs” (at the time listed as the “4Rs plus free to access”: free to access, free to reuse, free to revise, free to remix, free to redistribute – the right to retain came later…) of OER.
  25. Sep 2020

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  26. Aug 2020
    1. Cells, for example, are a central category, but there’s no definite criterion for what counts as a cell. If you attempt to find one, you rapidly bog down in a maze of exceptions. You might start with something like “a self-reproducing living unit carrying a single copy of the organism’s DNA within a membrane.” But red blood cells don’t self-reproduce and have no DNA. Mitochondria are not cells, but they self-reproduce using their own DNA within a membrane. Muscle cells have multiple nuclei, each with a separate complete copy of the DNA. Some algae have life stages in which they have no cell membranes. And so on indefinitely.8

      I'm not an expert in biology or anything, but perhaps the moral there is we should rethink this 'cell' idea? IIRC astronomers continue to talk about 'planets' even though the longer you examine the concept the more incoherent it becomes. (For an extended example, see the infamous Discourse about whether "Pluto is a planet", which led to hilarious goal post stretching where people kept trying to find a definition of 'planet' that exactly fit the traditional celestial objects we classify as planets without having to include any new ones or exclude existing ones)

      There is obviously no rule that says the categorizations we come up with for stuff when a field is young should be expected to have infinite inferential reach as that field of knowledge expands.

    2. The dream is that reduction could deliver absolute truths about the eggplant-sized world, by explanation through a series of levels. The rationalist’s reflex, when confronted with nebulosity, is to retreat to the most fundamental physics: quantum field theory. That, she says, is definitely not nebulous; there is absolute truth there.2 Based on this unshakable foundation, we can find absolute truths about atoms, which are just assemblages of quanta. And we can reduce molecules to atoms (chemistry), and cells to molecules (molecular biology), and eggplants to cells (phytotomy); and finally, triumphantly, prove beyond any possibility of doubt the absolute truth that eggplants are fruits (reproductive biology).

      Has anyone ever actually proposed something like this?

      Actually, let me rephrase, has anyone we have any good reason to take philosophically seriously ever actually proposed something like this, in a context I would care about?

      Something like, an important philosopher that people-who-do-stuff take seriously (it's not my job to police whatever degenerate things academia gets up to separated from course correcting incentives) making a serious unironic proposal along these lines that nontrivial resources were invested into?

    1. Unlike logicism, probabilism doesn’t require an absolute belief about what the truth of a statement is. However, it does require that any statement actually is either absolutely true or absolutely false. Suppose you want to know if there is any water in the refrigerator. To eliminate uncertainty, you look inside, and there appears to be only an eggplant. Now, is there water in the refrigerator? Well, with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of true that there is (in the cells of the eggplant).3 And with probability nearly 1.0, it’s sort of false (you were thirsty and there’s nothing to drink). It’s a rock-bottom principle of the mathematics that the probability of a statement being true and the probability of it being false have to add up to 1.0. (This is a different way of stating the Law of the Excluded Middle.) Here the probabilities of sort-of truth and sort-of falsity add up to nearly 2.0, which is uninterpretable as a probability. The math doesn’t work for sort-of truths.

      This argument strikes me as malformed and perverse.

      Obviously there's a conflation here between two different questions, but I think a deeper error is implied by the fact of the conflation.

      You seem to suppose there is some objective 'literal' sense of the statement "Is there water in the fridge?". Considering you wrote earlier that beliefs are not strings of words (reasonable), it's weird to then use that as a premise to argue against Bayesian Epistemology. Words are a way to locate things in concept space, and epistemology doesn't exist separate from neurology. There are no real agents that make this mistake, because it's more or less based on a type error. A Bayesian Epistemology is de-facto not enough to replicate human cognition, if it was then artificial intelligence would be solved. That doesn't stop it from being pretty powerful in conjunction with the world modeling capabilities of a human brain.

      More to the point: At the moment of posing the question, any sensibly designed agent capable of being in this situation wielding a Bayesian Epistemology knows exactly which of these two questions it is posing when it thinks "Is there water in the fridge?" in its internal monologue. The conflation only exists when an outsider observer tries to impute some literal meaning to a thing that is contextually in a system of meaning extending beyond the words in the sentence.

    2. and it is technically true that eggplants are berries.

      I tend to find it's useful to handle this case with the notion of category membership having a spatial organization. Leading to the whole idea of things being central, noncentral, midway, etc members of categories. 'Eggplants are noncentrally berries' communicates precisely what we mean, they are berries, but they're also not what is typically imagined as a berry.

    1. In Parts Four and Five, we’ll see how meta-rationality selectively integrates reasonableness and rationality to make both work better.

      Unfortunately the full description of 'reasonableness' is not currently present, but it's given in short as "everyday informal thinking and acting". Which, to wit: So what is that made of anyway? It's not like informal reasoning just exists an a magic phenomena. Clearly, there is some kind of machine (us) existing in the world that implements this informal reasoning algorithm. Obviously we can't know exactly how it works, but I think of a lot of the 'rationality' critiqued here as increasingly powerful models of what that thing is made of; that is the entire point arguably.

      That these models suck is fair game, but it's important not to conflate the people who geek out about formal systems with the people trying to derive the code to human cognition with the people trying to get a decent working model of human cognition so they can augment it with heuristics et al.

    2. In “the eggplant is a fruit,” probably what is meant is that all eggplants are fruits. In “the dog is a Samoyed,” probably what is meant is that some dog is a Samoyed. We can reasonably assume these meanings from our background understanding of their topics. This knowledge is nowhere in the sentence. The meaning depends on its parts—but not only on them.

      It's common in speech coding (e.g. a vocoder) to rely on a thing that reconstructs the 'meaning' of a signal by predicting its 'full' representation.

      This act of predicting then is also a form of compressing, by predicting the full representation from its lossy analogue you require less bandwidth to transmit messages just like if you'd used a non-stochastic compression technique.

    1. Using esoteric equipment and methods to get some tiny bit of reality to behave according to theory is most of what you do in a science lab.

      Not quite. You use esoteric equipment and methods to get the opportunity to make an observation of some tiny bit of reality that would help you narrow down hypothesis space.

    2. When your statistical analysis determines with high confidence that the moon is made of green cheese, you should not rush to publish your exciting discovery.

      I kind of feel like I'm being Motte-Bailey'd here. This book feels like it's responding to Eliezer Yudkowsky, yet this is literally the kind of scenario you have the notion of a 'prior' for. My prior probability that the moon is made of green cheese is very low. So low in fact that not even a crazy statistical analysis is going to convince me otherwise, the lie contagion factor is off the charts. That is, for the moon to be made of green cheese lots of other stuff I'm pretty confident is true has to be false.

  27. May 2020
  28. Apr 2020
    1. Video explaining how a commons works, adapted from economist David Bollier’s explanation of what a commons is, and threats to the commons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQiBcd7mBc

      This is an excellent primer on commoning or managing shared resources. By managing shared resources, we can work and move forward for the common good. A reminder that commoning is an effort by many for many. Key takeaway is that it is a fair way to manage and distribute shared resources.

    1. David could be a terror when you got it wrong, but when you got it right—when you wrote something that made him smile—he’d make you feel like you’d hung the moon. I can remember coming to his office after closing a piece on day laborers and him looking at me and saying, “I was just talking about how fucking great your piece was this week.” I was a kid who had never felt like he’d done anything great for anyone. And it was only when working for David that I came to understand that I might actually be “good” (to say nothing of great) at anything. Part of that realization wasn’t just in what David said about my own work, but where he set the bar. David would bring in writers from Vanity Fair to hold workshops with the staff. He’d introduce me to journalists who were doing incredible work. He’d clip articles from the New Yorker or Esquire and leave them on my desk with a note attached: “This is the level of work I expect of you.”
  29. Feb 2020

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  30. Jan 2020
    1. Or global warming. I can’t see or touch it. What I can see and touch are these raindrops, this snow, that sunburn patch on the back of my neck. I can touch the weather. But I can’t touch climate. So someone can declare: “See! It snowed in Boise, Idaho, this week. That means there’s no global warming!” We can’t directly see global warming, because it’s not only really widespread and really really long-lasting (100,000 years); it’s also super high-dimensional. It’s not just 3-D. It’s an incredibly complex entity that you have to map in what they call a high-dimensional- phase space: a space that plots all the states of a system. In so doing, we are only following the strictures of modern science, laid down by David Hume and underwritten by Immanuel Kant. Science can’t directly point to causes and effects: That would be metaphysical, equivalent to religious dogma. It can only see correlations in data. This is because, argues Kant, there is a gap between what a thing is and how it appears (its “phenomena”) that can’t be reduced, no matter how hard we try. We can’t locate this gap anywhere on or inside a thing. It’s a transcendental gap. Hyperobjects force us to confront this truth of modern science and philosophy.

      A short, and very cogent argument here.

  31. Oct 2019
    1. CH1009: SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS: Pine Box LP "This time of year the light comes through the pines in flat beams and spark points, glancing off the frost that decorates the grounds of the light-studded medical cities. For a six-sided second I feel like I'm back in the haunted Piedmonts, a decorated major in the Japanese Inner Space Program, renewing my vow to bear down on the truth even if there is none for the hundredth time. After the exodus of the Calm Reflectors I had started seeing the Scud Mountain Boys around town with their Baltimore haircuts, the guitarist's guitarist carrying his 1873 'trapdoor' Springfield rifle, the progeny of the muzzle-loading French Charleville muskets that had whacked so many Redcoats around these hills. I had heard it was the band's tradition to lay dinner on the table uncooked and then set the table on fire.I was out for a walk with Mr. Fiddler the other night, when he turned to me and said, 'this is the time of year when the region is at peace with itself.' I turned to laugh in his face when the impulse subsided. He had been right of course. I'd already seen it happen in the slide projector's cone of lit dust: the November sky hovering over lives of dark employment like a televised clay bank, breech-loaders replacing muzzle-loaders, crows wired to the sky like marred pixels, portraits cubed into accordioned life while every single object of perception waited for us in the air conditioning. Yes, tennis crested in the seventies, killing Eddie Money and the last of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, but how many times did we have to witness the L.A. fireplaces reflected in L.A. wineglasses before it ended?You meet these suburban kids with Biblical names, but there are walls behind their eyes, strange mathematical mountains at whose base we sit playing our native keyboards and rinsing our teeth with digital snow. I'm starting to believe that the inscription above the portal describes this side, not the next. Few people know that George Washington's favorite song was 'The Darby Ram,' or stop to think that before he was a statue he scratched his weld, got the hiccups, and danced alone in his room. All the 'human things.' He must have been scared when he fought in the woods, hiding in the dormant Christmas trees, his hand gripping the black walnut musket stock. In those times and these we turn to the pacifics of a Gamelan orchestra for transport and release. We stand by the hind legs of a K car, listening to the new city cassettes, searching for some sign of human residence here beneath the justifiably uncelebrated Massachusetts sky. This treasured early work brought calm forecasts and sad peace to our house. I hope you take it with you when you go. - D.C. Berman, Original Liner Notes to 'Pine Box' LP
  32. Sep 2019
    1. This is definitely from an incel's perspective, and I also realize it's also the ultimate neo-liberal love song, as we sit in a place of peak individualism. It's not the kind of message I'm proud to spread. I don't intend it to be a love song to the self — it's more of an 'I'm stuck with myself' song. If no one wants to fuck you, it's your fault.

      I still miss David Berman so very, very much, and I know I will continue to miss him for as long as I live.

  33. Jul 2019
    1. Myth: Refugees are all Muslim.

      Do people actually think that? That is ridiculous and so ignorant. People shouldn't stereotype like that. Does the general public really believe that all refugees are from the middle east and are Muslim? I wonder if they know that there are thousands of Christians in the middle east."Christians now make up approximately 5% of the Middle Eastern population, down from 20% in the early 20th century" That's part of the problem. It's a war on freedom. Religious freedom, basic human rights, and personal desires. Sheesh!

    1. Noam Chomsky: One of the most appropriate comments I’ve seen on Trump’s foreign policy appeared in an article in The New Republic written by David Roth, the editor of a sports blog: “The spectacle of expert analysts and thought leaders parsing the actions of a man with no expertise or capacity for analysis is the purest acid satire — but less because of how badly that expert analysis has failed than because of how sincerely misplaced it is … there is nothing here to parse, no hidden meanings or tactical elisions or slow-rolled strategic campaign.” That seems generally accurate. This is a man, after all, who dismisses the information and analyses of his massive intelligence system in favor of what was said this morning on “Fox and Friends,” where everyone tells him how much they love him. With all due skepticism about the quality of intelligence, this is sheer madness considering the stakes.
  34. Jun 2019
    1. Recent cognitive science research shows that the number of things you can mentally prioritize, manage, retain, and recall is . . . (hold on) . . . four! If you park any more than that in your head, you will sub-optimize your cognitive functioning. You will be driven by whatever is latest and loudest—rather than by strategy, intuition, or objective assessment.
  35. Oct 2018
    1. explaining his editorial procedures and adding his own observations and reflections, which are so extensive that they eventually overwhelm Zampano’s text

      Similar to the annotations in Foster Wallace's writing (footnotes on footnotes) and Jorinde Voigt's writing. The compulsion to annotate and explain is so strong, that it overwhelms the original text.

  36. Sep 2018
    1. Den britiske geografen David Harvey beskriver denne tendensen som en «entreprenørisering: lokale myndigheter blir nærmest til gründere som skal tiltrekke seg investeringer og legge til rette for vekst. Dette kan medføre en omprioritering av ressurser, og kritikere av en slik agenda hevder det går utover byens felleskapstjenester og et offentlig tilbud. Dessuten kan man spørre seg om politikken som slike entreprenør-byer fører, er forankret i demokratiske prosesser og den rådende byplanleggingspraksisen.
  37. Jun 2018
    1. sort through the historical and cultural debris of the latter half of the twentieth century in the hope of finding patterns where there seems to be nothing but noise.

      Similar and opposite to Adam S. Miller's statement about Foster Wallace's work in The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: "The real is full of noise, and more, it’s full of patterns that look like noise."

    1. explaining his editorial procedures and adding his own observations and reflections, which are so extensive that they eventually overwhelm Zampano’s text.

      Similar to the annotations in Foster Wallace's writing (footnotes on footnotes) and Jorinde Voigt's writing. The compulsion to annotate and explain is so strong, that it overwhelms the original text.

  38. Apr 2018
  39. Mar 2018
    1. If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

      I'd like to see that study. This article.

  40. Jun 2017
    1. A bad library will use the building as an excuse. The case will be made that the public/students/professionals will flock to the library with better parking or a bigger set of book stacks. And that is true. For weeks after a new building opens it will be filled with the curious. However, it is ultimately the services, professionals, and co-ownership that will bring people back. You build a new library when the old one is too small to accommodate the community, not when it is too small to accommodate the stuff.

      To be clear – buildings need to be a safe and welcoming environment, but that alone is insufficient for use and impact.

    2. Let me be very clear. What makes a library bad is not its collections. Bad libraries can have huge collections or small ones. Great libraries can also have large or small (or no) collections.

      Reinforce that this not saying a collection is bad or useless or not important, just of secondary importance.

    3. “Pizza, pizza, pizza, book!”

      Reverting back to the value of the work we do can only be seen in circulation is a bad habit. And it is a habit, often done reflexively. We need to negotiate new methods of assessment around community impact and not stuff.

    1. So what is a librarian if not a degree, if not a mission statement in isolation, and if not a set of functions? I would argue that a librarian is the intersection of three things: the mission, the means of facilitation, and the values librarians bring to a community. We’ve already covered the first two (approach to mission and facilitation), but what about values?

      Note that this defines a librarian not by the place they work.

    2. And what is the response to these so-called threats? Did librarians build a new Google, or their own eBook platform? No, instead they have adopted Google and Amazon because it turns out these tools work. Never mind that Google is the largest advertising agency in the world, and Amazon is now able to mine your reading history. If librarians and the communities that support them define the world through functional eyes of threats and competition, librarians do not engage new players as partners, nor do they effectively work to instill their values within their services. Too many librarians see what works, and use that tool nearly ignorant of the cost to themselves and those they serve.

      We need to acknowledge our limitations and faults. Too rosy of a picture that ignores past experiences will be dismissed.

    3. More and more, information professions are wrestling with an ever more connected society where information is readily available. More professions are coming to understand the importance of social interactions and the complexities of community. Because of that, many professions have found themselves in increasingly close and sometimes disconcerting proximity to other professions.

      SO here is our next trick. We need to tie librarians to the familiar and around the learning sphere – but we also need librarians to be special and taking a unique important position in a community.

    4. A community should be a better place because it contains a library. Better means change—from how it is to something better. The library and librarians should add value to the community. If you add something like value, you change something. So bottom line, a librarian should help guide a community through a continuous change process. Feel free to revisit the whole jackbooted librarians discussion in the “Improve Society” chapter—we know that this change is not solely a matter of the librarian enacting a vision of change. It is also the librarian working with the community, facilitating the change.

      Not enough to have nice librarians and nice buildings – librarians should challenge and provoke…be active.

    5. Being able to unlock walled gardens and a myriad of sources and then weave information into a comprehensive and comprehendible whole is one of the most valuable skills in a knowledge economy. That said, part of that work is to make the result easy to understand and use, not to make the community members into little librarians. You should expect your librarian to speak your language, and the librarian should expect you to respect that doing so is valuable work.

      Pounding home to the question “you need a masters for that?”

    6. Now, it would be easy to read that and think it just applies to public libraries. However, as a member of academia I can tell you there are plenty of cultural divides in higher education. Talking to faculty, then students, then administration can be like using three different languages. Likewise, school librarians have to understand not only the differences between teachers and students, but math teachers, and music teachers, and English teachers.

      Reinforcing librarianship across library types.

    7. I have mentioned ideas like the prejudice library where libraries circulate more than just books and DVDs. There are public libraries that circulate fishing poles near rivers and libraries that circulate puppets. At the Fab Lab in Fayetteville they will be circulating cameras and book-making materials. In Brooklyn they have an on-demand printing press that will print out bound books written by the community. In Africa they are circulating ceremonial masks; at Onondaga Community College you can check out models of body parts and vivisected cats for anatomy classes. My point here is that you should expect librarians to build living collections that the community needs and guarantee the availability of these resources for the whole community.

      So now that we assume folks are bought into the view of librarianship as learning we can spice things up with a few more “extreme” examples.

    8. It is not the books that make these containers into libraries, however; it is the dedication to the community good and learning.

      Many librarians have a problematic relation with little free libraries. On one hand they support reading and a form of community engagement (albeit a passive one), but aren’t connected to library institutions or professionals.

    9. Too often, degreed librarians (and the faculty who teach them) get stuck in the reductionist paradigm. Too often, degreed librarians use this reductionist approach to dismiss or ignore innovation and good ideas that come from outside of their specialization. You should expect more.

      The ultimate result of this vision allows librarians to ignore comlex social issues. Poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, civic engagement is not my small part of the world – that is someone else’s job.

    10. called reductionism.

      OK, where did this come from? It came from the frustration of public library board members that sought change (or at least understanding) and were blocked by librarians that resisted change by making librarianship more complex. Librarians and IT folks never say no, they simply throw acronyms at you until you give up.

    11. they tend to shield communities from the workings of the library

      This is the dilemma of the service expert. We work to make service smooth and easy on the member, however, folks need to know how hard it is to get the necessary “credit” for support.

    12. This is not restricted to just rural public libraries either. The Librarians of Congress have included historians, scholars, authors, and even a journalist. In fact, for centuries the heads of the libraries in colleges and universities were professors and humanities scholars.

      With our current Librarian of Congress being a delightful exception.

    13. There are three basic ways to become a librarian: you are hired as one, you are educated as one, or you grow into being one. The first is the easiest and often least effective way. The second is the norm often mandated by law and probably the most effective way. The last is rare but can be incredibly powerful. Let us take these in turn and talk about the potential positives and pitfalls of each, plus a little of what we can expect from each as well.

      Once again this is aimed as much to librarians as the public. It is important to look at librarianship as a field rather than a degree. It allows us to make the tent bigger, and therefore add more voice to the cause.

    14. The fact is that libraries can’t do anything—they are buildings or rooms.

      We have to be careful not to let the support of the community fall to too abstract a concept. We have seen many places where libraries are kept open with volunteers, or as unmanned machines.

    1. The second effect has been on the librarians. Now the librarians can leave the building and facilitate knowledge

      The best advocacy for libraries and librarians is to get out of the buildings. Do your job in public, provide service at the point of need. Meet the partners on their turf.

    2. However, the true collection of any library is not these tools, but the community itself.

      Community as collection is a concept as much for librarians as for the public. It bridges from the expected and comfortable to the progressive. Important skills in collection development are not marginalized in this community approach, they are essential and expanded.

    3. In 2001 Ellen Roche, a 24-year-old lab technician, entered into a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University’s Asthma and Allergy Center. The trial was investigating how the lungs responded to chemical irritants. Researchers had Roche inhale hexamethonium. Roche was the third volunteer to do so in the study. The first volunteer had developed a slight cough that lasted a week. The second volunteer had shown no adverse reactions. Roche developed a slight cough that got worse and worse. Five days after inhaling the chemical, Roche was admitted to intensive care. Less than a month later, she was dead.

      Our story is still here, just a bit later. Here we are really talking about embedded librarians.

    4. community platform for knowledge creation

      The big purpose in this chapter is to give people something concrete to hold on to as we break traditional simple definitions of library. The problem is, when you say localities define libraries, then they have nothing in common?!

    5. This drive for standards, efficiencies, and mass production has had a profound effect on libraries and how they are perceived.

      Dewey’s lasting legacy was prioritizing efficiency over effectiveness. Getting through to folks that having a well-defined process/definition/system/mission does not trump the fact that you are trying to get something done.

    6. Melvil Dewey. If you haven’t heard the name, then you probably have heard of the Dewey Decimal system, the scheme for organizing books Dewey developed at the end of the 19th century. The system was based on Dewey’s conviction that standardization and uniformity in libraries would help them grow and prosper.

      How many times have you mentioned you’re a librarian and someone says “Dewey!”

    1. There is another necessary attribute of a community: they must share limited resources.

      It is easy to only talk about the positive and easy aspects of community and libraries. True ownership and buy in has to show complexity and depth.

    2. So what does this have to do with libraries and the conversation about improving society? There is a growing demand for eBooks from library members, and publishers are getting increasingly worried about how they can make money off of their titles. Imagine if you could go register your eBook reader with your local library and seamlessly download any title you wanted free of charge. Why would you ever buy another book? Instead of selling a bunch of copies of the books, publishers would sell one to your library and be done. So publishers are seeking to introduce “friction” into this process. That is, they want to make it easier to license it directly from the publisher than to get it from the library. And most publishers are refusing to license eBooks to libraries at all.

      Trying to show members what librarians have to wrestle with behind the scenes. This is ultimately about getting folks to value librarians and library staff, not just the stuff.

    3. You also must expect a library to do more than simply take a dream and make it happen. Great libraries help shape the vision itself. Notice I use the word “conversation” throughout this book. It is done intentionally, and when talking about how communities seek to improve themselves and the larger society. It is important to know why I use “conversation.”

      If I were to rewrite this section today I would include a new definition of “library:” a library is a mandated and facilitated space supported by the community, stewarded by librarians, and dedicated to knowledge creation. This is discussed in greater detail in the New Librarianship Field Guide.

    4. However, we must never forget that our communities have aspirations and dreams. Though the diversity of our communities can make it difficult to agree on a single vision, we know it is possible. The library can bring our neighbors and colleagues and students and members together in a civil, safe, and inspiring space to dream.

      This is as much for librarians as members. We need to be in the aspiration business, not remediation.

    5. Throughout this book, I talk about expecting more out of the library, but for a moment I need to talk about how libraries and librarians need to expect more out of you. Seeing every community member as a consumer is expecting far too little of you. You are not a consumer or even a customer of a library. Most libraries will use the term “patron” when referring to the community. This is slightly better, but I would rather libraries be energized by their communities, not patronized. I prefer the word member.

      Time for some language work. The terms we use for community members matters. To be clear what term used within a community should be determined by the community. What term we use within the profession is a different matter.

    6. Now here’s one to twist your mind a bit: in some communities and for some questions the Stormfront MLK website is high-quality information. That community is not just the racist sect, but in your community as well. High-quality? Imagine a reporter looking for examples of how hate groups use the web for recruiting. Stormfront is one of the best resources for that reporter. However, it is not the best site to send to an eighth grader looking for after school activities. In discussions of quality, context matters.

      This more nuanced version of quality being contextual is as important for fellow librarians as it is for the public.

    7. Because you need bad information to produce good knowledge.

      Here is the paradox we have to work the reader through. It is important to directly address intellectual freedom and quality. To this point we’ve linked things to learning. That is a pretty easy argument applied to things like maker spaces and non-book resources. Now we have to try and sell holding “bad” materials and learning. This is tricky, but ultimately more important.

    8. “Schoolchildren; factory and shop girls; men who tended bar, drove carriages, and worked on farms and boats; and finally, fallen women, and, in general, the denizens of the midnight world, night-owls, prowlers, and those who live upon sin and its wages.”

      I love love love this quote and Wayne’s book. It gets people’s attention and provides a good narrative of how librarians change social perception, not just reflect them.

    9. Let me be clear: talking about libraries improving society does not include jackbooted librarians marching down the street forcing citizens to properly cite works and read only approved books. I say this because there are those in the library community who think that when one’s mission includes “improving society,” it implies a fixed and somewhat authoritarian vision of improvement.

      OK, not a story, but definitely an attention grabber. This was the result of an online “discussion” I had with a librarian who definitely did not buy into my view of librarianship.

      In having these conversations, activist librarians are perhaps to most tricky. Folks want librarians to empower, but get very uncomfortable with the idea of powerful librarians, particularly in the public sphere.