4,886 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
    1. Why did the chicken cross the road?

      To get to his zettelkasten on the other side!

      But when he got there, he realized he had forgotten the slip of paper with his perfect evergreen note. So the chicken crossed the road once again to retrieve it. But almost as if it were a jokerzettel, on the way back, a gust of wind blew the slip right out of the chicken's beak!

      The chicken tried to catch the runaway slip, but it kept evading him. He chased that slip all over the farm--through the pig sty, over fences, around the grain silo.

      Finally, exhausted but triumphant, the chicken caught the slip and carefully filed it away.

      Moral of the story: Don't count your slips before they're indexed!

    2. Q: Why did the zettelkasten cross the road?

      A: It didn't because Barbara Tuchman, Nicholas Luhmann, Jacques Goutor, Johannes Erich Heyde, and Keith Thomas all recommend only writing on one side.

    1. The epoche is always performed and we don't know it. We don't realize it. 00:19:42 This was said, for instance, by Michel Henry. But maybe even more strikingly by Jean-Paul Sartre in his book, The Transcendence Of The Ego
      • for: epoche - Jean Paul Satre, epoche, question, question - epoche - symbolosphere, Jean-Paul Satre - Nausea
      • paraphrase
        • Jean-Paul Satre
          • The Transcendence of the Ego
          • Nausea (book)
        • both the subject and object are cocreated and emerge simultaneously
      • definition start
        • Bitbol calls this "symmetrical effort"
      • definition end
        • it takes symmetrical effort to
          • extract invariance from experience (objectification and object permanence)
          • stabilize an experiencing pole (construction of self)
        • when some event causes
      • example: epoche
        • reading a book on history
        • you suddenly realize there is no past, no medieval events, just black marks on paper (or on a screen)
      • question
        • Is realizing the epoche the same as realizing the symbolosphere?
    2. according to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • for: quote, quote - Galileo, quote - hiding the origin of knowledge, physical theory - hiding origin of knowledge

      • quote

        • According to Husserl, Galileo was the one who performed the trick. Who suddenly was hiding the origin of knowledge.
      • author: Michel Bitbol
    3. what about the visual field itself? Can it reveal anything about its being seen by an eye? Yes. Why, because there is a structure of a vanishing point and vanishing lights, 00:06:14 converging towards the vanishing point. The vanishing point is the expression in the visual field of it being seen from somewhere. Namely, from an eye.
      • for: visual field, visual field - clues of a seer, nondual, non-dual, nonduality, non-duality, science - blind spot, science - subject
      • question
        • does the visual field reveal anything about the eye?
      • answer: yes
        • vanishing points indicate that the world is being seen from one perspective.
    4. several varieties of blind spots.
      • for: blind spots, science - blind spots, aware spot, Wittgenstein, Nishada Kitaro, Douglas Harding, BEing journey, finger pointing to the moon, the man with no head

      • paraphrase

        • blind spot by vacancy
          • ie. black area in visual field.
          • contrast with the rest of the visual field
          • easy to see
      • further research start
        • pure blind spot
          • I did not understand
      • further research end
        • aware spot
          • Douglas Harding ( Man without a head) exercise
          • Wittgenstein also commented on this
            • Nothing in your visual field leads you to infer that it is seen by an eye
            • BEing journey
              • point finger to objects in your visual field
              • then point to yourself
              • what do you see? There's no object there
              • it is empty but is the source of awareness
          • Nishada Kitaro
            • As soon as you adopt the stance of objective knowledge, the knower doesn't enter the visual field
    1. In other words, when a recipient clicks the “unsubscribe” link in your email, the recipient’s mail client will send an email to this address. It is your responsibility to receive and process these generated emails.
    1. Harl, Kenneth W. The Vikings: Course Guidebook. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2005.

      Vikings. Streaming Video. Vol. 3910. The Great Courses. Chantilly, VA, 2005. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/vikings.

      annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:e17d7b3a22a4a56be07f2afb64548410<br /> search

      Started 2023-09-18

    1. in a normal distribution, from over here you have the denialists and over here you have the environmental activists. But in between you have a lot of different types of people. And the majority are actually – we know this from opinion polls – they are very supportive of science. They're very supportive of and concerned about climate change. They want climate action. It's just that they live their normal lives, they have many preoccupations in life. 01:01:44 They have their children, their health, their school, their financing, their incomes. You know, many, many things to be worried about. But that's the question: how do we get this majority, the silent majority, to join us? And I don't think that the way to make them join us is to scare them. And I don't think the way to join is to fight with the denialists. I think the way to join... to make them join... is to show that this pathway can get a better life.
      • for: leverage points, quote, quote - Johan Rockstrom, quote - motivating the silent majority, climate change - priority, social tipping point
      • quote
        • In a normal distribution,
          • from over here you have the denialists and
          • over here you have the environmental activists.
        • But in between you have a lot of different types of people.
        • And the majority are actually
          • we know this from opinion polls
        • very supportive of science.
        • They're very supportive of and concerned about climate change.
        • They want climate action.
        • It's just that they live their normal lives, they have many preoccupations in life.They have
          • children,
          • health,
          • school,
          • financing,
          • incomes.
        • You know, many, many things to be worried about.
        • But that's the question:
          • how do we get this majority, the silent majority, to join us?
        • I don't think that the way to make them join us is to
          • scare them and
          • fight with the denialists.
        • I think the way to make them join is to show that this pathway can get a better life.
      • author: Johan Rockstrom
      • date: Sept., 2023

      • comment

        • in other words
        • the silent majority does not yet hold climate change activism to be sufficiently high on their list of priorities yet to warrant the necessary scale of action
    1. The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education. 27th Printing. Vol. 1. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. 1952. Reprint, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1984.

      I read the first edition.

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

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

    1. Hoekstra, a Shell man and a McKinsey man in charge of EU climate policy?
      • for: climate change policy hypocrisy, fossil fuel lobby, EU climate policy, Hoekstra, Fox guarding the henhouse, Linked In post
      • comment

        • What does it say about the EU's authenticity to deal with the global boiling crisis when they put a fox in charge of the henhouse?
        • this seems awfully similar to the choice for positioning an oil man to head COP28.
        • The fossil fuel lobby is EXTREMELY busy in the opaque back end of politics. We need more light to shine and bring the back end fossil fuel lobby activity out of the shadows to pre-empt future leadership betrayals.
      • future research

        • uncover future fossil fuel lobby’s game plan and future attempts to coopt climate change policy leadership
        • needed in order to proactively preempt the next attempt at coopting climate leadership. It’s difficult when we are simply reacting
      • for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
      • title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
      • author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
      • date: May 16, 2022
      • source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

      • summary

        • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
        • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
        • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology
    1. Underlines and margin notes in an unknown hand are interspersed throughout the texts. Volume I includes a daily devotional page that has been used as a bookmark. The back endpapers of Volume IV has been copiously annotated.

      Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

    1. the conjunction of those two claims the properties exist even when they're not perceived even when they're not measured and they have influences that propagate no faster 00:06:57 than the speed of light that's local realism and local realism is false
      • for: objectivism, materialism, question, question - materialism, question - objectivism, if a tree falls in the forest
      • question
        • How would Donald respond to the question:
          • If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear?
          • Does he hold the same view as modern consensus of quantum physics?
    1. an overview of the paper
      • for: paper overview, paper overview - the computational boundary of a self
      • paper overview

        • motivated by 2018 Templeton Foundation conference to present idea on unconventional and diverse intelligence
        • Levin was interested in any conceivable type of cognitive system and was interested in find a way to universally characterize them all

          • how are they detected
          • how to understand them
          • how to relate to them and
          • how to create them
        • Levin had been thinking about this for years

        • Levin adopts a cybernetic definition of intelligence proposed by William James that focuses on the competency to reach a defined goal by different paths
        • Navigation plays a critical role in this defiinition.
    1. In 2000, de Bono advised a UK Foreign Office committee that the Arab–Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread). De Bono argued that low zinc levels leads to heightened aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.[19][20]

      an interesting hypothesis, but was it ever fully tested?

      Could tests on other groups with long standing levels of aggression be used to support it? Possible examples:<br /> - The Troubles in Northern Ireland;<br /> - cultural aggressiveness of the Scots-Irish, particularly in America (Hatfields & McCoys, et al.) (Did Malcolm Gladwell have some work on this?)


      References in the article include: <br /> - Lloyd, John; Mitchinson, John (2006). The Book of General Ignorance. Faber & Faber. - Jury, Louise (19 December 1999). "De Bono's Marmite plan for peace in Middle Yeast". The Independent. Retrieved 3 January 2022.

    1. 'The Aeneid' Begins (Schedule and Context)

      reply to u/epiphanysherald at https://www.reddit.com/r/AYearOfMythology/comments/16eti72/the_aeneid_begins_schedule_and_context/

      I've not listened to it before, but some may find Elizabeth Vandiver's Aeneid of Virgil from The Great Courses series to have some useful information and background while reading: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/aeneid-of-virgil.

      It's not terribly expensive on their website, but many public libraries will have copies available for free, often including streaming through Overdrive.com, HooplaDigital.com, or other related free platforms.

      Others in their series including those I've gone through from Vandiver before (The Iliad of Homer comes to mind) have been useful/helpful, especially with regard to context and history.

    1. Observing the unconscious, through dreams for example, as predicting the future

    2. 1:41 identifying with a persona, consequence of society/expectations on oneself, & compromising the self

      Persona is fine, as long as you don’t “identify” with it

    1. "Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong

      1. He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.

      2. He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.

    1. Recent work has revealed several new and significant aspects of the dynamics of theory change. First, statistical information, information about the probabilistic contingencies between events, plays a particularly important role in theory-formation both in science and in childhood. In the last fifteen years we’ve discovered the power of early statistical learning.

      The data of the past is congruent with the current psychological trends that face the education system of today. Developmentalists have charted how children construct and revise intuitive theories. In turn, a variety of theories have developed because of the greater use of statistical information that supports probabilistic contingencies that help to better inform us of causal models and their distinctive cognitive functions. These studies investigate the physical, psychological, and social domains. In the case of intuitive psychology, or "theory of mind," developmentalism has traced a progression from an early understanding of emotion and action to an understanding of intentions and simple aspects of perception, to an understanding of knowledge vs. ignorance, and finally to a representational and then an interpretive theory of mind.

      The mechanisms by which life evolved—from chemical beginnings to cognizing human beings—are central to understanding the psychological basis of learning. We are the product of an evolutionary process and it is the mechanisms inherent in this process that offer the most probable explanations to how we think and learn.

      Bada, & Olusegun, S. (2015). Constructivism Learning Theory : A Paradigm for Teaching and Learning.

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

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

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

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

    2. This done, Adler can say that young crit ics of “the System” are not true revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries work within the System — since the System is the Revolution.

      How does the general idea of zeitgeist of the early 70's relate to the idea of "revolution"?

      See also: Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (1970)

    1. Nobody, however, who surveys the conventional working apparatus of courses of study, textbooks, recitations, examinations, and marks can have much doubt that in practice the schools are making the mastery of the curriculum an end in itself.

      A statement of "teaching to the test" in 1939!

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

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

    2. RECOMMENDED READING LIST

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

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

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

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

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

    1. Eckhart talking on how "the flow came back" (striking to write)

      • see note on knowing when to stop working (also reference earlier wu wei annotation)
    1. Movies as portraying limited existence, but sometimes “signs” of consciousness

      • In my opinion, well made movies, show a lot of signs of consciousness. See, for example, LOTR, with the rhoririm charge where there is a collective consciousness forming, or the scene in which Shanks stops Akainu.
    1. Virgil. Aeneid. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. 1st ed. Hackett Classics. 19BC. Reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 2005. https://www.amazon.com/Aeneid-Hackett-Classics-Virgil/dp/0872207323/.

  2. Aug 2023
    1. Whereas ChatGPT may be a bullshitter, Claude can be a co-reader whose output specifically references and works to make “meaning” in response to another author’s words.

      "Reading with an artificial intelligence" seems like a fascinating way to participate in the Great Conversation.

    1. Some may not realize it yet, but the shift in technology represented by ChatGPT is just another small evolution in the chain of predictive text with the realms of information theory and corpus linguistics.

      Claude Shannon's work along with Warren Weaver's introduction in The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), shows some of the predictive structure of written communication. This is potentially better underlined for the non-mathematician in John R. Pierce's book An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise (1961) in which discusses how one can do a basic analysis of written English to discover that "e" is the most prolific letter or to predict which letters are more likely to come after other letters. The mathematical structures have interesting consequences like the fact that crossword puzzles are only possible because of the repetitive nature of the English language or that one can use the editor's notation "TK" (usually meaning facts or date To Come) in writing their papers to make it easy to find missing information prior to publication because the statistical existence of the letter combination T followed by K is exceptionally rare and the only appearances of it in long documents are almost assuredly areas which need to be double checked for data or accuracy.

      Cell phone manufacturers took advantage of the lower levels of this mathematical predictability to create T9 predictive text in early mobile phone technology. This functionality is still used in current cell phones to help speed up our texting abilities. The difference between then and now is that almost everyone takes the predictive magic for granted.

      As anyone with "fat fingers" can attest, your phone doesn't always type out exactly what you mean which can result in autocorrect mistakes (see: DYAC (Damn You AutoCorrect)) of varying levels of frustration or hilarity. This means that when texting, one needs to carefully double check their work before sending their text or social media posts or risk sending their messages to Grand Master Flash instead of Grandma.

      The evolution in technology effected by larger amounts of storage, faster processing speeds, and more text to study means that we've gone beyond the level of predicting a single word or two ahead of what you intend to text, but now we're predicting whole sentences and even paragraphs which make sense within a context. ChatGPT means that one can generate whole sections of text which will likely make some sense.

      Sadly, as we know from our T9 experience, this massive jump in predictability doesn't mean that ChatGPT or other predictive artificial intelligence tools are "magically" correct! In fact, quite often they're wrong or will predict nonsense, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination. Just as with T9, we need to take even more time and effort to not only spell check the outputs from the machine, but now we may need to check for the appropriateness of style as well as factual substance!

      The bigger near-term problem is one of human understanding and human communication. While the machine may appear to magically communicate (often on our behalf if we're publishing it's words under our names), is it relaying actual meaning? Is the other person reading these words understanding what was meant to have been communicated? Do the words create knowledge? Insight?

      We need to recall that Claude Shannon specifically carved semantics and meaning out of the picture in the second paragraph of his seminal paper:

      Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

      So far ChatGPT seems to be accomplishing magic by solving a small part of an engineering problem by being able to explore the adjacent possible. It is far from solving the human semantic problem much less the un-adjacent possibilities (potentially representing wisdom or insight), and we need to take care to be aware of that portion of the unsolved problem. Generative AIs are also just choosing weighted probabilities and spitting out something which is prone to seem possible, but they're not optimizing for which of many potential probabilities is the "best" or the "correct" one. For that, we still need our humanity and faculties for decision making.


      Shannon, Claude E. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 1948.

      Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

      Pierce, John Robinson. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. Second, Revised. Dover Books on Mathematics. 1961. Reprint, Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, Inc., 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbols-Mathematics/dp/0486240614.

      Shannon, Claude Elwood. “The Bandwagon.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1956): 3. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774.


      We may also need to explore The Bandwagon, an early effect which Shannon noticed and commented upon. Everyone seems to be piling on the AI bandwagon right now...

    1. In finance, the greater fool theory suggests that one can sometimes make money through the purchase of overvalued assets — items with a purchase price drastically exceeding the intrinsic value — if those assets can later be resold at an even higher price.
    1. Purple is a small suite of quickly hacked tools inspired by Doug Engelbart's attempt to bootstrap the addressing features of his Augment system onto HTML pages. Its purpose is simple: produce HTML documents that can be addressed at the paragraph level. It does this by automatically creating name anchors with static and hierarchical addresses at the beginning of each text node, and by displaying these addresses as links at the end of each text node.    1A  (02)

      Purple is a suite of tools from 2001 that allow one to create numbered addresses/anchors at the paragraph level of a digital document.


      Link: Dave Winer's site still has support for purple numbers.

    1. For context, I don't use a traditional Zettelkasten system. It's more of a commonplace book/notecard system similar to Ryan HolidayI recently transitioned to a digital system and have been using Logseq, which I enjoy. It's made organizing my notes and ideas much easier, but I've noticed that I spend a lot of time on organizing my notesSince most of my reading is on Kindle, my process involves reading and highlighting as I read, then exporting those highlights to Markdown and making a page in Logseq. Then I tag every individual highlightThis usually isn't too bad if a book/research article has 20-30 highlights, but, for example, I recently had a book with over 150 highlights, and I spent about half an hour tagging each oneI started wondering if it's overkill to tag each highlight since it can be so time consuming. The advantage is that if I'm looking for passages about a certain idea/topic, I can find it specifically rather than having to go through the whole bookI was also thinking I could just have a set of tags for each book/article that capture what contexts I'd want to find the information in. This would save time, but I'd spend a little more time digging through each document looking for specificsCurious to hear your thoughts, appreciate any suggestions

      reply to m_t_rv_s__n/ at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/164n6qg/is_this_overkill/

      First, your system is historically far more traditional than Luhmann's more specific practice. See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/10/22/the-two-definitions-of-zettelkasten/

      If you're taking all the notes/highlights from a particular book and keeping them in a single file, then it may be far quicker and more productive to do some high level tagging on the entire book/file itself and then relying on and using basic text search to find particular passages you might use at a later date.

      Spending time reviewing over all of your notes and tagging/indexing them individually may be beneficial for some basic review work. But this should be balanced out with your long term needs. If your area is "sociology", for example, and you tag every single idea related to the topic of sociology with #sociology, then it will cease to have any value you to you when you search for it and find thousands of disconnected notes you will need to sift through. Compare this with Luhmann's ZK which only had a few index entries under "sociology". A better long term productive practice, and one which Luhmann used, is indexing one or two key words when he started in a new area and then "tagging" each new idea in that branch or train of though with links to other neighboring ideas. If you forget a particular note, you can search your index for a keyword and know you'll find that idea you need somewhere nearby. Scanning through the neighborhood of notes you find will provide a useful reminder of what you'd been working on and allow you to continue your work in that space or link new things as appropriate.

      If it helps to reframe the long term scaling problem of over-tagging, think of a link from one idea to another as the most specific tag you can put on an idea. To put this important idea into context, if you do a Google search for "tagging" you'll find 240,000,000 results! If you do a search for the entirety of the first sentence in this paragraph, you'll likely only find one very good and very specific result, and the things which are linked to it are going to have tremendous specific value to you by comparison.

      Perhaps the better portions of your time while reviewing notes would be taking the 150 highlights and finding the three to five most important, useful, and (importantly) reusable ones to write out in your own words and begin expanding upon and linking? These are the excerpts you'll want to spend more time on and tag/index for future use rather than the other hundreds. Over time, you may eventually realize that the hundreds are far less useful than the handful (in management spaces this philosophy is known as the Pareto principle), so spending a lot of make work time on them is less beneficial for whatever end goals you may have. (The make work portions are often the number one reason I see people abandoning these practices because they feel overwhelmed working on raw administrivia instead of building something useful and interesting to themselves.) Naturally though, you'll still have those hundreds sitting around in a file if you need to search, review, or use them. You won't have lost them by not working on them, but more importantly you'll have gained loads of extra time to work on the more important pieces. You should notice that the time you save and the value you create will compound over time.

      And as ever, play around with these to see if they work for you and your specific needs. Some may be good and others bad—it will depend on your needs and your goals. Practice, experiment, have fun.

      Meme image from Office Space featuring a crowd of office employees standing in front of a banner on the wall that reads: Is this Good for the Zettelkasten?

    1. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.
      • Empty the cup: start from beginning (see Alan Watts on this), let go of what you know, let new things come by removing the old
      • calling out fire energy/good aggression from within
      • create balance to this energy, by meditating etc.
    1. Texts are patient conversationalists always waiting for you to write your side of the conversation into the margin before they continue on with their side of the conversation. Sadly, too many readers (students especially) don't realize that there's a conversation going on.

      Link to:<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/bBwyhkN3Ee6nQNPI5xmSnQ - https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q

    2. Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.

      Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas

    3. Indigenous cultures can "see" dark constellations (example: the Australian emu in the sky) which are defined empty spaces which are explicitly visible.

      Using this concept, one could think of or use blank index cards in a zettelkasten or even the empty (negative) spaces between cards as "dark ideas" (potential ideas which need to be thought of and filled in).

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/FlqusEN1Ee6XEr_9StPUlA

    4. I could continue a thread anywhere, rather than always picking it up at the end. I could sketch out where I expected things to go, with an outline, rather than keeping all the points I wanted to hit in my head as I wrote. If I got stuck on something, I could write about how I was stuck nested underneath whatever paragraph I was currently writing, but then collapse the meta-thoughts to be invisible later -- so the overall narrative doesn’t feel interrupted.

      Notes about what you don't know (open questions), empty outline slots, red links as [[wikilinks]], and other "holes" in tools for thought provide a bookmark for where one may have quit exploring, but are an explicit breadcrumb for picking up that line of thought and continuing it at a future time.

      Linear writing in one's notebooks, books they're reading, and other places doesn't always provide an explicit space which invites the reader or writer to fill them in. One has to train themselves to annotate in the margins to have a conversation with the text. Until one sees these empty spaces as inviting spaces they can be invisible to the eye.

    5. In fact, it might be good if you make your first cards messy and unimportant, just to make sure you don’t feel like everything has to be nicely organized and highly significant.

      Making things messy from the start as advice for getting started.

      I've seen this before in other settings, particularly in starting new notebooks. Some have suggested scrawling on the first page to get over the idea of perfection in a virgin notebook. I also think I've seen Ton Ziijlstra mention that his dad would ding every new car to get over the new feeling and fear of damaging it. Get the damage out of the way so you can just move on.

      The fact that a notebook is damaged, messy, or used for the smallest things may be one of the benefits of a wastebook. It averts the internal need some may find for perfection in their nice notebooks or work materials.

    6. one early reader of this write-up decided to use half 3x5 cards, so that they’d fit in mtg deck boxes.

      First reference I've seen for someone suggesting using half size 3 x 5" index cards so that they could use commercially available Magic: The Gathering (MTG) boxes.

      Oxford and possibly other manufacturers already make 1/2 size 3 x 5" index cards.

    1. Imagine the younger generation studying great books andlearning the liberal arts. Imagine an adult population con-tinuing to turn to the same sources of strength, inspiration,and communication. We could talk to one another then. Weshould be even better specialists than we are today because wecould understand the history of our specialty and its relationto all the others. We would be better citizens and better men.We might turn out to be the nucleus of the world community.

      Is the cohesive nature of Hutchins and Adler's enterprise for the humanities and the Great Conversation, part of the kernel of the rise of interdisciplinarity seen in the early 2000s onward in academia (and possibly industry).

      Certainly large portions are the result of uber-specialization, particularly in spaces which have concatenated and have allowed people to specialize in multiple areas to create new combinatorial creative possibilities.

    2. The mathematical specialist, for example, canget further faster into the great mathematicians than a readerwho is without his specialized training. With the help ofgreat books, specialized knowledge can radiate out into agenuine interfiltration of common learning and common life.

      Here Hutchins is again prefiguring C.P. Snow's "two cultures". He makes the argument that by having a shared base of knowledge and culture in our society's past history of knowledge (and especially early scientists and mathematicians), everyone, despite their individual interests and specializations, can be an active participant in a broader human conversation.

    3. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      The commons as a social glue

      Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.

      Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ

    4. The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.

      We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.

      Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?

    5. I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.

      The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

      Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

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

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

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

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

      Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

    9. This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal educa-tion must have been largely responsible for the emergence ofdemocracy as an ideal.

      Graeber and Wengrow seem to indicate otherwise.

    1. The Great Gatsby  F. Scott Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Nippoldt (Illustrated by) FRONTLIST October 10, 2023 FRONTLIST | October 10, 2023 9781524879761, 1524879762 Hardcover $45.00 USD, $60.00 CAD Fiction / Classics

      https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=1524879762&page=1

      This looks like a fascinating illustrated edition from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

    1. there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • for: progress trap, quote, quote - progress trap, quote Brian Southwell, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
      • quote

        • We are likely to make some gains in personal health, are likely to face some collective concerns in terms of environmental health and
        • are not likely to cope with the alienation and despair that is a part of a life lived largely online.
        • In the latter case, there is a disconnect between the long period of evolution that honed our humanity and
        • the short period of rapid technology change we are facing.
      • author: Brian Southwell

        • director, Science in the Public Sphere Program, RTI International
    1. Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • for: quote, quote - Stowe Boyd, quote - progress trap, quote - unintended consequences, unintended consequences, progress trap, cultural evolution, technology - futures, futures - technology, progress trap
      • quote:
        • Technological change is an accelerant and acts on the social ills like pouring gasoline on a fire
      • author: Sowe Boyd
        • consulting futurist on technological evolution and the future of work
      • paraphrase
        • In an uncontrolled hyper-capitalist society,
          • the explosion in technologies over the past 30 years has only
            • widened inequality,
            • concentrated wealth and
            • led to greater social division.
          • And it is speeding up with the rise of artificial intelligence,
            • which like globalization has destabilized Western industrial economies while admittedly pulling hundreds of millions elsewhere out of poverty.
        • And the boiling exhaust of this set of forces is pushing the planet into a climate catastrophe. -The world is as unready for hundreds of millions of climate refugees as it was for the plague.
        • However, some variant of social media will likely form the context for the rise of a global movement to stop the madness
          • which I call the Human Spring
        • which will be more like
          • Occupy or
          • the Yellow Vests
        • than traditional politics.
        • I anticipate a grassroots movement
          • characterized by
            • general strikes,
            • political action,
            • protest and
            • widespread disruption of the economy
          • that will confront the economic and political system of the West.
        • Lead by the young, ultimately this will lead to large-scale political reforms, such as
          • universal health care,
          • direct democracy,
          • a new set of rights for individuals and
          • a large set of checks on the power of
            • corporations and
            • political parties.
        • For example,
          • eliminating corporate contributions to political campaigns,
          • countering monopolies and
          • effectively accounting for economic externalities, like carbon.
    2. What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip, tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything, including wrongly. The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world. That’s where the digital and the physical connect best. Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with the U.S., Europe and China becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward networks and what runs on them.
      • for: progress trap, unintended consequence, unintended consequence - digital technology, quote, quote - progress trap, quote - Doc Searls
      • quote
        • What won’t change is people’s tendency toward gossip,
          • tribalism driven by gossip and the ability of anybody to inform anybody else about anything,
            • including wrongly.
        • The only places where news won’t skew fake will be localities in the natural world.
        • That’s where the digital and the physical connect best.
        • Also expect the internet to break into pieces, with
          • the U.S.,
          • Europe and
          • China
        • becoming increasingly isolated by different value systems and governance approaches toward
          • networks and
          • what runs on them.
    1. ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change – seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm’s own scientists. Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial.

      Exxon knew as early as 1981 of climate change, and since has been actively denying and distracting from the real issue - burning fossil fuels

    1. The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found.

      Exxon knew from their climate scientists

    1. The Massachusetts high court on Tuesday ruled that the US’s largest oil company, ExxonMobil, must face a trial over accusations that it lied about the climate crisis and covered up the fossil fuel industry’s role in worsening environmental devastation.

      Exxon must face trial for climate crimes, Exxon Knew

    1. CAN THE BIOSPHERE SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS?

      A global program to regenerate soils, ecosystems, forests and revive life in the oceans can reverse a lot of the damage, fast. The biosphere can solve the climate crisis, if we give it a chance. #climatechange #slowwater #amazon #clouds #regeneration

    1. I propose a six pillar strategy besides the fight against CO2, frontloading climate action based on massive Nature based Solutions (NbS) implemented by everyone, everywhere as fast as possible:

      Rob 6-pillar strategy

    1. why does it in a sense if we think of money as a voting tool why is it that a billionaire has a 00:32:31 billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do
      • for: voting, power - money, money - voting, inequality, voting - money, equity, voting power - rich
      • paraphrase
      • question
        • if we think of money as a voting tool
          • why does a billionaire have a billion times more power to decide what society should be like than i do?
    1. Walter Jehne outlines hydrological processes that naturally regulate and cool Earth’s climate.

      hydrology and water cycles to cool the planet. resources.

      • for: emissions reduction, bend the curve, TPF, W2W, emissions reduction - cultural sector, bend the curve - cultural sector, TPF - cultural sector, W2W - cultural sector, carbon emissions - cultural sector, carbon inequality

      • comment

        • well written article on the carbon emissions challenges of the cultural sector
        • this is related to the carbon emissions of the luxury industry as well
      • question
        • same question as asked about luxury, since there is overlap with culture industry and luxury
        • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury aspects of the culture industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
      • reference
    1. I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time
      • for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
      • key insight
        • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
        • it means the difference between
          • living in the present
          • living in the future
      • paraphrase
        • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
        • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
        • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
          • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
          • but in the future when I have what I think I need
            • when I'm rich enough or
            • when I'm famous enough or
            • my body is perfect enough or whatever
          • when I have all this then everything will be okay
          • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
          • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
          • Now isn't good enough
            • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
        • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
        • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
        • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
          • the Eternal now
          • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
        • As long as the present is a means to some better end
          • this future when I'm gonna be okay
        • then the present is experienced as
          • a series of Nows that fall away
          • as we reach for that future
        • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
        • it's possible to experience the here and now
          • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
          • as lacking nothing
      • it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away
    2. t the irony of course is that if this desire if this craving for money if this lack project and we could also call it reality project because another 00:13:08 way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole right 00:13:20 because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside that's going to secure this sense of self-insight the tragedy of the whole process of 00:13:32 course is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn it's never going to be enough because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • for: the lack project, the reality project, sense of lack, sense of self, poverty mentality, polylcrisis, polycrisis - root
      • paraphrase
        • the irony is that
          • if this desire
          • if this craving for money
          • if this lack project and
          • we could also call it reality project
            • because another way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole
        • because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside
          • that's going to secure this sense of self-inside
        • the tragedy of the whole process is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn
          • it's never going to be enough
          • because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • key insight
        • the lack project is at the root of our polycrisis
    3. if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress
      • for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
      • key insight
        • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
        • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project
    1. highlights the dire financial circumstances of the poorest individuals, who resort to high-interest loans as a survival strategy. This phenomenon reflects the interplay between human decision-making and development policy. The decision to take such loans, driven by immediate needs, illustrates how cognitive biases and limited options impact choices. From a policy perspective, addressing this issue requires understanding these behavioral nuances and crafting interventions that provide sustainable alternatives, fostering financial inclusion and breaking the cycle of high-interest debt.

    1. It is not unrealistic to forsee the costs ofcomputation and memory plummeting by orders ofmagnitude, while the cost of human programmers increases.It will be cost effective to use large systems like ~. forevery kind of programming, as long as they can providesignificant increases in programmer power. Just ascompilers have found their way into every application overthe past twenty years, intelligent program-understandingsystems may become a part of every reasonablecomputational environment in the next twenty.
      • for: gene culture coevolution, carrying capacity, unsustainability, overshoot, cultural evolution, progress trap

      • Title: The genetic and cultural evolution of unsustainability

      • Author: Brian F. Snyder

      • Abstract

      • Summary
      • Paraphrase
        • Anthropogenic changes are accelerating and threaten the future of life on earth.
        • While the proximate mechanisms of these anthropogenic changes are well studied
          • climate change,
          • biodiversity loss,
          • population growth
        • the evolutionary causality of these anthropogenic changes have been largely ignored.
        • Anthroecological theory (AET) proposes that the ultimate cause of anthropogenic environmental change is
          • multi-level selection for niche construction and ecosystem engineering.
        • Here, we integrate this theory with
          • Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle
        • and propose a model linking
          • energy extraction from the environment with
          • genetic, technological and cultural evolution
        • to increase human ecosystem carrying capacity.
        • Carrying capacity is partially determined by energetic factors such as
          • the net energy a population can acquire from its environment and
          • the efficiency of conversion from energy input to offspring output.
        • These factors are under Darwinian genetic selection
        • in all species,
        • but in humans, they are also determined by
          • technology and
          • culture.
        • If there is genetic or non-genetic heritable variation in
          • the ability of an individual or social group
        • to increase its carrying capacity,
        • then we hypothesize that - selection or cultural evolution will act - to increase carrying capacity.
        • Furthermore, if this evolution of carrying capacity occurs - faster than the biotic components of the ecological system can respond via their own evolution,
          • then we hypothesize that unsustainable ecological changes will result.
    1. Barzun, Jacques. “The Great Books.” The Atlantic, December 1952. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1952/12/the-great-books/642341/.

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

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

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

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

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

    1. what are we gonna do with all these boundaries once this is their set right 01:43:58 what I always say that this esps really need to be linked to actors if they are going to have any bearing in real world and to guide the practice so we can do that by cross-scale 01:44:11 translation try to bring down this you know planetary level kind of our boundaries into actors cities and businesses in particular so when we talk about this cross-scale translation what we are talking about is if the boundary 01:44:24 is transgressed then what we are talking about is how do you allocate the responsibilities equal um equitably
      • for: downscaled planetary boundaries, bend the curve, allocate responsibilities, fair share, science-based targets
      • key insight
        • downscaling to city scale and to business actdors
        • based on Science based targets
    1. I like their simplicity and cloth texture, but family members seem to think that my 1952 set of The Great Books of the Western World are a bit on the "dreary looking side" compared with the more colorful books in our home library. (It says something that the 12 year old thinks my yellow Springer graduate math texts are more inviting...) Has anyone else had this problem and solved it with custom printed dust jackets?

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

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

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

      Other thoughts? suggestions?

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

  3. Jul 2023
    1. I have been using the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) which Adler developed for the Propædia volume of the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (orig. publ. 1974) as my way of indexing knowledge (there is a blog series describing this). I am now working on Part 7 of the series, which is concerned with porting from a card-based analogue system to a digital computer-based form, using the insights gained from having done so via the analogue approach initially.It appears as though the final version of the OoK which ever appeared was in 2010, and is archived at The Internet Archive.I am interested in whether anyone has continued using the OoK or has expanded upon it in any formalised or systematic way. I have made my own mods to it, of course, as it is several decades old and could bear with some revision. But I am not aware of any organisation or group that may already be doing this, including the Britannica itself (which seems a shame, if it is the case).Does anyone know of any such efforts?

      reply to u/TheVoroscope at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/va2s09/comment/jtwqhd7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      u/TheVoroscope, the only things I've seen on it are the original and what you've written. I suspect anything current will be quite niche and would require searching in the areas of academic journal articles or at the level of graduate studies within the library sciences where you might find something. Simon Winchester had a section on the rise and downfall of the Encyclopedia Britannica in his most recent book Knowing What We Know (2023) which has a brief mention of the Propædia, but it was broadly described as a $32 million dollar bomb that ended the Encyclopedia. I would suspect that the last printings in 2010 and 2012 were probably the last more as a result of the rise of internet usage than they were the form and function of the Propædia itself though.

    1. one of the things I think Civil Society has to be aware of is that there's been 00:09:33 a deliberate misuse of the prospects of technology
      • for: net zero, kick the can down the road, green growth, degrowth, NET, negative emissions technology
    1. The Divine image
      • for: William Blake, poem, evolution, beauty, climate communication, motivation
        • William Blake Poem
          • The Divine Image
            • To Mercy, pity, peace and love all pray in their distress and in these virtues of delight return their thankfulness
            • when push comes to shove as they say in English
            • when you're up against the wall when you're in an extreme situation
              • someone's going to hit you and what do you do? Mercy Mercy you just say it or
              • you see someone else, they're about to hit someone and you say for pity's sake don't do that or
              • you find somebody very, very attractive and you feel this love right?
            • that's why he says
              • love the human form Divine
              • mercy has a human heart
              • pity a human face
              • love the human form Divine
            • these things are actually almost spontaneous intuitive things that happen and what does it mean?
              • they come from the biosphere
              • they come from your body
              • they come from evolution
            • it's very, very clear for example that art and language ritual comes from at least as far back as primates
      • for: inner/outer transformation, transformation, rapid whole system change,
      • Title
        • The Human Form Divine
      • Speaker
        • Timothy Morton
      • for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
      • source
      • Description

        • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
          • William Rees
          • Rex Weyler
          • Nora Bateson
      • Reflections Overall,

        • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
        • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
      • There is consensus that
        • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
        • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
      • There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature
      • Rex

        • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
        • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
        • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
        • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
        • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.
      • Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

        • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
        • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
        • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.
      • William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

        • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
        • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
          • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
          • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.
    1. It does not make sense for   one species to command most of the energy flow  through the ecosystems of which it is a part.   That's a very destabilizing situation. And  the wise species would do everything possible   to reestablish some kind of balanced energy and  material throughput. If we don't do that, again,   01:15:52 I keep harping on this, people hate me for it,  but we will go down
      • for: anthropomorphism, apex species
      • quote
        • it does not make sense for one species to command most of the energy flow through the ecosystems which it is part of. That's a very destabilizing situation and the wise species would do everything possible to reestablish some kind of balanced energy material throughput.
    1. Books aren’t something one approves or disapproves of; they are to be understood, interpreted, learned from, shocked by, argued with and enjoyed. Moreover, the evolution of literature and the other arts, their constant renewal over the centuries, has always been fueled by what is now censoriously labeled “cultural appropriation” but which is more properly described as “influence,” “inspiration” or “homage.” Poets, painters, novelists and other artists all borrow, distort and transform. That’s their job; that’s what they do.
    2. I regret that the ideal of a home or family library has pretty much vanished along with door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and sets of the “Great Books of the Western World.”
    1. with the Earth commission has taken up all this science a first attempt of being a kind of a community effort 00:14:53 scientifically to really give businesses and cities in the world quantitative boundaries to work with to operationalize as science-based targets
      • for: downscaled planetary boundaries, earth system boundaries, bend the curve
    2. you may have seen last week that the global carbon budget to 00:11:43 have a chance of holding 1.5 was cut by half so no longer 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide but rather 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide remaining to have a chance of holding 1.5 that's only like 00:11:56 six seven years under current burning of fossil fuels so an orderly phase out means that we really need to start bending the curve immediately and reduce emissions by in the order of six to seven percent per year to have a net 00:12:09 Seer World economy between 2014 and 2050
      • for: bend the curve, climate clock
    1. The common definition of a progress trap is derived from the book’s cover text: “..it is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.”
      • for: progress trap
      • definition
      • quote
        • progress trap
          • A progress trap is the condition in which we find ourselves when science, technology and industry create more problems than they can solve. Often inadvertently.
      • author
        • Dan O'Leary
      • source
    1. The concept of the purity of science should be abandoned.
      • for: progress trap, abstraction
        • comment
          • we do not recognize the power of abstraction
          • through it, we begin to construct Indra's Net of Jewels, one jewel (idea) at a time
          • but each jewel (idea) that we construct is just a little knowledge, and as Dan observes, a little knowledge, compared to the endless knowledge reflected in any jewel is dangerous.
          • this then, is our dangerous predicament - we base technology on incomplete jewels of Indra's net
          • as we know from mathematics, when the finite meets the infinite, it can never win
    2. Since  humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
      • for: progress trap
      • quote
        • Since humanity is a small product of nature, he can by definition not control nature. To believe that he can is a delusion.
      • Author
        • Dan O'Leary
    3. Escaping The Progress Trap
      • for: progress trap, progress traps

      • Tttle

        • Escaping The Progress Trap
      • Author
        • Gordon Kubanek
      • Source
      • Description
        • Gordon Kubanek shares his review of Dan O'Leary's book, "Escaping the Progress Trap"
    1. There’s the power of the press for you.

      Quote from Evelyn Waugh's satire Scoop from section on Wenlock Jakes "creating" a revolution.

    2. You cannot hopeto bribe or twist,thank God! theBritish journalist.But, seeing whatthe man will dounbribed, there’sno occasion to.—Humbert Wolfe, epigram from The Uncelestial City (1930
    1. most of what we do when we look at power is we say, "This person is bad, let's get them out." And then we end up with another bad person a few minutes later or a few months later. And as a result of that, we end up replicating the exact same problems over and over and over.
      • we look at a bad person
      • try to get rid of him/her
      • when we do, then another bad person ends up in the role
      • this is because we are treating the symptom, not the root cause
    2. power does corrupt. We have plenty of evidence that it changes your psychology, it changes your neuroscience, it changes your brain, but it's only a small part of the story. And the much more interesting part of the story is how people interact with systems and why we end up with the wrong people in charge.
      • comment
        • interesting analysis that it is the system that promotes the wrong type of people to positions of leadership.
    1. The "Dokkōdō" (Japanese: 獨行道) ("The Path of Aloneness", "The Way to Go Forth Alone", or "The Way of Walking Alone") is a short work written by Miyamoto Musashi a week before he died in 1645. It consists of 21 precepts. "Dokkodo" was largely composed on the occasion of Musashi giving away his possessions in preparation for death, and was dedicated to his favorite disciple, Terao Magonojō (to whom the earlier Go rin no sho [The Book of Five Rings] had also been dedicated), who took them to heart. "Dokkōdō" expresses a stringent, honest, and ascetic view of life.

      The work of Musashi, Dokkodo, is the Japanese for "The way of walking alone", which I like most as a translation.

      • Title
        • The landscape of biomedical research
      • Authors
        • Rita González-Márquez,
        • Luca Schmidt,
        • Benjamin M. Schmidt,
        • Philipp Berens
        • Dmitry Kobak
      • Date
        • April 11, 2023
      • Source
      • Abstract
        • The number of publications in biomedicine and life sciences
        • has rapidly grown over the last decades,
        • with over 1.5 million papers now published every year.
        • This makes it difficult to
          • keep track of new scientific works and
          • to have an overview of the evolution of the field as a whole.
        • Here we
          • present a 2D atlas of the entire corpus of biomedical literature, and
          • argue that it provides
            • a unique and
            • useful overview
          • of the life sciences research.
        • We base our atlas on the abstract texts of
        • 21 million English articles from the PubMed database.
        • To embed the abstracts into 2D, we use
          • a large language model PubMedBERT, combined with
          • t-SNE tailored to handle samples of our size.
        • We use our atlas to study
          • the emergence of the Covid-19 literature,
          • the evolution of the neuroscience discipline,
          • the uptake of machine learning, and
          • the distribution of gender imbalance in academic authorship.
        • Furthermore, we present an interactive web version of our atlas that
          • allows easy exploration and
          • will enable further insights and facilitate future research.
    1. Professor Büchs said
      • quote
        • "Policymakers need to win public support for energy demand reduction mechanisms. -The reality is decarbonisation on the supply side, where energy is generated and distributed, will not be enough to deliver the emission reductions that are needed. -So, energy demand will have to be reduced. That is the inescapable reality."
      • Author
        • Milena Buchs
      • Experts on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate that
        • reducing energy demand could produce between 40% and 70% of the emissions reductions that need to be found by 2050.

      "Our research is indicating that public support for energy demand reduction is possible if the public see the schemes as being fair and deliver climate justice."

    1. The Great Turning, David Korten referred to this crisis as ​“the great unraveling.
      • title
        • The Great Turning
      • Author
        • David Korten
      • Description
        • David Korten describes "the great unraveling" as a multi-dimensional ecological, social and economic crisis
    2. The second great separation followed the industrial revolution.
      • Second great separation
        • Industrial Revolution
          • The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
          • Prior to the enclosures, land was held in common for public use, not owned by individuals.
          • The rise of capitalism also occurred during this time.
            • Adam Smith wrote his landmark book, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776.
            • Land was privatized so the most efficient use of land could be determined
              • by market competition rather than
              • community consensus.
            • Labor then also had to be ​“commodified,” or bought and sold,
              • so non-farmers could work for wages and buy food and the other necessities of life they had been getting from the land.
            • With reliance on working for wages, buying, and selling
              • the necessity for personal relationships were diminished.
            • With the diminished necessity for personal relationships,
              • the social cohesion within families, communities and society began to diminish as well.
          • The persistence of chronic poverty and malnutrition, even during times of tremendous economic growth and individual wealth, are direct consequences of a growing sense of disconnectedness from each other that was nourished by the industrial era of economic development.
    1. The Editors wish especially to mention their debt to thelate John Erskine, who over thirty years ago began the move-ment to reintroduce the study of great books into Americaneducation, and who labored long and arduously on thepreparation of this set.
    2. a conver-sation that has gone on for twenty-five centuries, all dogmasand points of view appear.

      Does it really?!? When the conversation omits so many perspectives and points of view for lack of diversity, it's also going to be missing quite a lot that one may not anticipate either. It's also likely to go down some blind alleys that may not be as beneficial too.

    3. the reader becomes to thisextent his own editor.
    4. Some writers have made an important contribution to theGreat Conversation, but in a way that makes it impossible toinclude it in a set like this. These are writers, of whom Leib-nitz, Voltaire, and Balzac are notable examples, whose con-tribution lies in the total volume of their work, rather thanin a few great works, and whose total volume is too largeto be included or whose single works do not come up to thestandard of the other books in this set.
    5. We attach importance to making whole works, as distin-guished from excerpts, available; and in all but three cases,Aquinas, Kepler, and Fourier, the 443 works of the 74 auth-ors in this set are printed complete.

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

    6. In many cases, all or some of an author'sworks included in this set were unavailable.

      One of the primary goals of The Great Books, was to make some of the (especially ancient writers) more accessible to modern audiences with respect to ready availability of their works which were otherwise much more expensive.

      This certainly says something about both publishing and reading practices of the early 20th century.

    7. The reason, then, for the omission of authors and worksafter 1900 is simply that the Editors did not feel that they oranyone else could accurately judge the merits of contempo-rary writings.

      The idea of the Lindy effect is subtly hiding here. Presumably it also existed before.

      It's often seen in how historians can or can't easily evaluate the impact of recent historical figures without the appropriate amount of additional evaluation with respect to passing time.

    8. the Great Conversation coversmore than twenty-five centuries.

      Broadly the entirety of the documented existence of mankind...

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

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

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

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

    10. The set is almost self-selected, in the sense that one bookleads to another, amplifying, modifying, or contradicting it.

      amplifying, modifying, contradicting...

      what other means of argumentation/conversation could one enumerate here with respect to a greater conversation?

    11. THE GREAT CONVERSATION

      How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?

      Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.

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

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

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

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

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

    13. democracyrequires liberal education for all.

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

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

    14. We may havemade errors of selection.

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

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

    1. Has anybody or could anybody ever have   the experience of consciousness emerging?
      • question
      • has ANYONE ever experienced consciousness emerging from matter?

      • comment

        • what Spira is getting at is that there is a fundamental category confusion
          • deep down, matter is an abstract concept
          • matter is NOT a phenomenological experience
          • from this perspective, a phenomena cannot emerge from a concept
          • in fact a concept ALWAYS emerges from consciousness, not the other way around
          • the claim that consciousness emerges from brains is a fundamental category error that makes an impossible claim
            • that phenomena emerges from a concept
  4. bafybeihzua2lldmlutkxlie7jfppxheow6my62x2qmywif2wukoswo5hqi.ipfs.w3s.link bafybeihzua2lldmlutkxlie7jfppxheow6my62x2qmywif2wukoswo5hqi.ipfs.w3s.link
      • Title
        • Three levels of the symbolosphere
      • Authors
        • Mark Burgin and John H. Schumann
      • Abstract

        • This paper attempts to understand the coexistence of the
          • material and
          • non-material
        • aspects of our lives.
        • By synthesizing ideas about
          • structures,
          • physical entities,
          • mental phenomena, and
          • symbolic relations,
        • we argue that
          • the nonmaterial can emerge from the material, and
          • then the nonmaterial may mediate the production of material entities.
        • Finally, this cycle is applied to notions of creativity and invention.
      • Comment

        • the authors are situated in materialism that explains non-materialism as an epi-phenomena
    1. transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining
      • insight
      • there is a transcendental need for reason as the vehicle of itself undermining

        • the only way to understand that
          • reason isn't self-justifying
          • there is knowledge that transcends reason
        • is to use reason to reach a stage where you think reason might need to be abandoned,
          • reason becomes most necessary
        • Understanding the limits of reason requires reason
          • that is the essence of Madhyamaka
      • comment

        • when reason is turned upon itself, when consciousness studies itself, that is where paradoxes emerge - at the limits of thought and the limits of conceptualization
    2. no we don't
      • Answer

        • No.
        • we end up with a non conceptual insight that:
          • we can then communicate
          • that we can discuss
          • that we can articulate
          • that requires that reason be present at:
            • the beginning like the seed
            • in the middle when we're performing the analysis
            • like the rain that nourishes the crops and
            • in the end in the harvest
          • because non conceptuality is really easy to achieve all you need is a very large rock,
            • just bang right on your head and non conceptuality is there
          • but that's a mute inert non-conceptual
          • Non-conceptuality needs to be enriched by the conceptual insight that allows you to actually make something of it
      • The Middle Way

        • using the conceptual to reach a deeper appreciation of the state of non-conceptuality,
        • in other words, using dualistic thought and language to reach insights about the nondual
    3. I'm thinking now about sex this 00:03:32 empirical remarks in against the logicians