27 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. "In transport, we have progressed from coaches and horses by way of trains to electric traction, motor-cars, and aeroplanes. In mental organization, we have simply multiplied our coaches and horses and livery stables."

      from World Brain, double check with source

  2. Dec 2023
  3. Nov 2023
      • for: three great separations, alienation, financial capital vs social capital, the great simplification, linked in post - social capital
    1. Why do we feel so dissatisfied with the Western way? I think it’s because we have valued financial capital over social capital.
      • for: The Great Simplifcation, Nate Hagen, The Great Complexification, The Great Alienation, three great separations

      • comment

        • Last night, I had a thought about Nate Hagen's "The Great Simplification" project. Seeing Annilina's post this morning made me think of a recent film I annotated on the isolated Jarawa people living on a once desolate island off the coast of India
        • Watching the events of modern Indians exploited the Jarawa is like watching colonialism unfold in realtime.
        • The Jarawa people interviewed said how they are happy with the life they have lived before modernity discovered them.
        • Progress, especially the Western flavored one beginning with Colonialism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution has set a trajectory for what we might call "The Great Complexification".
          • Remember when watches and clocks were all mechanical spring and windup? Now billions of them depend on batteries. Do we really need to modernize everything? It simply creates more waste and greater demands on nature for natural resources. Do we really need exponentially increase stuff with an Internet of Things?
        • Western influenced progress has led us into multiple progress traps, which now make up the many threads of the current polycrisis.
        • Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
        • These created successively more alienation. As progress marched towards modernity, we created more and more technology that broke apart community and making us dependent on transportation and communication technology to maintain it or some proxy of it. Today, we live in cities teeming with millions, yet there is widespread alienation in the mere act of walking or driving down a crowded street.
        • It is the irony of modernity that it packs so many people into small spaces, and yet we are all estranged to each other.
  4. Oct 2023
    1. arguments in favor of these ''objective'' tests: They are easy to grade; uniformity and unmistakable answers imply fairness; one can compare performance over time and gauge the results of programs; the validity of questions is statistically tested and the performance of students is followed up through later years.

      Some of the benefits of multiple-choice tests.

      Barzun misses the fact that these are not just easy for teachers to grade, but they're easier for mass grading by machines in a century dominated by standardization of knowledge in a world dominated by standardized mechanization for a mass-production oriented society.

      Cross reference educational reforms of Eliot following the rise of Taylorism.

  5. Aug 2023
    1. Democracy and Education was written before the assemblyline had achieved its dominant position in the industrialworld and before mechanization had depopulated the farmsof America.

      Interesting history and possible solutions.

      Dewey on the humanization of work front running the dramatic changes of and in work in an industrial age?


      Note here the potential coupling of democracy and education as dovetailing ideas rather than separate ideas which can be used simultaneously. We should take care here not to end up with potential baggage that could result in society and culture the way scholasticism combined education and religion in the middle ages onward.

  6. Mar 2023
    1. Sustainable consumption scholars offer several explanations forwhy earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers falter when itcomes to translating their values into meaningful impact.
      • Paraphrase
      • Claim
        • earth-friendly, justice-supporting consumers cannot translate their values into meaningful impact.
      • Evidence
      • “the shading and distancing of commerce” Princen (1997) is an effect of information assymetry.
        • producers up and down a supply chain can hide the negative social and environmental impacts of their operations, putting conscientious consumers at a disadvantage. //
      • this is a result of the evolution of alienation accelerated by the industrial revolution that created the dualistic abstractions of producers and consumers.
      • Before that, producers and consumers lived often one and the same in small village settings
      • After the Industrial Revolution, producers became manufacturers with imposing factories that were cutoff from the general population
      • This set the conditions for opaqueness that have plagued us ever since. //

      • time constraints, competing values, and everyday routines together thwart the rational intentions of well-meaning consumers (Røpke 1999)

      • assigning primary responsibility for system change to individual consumers is anathema to transformative change (Maniates 2001, 2019)
      • This can be broken down into three broad categories of reasons:

        • Rebound effects
          • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=jevon%27s+paradox
          • increases in consumption consistently thwart effciency-driven resource savings across a wide variety of sectors (Stern 2020). -sustainability scholars increasingly critique “effciency” both as:
            • a concept (Shove 2018)
            • as a form of“weak sustainable consumption governance” (Fuchs and Lorek 2005).
          • Many argue that, to be successful, effciency measures must be accompanied by initiatives that limit overall levels of consumption, that is, “strong sustainable consumption governance.
        • Attitude-behavior gap

        • Behavior-impact gap

  7. Jan 2023
    1. One might call pirate legends, then, the most importantform of poetic expression produced by that emerging North Atlanticproletariat whose exploitation laid the ground for the industrialrevolution.
    2. Modern factory discipline was born on ships and on plantations. Itwas only later that budding industrialists adopted those techniques ofturning humans into machines into cities like Manchester andBirmingham.
  8. Jul 2022
    1. That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide.

      Third Transition: Industrial Revolution

  9. Jun 2022
    1. Concerning deforestation, Pomeranz stresses the fact that by theend of the eighteenth century, Europe had spent nearly all its avail-able resources. In the United Kingdom as in France, in Denmark asin Prussia, in Italy as in Spain, forests had disappeared at a rapid ratein the course of the preceding centuries, decreasing from around 30to 40 percent of the surface area around the year 1500 to scarcely morethan 10 percent in 1800 (16 percent in France, 4 percent in Denmark).Initially, trading in wood with regions of eastern and northern Eu-rope that were still forested made it possible to compensate in partfor these losses, but very soon that was no longer sufficient. We alsosee a gradual deforestation in China between 1500 and 1800, but it isless marked, in part because of a greater political and commercial in-tegration between the most advanced regions and the wooded re-gions of the interior.

      Kenneth Pomeranz indicates that there was massive deforestation of most of Europe 1500 (30-40 percent coverage) to 1800 (scarcely over 10 percent coverage) during the early industrial age. Similarly there was a corresponding deforestation in China, but it was less marked because of the their size and distribution of technology.

    2. How did Europe and the United States attain such a dominant posi-tion on the global level, at least until recently? Although no single ex-planation exists, we shall see that slavery and colonialism played acentral role in the Western world’s acquisition of wealth.

      Slavery and colonialism likely played the most outsized roles in global positioning for the United States and Europe, but how might we also comparatively measure these effects separately and also include other broad effects like the industrial revolution?

  10. May 2022
    1. in my experience it has its head has a similar pattern to what henry ford did to the automobile 01:20:31 industry so before him it was basically like a few people built one car at a time and he basically broke up the process so you had like i don't know how many but 01:20:43 like dozens people a dozen people and each individual had just one one motion to do and the industrialization specialization right yeah and the the result was that 01:20:56 each individual didn't know anything and all the knowledge was in the process and my suspicion is that the promise of the settle custom that the paper 01:21:08 just write themselves it's like a very prominent process a promise around the telecast method lead to the to the thinking that you basically reduce your 01:21:20 the need for yourself and all the intelligence all the proficiency is put into a system and you have something doing for you and you treat yourself more like a like a 01:21:33 worker on a an assembly line just being and having all just a simple a simple motion that you have to do and then the end product will be 01:21:45 but will be very complex and very sophisticated because the intelligence is embedded in the process

      Sascha Fast analogizes the writing process using a zettelkasten to Henry Ford's assembly line for building cars. Each worker on the assembly line has a limited bit of knowledge for their individual part of the process, but most of the knowledge and value is built into the overarching process itself. This makes the overall system quicker and more efficient.

      Similarly with note taking, each individual portion of the process is simple and self-contained, but it allows the writer to create a much more creative and complex piece in the end. Here an individual can accomplish all of the individual steps in a self-contained way while focusing on individual steps without becoming lost in the subsequent steps which would otherwise require a tremendous additional amount of energy.

  11. Mar 2022
    1. He was, after all, one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative: that the origins of mass schooling are inextricably bound to the need to reshape a rebellious farming nation's sons and daughters into a docile, industrial workforce.

      John Taylor Gatto is one of the most influential promoters of the "school-as-factory" narrative.

  12. Nov 2021
    1. Sixty years ago, in France, the first Napoleon made great changes, mostly useful ones, in methods of education. For more than a generation the government schools of arts and trades, arts and manufactures, bridges and highways, mines, agriculture, and commerce, have introduced hundreds of well-trained young men every year into the workshops, factories, mines, forges, public works, and counting-rooms of the empire. These young men begin as subalterns, but soon become the commissioned officers of the army of industry.

      Notice the focus of turning education here toward servicing the industrial revolution.

  13. Sep 2021
    1. em ? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with the equation, time is money.128 O
    2. Once in attendance, they were under military rule: The Superintendent shall again ring, - when, on a motion of his hand, the whole School rise at once from their seats; - on a second motion, the Scholars turn; - on a third, slowly and silently move to the place appointed to repeat their lessons, - he then pronounces the word "Begin" . . .93 T

      Have we industrialized the humanity out of our society? Where is the space for creating identity, autonomy, and self-direction?

    3. and McKendrick has shown how Wedgwood wrestled with the problem at Etruria and introduced the first recorded system of clocking-in.87 Bu

      Josiah Wedgwood was apparently the first to institute a system of clocking-into work.

    4. ween societies at greatly differing economic levels). It is also that there has never been any single type of "the transition". The stress of the transition falls upon the whole culture: resistance to change and assent to change arise from the whole culture. And this culture includes the systems of power, property-relations, religious institu- tions, etc., inattention to which merely flattens phenomena and trivializes analysis. Above all, the transition is not to "industrialism" tout court but to industrial capitalism or (in the twentieth century) to alternative systems whose features are still indistinct. Wh

      Speaking about transitions within societies and cultures can be problematic as they are complex and intertwined between individuals, families, and larger structures and institutions. The transition to industrialization is often seen as a foregone conclusion when, in fact, it was a gradual struggle over time. Glossing over these types of transition can trivialize analysis of the complex effects at play.

  14. Jul 2021
    1. teaching is a very special art, sharing with only two other arts-agriculture and medicine-an exceptionally im­portant characteristic.

      Note here that this analogy only goes so far. The sciences of medicine and agriculture have come leaps and bounds since the start of the industrial revolution and our outputs and expectations for both with respect to humanity have increased tremendously.

      Not so with education. While we have dramatically increased the amount of information, there still seems to be a limit to how much an individual can learn.

      César Hidalgo calls this limit the personbyte.

      The perennial question for education technology is how might we get around this limit?

      The only solution in some areas is new discoveries concatenating and compressing some of the knowledge by abstracting it to simpler spaces, as sometimes happens in physics, but generally this is relatively rare. (or is it? justify...)

    2. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.

      This underlies the reason why the acceleration of the industrial revolution has applied to so many areas, but doesn't apply to the acceleration of learning.

      Learning is a linear process.

  15. Jun 2021
    1. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

      Reminder to go back and read this.

      [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]

  16. Apr 2021
    1. 1790> Morris Town (built by John morris (1745-1819) - apparently the first purpose-built workers' village (a precursor to Levittowns in the United States and Puerto Rico)

  17. Oct 2020
    1. There must be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education

      This first phrase is the most telling of all the issues we deal with on the edtech front. Because the industrial revolution touched almost every aspect of life since its inception, everyone presumes that it must also affect education.

      Sadly other than helping to make searching for and obtaining material much quicker, it still needs to be consumed, thought about, and digested by a student. The industrial revolution simply hasn't increased the bandwith of the common student's brain. It's unlikely that anything in the near future will expand it.

  18. Feb 2017