for - Nate Hagens - The Great Simplification - toxic power - Ashley Hodgson

This is not only a nice quote by itself, but seems to be saying something deeper to me about productivity.

There's a difference in productivity for it's own sake, but being both productive in the send of time spent efficiently and productive in the sense of producing something of greater value with your time than you might have spent doing something else which was less valuable, but which might still have been time well spent.

Worth, Robert F. “Clash of the Patriarchs.” The Atlantic, April 10, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/.

A fantastic overview of the history, recent changes and a potential schism in the Orthodox Church with respect to the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/godinamerica/people/charles-finney.html

Great Books tend to arise in the presence of great audiences. by [[Naomi Kanakia]]

Kanakia looks at what may have made 19th C. Russian literature great. This has potential pieces to say about how other cultures had higher than usual rates of creativity in art, literature, etc.

What commonalities did these sorts of societies have? Were they all similar or were there broad ranges of multiple factors which genetically created these sorts of great outputs?

Could it have been just statistical anomaly?

Both sides of a tool

References

Victor, B. (2011). A brief rant on the future of interaction design. Tomado de https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

Arabs and Turks as having most asabiyyah (even more than the likes of Caesar and Alexander)

It's no wonder that Mortimer J. Adler was able to write such a deep analysis of reading in How to Read a Book after having spent so much time indexing the ideas behind The Great Books of the Western World.

Indexing requires a solid inspectional read at minimum, but will often go deeper into contexts which require at least some analytical reading. To produce the Syntopicon, one must go even further into analytical reading to provide the proper indexing of ideas so that they may be sub-categorized and used for deeper analysis for things such as comparison and contrast of those ideas.

The intellectual historian in me: 😱

https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Democratic-Culture-Mortimer-Intellectual/dp/0230337465

The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) by Tim Lacy

for - Great Transition Initiative - GTI - GTI - How to de-silo movements

title - How to De-Silo Movements author - Jerry Brecher date - Jan 2024

for - definition - Dzogchen - Great Perfection

• definition - Dzogchen - The Great Perfection
• Dzogchen is one of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism
  • The Great Perfection claims that everything is pure from the beginning
  • every moment is an emanation of a temporal origin

[[Dan Allosso]] in How to Read, part 2

for - nature-based carbon sequestration - reestablish whale populations - Nate Hagen - The Great Simplification - David King - climate crisis - solutions - progress trap - overfishing - whales

Read [Zeb Larson]] in The Second Ku Klux Klan: How It Gained Social and Political Power Among White Protestants

https://app.thebrain.com/brain/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/d06bd27d-2452-cae5-f99d-622f9311051b

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSuz01zvOjE Jerry Michalski's review of The Great Transformation (1944) by Karl Polanyi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_letter

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Transformation-Political-Economic-Origins/dp/080705643X

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.

15:00 könnte der generalstreik am 8.1.2024 eine wende einleiten?<br /> hahahahhahahaha, nein.<br /> du glaubst ernsthaft, das system rechnet nicht mit "widerstand"?<br /> die haben alle variationen durch-simuliert, und haben für jedes problem eine lösung.<br /> der "plan Z" sind atombomben, weil das erste gebot (depopulation) ist absolut.<br /> vorher werden die noch die migrantifa bewaffnen und auf euch hetzen...<br /> und vorräte haben die sowieso für jahre, also die brauchen keine bauern / züge / LKW.<br /> also unterschicht und mittelschicht werden "bluten", egal wie dus drehst.<br /> das grundproblem ist die globale übervölkerung, "flatten the curve" heisst: die übervölkerung muss weg. erst dann gibt es ein "back to normal", eine "wende".

Syntopical Construction by [[Dan Allosso]]

https://www.amazon.com/GREAT-BOOKS-David-Denby/dp/0684835339

Adler & Hutchinson's Great Books of the Western World was an encyclopedia-based attempt to focus society on a shared history as their common ground. H. G. Wells in his World Encyclopedia thesis attempts to forge a new "moving" common ground based on newly evolving knowledge based on distilling truth out of science. Shared history is obviously much easier to dispense and spread about compared to constantly keeping a growing population up to date with the forefront of science.

How could one carefully compose and juxtapose the two to have a stronger combined effect?

How could one distribute the effects evenly?

What does the statistical mechanics for knowledge management look like at the level of societies and nations?

link to https://hypothes.is/a/abTT1KPDEe6nqxPx4fXggw

Compare this with Hutchins and Adler's solution undertaken just a few years following this beginning in the early 1940s and finally published in 1952: The Great Books of the Western World.

These books speak toward the idea of living well and understanding mankind, but don't have the same deeply edited and critical synthesis viewpoint.

Oxfam legt die bisher umfangreichste Studie zur weltweiten Klima-Ungleichheit vor. Sie wurde gemeinsam mit dem Guardian und dem Stockholm Institut erstellt. Sie ergibt unter anderem, dass das reichste Prozent der Weltbevölkerung für mehr Emissionen verantwortlich ist als die unteren 66%. Analysiert wird auch die Verbindung von wirtschaftlicher und politischer Macht der globalen Eliten und die Möglichkeit, eine just transition durch Besteuerung der Superreichen zu finanzieren https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/richest-1-account-for-more-carbon-emissions-than-poorest-66-report-says

Report: https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/climate-equality-a-planet-for-the-99-621551/

overpopulation and degeneration caused by pacifism and civilization,<br /> and the long-overdue depopulation through mass murder on all levels.<br /> hell of a time to be alive... most of us will be dead soon. byee, i hate you all : D

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/second-unboxing

• for: neighborhood cooperation - challenges, community cooperation - challenges

• comment

  • the greatest challenge with community and neighbourhood cooperation is that the great diversity of people living in them can pose a challenge to effective cooperation.
  • there is a structural reason for the alenation found in Western communities and neighbourhoods that have emerged in historical context of the three great separations

• references

  • the three great separations
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world

https://lifelonglearn.substack.com/p/unboxing-the-great-books

• for: three great separations, alienation, financial capital vs social capital, the great simplification, linked in post - 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
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FNdvlO6bPG60%2F&group=world
  • 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.
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=progress+trap
  • Along with the Great Complexification, we also have the Great Alienation. John Ikard writes of the "Three Great Separations":
    • the agricultural revolution
    • the industrial revolution
    • the industrial agricultural revolution
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Finthesetimes.com%2Farticle%2Findustrial-agricultural-revolution-planet-earth-david-korten&group=world
  • 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.

• for: Great Separations, Three Great Separations, alienation, alienation - industrial revolution, John Ikerd
• Title
  • The Three “Great Separations” that Unravelled Our Connection to Earth and Each Other
• Author
  • John Kkerd

reply to u/ethanzanemiller at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/185xmuh/comment/kb778dy/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Some of your methodology will certainly depend on what questions you're asking, how well you know your area already, and where you'd like to go. If you're taking notes as part of learning a new area, they'll be different and you'll treat them differently than notes you're collecting on ideas you're actively building on or intriguing facts you're slowly accumulating. Often you'll have specific questions in mind and you'll do a literature review to see what's happing around that area and then read and take notes as a means of moving yourself closer to answering your particular questions.

Take for example, the frequently asked questions (both here in this forum and by note takers across history): how big is an idea? what is an atomic note? or even something related to the question of how small can a fact be? If this is a topic you're interested in addressing, you'll make note of it as you encounter it in various settings and see that various authors use different words to describe these ideas. Over time, you'll be able to tag them with various phrases and terminologies like "atomic notes", "one idea per card", "note size", or "note lengths". I didn't originally set out to answer these questions specifically, but my interest in the related topics across intellectual history allowed such a question to emerge from my work and my notes.

Once you've got a reasonable collection, you can then begin analyzing what various authors say about the topic. Bring them all to "terms" to ensure that they're talking about the same things and then consider what arguments they're making about the topic and write up your own ideas about what is happening to answer those questions you had. Perhaps a new thesis emerges about the idea? Some have called this process having a conversation with the texts and their authors or as Robert Hutchins called it participating in "The Great Conversation".

Almost anyone in the forum here could expound on what an "atomic note" is for a few minutes, but they're likely to barely scratch the surface beyond their own definition. Based on the notes linked above, I've probably got enough of a collection on the idea of the length of a note that I can explore it better than any other ten people here could. My notes would allow me a lot of leverage and power to create some significant subtlety and nuance on this topic. (And it helps that they're all shared publicly so you can see what I mean a bit more clearly; most peoples' notes are private/hidden, so seeing examples are scant and difficult at best.)

Some of the overall process of having and maintaining a zettelkasten for creating material is hard to physically "see". This is some of the benefit of Victor Margolin's video example of how he wrote his book on the history of design. He includes just enough that one can picture what's happening despite his not showing the deep specifics. I wrote a short piece about how I used my notes about delving into S.D. Goitein's work to write a short article a while back and looking at the article, the footnotes, and links to my original notes may be illustrative for some: https://boffosocko.com/2023/01/14/a-note-about-my-article-on-goitein-with-respect-to-zettelkasten-output-processes/. The exercise is a tedious one (though not as tedious as it was to create and hyperlink everything), but spend some time to click on each link to see the original notes and compare them with the final text. Some of the additional benefit of reading it all is that Goitein also had a zettelkasten which he used in his research and in leaving copies of it behind other researchers still actively use his translations and notes to continue on the conversation he started about the contents of the Cairo Geniza. Seeing some of his example, comparing his own notes/cards and his writings may be additionally illustrative as well, though take care as many of his notes are in multiple languages.

Another potentially useful example is this video interview with Kathleen Coleman from the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. It's in the realm of historical linguistics and lexicography, but she describes researchers collecting masses of data (from texts, inscriptions, coins, graffiti, etc.) on cards which they can then study and arrange to write their own articles about Latin words and their use across time/history. It's an incredibly simple looking example because they're creating a "dictionary", but the work involved was painstaking historical work to be sure.

Again, when you're done, remember to go back and practice for yourself. Read. Ask questions of the texts and sources you're working with. Write them down. Allow your zettelkasten to become a ratchet for your ideas. New ideas and questions will emerge. Write them down! Follow up on them. Hunt down the answers. Make notes on others' attempts to answer similar questions. Then analyze, compare, and contrast them all to see what you might have to say on the topics. Rinse and repeat.

As a further and final (meta) example, some of my answer to your questions has been based on my own experience, but the majority of it is easy to pull up, because I can pose your questions not to my experience, but to my own zettelkasten and then quickly search and pull up a variety of examples I've collected over time. Of course I have far more experience with my own zettelkasten, so it's easier and quicker for me to query it than for you, but you'll build this facility with your own over time.

Good luck. 🗃️

https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/a/aris-and-phillips-classical-texts-apctlup/?cc=us&lang=en&

The Syntopicon Vault by Dan Allosso

• for: elites - lifestyle change, great simplification, worldview transition -materially-excessive and wonder-poor to materially- sufficient and wonder-rich, awakening wonder, Deep Humanity, BEing journeys

• comment

• possible way to have more than one home
• a group can co-create and mutually invest in a regenerative timeshare
  • an example is to co-invest in a regenerative local community economy based around a regerative agroforestry system which has community owned and supported agriculture with year round Regenerative work and sustainable accommodations
  • Deep Humanity BEing journeys can play a role to re-awaken wonder

https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/tomaine

I recall hearing ptomaine used in an Abbott and Costello bit with the connotation of foot poisoning. Charlie Chaplin also portrayed Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, in the picture The Great Dictator (1940).

The implication of the country name Tomania outside of the "mania" meaning may be lost on audiences today.

Lou Costello: Now look, Mr. Fields, don't get mad. Now, you can bring your kids to the party, and they can eat anything they want. They can have plenty of food. They can eat anything they want.<br /> Sid Fields: Sure, I can have my kids eat first, huh? Then if that broken-down, bad food you got doesn't give my kids ptomaine, then the other people will eat it, huh? You're gonna use my kids for guinea pigs. Say it! My kids are guinea pigs!<br /> Lou Costello: Mr. Fields, your kids are not guinea pigs.<br /> Sid Fields: Oh, they're just plain pigs?

The Abbott and Costello Show, S1.E5 "The Birthday Party", Episode aired Jan 2, 1953, Running time: 00:27:00 <br /> (emphasis added)

love "raucous conversation"!

reply to u/Paddy48ob at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/17jscyk/comment/k80z1nn/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Thanks for this pointer. As a note, when I compare my 1954 version against the photo of the 1990 edition (which has fewer pages), it's obvious that the "1. The ends of education" section in the 1954 edition is significantly more thorough with more references (and supplementary data) which don't exist in the 1990 edition. The 1990 edition presumably removes the references for the books which they may have removed from that edition (though it may have actually been even more--I didn't check this carefully).

Just comparing the two pages that I can see, I don't see any references to the added texts of the 1990 edition appearing in that version of the Syntopicon at all.

I took a quick look at the Syntopicon V1 (1990) via the Internet Archive and of the added texts that year I sampled searches for Voltaire, Erasmus, and John Calvin and the only appearances of them to be found are in the Addition Bibliography sections which is also where they appeared in the 1952 editions. My small sampling/search found no added references of any of these three to the primary portions of the main References sections, so they obviously didn't do the additional editorial work to find and insert those.

As a result, it appears that the 1952 (and reprint editions following it) have a measurably better and more valuable version of the Syntopicon. The 1990 (2nd Edition) is a watered down and less useful version of the original. It is definitely not the dramatically improved version one might have hoped for given the intervening 38 years.

https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14738022

Is it really incumbent on the author to translate every word he's using with respect to the language in which he's writing. He's already doing us a service by translating the Hebrew. Are modern readers somehow with out a dictionary? I might believe they've not been classically educated to capture all the allusions, but the dictionary portion is a simple fix that is difficult to call him out on from a critical perspective, especially in a publication like "Law & Liberty" whose audience is specifically the liberally educated!?!

Our Journey, Day 83 by Dan Allosso

reply to Admirable_Discount75 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17beucn/comment/k5nzic6/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

If you've not come across it before you'll likely find Adler & Van Doren (1972) for reading a useful place to start, especially their idea of syntopical reading. Umberto Eco (2015) is also a good supplement to a lot of the internet-based and Ahrensian ZK material. After those try Mills.

Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated ed. edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011. https://amzn.to/45IjBcV. (audiobook available; or a video synopsis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rizr8bb0c)

Eco, Umberto. How to Write a Thesis. Translated by Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina. 1977. Reprint, Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 2015. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis.

Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

​

Should it help, I often find that audiobook versions of books or coursework sources like The Great Courses (often free at local libraries, through Hoopla, or other sources), or the highest quality material from YouTube/podcasts listened to at 1.5 - 2x speed while you're walking/commuting can give you quick overviews and/or inspectional reads at a relatively low time cost. Short reminder notes/keywords (to search) while listening can then allow you to do fast searches of the actual texts and/or course guidebooks for excerpting and note making afterwards. Highly selective use of the audiobook bookmarking features let you relisten to short portions as necessary.

As an example, one could do a quick crash course/overview of something like Marx and Communism over a week by quickly listening to all or parts of:

• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-rise-of-communism-from-marx-to-lenin
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/communism-in-power-from-stalin-to-mao
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/legacies-of-great-economists
• https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/modern-intellectual-tradition-from-descartes-to-derrida

These in combination with sources like Oxford's: Very Short Introduction series book on Marx (which usually have good bibliographies) would allow you to quickly expand into more specialized "handbooks" (Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Sage) on the subject of Marx and from there into even more technical literature and journal articles. Obviously the deeper you go, the slower things may become depending on the depth you're looking to go.

Thank you. Steve, for raising the alarm on this catastrophe! One minor comment. It should be QC'ed, not QA'ed. Quality control is done first. Quality Assurance (QA) comes after QC. QA is basically checking the calculations and the test results in the batch records. I worked in QC and QA for big pharma for decades. I tried to warn people in early 2021 that there's no way the quality control testing could be done at warp speed. Nobody listened to me despite my decades of experience in big pharma!

"warp speed" sounds fancy, plus "its an emergency, we have no time"...

it really was just an intelligence test, a global-scale exploit of trust in authorities. (and lets be honest, stupid people deserve to die.)

problem is, they (elites, military, industry) seem to go for actual forced vaccinations, which would be an escalation from psychological warfare to actual warfare against the 95% "useless eaters".

personally, i would prefer if they would globally legalize serial murder and assault rifles, then "we the people" would solve the overpopulation. (because: serial murder is the only alternative to mass murder.) but they are scared that we would also kill the wrong people (their servants because they are evil or stupid). (anyone crying about depopulation should suggest better solutions. denying overpopulation is just another failed intelligence test.)

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/our-journey-day-68

https://udenver.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuceuspzkuE9VomnEaGva1HH1ra_iS4Eua?ref=jessestommel.com#/registration

Some related ideas that are suggesting some sort of thesis for improving the idea of ungrading: - We measure the things we care about. - In Education, we care about learning and understanding, but measuring these outside of testing and evaluation is difficult at best (therefor ungrading). - No one cares about your GPA six months after you graduate. - Somehow we've tied up evaluations and grades into the toxic capitalism and competition within US culture. Some of this is tied into educational movements related to Frederick Winslow Taylor and Harvards Eliot. - Hierarchies instituted by the Great Chain of Being have confounded our educational process.

https://newrepublic.com/article/176138/twitter-went-evil-musk-misinformation

A stark statement that lays bare the original sin of Western thought.

—Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941.

via Doug Brent at https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/2.1/features/brent/burke.htm

relationship of synoptical and syntopical

Did the idea of syntopicality exist prior to Adler? Did it spring from the work of German religious scholars of XIX C who began doing synoptical readings and comparisons of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke in the Bible?

link to the "great conversation" quote of Whitehead about Plato: https://hypothes.is/a/qb2T7l9nEe6uVVOdez8mKw

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

"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.

https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14738022

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Purpose of the Great Books of the Western World

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

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

Über den nördlichen Teilen des Great Barrier Reefs würden die heißesten Temperaturen seit 1985 gemessen. Die Hitzewelle könnte eine zweite große Korallenbleiche nach der letztjährigen auslösen.

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.

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

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

Brief story of John Erskine's creation of "Great Books" study program.

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:

• The School of Athens by Raphael
• The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Other thoughts? suggestions?

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

• for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
• source
  • The Great Simplifcation
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

• 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.

Margin Shopping suggestions?

I've browsed through dozens of publishers who reprint translations of popular classics to find ones that have good broad margins to more easily be able to annotate in them. I've often considered self-publishing nice hardcover copies of out of copyright versions so that I could make nice wide margins or even interleave the books so that every other page was blank for taking notes.

Notes on some publishers I've been contemplating:

• The Folio Society seems to have some of the widest margins, but at a steep cost and a more limited selection.
• Heritage Press has some good margins, but they're out of business and can be more expensive
• Library of America has some of the larger mass-market hard cover margins with excellent quality, though their offerings are American writers only.
• Penguin Classics seem to have some of the best margin widths for inexpensive paperbacks and has one of the widest offerings.
• Norton Critical editions usually have reasonable paperback margins with excellent additional editorial for reasonable prices.

Does anyone who marks up their books have particular publishers they like best for their ample margins, preferably in hard cover at a reasonable prices?

Other than reprinting things myself, what other options are there for physical books? (For digital books, I often rely on my Kindle or I use Hypothes.is which offers endless margins digitally.)

syndication link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/15clwfd/margin_shopping_suggestions/

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/greatbks.html

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/masters-eastern-classics/reading-lists

https://graham.uchicago.edu/programs-courses/basic-program

• title
  • The Great Turning
• Author
  • David Korten
• Description
  • David Korten describes "the great unraveling" as a multi-dimensional ecological, social and economic crisis

• Third great separation

  • industrial agricultural revolution

    • Farming was a community affair, by necessity.
    • Nearly everyone in the United States lived on a farm, had lived on a farm, or knew someone who lived on a farm.
    • There was still a sense of connectedness to the land, the earth, through food and farming.
    • But ​“times changed” in rural America.

    • The industrialization of agriculture removed the necessity for community-based farming.

    • Farmers eventually lost their sense of connectedness to

      • their land,
      • to each other and
      • to their communities.
    • Consumers no longer know
      • who produces their food,
      • where it was produced, or
      • how it was produced.
    • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.
    • Food for family gatherings and religious holidays are of economic importance to the food industry,
      • but have little social or spiritual significance beyond following cultural traditions.
    • The dependence of humanity on the Earth for food is no less than during the early times of hunting and gathering,
      • but the sense of connectedness between the eater and the Earth has been lost.

• quote

  • Farming was a community affair, by necessity
  • What happens to food between the earth and the eater has become largely a mystery.

• Second great separation
  • Industrial Revolution
    • The early enclosure movement during the 1600s
      • separated people into farmers and non-farmers
      • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.parliament.uk%2Fabout%2Fliving-heritage%2Ftransformingsociety%2Ftowncountry%2Flandscape%2Foverview%2Fenclosingland%2F&group=vnpq69nW
    • 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

amplifying, modifying, contradicting...

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

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

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

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"?

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.

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?

https://thegreatestbooks.org/

https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list

Part of literature is the Great Conversation, which often turns on the ability for writers to be understood and appreciated, often in translation. Gary Saul Morson takes P&V to task for their Russian translations which often focus on the incredibly specific nuances of direct translation, but which simultaneously lose the beauty and sense of literature. He says, "[...] readers typically turn to translations not to hear about culinary ephemera but to read literature."

• First great separation
  • The agricultural revolution that occurred 10,000 years ago

These are much pithier versions of what Robert Hutchins is getting at when he's talking about the importance of the Great Conversation with respect to Democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Man to World. 1st ed. Vol. 3. 54 vols. The Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Hutchins, Robert M., Mortimer J. Adler, and William Gorman, eds. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume I, Angel to Love. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

Aby Warburg, scion of a major banking family died on October 26, 1929, just two days before Black Monday on October 28, the stock market crash which marked the end of the "Roaring Twenties" and the beginning of the Great Depression.

Could family influences or changes at that time have caused small, but underlying issues relating to the crash at that time? What was the reaction of the Warburg family on early Monday the 28th?

Aby, as the oldest, would have inherited the bank, but by arrangement with his younger brother in their youth apparently gave it to his brother in exchange for books.

While the Syntopicon ultimately appears in book form, one must recall that it started life as a paper slip-based card index (Life v24, issue 4, 1948). This index can be queried in some of the ways one might have queried a library card catalog or more specifically the way in which Niklas Luhmann indicated that he queried his zettelkasten (Luhmann,1981). Unlike a library card catalog, The Syntopicon would not only provide a variety of entry places within the Western canon to begin their search for answers, but would provide specific page numbers and passages rather than references to entire books.

The Syntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arise from his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader, no matter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of the Great Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed. (p. 85)

While the search space for the Syntopicon wasn't as large as the corpus covered by larger search engines of the 21st century, the work that went into making it and the depth and focus of the sources make it a much more valuable search tool from a humanistic perspective. This work and value can also be seen in a personal zettelkasten. Some of the value appears in the form of having previously built a store of contextualized knowledge, particularly in cases where some ideas have been forgotten or not easily called to mind, which serves as a context ratchet upon which to continue exploring and building.

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.

Provides an small example of "the great conversation" on the equality of men and women.

Amidst a number of very gendered advertisements in issue 4 of volume 24 of LIFE magazine from 1948 is a short piece on the pending release of The Encyclopædia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

The piece starts out talking about the 432 classical works written by 71 men and highlights the fact that "Woman, not a main idea, is included [with] in [the topical category] Family Man and Love." The piece goes on by way of example of the work to excerpt portions on Idea number 51: "Man". To show the flexibility of the included Syntopicon categorization they elaborate with 15 excerpted passages from authors from Plato to Freud on Idea 51, subdivision 6b: "Men and Women: their equality or inequality".

It provides a fantastic mini-study on the emerging conversation on gender studies as seen in a mainstream magazine in 1948.

Were there any follow up letters to the editor on this topic in subsequent issues? How was this broader piece received with respect to the idea of gender at the time?

A staff of at least 26 created the underlying index that would lay at the heart of the Great Books of the Western World which was prepared in a rented old fraternity house on the University of Chicago campus. (p. 93)