The AdlerNet Guide, Part III<br /> by Amy Hunt

https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabritannicagreatbooksofthewesternworld/Encyclop%C3%A6dia%20Britannica%20-%20Great%20Books%20of%20the%20Western%20World%2C%20Volume%201%20-%20The%20Great%20Conversation/

Lubbock's List: http://www.greaterbooks.com/lubbock.html

http://www.greaterbooks.com/

Center for the Study of the Great Ideas

https://web.archive.org/web/20190806154724/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/literature/gbww/index.html

University of Adelaide digital collection of the Great Books of the Western World using public domain sources within their collection.

https://www.logos.com/product/55052/great-books-of-the-western-world

A digital (app?) version of The Great Books of the Western World with cross references.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ebooks/comments/eao9c8/great_books_of_the_western_world_ebook_collection/

Someone's collected digital copies of most of the Great Books of the Western World collection here.

https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britannicas-great-books-of-the-western-world

the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

• Title
  • Impacts of meeting minimum access on critical earth systems amidst the Great Inequality
• Abstract

• Paraphrase

  • The Sustainable Development Goals aim to improve access to resources and services, reduce environmental degradation, eradicate poverty and reduce inequality.
  • However, the magnitude of the environmental burden that would arise from meeting the needs of the poorest is under debate—especially when compared to much larger burdens from the rich.
  • The ‘Great Acceleration’ of human impacts was also accompanied by a ‘Great Inequality’ in using and damaging the environment.
  • To correct the great inequality, the authors define ‘just access’ to minimum energy, water, food and infrastructure.
  • The penality incurred for achieving just access in 2018, with existing inequalities, technologies and behaviours, would have produced 2–26% additional impacts on the Earth’s natural systems of climate, water, land and nutrients—thus further crossing planetary boundaries.
  • These hypothetical impacts, caused by about a third of humanity, equalled those caused by the wealthiest 1–4%.
  • Technological and behavioural changes thus far, while important, did not deliver just access within a stable Earth system.
  • Achieving these goals therefore calls for a radical redistribution of resources.

• Comment

  • Check the 1/3 figure against the 2/3 figure equal to 4% of the wealthiest in the Earth System Justice paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01064-1#annotations:3cWMhLv6Ee2jgD9EDXKNVA

1952, 1970s, 1980s editions and their differences.

Vandiver, Elizabeth. Classical Mythology. Audible (streaming audio). Vol. 243. The Great Courses: Western Literature. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 2013.

Vandiver, Elizabeth. “Classical Mythology: Course Guidebook.” The Teaching Company, 2013. https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/classical-mythology.

https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

https://press.princeton.edu/series/ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers

This appears like Princeton University Press is publishing sections of someone's commonplace books as stand alone issues per heading where each chapter has a one or more selections (in the original language with new translations).

This almost feels like a version of The Great Books of the Western World watered down for a modern audience?

Bertolt Brecht has a poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" which points out how necessary societies are to their great accomplishments which can't ever be solely attributed to kings and leaders as if there is only a "Great Man theory of history".

https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/

What a solid looking list of non-fiction books.

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.

https://brilliantmaps.com/eng-gb-uk/

An interesting, albeit simplified version, of the geography of these islands.

Lots of controversy and history hiding in the comments here to underline the point.

Could this, in part, be behind some of the bump for slogans like "Make America Great Again" by looking back to an imagined past?

Kelley, Nicholas J., William E. Davis, Jianning Dang, Li Liu, Tim Wildschut, and Constantine Sedikides. “Nostalgia Confers Psychological Wellbeing by Increasing Authenticity.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102 (September 1, 2022): 104379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104379.

Hoover provided support for the banks in crisis, trying to stabalize the withdraws and panic

He's trying to limit the amount of federal control and only trying to promote the help of state and local government.

Hoover didn't really DO anything; FDR was the one who made sure everything was in order, all the groups and laws he made. Hoover on the other hand, didn't. He just provided for some public work projects and helped a little, but definitely not as much as FDR. He should've done more.

Why was Hoover so stuck on helping Germany? Yes, it is the right thing to do, and to support Germany as it struggles, but our country was facing an economic panic; why help others with resources we desperately need ourselves?

I find it odd how Hoover is blaming almost everything on other countries instead of taking accountability and doing something about it. He's using a victim perspective instead of fixing it.

laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"

Calls to mind:

Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)

Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)

In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.

Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again

The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!

When did phonics start as a practice historically? Presumably after Mortimer J. Adler's note here?

The great vowel shift and the variety of admixtures of languages comprising English make it significantly harder to learn to read compared to other languages whose orthography and sound systems (example: Japanese hiragana) are far simpler and more straightforward.

http://www.greyroom.org/issues/60/20/the-dialectic-of-the-university-his-masters-voice/

“The Indexers pose with the file of Great Ideas. At sides stand editors [Mortimer] Adler (left) and [William] Gorman (right). Each file drawer contains index references to a Great Idea. In center are the works of the 71 authors which constitute the Great Books.” From “The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog,” Life 24, no. 4 (26 January 1948). Photo: George Skadding.

Photos from

"The 102 Great Ideas: Scholars Complete a Monumental Catalog," Life, 26 January 1948, 92–3.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation. The Teaching Company, 2012, https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-history-of-christianity-from-the-disciples-to-the-dawn-of-the-reformation

https://www.npr.org/2010/07/02/128245468/a-true-champion-vs-the-great-white-hope

origin of the phrase "Great White Hope"

https://occidental.substack.com/p/the-adlernet-guide-part-ii?sd=pf

Description of a note taking method for reading the Great Books: part commonplace, part zettelkasten.

I'm curious where she's ultimately placing the cards to know if the color coding means anything in the end other than simply differentiating the card "types" up front? (i.e. does it help to distinguish cards once potentially mixed up?)

Kulldorff, M. (2021, October 12). Covid, lockdown and the retreat of scientific debate | The Spectator. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/covid-lockdown-and-the-retreat-of-scientific-debate

Martin Gurri argues that had the financial crisis of 2008 happened in the 20th century, the elites, through their control of the flow of information, might have portrayed it as a natural disaster we should rally around our leadership to overcome. But with the advent of the internet, we got the "networked public", and the elites and government lost their monopoly on information.

http://www.nationalgreatbooks.com/cirriculum/background.html

Louis Menand had an interesting article on great books courses recently: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates.

If you look closely at those photos of Adler, you'll notice that one is in context and the other is the same image of him cut and pasted onto a set of books.

Those who are into this broader topic may also appreciate Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books". A while back I remember going though Lawrence Principe's Great Courses lecture series on the History of Science to 1700 which I suspect might help contextualize a tour through the great courses.

I'm curious if you're adding any other books that Adler et al left off their list?

https://github.com/sajjad2881/NewSyntopicon

Someone's creating a new digitally linked version of the Syntopicon as text files for Obsidian (and potentially other platforms). Looks like it's partial at best and will need a lot of editing work to become whole.

found by way of

Has anyone made a hypermedia rendition of the Syntopicon, i.e. with transcluded windows or "parallel pages" into the indexed texts?<br><br>Many of Adler's Great Books are public domain, so it wouldn't require *so* titanic a copyright issue… pic.twitter.com/UmWiyn5aBC

— Andy Matuschak (@andy_matuschak) August 17, 2022

https://occidental.substack.com/p/my-adler-antinet

Cross posted at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/wromeb/the_antinet_as_an_aid_to_analytical_reading_a_la/<br /> with additional commentary.

4.3 Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.

https://manage.kmail-lists.com/subscriptions/web-view?a=Vc5bVr&c=01FM1J43DPQ7Z364Z8K8CX8XD5&k=8a739d0b524d1452c6bb9dcf67fb51f9&g=WQd6TQ&m=QSAze3&r=QiCJM9j

Description of Great Acceleration graphs

• Title: The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration
• Author: Steffen, Will; Broadgate, Wendy; Deutsch, Lisa; Gaffney, Owen and Ludwig, Cornelia Date: 2015

Title: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation Author: Nate Hagen Guest: Peter Whybrow, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author Date: 6 July, 2022

Fourth Transition: The Great Acceleration

Will Steffen et al: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053019614564785

Inequalities in income and wealth decreased markedly in the West from 1914 to 1980 due to a number of factors including:<br /> - Two World Wars and the Great Depression dramatically overturned the power relationships between labor and capital<br /> - A progressive tax on income and inheritance reduced the concentration of wealth and helped increase mobility<br /> - Liquidation of foreign and colonial assets as well as dissolution of public debt

Research by Britannica (source?) indicated that the Great Books of the Western World sold well but were not often read.

Link to: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Owen Gingerich Copernicus

Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

Are we training thinkers or doers?

Though if we roughly estimate this collection at 1000 cards per box with roughly 76 boxes potentially present, the 76,000 cards are still shy of Luhmann's collection. It'll take some hunting thigs down, but as Adler suggests that people write their notes in their books, which he would have likely done, then this collection isn't necessarily his own. I suspect, but don't yet have definitive proof, that it was created as a group effort for the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World and its two-volume index of great ideas, the Syntopicon.

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/recipes/all/prue-leith-prinzregententorte/

Fraser Myers. (2020, October 10). Google is censoring The Great Barrington Declaration. When you search for it you’re directed to a conspiracy theory from Byline Times https://t.co/OUVBeFi4Mr [Tweet]. @FraserMyers. https://twitter.com/FraserMyers/status/1314874791745277953

Who was Alexander the Great.

Nerd, G. M.-K. H. (2022, March 2). Focused Protection From the Great Barrington Declaration Never Made Sense. Medium. https://gidmk.medium.com/focused-protection-from-the-great-barrington-declaration-never-made-sense-416b86ac5f06

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/scientific-secrets-for-a-powerful-memory

Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory

Peter M. Vishton, Ph.D.

A course on memory from the Great Courses

Playlist for a version on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEe8GXNH09zkgH83tjuPzmB_HZe7Hdv39

Notably Steven Hawking (and others) warned about this year ago already. Not to take away from Musk's achievements, but he's not the first to recognise and work on this problem.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interstellar-travel-starmus-speech

Classic article about the topic: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Prof. Gavin Yamey MD MPH. (2022, January 21). His vax disinformation is at 34.55 in the video His full comments: “But people do not trust this vaccine. It’s not been through the normal trials, it’s a technology that’s not been proven as safe & effective, & now the data is coming in on the vaccine that’s showing that..” 1/3 [Tweet]. @GYamey. https://twitter.com/GYamey/status/1484668215825469445

A cause of America’s labor shortage: Millions with long COVID. (n.d.). Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/long-covid-labor-market-missing-workers/

Health Nerd. (2021, August 8). A story told in three parts https://t.co/7glwHKA45d [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1424492557698928640

Published in 1941, this article precedes the beginning of the project of publishing the Great Books of the Western World for Encyclopedia Britannica, so Adler isn't just writing this from a marketing perspective.

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

nice

wonderful analogy!

https://getpocket.com/collections/a-guide-to-the-great-resignation

The Great Man theory of history is the misconception that all the most important ideas can be traced back to a single great individual—usually a man—and ignoring the fact that they had likely been brewing in the social milieu of their time before being encapsulated, like a bug in ember, by a particular writer who then gets an outsized amount of credit for "inventing" the idea.

I wonder if the effect of social media and ubiquity of communication will dampen this effect?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/whats-so-great-about-great-books-courses-roosevelt-montas-rescuing-socrates

The format of many "great books" courses is to help students relate the texts to their own lives, not to have a better understanding of the books or to hone methods of interpreting them.

This isn't too dissimilar to the way that many Protestants are taught to apply the Bible to their daily lives.

Are students mis-applying the great books because they don't understand their original ideas and context the way many religious people do with the Bible?

Brief history of the "great books".

What part does The Great Resignation have in part of this? Any? Is there overlap for any of the reasons that others are resigning?

What about the overlap of causes/reasons for teachers leaving the profession since the pandemic? What effect does the hostile work environment of politics play versus a loss of identity and work schedule during a time period in which closures would have affected schedules?

What commonalities and differences do all these cases have?

A builders collective?

We have realized that we want more in our lives than to be the unwitting pawns in a game of global domination, genocide, slavery, and oppression called capitalism.

I am just realizing that I was not listening to The New York Times about the strikes spreading across the United States of America. Of course, the editors would not want to be causing this mass panic or a labour movement.

I was learning about this from Democracy Now!

I received an email from Emma Shimmens at Designlab referring to the Great Resignation.

Then I began to look up what this term meant. I had been listening to The Daily podcast from The New York Times about the strikes at John Deere and Kaiser Permanente. But I hadn’t realized that this movement had a name: Striketober.

This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

Self evident truth might be referring to the Bible.. "All men were created equal" But slaves were treated with no respect what so ever

Book review (and cultural commentary) on Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, (Public Affairs, 2008).

what a lovely sentence

How does one keep the spirit of these older books alive? Is it only by subsuming into and expanding upon a larger body of common knowledge?

What do they still have to teach us?

Just the title "A Great Idea at the Time" makes me wonder if this project didn't help speed along the creation of the dullness of the humanities and thereby attempt to kill it?

What might they have done differently to better highlight the joy and fun of these works to have better encouraged it.

Too often reformers reform all the joy out of things.

I remember screenwriter Millard Kaufman gesturing to his large home library and saying that he didn't write anything brilliant himself, but that he borrowed from the best.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/rum_babas_served_with_48561

Recipe for rum babas via Paul Hollywood from Season 5(?) Episode1 "Cakes" of The Great British Baking Show.

Government’s Mass Infection Plan pushed by Great Barrington Declaration Lobbying Effort to End COVID Protections – Byline Times. (n.d.). Retrieved July 19, 2021, from https://bylinetimes.com/2021/07/08/governments-mass-infection-plan-pushed-by-great-barrington-declaration-lobbying-effort-to-end-covid-protections/

the Guardian. ‘10% of People of Colour in Great Britain Would Refuse Covid Jab - YouGov Data’, 7 March 2021. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/07/10-of-uks-people-of-colour-would-refuse-covid-vaccine-yougov-data.

Another resource to review...Spark Video!

Neil O’Brien MP. (2021, January 14). I may... Convene a public inquiry of my own. The experts I’ll invite to sit on the panel won’t be the usual hacks with an axe to grind... They’ll be [like] Sunetra Gupta, the Oxford epidemiologist who believes we may have achieved herd immunity already" Spectator, 25 July [Tweet]. @NeilDotObrien. https://twitter.com/NeilDotObrien/status/1349701118700507137

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: “There is a Twitter account for the Great Barrington Declaration. It is totally silent on what is presently unfolding in India. Is it really possible to watch the surge there and in Brazil and not feel challenged in your beliefs about herd immunity? For otherwise smart people?” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved April 25, 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1384794607997890560

Nikiforuk, A. (2020, October 28). ‘Herd Immunity’ Is an Inviting Idea but Terrible Policy. The Tyee. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/10/28/Herd-Immunity-Inviting-Idea-Terrible-Policy/?utm_source=weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=021120

Yale SOM. (2020, October 27). Herd immunity is the end goal of developing a vaccine, @thehowie explains. But when government officials talk about relying on “herd immunity” as a strategy for slowing or stopping the Covid-19 pandemic without a vaccine, it’s a more dangerous approach. Https://t.co/aJ8VXos7zh [Tweet]. @YaleSOM. https://twitter.com/YaleSOM/status/1321150247503101956

Liverpool, M. L. P., Clare Wilson, Jessica Hamzelou, Sam Wong, Graham Lawton, Adam Vaughan, Conrad Quilty-Harper and Layal. (n.d.). Covid-19 news: 95 per cent of over 70s in Great Britain given vaccine. New Scientist. Retrieved 22 February 2021, from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237475-covid-19-news-95-per-cent-of-over-70s-in-great-britain-given-vaccine/

Even though China's publishing class lost control as cultural gatekeepers with the advent of blogs, the Communist Party propaganda department constantly rebuilds, upgrades and reinforces the gates.

Survey results reveal that Chinese citizens trust domestic sources more than foreign sources.

This is a curious result and something I'm beginning to see in the West. I wonder if it's a result of their policies. I wonder if this means that the filtering and manufacturing of opinion is successful.

The Chinese government has succeeded in leveraging the internet to generate economic benefits, without succumbing to its predicted democratizing effects.

China is determined to not have the internet serve as a tool that helps bring about another color revolution, like in Ukraine and Lebanon.

In the past they've leaned aggressive on organizations hosting discussions about government crackdowns.

The Chinese government employs thousands of people to monitor and censor content. Their job is to filter out anything objectionable that gets posted.

Die Great Barrington Declaration wird offenbar von Charles Koch und Konsorten gesponsort. Via https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/coronavirus-herdenimmunitaet-barrington-erklaerung-102.html

I've not seen any research that relates the Renaissance ideas of the Great Chain of Being moving into this new era of supposed freedom. In some sense I'm seeing the richest elite whites trying to maintain their own place in a larger hierarchy rather than stronger beliefs in equality and hard work.

editor, M. S. P. (2020, August 16). End of UK furlough scheme ‘means needless loss of 2m jobs.’ The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/16/end-of-uk-furlough-scheme-means-needless-loss-of-2-million-jobs

Bordo, M. D., Levin, A. T., & Levy, M. D. (2020). Incorporating Scenario Analysis into the Federal Reserve’s Policy Strategy and Communications (Working Paper No. 27369; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27369

Barro, R. J. (2020). Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions and Mortality in U.S. Cities during the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1919 (Working Paper No. 27049; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27049