[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build intellectual community out of St. Louis]
Dear Laura,
There’s a cool video I found on Twitter a few years ago which showed a 1994 workstation and one by one each item transformed itself into an app on the computer until nothing was left on the desk except a laptop. Each item, the phone book, the planner, the telephone, the notepad, the sticky notes, the calendar, all disappeared into the laptop. (I very intentionally retweeted this little video so I could find it again, but somehow still I can’t find it on my timeline. Oh well. I’m not very good at using Twitter.)
I wonder whether something was lost in this transition and something else will rise to take the place of all that empty desk space. I hope so. The flattening of environmental information into openable apps seems to decrease affordances and impoverish the physical environment. Even adding in two external monitors can’t fully fix this.
Let me provide an example. Last week I purchased an analog watch. It has the date and time. The first effect I noticed was that it revealed to me the extent to which “checking the time” is pretext for checking notifications. Pulling out my phone every time I want to know the time is a lot of work. And further, a time check on a phone costs a lot of cognitive resources. I am no longer paying the notification tax in order to know the time, and it is great. (Yes, most apps have notifications turned off. Still super valuable.)
So I’m wondering, what else in my physical environment am I missing? What else should I be doing or could be built that enhances our experience of daily life. The influence of Factorio on culture teaches “it is a mortal sin for something that is used less often to get in the way of something used more often.” My pocket, my earbuds case, the side button, and the email notifications were in the way of telling time. Now they are not.
A key term I’m thinking about here is affordances. Affordances come from behavioral psychology as an idea for explaining how the mind picks up on certain environmental cues to perform specific behaviors – very similar to the idea of “prepared spaces.” Whether a space is prepared or not really matters towards what actions will be performed in that space.
And just as spaces matter so too do the tools and their receptivity to the user’s touch and purpose.
I am a Stan fan of e-ink, but I lost my religion when I received a copy of the Daylight computer (which I am writing this on while I fly). E-ink is beautiful, high-contrast black and white — well, it’s pretty close to white. My Boox could last weeks on a single charge and the software was an excellent multi tool with good integrations. But the Boox is like 4hz. The Daylight is 60hz. And that responsiveness makes up for literally 100 hundred unique defects in the device. Reliability and speed and response make a user experience feel embodied and connected, while randomness, sluggishness, and lag do not. Writing on a pad with a pencil has a reliability to it and an immediateness that is hard to replicate.
I find the Daylight experience generalizes. Digital vs physical chemistry experiments are like this too. The virtual lab is not immediacy in a box. A bookshelf is immediate. I love to meditate on the topics contained on my shelves. My displayed books guide and shape my thoughts and what I think about and what I value. I’m a mere man, visually stimulated by these to think about the things I want to think about. I cannot sit in a dark room and expect my thoughts to grow brighter. I need the totems. But I wonder what totems new and old can be brought into the intentionally prepared spaces of the future.
The totems of long cogent word strings are books. The totems of music were once CDs, in our house they are now Tonies and those library book audio things, and vinyl. The totem of math is the abacus, magic square, and calculator, but hey I’m up for learning slide rules. I used to be deft with a soroban, and sometimes I wonder if I should have a separate tablet for every app and app combo… Obviously with a suggestion like “one app one device” I am moving I the wrong direction here… Or am I?
Changing topics back to prepared spaces. Imagine a science house where dozens of experiments are set up and ready to go – a kind of touring tutorial on a single topic. I like to think of it as a library of discovery.
Say I want to explore combustion. So I have a space dedicated to Michael Faraday’s *Chemical History of a Candle*. We have updated versions of all of the experiments in those lectures. Identifying the hottest part of a candle. Identifying where on a candle the fire actually takes place and what it is made of and how the smoke from a candle can be lit and how to show that water is a product of combustion even when there is no water in the air and no water in the candle. All those experiments set up yes, but also giant flippable flashcards of leading questions whose answer are provided after the experiment. A comparison and contrast with the modern equipment with the original equipment used for the experiment.From there we move back to Boyle and the discovery of vacuums. We use pumps to remove air and change air pressure in a variety of pumps and move different sized objects using the power of air pressure and vacuum. We build a piston and crankshaft converting [rotational energy] out of [pressure]. Along the way we reveal several major applications. Water pumps, turbines, pistons.
From there we go to the internal combustion engine room. We take the machined parts of a single piston engine and put it together, then we explore all the design flaws of the single piston and slowly come up with a four cylinder engine. Valves open and close, engine casing, oilng, cooling system, exhaust system each receive their own treatment. At the end such a process, we have explored a huge portion of science and engineering.
The biggest barrier in my opinion to any of this is space. Making good spaces is expensive. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and showcase just what a good space can be and do for learners. I am hopeful for a future where we have the resources to build and experiment with more such spaces – at schools that specialize in this type of work AND rotating exhibits around the country AND “science sites” within a single city spreading the real estate cost across a metro area so that educational institutions can take turns using the same systems.
[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community intellectual community.]
Dear Gavin,
I enjoyed your rumination on the difference between traditionalists and rationalists. As you know, these terms are so fuzzy, inexact, and frequently misleading. Yet for me, despite their vagueness, both referents remain deeply important. I don’t know how much I can add to your already well-vibed dichotomy, but perhaps somewhere in our separate approaches we can find a delta in our understanding out of which new insights might emerge.
Robinson Jeffers wrote: “The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.”
And given that I’ve been on a deep Leibniz kick these past two months, I see him as a man with no pack, and thus relevant to our conversation. The reason is this: Leibniz models the rare ability to amalgamate traditional paradigmatic questions with modern lines of inquiry. He never stops seeing the old as useful, even when it is no longer correct. He can see what remains fruitful in a method even when large portions of doctrine prove inadequate to the task at hand. Yet, his love and recognition of the new does not yield to infatuation; he is constant and incessant critic as well as devotee. He is not afraid to posit replacements to the old or the new. I think it is precisely his ability to navigate multiple paradigms that yields his dozens (scores?) of right insights — insights on space relativity, binary arithmetic, the necessity of grounding metaphysics in more than mathematical objects, the consciousness of animals, to name but a few against the many currents of his times. Not only that, but Leibniz had the rage of youth — and you know how much I love the rage of youth. Who doesn’t want to solve all philosophical problems with a clear and distinct logical system built atop universally accessible intuitive primitives? I know I do.
And then there are his world-shaking quotes, like (to paraphrase): “I judge the man more worthy of esteem and honors who has cured a single disease than he who has found the area under a curve.” (Written before he himself did the latter.) Also, his mathematical explanations are actually lucid to me — a shocking feat for clarity. His letters display this same clarity of expression.
By my Fermi estimate, he wrote for four to five hours a day, every day of his life. And yet, no one is a real “Leibnizian” in the way that someone can be an Aristotelian, a Cartesian, or a Kantian.
On the one hand, I find this quite sad. How can someone who wrote ten times more than any of his contemporaries create such diffuse influence without founding a true school of thought? He didn’t cultivate disciples, teach formally, or publish didactic works. He didn’t build charisma. He just built content and followed his many methods. He developed methods that others took on and extended: a huge influencer through sheer quantity of insights and correspondence (nevertheless it never seems like he has the right correspondents).
Perhaps this is just as well. A Leibniz doesn’t need an “-ism” named after him. The key to rigorous and right thinking is using all tools at one’s disposal to understand the many facets of reality. Maybe Leibniz’s “hedgehog in a fox mech suit” approach to intellectual life is non-reproducible—or, as I sometimes worry, even anti-mimetic.
You’ve taught more workshops on rationality than I have. Is it teachable? I think so, but it is hard without good contextual questions. Tradition can be taught and can be lived, but can innovation and “the new life of the mind” be taught in quite the same way (though Matt Clancy has made me more bullish that useful innovation can be its own sort of tradition)? Nonetheless, only through a community of practice can one build the synthesis of approaches that you and I both want to see in the world.
In Maria Rosa Antognazza’s intellectual biography of Leibniz, I hear her philosopher groans: that Gottfried spent so much time on practical matters, on inconsequential Germanic politics, on his practical schemes, political projects, and writings on the esoterica of binary were distractions from his true calling—the development of the Monadology and his other dozen philosophical projects. The terrifying object here is the implicit assumption that the intellectual life is defined by the questions treated by academic philosophy. There is a real sense in her writing that he squandered his gifts as a philosopher by pursuing so many interests outside it. But is philosophy the only game in town?
I think Leibniz believed—or at least what I like to believe myself—is that philosophy is a way of life, a habit of mind, and a set of all sets of inquiry, not a distinct discipline. To make it into its own discipline is to turn it into a Glass Bead Game. The whole Great Books and Classics ecosystem might prepare some of the best Glass Bead Game players around—and I honor the game! But does it prepare one for discovery, action, and becoming one of those lights that supplies the beads for the game? For that, one needs practical wisdom, the art of rationality, applied history and economics, and of course, the philosophical disposition.
As I wrote recently, the classical quest for virtue is greatly complemented by modern tools, and the modern context is sufficiently different that the intellectual demands of prudence and justice are much greater than before. An analogy that might resonate with the traditional ethicist is that of extraordinary medical care. In the Thomistic tradition of medical ethics, providing medical care is obligatory if it is ordinary, but not if it is extraordinary — and the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is circumstantial. The generic heart pill we might have a moral duty to supply in the USA in 2025 was utterly beyond society’s capacity in 1905. Moral duties are contextually realized, not imposed by synthetic a priori reasoning upon the universal kingdom of ends. In the same way, the demands of prudence and justice shift with context. Prudence and justice are more demanding now than in the past for the demands rise as our capacity does.
Thus I expect today’s great leaders to have a firm grasp of economics, probability, game theory, transaction costs, coordinating mechanisms, elasticity, and incidence, not to mention several fields of science, history, and philosophy. I think the standards simply must be higher.
Furthermore, the seduction of the world of ideas is that we might come to confuse the clear and distinct ideas of philosophers for the world itself. The most important things in history, and the most important things in our lives, are not necessarily those that are easily talked about in didactic treatises or rigorous formalizations. (And yet those rigorous formalizations come from somewhere.) They emerge from wading into the algae-filled pool of history and embodied, carbon-based stuff, and trying to pull out abstractions and generalizations and statistics and causal explanations that work.
So far I am in full agreement of temperament with you, and yet. And yet. And yet.
Perhaps there is a weird quirk here being underplayed, and that is the importance of being a bearer of a tradition. (This goes back to my writings on identity and politics). The iconoclast by temperament might not like the stodgy and inflexible bearers of a dead or dying intellectual tradition, yet it seems to me very terrible not to have them around. The majority of people will be establishment people by nature, preferring convention and authority, not desiring to exploit a good intellectual arbitrage or find contradictions in Torah or respond to thirteen objections to a proposition. So I think it is very important that the majority of education is about passing along the Burke-processed fundamentals with their priorities, paradoxes, and unanswered questions, but most of all that sincere belief in the study of authorities as a useful scaffold to knowledge of Divine things and human benefit. As a matter of temperament, I cherish exploration and think new tools and their development is necessary for a good and successful vita activa, but as a matter of principle, we are well below the point of saturating our world enough with either the “traditionalist” Way of Wisdom or the “rationalist” Way of Calibrations approach to the intellectual life.
[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community intellectual community.]
Dear Henrik,
You likely are wondering about the education of Gottfried Leibniz.
But let’s start with a 17th century pedagogical theory called Ramism developed 100 years prior, a virus spreading throughout Protestant Central Europe. We might call it a form of reductionism and an aggressive simplification of the curriculum, curriculum requirements, of the categories in philosophy and metaphysics, and the promotion of new tabular methods for pedagogy that trade off exactitude and nuance for ease of use. It was wildly successful, influential, loathed, and hated, and achieved a semi victory, that lasts to this day.
Here’s what the Ramists believed.
There are two types of philosophers, those who make easy to recall dichotomies and those who don’t i.e. dastardly Aristotelians. Among those who make dichotomies there are the Ramists and the Semi-ramists. The Ramists require all things be organized into pedagogically satisfying charts and the Semi-ramists only require most things. There are two types of Ramists, the ones who emphasize the doctrines of Ramus and the ones who spend all their time attacking Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Quintillian for being too obtuse and poorly structured. For the Ramists there are two doctrines: 1) All knowledge is a form of dichotomous categorization. 2) Philosophy should be immediately evident and empirical. There are two types of philosophy: physics and logic. Physics should be based on math and simple observation. Logic should also be based on math and simple observation. Anything too complicated is likely not true, because true things are useful, and complicated things are not useful, and thus not true!
Leibniz was influenced by it greatly. Many later Ramists were interested in the mad quest to reduce ideas into primitive notions which could be combinatorially combined along with rules to create all possible ideas, like some mad Principia Mathematica or Peano Arithmetic for philosophy. Some post-Ramists were encyclopaedists looking to reconcile the sciences and philosophies of the day. What could be more useful than theological and political harmony in days torn by confessional, political, and philosophical divisions!
Leibniz went to an Orthodox Lutheran school in the very Orthodox Lutheran town of Leipzig in which the reading list was tightly curated for Lutheran Orthodoxy. At this school, he learned excellent Latin which was the language in which all of his writings, essays, and conversations had to take place. And as far as it went, it was solid. The secret sauce, though, was his father’s death when he was 8 years old. His father was a pastor and professor of theology and his library contained many books from the various confessions Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic. The library was locked. A noble in town interceded on behalf of the young Gottfried to unlock this library and allow him free reign, despite the objections of the schoolmasters. Enter the autodidact.
Leibniz, however, was not solely a follower of this Ramist school of thought. He was extremely broad-minded – despite his parochial environment. Reading widely, he thought the various traditions could be reconciled. Everything from Aristotle and Aquinas to Philip Melanchthon and John Calvin. He read Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, the Jesuits and the Jansenists. If only we had the right alphabet of ideas, the right structure of thought, the right metaphysical axioms, then rational argument could undo the Gordian Knot of politics, religion, theology, and natural philosophy – all that had been thrown into great uncertainty in the 17th century.
Who knew that the inventor of the integral originally received his degrees in law? I didn’t!
Because he was completing his curriculum and dissertation so quickly, he finished his dissertation for his bachelor’s degree and was almost immediately ready to be finished with his master’s degree. However, the older students in the program worked hard to block special permission for Leibniz to be allowed to graduate early. Annoyed by his institution’s inability to adapt to his needs, he transferred to the University of Jena, where he almost immediately submitted his master’s degree thesis for jurisprudence.
One method of his study was to take a topic or disputed question and read across several traditions upon that question, taking notes. There are groups that he met at the University of Jena in which six students would read together. Each would read different authors on the same topic, and they would meet together to share the diversity of views, thus enabling a comparative approach to natural philosophy and legal studies.
Leibniz’s masters degree dissertation De Casis Perplexis in Iure offers a great example of how the simplified branching style of Ramus can be combined with erudition and novel thinking, especially through the use of comparison across texts. In terms of method, this would require creating notebooks by topic which collect references to deployed on that topic later. As scholars and writers struggle to organize their notes and reading into sensible systems for recall, the world after Ramus worked hard to develop these systems for keeping track. We take it for granted… yet how many of us have a truly good system?
—
Leibniz: An Intellectual Autobiography by Maria Rosa Antognazza HOPWAG: Peter Adamson De Casis Perplexis in Iure by Leibniz
[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community in St. Louis]
Dear Nick,
I am beside myself with thoughts on the matter of urbanity and the good life. But I am shaken with terror that our views might be irreconcilable. The reason this terrifies me is simple. My faith in reason is scholastic. I think that should we be talking about the same thing, but I feel we are not. We should be able to at least communicate principles of discussion and come to a shared understanding of how this “science” should work. Ideally, we could come to a full list of objections and respondeos and sed contras that demonstrate a mutual understanding, which to me counts as affection.
So, my proposition is this: let’s go to Kigali, Rwanda and Krakow, Poland and test our theories. Should these towns be more like America or more like Western Europe or stay like they are? I think we will see that Americanization is more desirable, even if not exactly replicable.
You might say this is unfair. I am stacking the deck in my favor by anchoring the discussion around actually existing states of affairs. You want to start from the platonic view of the good city and figure out what tradeoffs get us closer, while I want to start with empirical places that at first glance seem to offer the things you say are most essential for a good city.
I think we can overcome this obstacle. I am not a “status-quo-monger”; I do not think that whatever just so happens to be at this moment is the best achievable – or that whatever societal forces produce is normative by the mere fact of it being produced, rather than something else. I think we could do much better and could have made better choices in the past, which implies that I too have a platonic view about what ‘better’ may be. However, the difference so far in our conversation are that I take historical examples of the past century as strong evidence for what is preferable and what is not. When millions of people individually make a choice, I should seriously consider whether that might have been in their best interest.
Automobiles are preferable. Individual self-owned powerful machines that can move goods, children, commodities, Amazon packages (“thank you for your service!”) and groceries are amazing. They can move canoes, baseball equipment, my book boxes, furniture for my house, and musical instruments. With enough density of people and luck of location I suppose I wouldn’t need a car – provided my relatives lived nearby. But the automobile used well is a huge boon to freedom for the arts, sports, leisure, and even religion, as well as work, labor, and economy. Even the Spartan men were notorious for their one luxury: the decked-out chariot. From better transportation spring so many options for finding communities that want what I have to offer and have what I want to enjoy. By increasing the extent of the market, autos increase the quality and quantity of businesses which I want to patronize. Oh great, internal combustion engine, rise and buzz, ye electric car! The world without such machines would be poorer and sadder and less vibrant – more like Kosovo, not more like Cologne.
Those incessant sorrowful singers about the sins of the automobile do have important things to say as well. Cars are loud, deadly, polluting, and atomizing. Can these costs be mitigated? I think so, and I know so, for we have already progressed in each of these dimensions since 1960, and noisy automobiles remain merely as a hideous choice exercised by Bosnians and hot rod kids and Harley guys. Meanwhile, I drive across the metro to St. Charles listening to a Ron Chernow biography, or the excellent dj’s of 88.1 KDHX, or a Conversation with Tyler, or conversing with a distant friend over the phone. In most other historical and present cities, there is much more cost to commuting. We are not the best we could be, but we have it pretty good.
Now, I hear your objections. Firstly, “Automobiles do not allow these choices, they cause the problems they are an alleged solution to! That is not progress.” I respond that it is progress on net, though there is still more to do to improve things. Or secondly you could object, “Is your disembodied intellectualized experience of the world better than knowing the actual neighborhoods you are traversing? Lost in a technologically enabled reverie?” I respond, these are not mutually exclusive and I, desiring to live a good life study the map of neighborhoods and businesses along my routes and sometimes refuse the interstate.
The strongest objection is the poem by Dana Gioia:
The Freeways Considered as Earth Gods by Dana Gioia
These are the gods who rule the golden land. Their massive bodies stretch across the countryside, Filling the valleys, climbing the hills, curving along the coast, Crushing the earth from which they draw their sustenance Of tar and concrete, asphalt, sand, and steel.
They are not new, these most ancient of divinities. Our clamor woke them from the subdivided soil. They rise to rule us, neither cruel nor kind, But indifferent to our ephemeral humanity. Their motives are unknowable and profound.
The gods do not condescend to our frailty. They cleave our cities, push aside our homes, Provide no place to walk or rest or gather. The pathways of the gods are empty, flat, and hard. They draw us to them, filling us with longing.
We do not fail to worship them. Each morning Millions creep in slow procession on our pilgrimages. We crave the dangerous power of their presence. And they demand blood sacrifice, so we mount Our daily holocaust on the blackened ground.
The gods command the hilltops and the valleys. They rule the deserts and the howling wilderness. They drink the rivers and clear the mountains in their way. They consume the earth and the increase of the field. They burn the air with their rage.
We are small. We are weak. We are mortal. Ten thousand of us could not move one titan’s arm. We need their strength and speed. We bend to their justice and authority. These are the gods of California. Worship them.
Do they cleave our cities, push aside our homes? Yes. Yet we a flexible and ingenious people, adjust our cities and lives bit by bit to maintain the benefits and decrease the costs of suburban disruption.
Aesthetics arguments are too often selective in their evidence. Unpleasantness can be economically modelled.
I agree that the costs of suburbanism and the auto are not properly adjusted. I agree that minimum parking requirements are stupid, that cars get a free ride and implicit subsidy in urban planning, that there is too much wasted space in business developments (especially through minimum parking requirements, and that restrictions on building housing make all this worse. Yet, I also think the vast majority of people for justified reasons want personal transportation optionality provided by car ownership. Too many localists and urbanists are willfully minimizing of this fact. They think that the goal of urbanism should be to minimize car ownership. Even in the great public transit, walkable cities of the Netherlands a majority own cars. The purpose of transportation in a whole ecosystem is to move people and goods to where they need/want to go as quickly, safely, and cheaply as possible. Thus autos need not be taxed and penalized out of oblivion because “the people have bad taste.” Cars integrated into and harmonized with cities is not only possible, but desirable.
So let me leave you with this, following the sage advice from Plato and Aristotle, the view of the good city should include a mathematical model. Now while I am a bit more mathematically sophisticated than the ancient philosophers, I am not up to contemporary standards of urban economists like Ed Glaeser. Nonetheless, the standard introductory graduate school model assumes only two needs: a workplace and a living quarters whose cost is a function of distance from work. But you can and should introduce whatever values you want into the model, create a distance-cost value function, then create a map of the resulting small world. As you as you start adding in things like heterogenous desires among residents, and agglomeration of certain types of businesses in certain districts, you start getting shapes that look strikingly similar to our actual world (but with much more density). Add in HOAs, municipal building regulations, and poor urban safety and you get the status quo. I am not saying these are good. I believe there are winnable battles to improve both urban and suburban life. Yet, it is a hard drill to get anywhere else than where we are. And I believe in the types of improvements you point to that make drama productions, religious community, and community musical concerts easier. I would just not blame “the automobile” or “American values” or “capitalism” for the current state of affairs, nor do I think Europeans have it so much better. Europeans move to the US far more often than the other way, because, at its best, US dynamism in economics and the arts and family formation are all complementary to each other.
In any case, I think my economic view of the world is the correct starting point for both ought and is, and from it we can work towards the best possible set of tradeoffs together.
Meet me in Rwanda, where we will continue the discussion.
My cousin Sylvester has a few critiques of Kevin Vallier’s All the Kingdoms of the World. Now Sylvester is an unrepentant traditionalist reactionary. His side of the family has been resisting freedom of association since 1792. Thus, he has a pedigree in this type of art. Don’t take him too seriously.
“Dear Kevin,
“Your book is at once too short and too long. It is too short, because you leave so many ideas on the table as mere placeholders for a full argument. You want me to fill in the argument against my own position. Unlikely! On the other hand, it is too long a book since most of those pinched off arguments are irrelevant anyway. You modern political philosophers are anxious to make a formal theory of a position and deal with its consequences. 2/3rds of your book could be ignored if your integralist interlocutor just relaxed the constraint that the state should use religious coercion on the baptized – which he should. That is an extraneous feature of a Christian nation. Just because Patrick Smith and Adrian Vermeule might anchor on it in writing, doesn’t mean we should take it that seriously.
“The key is to realize that Anglophone classical liberalism has a lot of room for an additional layer of ideological nudge-ocracy. We have seen the WASP nudgeocracy in the American North, the white Baptist Nudgeocracy in the South, the university educated nudgeocracy in the 20th century (which was the compromise between the former two groups to stop anyone else getting in), and the woke nudgeocracy of today which is the repentance of secularized WASPs and Baptists. Every Western nation has a nudgeocracy, and there is nothing shameful about it. It is bound to exist within the liberal order. I just think it should be a Catholic nudgeocracy that nudges religiosity, family life, widely dispersed access to capital, and the “success sequence.” We are not ever going to live in a post-ideological pure libertarian dream land of Rawlsian doxastic volition concerning cultural mores. The state will always influence and be influenced by prevailing ideologies. To that end, we should consciously choose the ideology that best advances what is going to be the most fulfilling lifestyle for the modal American: some religion, a lot of family, and the freedom to try to become economically independent owners if they want to be.
“All your writing about religious coercion, the justice of unequal enforcement, and the diminishing marginal utility of Masses each week might even be true! But it is beside the point. You are a Christian. Surely you would like the nudges to swing differently – for vice to be taxed, even if subtly, and normal civilizing virtues like marriage and children more greatly rewarded.
“While sometimes individual integralists might point towards upending things a bit too much, the key is that the nation has never been ideologically uncontaminated creating a level playing field. We have always had integralism – more or less. Southern Baptist Race Integralism, Northern WASP Integralism, their shared Manifest Destiny integralism, and post-civil war rapprochement against non-elites and their later repentance. Today, American legislators pass funding packages with all sorts of wish list DEI integralism. Some of that might even be good and worthy. But surely it is an integralism of some ideology with the state!
“Okay, I suppose this the standard whataboutism, the same whataboutism that has pushed on your book since publication. I don’t want to rehash the old objections only. Human Flourishing should be defended on its own terms then.
“Let me try one more counterpoint then. You say that integralism is unlikely to be stable, because the stability of a regime decreases as coercion increases. But your model totally misses that there are several equilibria. China and Iran and Russia, while not great role models are acceptably stable. North Korea is miserable, but stable. None of those are democracies and only China is even moderately close to flourishing. I don’t want to rid the world of democracy. But if we had 20% less democracy and a more republican structure, we could be both more moral as a country and more effective as a state bureaucracy. Garrett Jones writes about the effectiveness benefits of 10% less democracy. The integralist goal would be an additional 10% more trustee republicanism after that, accompanied by extensive legal, economic, business training for the younger generation to take up the mantle.
“Just as the stability of a pluralist regime does not require Title IX protected classes, so too does an integralist regime not require extremely inequitable treatment. A lot of little taxes on behavior shifts behavior, a lot of little subsidies incentivize it. And I believe there is plenty of evidence that culture is far more elastic and choose-able than my status quo feting opponents dare recognize.
“The link between morality and political stability is not a claim, I will make nor defend. Hobbesian state may be stable, Madisonian liberalism may be stable, Ghandi can rule. Maybe all those are stable in the long run or maybe they are not. In the long-run we are all dead. What matters are the nudges of today towards the good life and the salvation of the marginal citizen. Pax.”
So that’s Sylvester. You will notice he isn’t quite ready to say exactly which policies and nudges would be favored in his world. He is prone to the motte and bailey. You may also notice a style of nationalism in his outlook. C’est la vie.
My dear friend John Mulhall asks “Are you sympathetic to Tyler Cowen’s optimism about AI and technology in general?”
I am a first principles kind of person, so let’s start with finding a common starting point for how to think about technological change. One way I think of new technologies is as a new type of trade: I can now choose between exchanging money for a typewriter or for a digital word processor. On some dimensions, I favor one over the other and vice versa. When a new technology passes the market test and is implemented by users, there must be some type of “gains from trade” occurring. The trade would not occur if both parties did not perceive some real benefit along some dimension. The gains from trade ripple out throughout the economy, but they do not do so equally. While the writers’ industry and the computer engineers industry might see gains, those gains only very slowly and indirectly show up in regions which do not have those industries.
In general, the aggregate social benefit from a new type of trade requires individuals adjusting their behavior to realize the benefit. For example, electric drills change construction making those people and firms more productive and allowing them to be hired to do more for less total expense. Those are two gains: one to the firms using drills and the other to people hiring electric-drill-users. Those change to those two groups constitute the basic sum of benefits.
People and communities have to adapt to realize those benefits. Sometimes they choose not to. But they also generally do not receive those positive spillovers from the technology to the same degree as others. Though they still benefit indirectly, even when many levels removed. Many Amish communities famously use no electric powered equipment when building. Nonetheless, they do purchase high quality tools made by precision machining and electrification. So even their own agrarian-first production benefits from trade with a “high technology” society. Drills, screws, the use of electricity to power the one and drive the other, allowed America to quickly accommodate all sorts of changes. Suburbanization was made possible and cheap by precision machining!
A lot of dimensions of society are affected by even simple technologies, how much more so for more general technologies. LLM AI tools created through reinforcement learning is a very general technology, and thus how much harder must it be to predict net effects.
What are the spillovers and likely effects of AI? Many writers get bogged down in metaphor making for AI. It’s “a transformative technology”: a machine gun, a replacement for people, a complement to people, a therapist, a girlfriend, a test maker, an essay grader, a medicine finder, a coder, a nuclear physicist. It’s like electricity, the printing press, the internet on steroids, a bicycle for the mind, a parrot of intelligence, intelligence itself, a new species! Arguing over analogies does not go anywhere. At least for me it hasn’t.
So I call it quits and go back to rehashing the two standard effects of new technology (in the broad sense). One is that firms that cannot adapt to the higher productivity manner of doing things go out of business, and two, new products are created as a result of the original innovation. In the first case, much of economic growth is caused by driving low productivity organizations into the graveyard, and so we all benefit from that – even if it sounds bad.
Here’s the basic story of why. When demand is fulfilled by a more productive firm, resources are used more efficiently. When resources are used more efficiently, then savings can be used elsewhere instead. The savings caused by an increase in productivity do not go to waste, they are not hoarded by the capitalist dragon Smaug. They are used elsewhere.
And sometimes as a result of productivity and innovation better quality products can be crafted. Most people cannot predict easily a priori whether something will cause new and improved products, even less can we predict what those products will be. But at its most basic, this is what economic progress is: better use of resources and innovative uses of resources. And it’s a good thing.
Now, I always do wonder what the effect of a technology on society will likely be. I am given to speculation like that. But asking about a technology generally is a curious and overbroad question. Society is not a monolith. There are different age groups, classes, subcultures, ideological groupings, social networks which are constantly adapting to their circumstances together. As a whole, society is adaptive because it is in many parts. In the uptake of a new technology there is both a diffusion process and an adaptation process. Different groups find different uses. Different groups put in different safeguards – based upon what they see as their responsibility. If you notice this feature of our society, that disruptions are temporary, that negative externalities elicit coordinated responses, then a better equilibrium than the status quo ex ante can be expected. Better, however, does not mean costless. On some dimension for someone somewhere, value is lost. If I were handwriting this, I could be outside in warm summer air listening to the chirps of cicada-eating birds and the bestial groans of bird-eating cicadas, but instead I am inside. That is a cost to typing rather than writing, but it’s still a net gain.
This is my prior model on technology that allows me to be generally more optimistic than most others in our milieu. I believe in our collective ability to adjust to technological change, even if there is no formula to predict exactly what the adjustment will ultimately look like from the armchair. Its a lived solution.
I do worry about blocking the adaptive process too much. Strong regulation from the top can prevent a synthesis of the old and the new. A desire for total control over a technology and its diffusion in order to do damage control often does more damage than control. Perhaps biblical translation in the 16th century is an example. Shut down society’s adaptive reflexes and create a debt for a much more painful transition later. What was more painful China’s modernization or America’s? And could one have happened without the other, and would we want to go back?
In 1900 could Henry Adams have predicted the results of electricity? Or the effects of the window AC, the recorded LP, or the PC? Are not the social impacts of electricity found in the new organization and technology it allowed?
Or if the printing press is more your style. Did Erasmus know how science and politics would change as a result? Could he have drafted the perfect policies for the monarchies? How long did it take society to adapt to full literacy? We hardly know the answers to these questions even in retrospect. As W.H. Auden wrote, “Foresight as hindsight makes no sense.”
It doesn’t seem to me that we have a strong ability to forecast distributional or productivity changes from technology a priori. Too many things change in the process: the firms, the gains from the trade, the new products created are dependent upon human choices, ingenuity, and iteration. We are living an evolutionary process without an inevitable endpoint.
However, this agnosticism abdicates too much responsibility and truly is too optimistic about human nature. So allow me to walk it back a bit with some guidelines.
If I want to characterize a view about some technology, the first thing to do is to learn what is and how it works. Investigate what current users are paying for and how they are using it. If you can figure out what the average, or even better, what different clusters of users are paying for and how they are using it, you will get a factual understanding of what the technology is, rather than a merely theoretical one. Then you can just look at the current upside and downside uses. Then, insofar, as you wish to advise and craft good policy, notice the particular destructive uses, and look for ways to curb them without also destroying all positive value. Gesticulating at the bad is not a reason to slaughter them all and let God sort it out. We can almost always do better than blanket bans. We want to afford to the different parts of society the chance to maximize the upsides and minimize the downsides of technology. Consider too what happens with declining costs. Frequently claims about distributional effects between rich and poor are not true for long as costs come down.
The CEO of NVIDIA said in a Stanford School of Business talk that we need the organizations that regulate their fields to update their regulations to include AI as it relates to their mandate, but we do not need a body that oversees all. I share the spirit of the suggestion, though I will quibble. I believe in a need for standards of model robustness and model security. And eventually, the biggest problem with AI will not be misuse, which I think can be managed, but misalignment, which I worry cannot.
(I myself do in fact regulate AI and technology as head of a school. It is part of our adaptive process as schools, I would prefer to make those calls within my community though, and not have those decisions made for us.)
I think AI is an exceptional case, but if we just want to talk about automation technology in general, I strongly recommend the essay by economist Matt Clancy: ”When the Robots Take Your Job”, which covers the economic challenges of automation. He explains the assumptions and implications of a few academic models that relate Capital and Labor to automatable tasks. In these models, new creative technology does not destroy wages, but rather it increases them so long as there is enough capital to hire human necessary labor. One big caveat is that if wages in some industries are driven to zero and the number of non-automatable tasks does not increase, there could be an economy-wide wage collapse. It is a simple model, but like many of these models, it is a great intuition pump.
There are other greater worries one could and should have about General AI, mainly the misuse of AI tools to create dangerous synthetic pathogens, but the economic worries above are a good starting point for our discussion. Confer Matt Clancy’s behemoth paper, “Returns to Science in the Presence of Technological Risk” for a more rigorous take on the health and income risks and the benefits of science.
But the greatest worry of all is AI alignment, that is, whether eventually we can make technologies that both act as capable autonomous agents and don’t completely disempower or destroy humanity.
Nuclear weapons, biological pathogens, and autonomous AI systems are probably not good technologies. But in general, technology is good for human health and the cultivation of civilization.
In 330 BC, Romans quaked at the name of Celt – skilled iron workers, fierce tall bearded fighters, sackers of cities. In fact, there’s a reason iron is called ‘iron’ and not ferrum in English. Isarn in Celtic became isen in Old English. cf. Isengard, and later iron. Celts gave the northern Europe the skill of ironworking. The etymology tells the tale of technological dissemination. Confer all the English words (many of which are Greek portmanteaux) floating around in Spanish and Chinese today. They show off the originators and disseminators of invention. What is a greater signal of inventive power than the penetration of the phrase “blue jeans”?
The Romans hated Celts and Gauls and thought their life and ways depraved. They took on no words from them. On the other hand, vae victis, the Gauls took up Latin with great aplomb and Gaulish writing died out shortly after Caesar’s arrival. They were “converted”. One Celtic the Welsh learned all sorts of new words from Rome though never sold out their language, and you can see from the list of acquired words what types of things the Welsh still needed to learn from the imperium:
Although the Welsh were Celts, they were not as sophisticated as the Gauls. Roman interest in the Britons and Welsh retreated by 410, leaving only windows and sponges and a smattering of Latin words behind… at least until the trade routes dried up a bit and with them the good sponges for feminine hygiene. And one other legacy left behind from that Roman era was kidnapped Romano-Briton who spoke poor Latin: we call him Patrick. The Celts were not a monolith, even if they liked the monolithic style. It was hard going in Britain after 400. But apparently the Welsh weren’t willing to throw away national character in the name of soap and sponges. Richard Rich, remember, was willing to throw away his soul for Wales. So he at least was attracted to them!
No wonder St. Augustine of Canterbury and his monks were so welcome when he arrived in Kent in 597. Did he bring sponges?
Sources:
Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler Mary Beard, various A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt
“Oin and Gloin had lost their tinder-boxes. (Dwarves have never taken to matches even yet.)”
The Hobbit
The hobbits were the first to put it in their pipes and smoke it.
The Fellowship of the Ring
“Among the wise I am the only one that goes in for hobbit-lore: an obscure branch of knowledge, but full of surprises.”
Gandalf., The Fellowship of the Ring
Notice! Making matches requires advanced techniques of production that not even the dwarves were messing around with. Certainly the dwarves were advanced in other ways, but not in matches. Elves, obviously, weren’t making matches. And as for men, I see no evidence for them being the inventors. Let’s ask the question that should be asked of any invention, “Cui Bono?” One of the younger creatures of Middle Earth has great demand for quick fires, the smoking, toking hobbits. And were than Hobbits that might invent? A Took is one of the adventurous, curious types! Thus, it stands to reason that hobbits are the inventors. Not only that, but this invention explains at least part of Gandalf’s fascination with the little creatures.
The easiest version of strike-matches that I can discover requires antimony and saltpeter as raw minerals followed by a difficult, but achievable-for-a-crazy-enough-hobbit, set of procedures to make antimony sulfide and potassium chloride. Mix them together with a glue and stick them on a toothpick head, or something of the sort, and, presto!, you have a match to strike against sandpaper. (A US patent for sandpaper dates to 1834, the manufacturer of which would need glue, rollers, cloth or paper, and pulverized quartz or glass).
These raw materials would be available from the trade between the Iron Hills and along the Great Road.
When would matches have been invented? Tobold Hornblower of the Southfarthing was the first to grow true pipe-weed in his gardens around T.A. 2670 (S.R. 1070). Smoking would best be served by a method for a quick light, even when one is away from immediate fire. There was high demand for quick solutions for lighting a pipe, especially among the small creatures for whom smoking is such delight, it was common practice among dwarves, men, and, even, wizards.
Tolkien implies that by T.A. 2941, matches were widely used, but the dwarves still carried tinder-boxes, holding on to the practice long after it was strictly sensible to do so. Nostalgia is a powerful force in Tolkien’s world. So, we might imagine the dwarves are at least a century out of step of what is likely a common product among intelligent smokers.
If we imagine matches were invented at least 100 years before 2941, this would put the invention of matches sometime between 2670 and 2841. If we assume it took two generations for smoking to fully penetrate the Shire then, perhaps add 66 years for a second generation of smokers to come of age. That puts us between 2736 and 2841.
Now, I think, it always make sense to fit Gandalf into the picture. Gandalf knew of the Hobbits sometime right before 2758, when he came to their aid during the Long Winter.
I would like to think in addition to their courage and stoutheartedness, and despite their squishy exteriors, Gandalf also noticed their matches.
You can imagine the scene: Gandalf found a hobbit, let’s name him Fife Graytoe, working on matches sometime near the year 2750, and he immediately showed a keen interest, seeing in this a surprising development. Not only did they have rudimentary firecrackers too, but young Fife was trying to control that power. How the Hobbits would be impressed when they saw what Gandalf could do with fireworks! With a little nudge, Gandalf helped Fife along. Shortly thereafter, hobbits were exporting not only tobacco, but matches to boot.
Or perhaps, Gandalf showed the hobbits how to make matches to help them with tobacco smoking, of which he was quite fond, and he apprenticed a hobbit or two, keeping the art secret. Hobbits, like Gandalf, might wield the secret power of quick controlled combustion!
Books have been on the defensive since the first batch of Kindles sold out in 2007. Since then audiobooks and podcasts have exploded in popularity, and the internet not only provides millions of archived and public domain books ripe for download, but also creates opportunities for literary experiments and experiences which could not have happened otherwise. Text adventures, web serials, blogs on every subject under the sun – costs couldn’t be lower and opportunities to write have never been cheaper. Nonetheless the old codex format of pages between two covers still has much to recommend it. Traditional books are not obsolete, but I do believe we have forgotten how to approach books in particular amidst the information proliferation. And since we have forgotten how to approach books, publishers have stopped publishing books that are approachable. In the past dozen years, codex technology has not only failed to advance, but the knowledge of how to read and write a book has backslid.
One of the interesting things about physical books is their versatility. The form of a book lends itself to many different readings and interactions. For example, sometimes I read a book to quote mine or find an author’s opinion on a certain topic, other times to introduce myself to a new field, other times to read deeper in a field I’m already familiar with. Each of these goals means I will interact with the book in a different way. I can skim, flip through, read forward linearly, or even backwards – from a conclusion back towards the premises. I can single out tables and diagrams and read those, or jump right to the bibliography for a list of more works to read, or flip to the end-notes to discover a citation for some dubious claim. The Table of Contents should offer an outline of the book in miniature and a short study of the contents, should prime me for the meat of the work coming later. And, of course, the thickness of the sections provides quick intuitive information about how much I am missing when I skip around. The physical interaction encourages active reading and the static pages of the book allow the user to choose a reading style which fits best with his/her purpose. Today, in fact, I even read an index to get a handle on what the core vocabulary I need to master is. If I get lost in a sea of terms, I can refer to the index again to help guide me to the light. Okay that’s a big laundry list of things, but I will revisit and explain more fully in a moment.
Now admittedly, a digital book is better for quote mining and is equivalent to a physical book in a variety of ways, and superior to it in a variety of others. One disadvantage of the digital book, is how much harder to remember where in a work a particular argument was laid out or curious diagram printed. But the lightweight portable nature of the digital might offset those costs. If you would never engage with the work or have it on hand when needed otherwise, more power to the medium! There are trade-offs both ways, and I am not trying to convince anyone that physical books are better in every circumstance. Instead I am trying to recover a sense of what the medium of the physical book has to offer in a world of other options so that readers (and even writers) can decide what medium aligns best with their goals.
The principal problem, as I see it, is not the internet or audiobooks or the unwashed masses not appreciating the aesthetics of books, but the problem is how to read a book for understanding in a world which publishes as though every book is for entertainment. It may not be obvious that I am indicating any real problem, but I think I can demonstrate the issue with a simple test and some comparisons. Pick up a book that will challenge you, that you want to learn something from, the type of book you would read to develop a deeper understanding. Tell me what can you learn about a given book in 20 minutes? And how would that book be formatted if it were designed to maximize the knowledge gained in 20 minutes of interaction?
Informative Titles
The title should be informative enough to let you know the subject matter. Honestly, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life may not be the greatest title, but at least it tells you that this work concerns psychology or neurology and “something no one is thinking or speaking about” with practical applications for life – not bad for just a simple title. It would be a shame if it were misleading.
The 20 Minute Speed Read
The Table of Contents should then outline the structure of the argument of the book. Mortimer Adler provides an excellent synopsis of the table of contents in his highly recommended How to Read a Book:
Study the Table of Contents to obtain a general sense of the book’s structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip. It is astonishing how many people never even look at a book’s table of contents unless they wish to look something up in it. In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents, and it is sad to think their efforts are often wasted.
It used to be a common practice especially in expository works, but sometimes even in novels and poems, to write very full tables of contents, with the chapters or parts broken down into many subtitles indicative of the topics covered… Such summaries are no longer common although sometimes you do come across an analytical table of contents. One reason for the decline of the practice may be that people are less likely to read the table of contents than they once were. Also, publishers have come to feel that a less revealing table of contents is more seductive than a completely frank an open one. Readers, they feel, will be attracted to books with more or less mysterious chapter titles—they will want to read the book to find out what the chapters are about. Even so, a table of contents can be valuable, and you should read it carefully before going on to the rest of the book.
How to read a book
I have been following Adler’s advice faithfully for years, and it has helped me learn more and retain more from my reading, as well as help me quickly go back and benefit more fully from having my memory jogged.
Perhaps at this point we are at minute 2 – 4 of our 20 minute tour of the book-to-be-understood. Now we read the preface, where the subject, general scope, and purpose are laid out. Read this quickly or even skim it if it is especially long. I find reading the first and last sentences of paragraphs to be a fast way to find the paragraphs which are crucial to me.
We are at minute 12-15 now. Flip through the book and sample some paragraphs or even a few consecutive pages to get a flavor the work, its density, its style, the challenges, and sensibility you will have to develop to appreciate it.
In the last few minutes, go for the total spoiler and read the final pages. Adler recommends that if there is an Epilogue, go to the pages right before the Epilogue. Usually an author cannot stop himself from summarizing what he believes to be the big takeaways at the end of the work. In any case, it is good to see where you are going to end up at the end so that the unity of the work can become clearer.
With that we come to the end of our 20 minutes and we should know a lot about our book. We should now know clearly the topic, the scope, and the basic skeleton of the work (think “head, shoulders, knees and toes” not “clavicle, acromion, coracoid”), the flavor of the text, and where the author wishes to take us. To some people, this might be a foreign and unromantic way to read, but it is rather a very involved and dedicated way to read. Yes, it is superficial. That’s sort of the point. To achieve this superficial overview required effort and attention, not merely glazed eyes scrolling over the pages. And the ultimate goal is an intimate knowledge of the book. Sometimes, even this superficial reading of a book, disabuses the reader of the notion that the book in question is worthy of deep reading. Perhaps the book contains only one core insight and several hundred poorly told anecdotes (On Grand Strategy likely qualifies). Sometimes a superficial reading reveals a superficial book.
Climbing the Ladder of Understanding
I remember in high school, we read at least one Shakespeare play a year. I wanted to like them, because I liked being challenged and I like language. My teacher recommended I read a summary of every play before reading it. So I purchased Shakespeare A to Z and read the summary of every Shakespeare play before I read the text. Then before each scene I would reread that scene’s overview from Shakespeare A to Z. I noticed my comprehension went up when reading the actual text, and Shakespeare became more and more enjoyable, until one day I could comprehend large swathes of unseen Elizabethan writing without need of a summary. This is an example of climbing a ladder of challenge toward understanding.
On Tables of Contents Including Many Asides About the Abusive Tables we are now Nearly Always Subjected to
One impediment to developing a deeper understanding and keeping clear memories of a work are the abysmal tables of contents produced today. Like Adler, I have noticed a seriously sad state in TOCs (Tables of Contents).
For example, the TOC for Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction goes as such*:*
When I compare Tetlock’s TOC to my copy of Aristotle’s Politics… call me a clock — I am ticked about this TOC. Tetlock’s TOC is not useless, but it is a far cry from Adler’s ideal of a useful road map. In Tetlock’s defense, I’m sure this was an editorial decision—all popular science books are written this way now. Furthermore, while there were subheadings to each of Superforecasting’s chapters, they were not included in the TOC. I imagine this was not Tetlock’s fault. I don’t know, but my guess is that clean, minimal TOCs of exactly one page are publishers’ choice right now.
With this Table of Contents, I can tell you Chapter 1 is about Tetlock’s position. Chapter 2 is about uncertainty… no, wait, it’s about experts and his previous book Expert Political Judgement. Chapter 3 is how a scoring system works. You get the idea, but the problem with this, is that each of these chapters actually contains far more than I can quickly recall from seeing the chapter title. The subsections of each chapter would help immensely.
Benjamin Jowett’s TOC for Aristotle’s Politics stretches an immense eleven pages. Here’s the table of contents of just a part of Book 5. (For those who don’t know, in most editions of ancient works ‘Book’ is used in a way we might use Chapter, and chapters are just a few pages.)
BOOK V
Chapters 5—12. Revolutions in particular States, and how revolutions may be avoided.
5. (a) In Democracies revolutions may arise from a persecution of the rich; or when a demagogue becomes a general, or when politicians compete for the favor of the mob.
6. (b) In Oligarchies the people may rebel against oppression; ambitious oligarchs may conspire, or appeal to the people, or set up a tyrant. Oligarchies are seldom destroyed except by the feuds of their own members; unless they employ a mercenary captain who may become a tyrant.
7. (c) In Aristocracies and Polities the injustice of the ruling class may lead to revolution, but less often in Polities. Aristocracies may also be ruined by an underprivileged class, or an ambitious man of talent. Aristocracies tend to become Oligarchies. Also they are liable to gradual dissolution; which is true of Polities as well.
8. The best precautions against sedition are these: to avoid illegality and frauds upon the unprivileged; to maintain good feeling between rulers and ruled; to watch destructive agencies; to alter property qualifications from time to time; to let no individual or class become too powerful; not to let magistracies to be a source of gain; to beware of class-oppression.
Okay. Now this might be a bit excessive, but it is both useful before reading the work, and as a reference while in the weeds to see where the current section is going. A quick bird’s eye review of the table of contents gives the reader a context for understanding, for example, Aristotle describes Hiero of Syracuse use of secret police in Chapter 11. The TOC for 5.11 tells us that “Tyranny may rely on the traditional expedients of demoralizing and dividing its subjects” and here Hiero is an example one such tyrant, who kept his adversaries from coordinating by keeping them in fear. Astute readers easily see then how this example fits into the larger work of Book V, and even the larger vision of Politics.
Besides terse chapter titles with no subheaders, another problem one runs across in TOCs are totally coy titles. As one friend told me, “Often, even after I’ve read a modern nonfiction book, I can’t recall what a given chapter is about from the table of contents because they all have titles like ‘The Mouse and the Octopus’ or ‘How to Play Cribbage in a Boiler Room’.” I didn’t ask, but I think he had Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder in mind:
I appreciate that Antifragile has all of its subheadings included in the TOC. Some of them are quite useful, and I remember some of the sections therein quite well. Why do I remember some of these sections quite well, but not others? I suspect that the common cause, besides the punchiness of the writing which sometimes sticks, is their descriptive quality. Some of these subheadings, however, I just have no idea about. What was “France is Messier Than You Think” about? I vaguely recall the phrase “protesting as a national sport”. (In fact, I only remember the protesting as national sport thing, because I went to look up the book or article he was referencing and couldn’t access it.) Despite a less than perfect score on the table of contents, Taleb has the redeeming quality of plainly stating the thesis of his book at the beginning and again at the end in two different formats–verbal and mathematical. That he does this clearly improves an otherwise droll book sevenfold. A clear thesis provides a framework to his soup of spiteful words, amusing descriptions, and insightful lessons.
Douglas Hofstadter, known for his tyrannical control over each aspect in the production of his books, provides a very pleasant six page Overview immediately after the two page Table of Contents in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. For those who have read it they will know, GEB is not really a book with a thesis, it’s an experimental work. The Overview, I think, makes that clear.
Take my word for it, though, most authors are not Douglas Hofstadter and will not try to maximize the information available to the reader for the purpose of the learning journey. So what can we do given the state of TOCs? Because most publishers prefer mystique, and the general public is willing to endure nearly useless Tables of Contents, one has an opportunity to engage with the book deeply and create your own Table of Contents at the beginning of the book on the blank page and in all that white space publisher left for you. Maybe something like this for Chapter 3 of Superforecasting:
3. Keeping Score
Ballmer’s Forecast on the iPhone – imprecise predictions can’t be assessed
a. “A Holocaust…Will Occur”
Predictions about Chernenko’s successor – hindsight bias rife among experts
b. Judging Judgments
Imprecise phrases like “very likely” and “serious possibility” – Sherman Kent’s Solution to numericize language – it was never adopted – The wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy – what calibration means — overconfidence and underconfidence – Brier Scores
c. Meaning of The Math
Brier Score Meaning depends on the Difficulty of Predictions
d. Expert Political Judgement
EPJ Program to assess expert predictions 5- 10 years out
e. And The Results…
Ideologues did worse – hedgehog and fox distinction – prototypical hedgehog Larry Kudlow and his recession denial – Foxes are more boring than hedgehogs
f. Dragonfly Eye
Sir Francis Galton and The Wisdom of Crowds – why crowds work – foxes simulate a crowd – Richard Thaler’s Guess the Number Game – using different perspectives yields more accurate guesses – Seeing poker through the perspective of the opponent – the dichotomy is a simplification, a mere model
Obviously, you can’t make a new table of contents off of the 20 minute fling we discussed earlier. You need to have read the work at least once. But if you do choose to make your own Table of Contents after you have read the book, then you are probably well on your way to a deep understanding of its material. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We should talk about the first full reading of a work.
The First Full Read and Types of Notetaking
Through your first reading of a difficult text it makes sense to keep a brisk pace. Your goal should be to read all the parts you can understand *at your current level of knowledge.* Even though the work may be in your native language officially, if it is the type of work which is challenging you, then you need to read it as though it is a foreign language. Look for the key repeated terms and don’t worry if you do not understand something. Don’t slow down to work out the math section which is above your level, or to look up that arcane word which has something to do with naval batteries; read everything that is in the 75% comprehensible range and above. Slow down a bit when you have to, but avoid getting bogged down. This first reading, though still superficial, should provoke you to ask all the questions you need answered to make total sense of the text next time around. At this point you can go back and build your personal table of contents and then either embark on a closer, analytical reading to make sense of the work, or do whatever it is you need to do with the text.
Perhaps the most common way for a reader to take control of a text is through note-taking. The theory of note-taking, however, is a swamp of preferences and methods. Ideally each person uses a method which fits their context. What type of notes a reader takes should depend upon the reader’s expertise in the field AND on their purpose. This is why interactive learning platforms are so hard to create. Learners have disparate purposes and come in to a topic with different holes in their knowledge and understanding. For these same reasons, it is nonsense to say that there is a right or wrong way of taking notes in the abstract. Furthermore, some scream sacrilege about writing in books, others feel it is essential to making the book their own possession. Some prefer typing for its speed, others love baroque note-taking systems, like the Cornell method. Despite the diversity of methods and the idiosyncrasies of users, it is worth surveying five purposes of note taking and methods for going about it, so that readers can choose the method which suits their purpose best.
Structural notes outline the sequence of topics covered by the work. This can be done in the margin or in a notebook. One can make a “key word outline” or key phrases. Seeing the structure should facilitate understanding the purpose of the arguments and descriptions.
Substantial notes summarize the key arguments, descriptions, and examples in order. For this, one would want to identify important sentences or sections. Rewrite them, highlight them, or indicate them with a vertical line in the margin. The examples, descriptions, and specific arguments put flesh on the airy concepts and add meat to the otherwise bony structure.
Conceptual notes paraphrase several takeaway ideas from the work in your own words. These are probably not written in the work itself but in a separate document.
Critical notes include your emotional and intellectual responses to the key sections, core arguments, and general ideas of the work. This really should be done last. Of course, our temptation as intelligent readers is to prejudge based on what we already know. Understanding the author on his own terms is an essential goal. I have no fleshed out strategy for balancing the competing need to be both a discerning reader and a lenient judge (at least at first). More ideas welcome.
Dialectical notes cross-reference passages from the work with similar or contradictory passages from other works you have read and even can cross reference previous ideas from the book in question. These notes are crucial when overviewing a broad topic and seeking to understand the shape of a wider conversation and not merely one author’s voice in it.
Note taking, I think, for most people is an annoying exercise. It requires much attention and effort and crucially takes longer than reading. Paradoxically, patience with note-taking takes time to develop, especially because it takes a long time to bear fruit. A decent rule of thumb is that the more invested a person is in mastery, the more time will be spent note-taking. While the conscientious may go overboard for fear of missing something, most need only assess to what extent they are reading for enjoyment, and then what type of notes to take becomes clear.
Marking enjoyable sentences, difficult passages, crucial arguments, and genuine insights is something one can do even when reading mostly for pleasure. Fun notes offer a sense of completion and something to show for your time.
How the Uses of Books Should Inform the Writing of Books
Books lend themselves well to use by people of all levels of expertise, from professionals to novices to dilettantes. A professional who is clued in to the larger conversation can mine through a book quickly and discover the interesting and unique insights, a novice can read slowly and digest each element of the work making notes and outlines and summaries, the dilettante can sample and read superficially, reading for pleasure sometimes and at others for a deep understanding. No group is slowed down by interspersed flashcards or interactive elements, which may be useful for some, but for others superfluous. As a medium, standard books offer significant optionality to readers, a freedom to choose when to slow down, speed up, when to stop to take notes, when to skip a section. These decisions can be be made quickly, easily, and sometimes even subconsciously. While audiobooks whisk listeners onwards for hours, books progress only at the rate of your processing. Studies on eye movementreveal the advantageof a medium which does not assume the manner in which a reader will engage with the information. Assuming we are not vetting readers for expertise, book design should offer accessibility to both professional and novice readers though they read differently. Experts navigate across the page differently and chunk information more efficiently. Despite these differences, a difficult book still should offer a gateway into a subject for the novice (learnability) and seamless navigation for the expert (discoverability).
I have formulated a few ideas explaining what publishers already do and what they should do to improve the medium further. Some of these ideas transfer to long form online articles as well, and if I put together a website this year I am now on the hook to practice what I preach, otherwise you have permission to harangue me with strongly worded emails.
Authorship 101 says that a book needs a definite and discoverable structure. We’ve already talked about this with tables of contents. However, it is important to remember as well, that reading even a detailed skeleton of a work is not the work itself. If a work is all skeleton, then there will be too much room for abstract misinterpretation or the evaporation of the ideas into meaningless platitudes; there needs to be some meat, specific arguments and examples and anecdotes. However, the ratio needs to be right. Too much meat and we rightly call it fat.
Books require cues which remind readers of their location within the conceptual territory of the work. The chapter titles and or section titles restated at the top of the page, page numbers in the bottom, or even paragraph numbers at the beginning of paragraphs (which make citing nonfiction way more convenient across platforms. This is one of the pleasant things about ancient classical works for example, Republic 514a always refers to the allegory of the cave paragraph in Plato.) these all serve to contextualize the page. Footnotes give the reader assurances while reading, and can help readers generate further inquiries quickly. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies lacks footnotes and has such lackluster citations in the endnotes that I found myself growing more and more suspicious of the narratives as I read.
The Landmark History Series does everything in its power to make old historical works accessible to novice readers of classical history as well as experts. Here is the explanation of the method from the series editor, consider this whole block as though it were bold and italicized. It’s that worthy of emphasis:
Text features in Landmark editions are designed to assist the reader including side notes which are found on the outside page margin at the beginning of the chapters into which the ancient text was divided long ago by Alexandrian scholars. Normally, the first two lines of the side note display the book and chapter number and the date (if known or applicable). The third line shows the location of where the action takes place (or in some cases, a topical title). Finally, there is a summary description of the contents of the chapter. Each chapter contains section numbers in square brackets, such as [2] to mark the divisions into which scholars have traditionally divided the text for ease of search, analysis, and discussion. Running heads are placed on the top of each page of the book which at a glance provide date and place and a brief summary of the action of the first complete chapter on the page. Footnotes not only refer place-names in the text to nearby maps, as mentioned above, but they may serve to connect certain points in the text to other relevant sections, or to the work of other ancient writers and poets. They also cite particular paragraphs in the Introduction or in one or more of the appendices where the reader will find discussion of the topics or events footnoted. On occasion, they provide background information that does not appear in any of the appendices. They may also point out and briefly describe some of the major scholarly controversies over interpretation, translation, or corruption of the text. A few explanatory footnotes are quite long and detailed, but they contain important information which could not be further condensed. Footnotes and map data are repeated throughout the work to assist those who will read only selections from it, or whose reading of the text is discontinuous.
The result of this editorial care is a historical series which is deeply informative. Twenty minutes with any book in this series always lends itself to progress in understanding. And this should be our goal when putting together written works – to make our medium serve as many readers as possible.
Other innovations can and should be developed, especially for presenting long essays online. Gwern’s long essays are probably the best I have seen formatting wise. Wikipedia is acceptable. The New Yorker’s website does a poor job providing a sense of place to the reader. Audiobooks are necessarily abysmal (frequently Audible does not even include the subsections or chapter titles in their navigation pane). But when it comes to the physical book the Landmark Series is the best I know.
Realist history in one beautiful volume
A beautiful volume inviting the reader to master it.
“If there are dangerous precipices about, it is much easier and cheaper to forbid people to walk near the edge than to put up an effective fence: that is why both legislators and parents and the paid deputies of parents are always inhibiting and prohibiting and punishing and scolding and laming and cramping and delaying progress and growth instead of making the dangerous places as safe as possible and then boldly taking and allowing others to take the irreducible minimum of risk.
“It is easier to convert most people to the need for allowing their children to run physical risks than moral ones. I can remember a relative of mine who, when I was a small child, unused to horses and very much afraid of them, insisted on putting me on a rather rumbustious pony with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my agitation I would use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused at my terrors. Yet when that same lady discovered that I had found a copy of The Arabian Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was horrified, and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might have broken my neck. This way of producing hardy bodies and timid souls is so common in country houses that you may spend hours in them listening to stories of broken collar bones, broken backs, and broken necks without coming upon a single spiritual adventure or daring thought.”
A Treatise on Parents and CHildren
It’s better to teach someone to swim, chainsaw, and parachute through practice and explanation and practice rather than deadly Darwinian experience. The same goes for the moral and intellectual hazards of life.
Sebastian Garren 