I really like Brooks's stuff...................

 

..........the fact that he is willing to read and think about Hegel makes him all the more impressive.

thanks David

Opening paragraphs.................

 

I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning.  It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama.  A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodland and along the freshwater streams of my native state.  I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

If only I had known...........................

 

.......I would have studied gastrophysics in college.

I have no regrets.......................

 

..................................about being a History major in college (of course 1973 was a long time ago).

Polybius............................

 In London, meanwhile, John Adams composed his best-known work, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, the sole piece of writing he finished that is longer than an essay. . . .

     In this rambling constitutional study, Adams surveyed all sorts of governments in the ancient and modern worlds, and concluded, as others did, that the most effective and sustainable form is one that is "a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, extolled by Polybius."  That ancient Greek historian had tired in his work to explain the rapid rise of the Roman Republic.  Polybius wrote that he intended to analyze how "it came about that nearly the whole world fell under the power of Rome in somewhat less than fifty-three years."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

In contrast...........................

 

-Murry Davis, as literally cut-and-pasted from here

Broaden the horizon.....................

"If news were just one of the many things that we read each day, it wouldn't have the same impact.  If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today's events."

-C. John Sommerville, as excerpted from here

as quoted here

The concept of the corporation............

Why did Sloan dislike Drucker’s book so much?  It was certainly not because it was hostile to GM: the overall tone is one of admiration for the company and respect for the men who had built it.  However, Drucker raised questions that Sloan and his colleagues did not wish to discuss, and attempting to bury the book was their response to this challenge.  Professional managers did not derive their power from the ownership of the means of production.  So what gave legitimacy to the power that Sloan and his colleagues exercised?  What was the proper scope, and necessary limits, of that authority?  What defined the social role of the modern, professionally managed corporation?  These were the issues which  Drucker sought to open in The Concept of the Corporation; Sloan’s response was to close the book.

-John Kay, as extracted from this essay

Makes perfect sense to me.....

     Although I am an atheist, I have argued for over twenty-five years that true multiculturalism would make scholarly study of comparative religions the core curriculum of university humanities programs everywhere.  No society or civilization can be understood without reference to its religious roots.  Every student should graduate with a basic familiarity with the history, sacred texts, codes, rituals, and shrines of the major world religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam.  Indeed, what could be more urgent, in this time of terrorism, that to know exactly what the Quran says about jihad and how those verses have been interpreted in multiple ways in Muslim tradition?

-Camille Paglia, from Provocations

How to have an opinion worth hearing......

Think about it this way, too. It’s not sufficient to just be closely acquainted with the scientific research on a given topic. What good does a hundred scientific studies do you, if they are all confounded and misleading? Simply pointing to studies that support your arguments puts you in the minor league of opinion holders. You must cultivate a deeper knowledge by also being capable of articulating lurking factors that might render an association between any two variables spurious. Doing this requires more effort than reading a newspaper article or magazine column; including this one.

-Brian Boutwell, full post, and interesting conclusion, is here

The poker table as a laboratory.......

     To say that I had strayed from the academic path might seem like an understatement.  But I realized pretty quickly that I hadn't really left academics as much as moved to a new kind of lab for studying how people learn and make decisions.  A hand of poker takes about two minutes.  Over the course of that hand, I could be involved in up to twenty decisions.  And each hand ends with a concrete result:  I win money or I lose money.  The result of each hand provides immediate feedback on how your decisions are faring.  But it's a tricky kind of feedback because winning and losing are only loose signals of decision quality.  You can will lucky hands and lose unlucky ones.  Consequently, it's hard to leverage all that feedback for learning.

-Annie Duke,  Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts

Opening paragraphs.........................

     There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes.   One hundred ninety-two of them are covered with hair.  The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo Sapiens.  This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.  He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but also attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis, preferring to accord this honor falsely to the mighty gorilla.  He is an intensely vocal, acutely exploratory, over-crowded ape, and it is high time we examined his basic behavior.


-Desmond Morris, from the Introduction to The Naked Ape:  A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

It is never to late to study up............

Audited a history course, The Late Antiquity,  at my alma mater last semester.  The professor was interesting enough to get me to sign up for his follow-on course, Origins of Europe: Medieval Society, this semester.  The former covered the years 200 C.E to 1000 C.E..  The latter covers 1000 C.E. to about 1400.  Candidly, those are way too many centuries to cover in depth in just one semester.  What one gets is a whetting of the appetite for a few of the particulars.  So, as happens with the serendipitous nature of the Intertunnel, this blog post was discovered, and the links followed.  Oh, my!   Amazon has been consulted and the mailman put on alert.

One risk of the Intertunnel...............?

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

-David Hume

The Munger Operating System: Part 2

Avoid intense ideologies. Always consider the other side as carefully as your own.

Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology, because it cabbages up one’s mind. You’ve seen that. You see a lot of it on TV, you know preachers for instance, they’ve all got different ideas about theology and a lot of them have minds that are made of cabbage.

But that can happen with political ideology. And if you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very careful with this ideology. It’s a big danger.

In my mind I have a little example I use whenever I think about ideology, and it’s these Scandinavian canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools in the Grand Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100%. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.                                                                                    

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say “I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.” Now you can say that’s too much of an iron discipline..it’s not too much of an iron discipline. It’s not even that hard to do.

via 

Interesting paragraphs...........................................

      The Japanese government in particular is investing millions in its own studies of El Nino, and for good reason.  Japan has historically been a magnet for highly destructive Pacific typhoons, storms that, along with the earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions that bring regular ruin, have helped forge the national character traits of stoicism and mutual philanthropy.  Forecasting such traumatic occurrences would of course be a fine thing, for the national economy, for the nation's morale.  The recent accelerating ability to forecast the eruptions of volcanoes may still not have been matched by an ability to predict earthquakes.  But to balance that, a major effort is now being made in Japan to fine-tune global long-term weather forecasting, and in particular to investigate the possibilities of predicting when an El Nino - with its clustering of typhoons - is most likely to occur.


-Simon Winchester,  Pacific:  Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers

Having fun with pricing power.............

      "Dun and Bradstreet had a very good business, and Moody's had an even better business.  And basically, the single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.  If you have the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got very good business.  And if you have to have a prayer session before raising prices by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business.  I've been in both, and I know the difference."

-Warren Buffett, as answering a question from the U.S.A. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on why he had invested in Dun and Bradstreet in 1999 and 2000.

I don't believe their "study"...................

.............................comes close to answering the question.

It is striking that our brute instincts, rather than our celebrated higher cognitive faculties, are what lead to such moral acts. But why would anyone ever develop such potentially fatal instincts?

Studying us humans is endlessly interesting.  Study this if you would.

thanks greg

The headline reads................................

A self-made millionaire who studied 1,200 wealthy people found one thought pattern they all tend to avoid.

I could have made about thirty guesses before coming up with this answer:

He also noticed one thought pattern they tend to avoid: nostalgia.

Full post here.

Scent discrimination.................................

.................or, I knew something smelled funny around here.

In a 2001 study published in The Journal of Investigative Dermatology, researchers discovered that what we categorize as “Old People Smell” is likely due to one chemical compound: 2-noneral.

For their study, the scientists gathered a control group of 22 healthy individuals -- 13 males, and 9 females -- ranging in age from 26 to 75 years old. Each person bathed with odorless soap and shampoo, and was then given a T-shirt to wear (washed and prepared in such a way that no odor was detectable) for three consecutive nights. At the end of this period, swatches of the shirts were cut out examined for various chemical compounds and lipids.

Here’s what they found (the first column represents subjects under the age of 40, and the second, subjects over the age of 40)::

Science is a wonder.  Did you know that The Journal of Investigative Dermatology existed?  Me neither, but I am pleased they are on the case.  If you want to know what they found, do read the full article.

thanks craig