We should not lock our thinking into pre-defined channels via easy categorization. Also Future analysis is good and should be done more. If you've reaWe should not lock our thinking into pre-defined channels via easy categorization. Also Future analysis is good and should be done more. If you've read and mastered those two sentences, you now know the entire argument of the book.
While I was initially optimistic, since I hold a Pragmatism-inspired dislike for the idolatry of ideas, there's little attempt to either justify Johnsen's critique of categories, or to explain how we might do better.
The book isn't even consistent. For someone who dislikes categories and pre-defined answers, he often highlights the importance of setting very clearly defined long term goals, and praises the CCP for their apparent long term plans. But if we're thinking 'full-spectrum', then surely a defined goal narrows our range of desire/acceptable outcomes?
Most of this short book instead is filled with ad hoc examples of his business consulting career, praising random people as full spectrum thinkers, and assorted claims about the importance of futures analysis.
The central idea is good, but the reader has to do most of the intellectual heavy lifting here....more
I wanted to like this, but it's ultimately far more descriptive of current trends than offering any unique or valuable framing of these well known treI wanted to like this, but it's ultimately far more descriptive of current trends than offering any unique or valuable framing of these well known trends. Strangely for a book reviewer the amount of books mentioned varies widely. The chapters with lots of references offer some great quotes and reading suggestions, but many others are strangely absent....more
The best guide to thinking about AI you'll find currently out there. If you follow Mollick's substack you'll have encountered some of the main ideas, The best guide to thinking about AI you'll find currently out there. If you follow Mollick's substack you'll have encountered some of the main ideas, but it's still an engaging and thoughtful read.
An impressively clear introduction to Pragmatism as a philosophy. There are areas you will need to chew through, and some basic senClear and effective
An impressively clear introduction to Pragmatism as a philosophy. There are areas you will need to chew through, and some basic sense of who the main people are will help, but it impressively achieves its stated goal of introducing and exploring (and advocating) pragmatism as a philosophy.
Will have to check out others in this MIT series if this is in any way the standard. ...more
Charming as Abdaal’s work usually is. The focus on enjoying work as a basis for productivity is good. Though you can tell he struggled with the book. Charming as Abdaal’s work usually is. The focus on enjoying work as a basis for productivity is good. Though you can tell he struggled with the book. Once the basis idea is in place there’s not a lot else there. And I was surprised that for someone who may cite several scientific studies per video, each big idea had just one studied extrapolated to a long degree. Better than your average entry in this genre though. ...more
A generally excellent account of the early American Pragmatists. Menand writes about ideas and intellectual debate with a clarity few public authors cA generally excellent account of the early American Pragmatists. Menand writes about ideas and intellectual debate with a clarity few public authors can match. The book could have been about 50-80 pages shorter however. There are long asides about the debates on slavery and race which are interesting but sit as only distant context to the focus of the book. Making it sometimes hard to know why you’re being told some information whether the central figure will pop up again later in the story or not. ...more
This is not a textbook or MBA handbook, rather it is an account of two years in the classroom, and reflection on the role and impact of studying in suThis is not a textbook or MBA handbook, rather it is an account of two years in the classroom, and reflection on the role and impact of studying in such a prestigious location.
As a genre, I rather like accounts of students in specific fields & substantive reflections on those who are entering their field. My favorite among the type is Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef covering his time at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America). What They Teach You at Harvard Business School isnt quite as charming, but there is an engaging and thoughtful tale, and Delves Broughton does well to bring the environment, people and educational challenge to life.
In my view, what makes journalistic tours of unusual communities interesting is the enthusiasm of the author for the material and field they are entering. Delves Broughton offers that through 2/3rds of the book and these are the most interesting sections. However as his own fortunes sour (he was one of just a handful of graduating students not to get an internship mid-way through nor job on completion), and with the post-script of the 2008 financial crisis, he turns into an open critic of the field.
His analysis is good and I generally agree with it, but as with any tour guide, the moment they turn critical of the animals in the zoo is the moment the fun stops. I'd rather a book which takes an explicitly analytical basis - Such as The Golden Passport by Duff McDonald - rather than the slow drift towards disillusionment on offer here. There's also a slight disconnect between the knowledge he gains and the critiques he later offers. Can a school be responsible for the failure of people who later in life make ethical or intellectual errors? Were their errors tied to what they learned at the school and the way the school thinks or other factors? Delves Broughton makes a partial attempt at connecting them - such as the hubris, the unquestioned assumptions behind the financial models - but these seem additions to his critique not central to it.
Still, we need more books about university life. It's increasingly a place where much of society will go, and we should think more seriously about how it works and what role it serves society. So this was a worthwhile read. ...more
A good overview of an important topic. I'd have liked a little more theory to establish what inflation is. The author instead focuses on teasing out eA good overview of an important topic. I'd have liked a little more theory to establish what inflation is. The author instead focuses on teasing out economic insights from 20th century political history (there's a few Roman references to justify the 2,000 years subtitle), and some general observations of the challenges diagnosing and responding to the 2021-2023 inflation squall (the book was finished in Jan 2023).
There should be an edict among publishers: The older and more esteemed an author, the greater the scrutiny and questioning that should be applied befoThere should be an edict among publishers: The older and more esteemed an author, the greater the scrutiny and questioning that should be applied before allowing publication.
This is a rambling, contradictory and pointless book. Gray does not know who he is arguing with, or care what they stand for, but he Does.Not.Like.IT. Instead of argument or analysis, you have an aging European writer memorializing earlier European writers as a way of decrying the present.
The closest the book comes to an argument is that having set up the straw man that liberalism had a totalizing global influence in 1989, Gray delights in highlighting the presence of alternate actors (mainly Russia and China) as somehow obvious proof that all liberalism has failed. Along the way he takes many a sideswipe at woke modern-day liberals, though he never pauses to examine anything they say.
Any editor undaunted by the famous name would have surely questioned the whiplash transitions that occur in Gray's 'argument'. In one case, he spends 2 pages describing the torture of a black US WW2 veteran in the 1950s, and then concludes by declaring modern liberals are evidence of racism rather than its cure. At another point he describes medieval Tibetan monks who could tolerate divergent views within their midst, and uses that to decry the inhumanity of modern western university campuses where no dissent is allowed (We here must take the word of the good Professor from Oxford with visiting positions at Yale and Harvard as evidence alone).
What really stands out however is just how tired the attack is. The modern state is too big! atheists are trying to create their own religion! Christianity is the foundation of all modern ideas! The west's decadent decline is right around the corner! Yawn.
We've heard it all a thousand times before on the op-ed pages, and sprinkling in some large paragraphs of Hobbes amongst this pamplet of a book does not make it any more coherent. Indeed, Gray amusingly offers a quote of a piece he wrote in 1989 where he claimed the US was on the verge of collapse among economic decline and an uncontrollable crime wave. That the reverse was evidently true in the 1990s is not something he has evidently recognised, nor offset his evident glee in his pessimistic predictions of collapse in 2023.
Having seen others describe and praise this book I had genuinely looked forward to it. But The New Leviathans is a superficial and lazy book. Go find a young writer to engage with. At least then you'll know they've been edited properly....more
"My experience is what I agree to attend to " wrote William James in 1890. That is still true, though many of us today feel the world 'agree' no longe"My experience is what I agree to attend to " wrote William James in 1890. That is still true, though many of us today feel the world 'agree' no longer holds primacy in that sentence. We find ourselves looking at our phones, we catch ourselves an hour later still scrolling, we can't get the noise of the world to stop for just the moment we need to catch our breath.
Resisting our contemporary 'Attention Economy' is hard, but Jenny Odell has penned a beautiful series of essays on not only why, but how and to what end we should attempt to do so. Her goal, she stresses, is not simply to 'do nothing', and, though there's a slight ambivalence, nor does she want to smash the system, banning Facebook, TikTok and the others who profit from our attention.
Rather, while the structural factors certainly matter, Odell wants to stress the importance of the personal response. Of slowly learning the self-discipline to 'agree to attend' to the world. Not simply to avoid, but as an intensely political act of engagement with the things that are worth attending to. Community, nature, our own rhythms and potent creativity. To maintain what is valuable, first we must be able to attend to it, Odell wants to argue.
How to do nothing is a mixed book in some ways, exploring the question of attention at individual, social and environmental levels. In the first and third of those, Odell is a wise, humane, moving writer who teases out nuance and looks with fresh eyes at tired questions. I adored many of these meditations, and there's a clear authorial voice that can be clearly heard.
The social analysis however never quite seemed to work for me. Perhaps that's my own unwillingness to listen. I believe that the very virtues of local knowledge and humility are reasons why capitalism works, rather than the values lost in its wake. I find her San Francisco politics superficially appealing, and yet can't help but remark on its old style conservative sentiments. In search of security amidst a world of noise and confusion, Odell, like many progressives, wants to stress place, community and continuity. The tone also seems more black and white, as she reads and invokes a series of anti-capitalist books, taking their critiques as the obvious and whole story.
No matter. This is a wonderful book of many great insights and thoughtful conversations. I am slowly trying to get my head around the modern attention economy, and how knowledge workers such as myself can carve out space within it. Maybe James is still right. I hope so....more
I've deliberately avoided most of the efforts to write about the COVID 19 pandemic. It was either too depressing (for work focused on the human cost) I've deliberately avoided most of the efforts to write about the COVID 19 pandemic. It was either too depressing (for work focused on the human cost) or too early (for work focused on the social implications). Bratton's book doesn't quite escape its mid-pandemic moment of conception, but it's a thoughtful and bold attempt to explore the implications of the pandemic for politics and philosophy.
Bratton's argument is two-fold. First, he argues that COVID has revealed the need for a radically different 'positive biopolitics', operating at a planetary level, in order to address both the pandemic and its future cases (or equivalent challenges such as climate change). In the face of such 'real' events, he argues we need far better efforts to understand, track and respond to the threats than we are currently able. He is quite explicit that this would mean government(s) with power to compel, surveil and if need be, compel, in order to protect the organism of society.
Second, Bratton realises that the biggest challenge to his argument is not the nutters on the right screaming 'PLANDEMIC!', but the academic left. Vast elements of the academy, especially those in the baby (boomer) generation, have imbibed a distorted form of Foucault that sees all power as illegitimate and unethical and all social structures as the illicit constructions of the powerful. As such, 'biopolitics', where we take the health of the species as an essential political concern, can only and ever be seen as a totalitarian movement (a claim far too many reputable scholars made about government plans for lockdowns and vaccines). The unhappy result has been a performative form of politics which is also a deeply conservative movement. Like other conservative movements of previous eras, this group considers itself smarter and more moral than its adversaries, and seeks to defend a comfortable position in the social hierarchy by misquoting sacred texts. 'Read your Foucault properly' Bratton pleads, though I suspect he knows its a lost cause for the time being.
'The Revenge of the Real' is a provocation of a book that still bears its birthmarks. Bratton sees western society as having fundamentally failed the test of COVID-19, while he praises the achievements of China. I'm not sure either claim is quite right. Across the world, the supposedly isolated individuals of western societies largely adhered to unprecedented lockdowns, in order to save their grandparents. Meanwhile, the economic, social and political systems, while clearly strained immensely, bent but did not break (arguably no worse than any other major crisis over the last half-century). And the China story was always one with an asterisk - how real were its figures, and how long could it stay closed to the world.
Personally, I can't endorse the substance of Bratton's views, even if i'm sympathetic in principle. This is partly because he doesn't really do enough to substantiate what that substance is. The book is as much an effort to clear space for his political argument, as an effort at the political argument. Bratton's biopolitics also seems to require a rather herculean, if not Utopian conception of the role of models to help us interpret society. Models have their uses, especially when it comes to some parts of society, but as any good modeler will tell you, 'every model is wrong'. So it's a question of how many models, how used, how evolved, and what you want to achieve which shape the ultimate value of models.
I am sympathetic however, because as a historian I see the trajectory towards global governance in both mindset and structure as moving in the direction Bratton urges, and generally to the benefit of humanity. As a utilitarian, I also have no problem with some of the requirements for imposition he seeks, even if I can't and won't endorse his broader attacks on individualism. And finally, as someone who values strategy, the essential question is always a diagnostic 'what is really going on here'. Bratton wields the 'realness' of the coronavirus like a baseball bat against his adversaries, but it is nice to see someone trying to actually grapple with an indifferent universe, when too many believe that absent coercive power we could construct any form of reality we wish.
Personally, I suspect we are victims of our success when it comes to COVID. The world did just enough to ensure society didn't break. Those expecting or hoping for a radical change will be disappointed, those who saw it all as an overblown effort at social control will feel vindicated, and those who dutifully sacrificed from nurses to healthy 19yr-olds who spent lost prime years of life, will never be thanked or recognised properly. But at some point we will need to think clearly about how we might do better next time, but we probably can't quite get a good perspective on what we've been through just yet....more
Extraordinary. Collins provides the clearest explanation I've encountered of what it is intellectuals do, how they work and why some succeed. For acadExtraordinary. Collins provides the clearest explanation I've encountered of what it is intellectuals do, how they work and why some succeed. For academics, the first 75 pages should be mandatory reading.
'Sociology of Philosophies' is a comparative study of intellectual networks of philosophers. It ranges from Ancient Greece, China and India, through the medieval period, and the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a lifetime of work.
Collins argues that the foundation of intellectual life is 'first of all conflict and disagreement'. All thought he believes is an 'aftermath or preparation of communication'. As such, by tracing who argued with who, we can see the development of ideas, and learn about why ideas change, what counts as creativity, and how networks and arguments evolve. There is useful, fascinating and well explained detail on what the content of those ideas are across these many epochs, but Collins focus is how the ideas-work was done.
Thanks to the multi-decade study behind this book, Collins comes to a few important conclusions about intellectual life. First, he argues there is rarely more than 3-6 centers of 'attention' which define the core of the intellectual world. There is limited capacity for attention, and so what defines the 'superstars' from the rest of us, is their timing and networks for locating their work within one of these centers of attention. Drawing on related studies, the eminent tend to be slightly more prolific and slightly better at identifying puzzles that draw others in (creating an incentive for a response), but this network hub position is essential.
In explaining the intellectual world in this way, Collins makes the best argument I've yet encountered for the role of the Literature Review. That most hated of PhD labours, and a tiresome challenge for many a scholar. Yet it is only by showing how our ideas connect to the core arguments that attention is likely to come our way. Creativity comes from the merging of ideas in new places, and thus it is a communicative act.
For this reason Collins also argues that there are almost no isolated geniuses. Instead he emphasises the role of face-to-face networks.First, he shows that superstar scholars typically have superstar supervisors. This may be because of location and selection (today the very best want to study at Harvard etc), but Collins suggests it is also because the eminent have the clearest insight into how the networks, arguments and puzzles are emerging and pass on these insights to their students.
Collins also makes the case for the academic lecture and workshop, face-to-face are the 'core activities from which the sacred object "truth" arises". Despite the introduction of the written word, and the mass distribution of books across recent centuries, he shows that the academic networks of ancient china or India resemble those of Western Europe in the early 20th centuries. Thinking is done together, not as one genius with a book and a pen. An insight I firmly agree with, and think could be much more usefully brought into contemporary academic analysis.
There is much much more to this book, not least the content of it, offering an engaging network analysis with many fresh insights into why names such as Socrates come down to us, while the more influential-in-their-own-time sophists are forgotten. Likewise, I learned much about the structure of Chinese and Indian philosophy, though at least a passing knowledge of each would benefit the reader.
I cannot claim to have read all the book. Much as I wanted to lose a month doing nothing else, I reluctantly had to give an 'academic read' to many of the empirical chapters. Still, I know I will return time and again to them. And the theoretical work, the broader insights into what intellectuals do, and why they act as they do, are compelling and can and should be read for their own sake.
There are some rare books which you read and suddenly the world makes a little more sense. As an academic, this is one of those books. ...more
An engaging if diverse account of why wars begin and why some paths to peace have proven successful.
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and IAn engaging if diverse account of why wars begin and why some paths to peace have proven successful.
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I'm still not entirely sure why. I agree with many of Blattman's analysis. Especially his first and most important point: Peace is actually the default within contesting groups, and we err by first and primarily looking at conflicts to understand security. Finally I think there's immense wisdom in his concluding point, advocating 'peacemeal' efforts, taking small steps towards piece, rather than large, centralized social change endeavours.
Perhaps the heart of the difference is philosophical. Blattman, an economist by training, explains war by creating mini models about how the world works, and through very basic assumptions (such as game theory) explains why groups are likely to cooperate or contest. There's a quasi aim at comprehensiveness in explanation, though it's not fully pursued. It's also notable that in the introduction when he explains the extensive research behind the book, the listed fields are 'economists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists and policymakers have learned' (p.16). Is it petty of me to wonder where the field of Strategy or History (especially military history) are? Even if names such as Schelling and Blainey do pop up (and even Clausewitz, albeit not in a substantive way).
At the same time, Blattman has spent many years living and working in NGO groups seeking development and stability in some pretty war-torn places. And he has a lot of compelling stories about how those places changed, some for the better. Likewise, when he turns to his stronger field, that of causes of peace, there is a broad and rich set of insights and analysis. From why some forms of sanctions and peacekeepers work, to why some of the proposed 'obvious' assumptions (such as more female leaders leading to peace, or the inevitability of wars over water) don't always pan out. So much of the book is thus quite free of models, and quite willing to live in a 'dappled world' (to borrow Nancy Cartwright's term) where we shouldn't expect elegant or consistent theoretical effects.
Perhaps I'm simply not the right audience for this book. It's a very richly researched and thoughtful book, but one aimed at a large public audience. And perhaps scholars who don't think about war nearly as much as they should (almost all the blurbs on the back are economists or physical scientists). As Blattman says, once you get interested in how do we prevent war, it's hard to care about anything else. It is still, the first order question. Especially in a world of thousands of nuclear weapons.
So we need more books like this, we need the question examined from those with a real diversity of backgrounds, and Blattman has both the academic and on-the-ground experience to provide rich insights, in an easy to read fashion.
Hopefully you'll get more out of it, but I remain slightly confused as to just what didn't quite sit right with me for this one. ...more
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