“As a part of this course, I’m sharing rough drafts of pieces of a manuscript I am working on, a sort of textbook on Marx’s political economy.
I’m experimenting with crowd sourcing the revision process.”
http://davidharvey.org/2022/01/new-course-the-abc-of-contemporary-capital/
I’ve talked about Hypothes.is for annotating in the past. I haven’t watched this particularly series, but I have read some of Harvey’s books and have found them useful. Bookmarking for later.
“The positively charged particle at the heart of the atom is an object of unspeakable complexity, one that changes its appearance depending on how it is probed. We’ve attempted to connect the proton’s many faces to form the most complete picture yet.”
-Charlie Wood, “Inside the Proton, the ‘Most Complicated Thing You Could Possibly Imagine.” Quanta Magazine. October 19, 2022
“3. “Not wanting something is as good as having it.” — If you don’t want something, you’re just as satisfied as someone who has it. Naval Ravikant says that “…desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”…
42. “It’s easier to resist in the beginning than the end.” — Mistakes become harder to correct the longer they linger. Sunk costs play tricks on us. Suck it up and rip the bandaid off now. Toxic relationships, bad hires and tough conversations. It’s immediate pain versus chronic pain…
82. “Play long-term games. Compound returns.” — Focus on the long-term. Most benefits come from later stages of compounding. Pick up habits that you can see yourself sticking with. Jeff Bezos says to focus on what doesn’t change…
90. “Live below your means for freedom and options.” — Establish a margin of safety to take more risks. James Clear says that ‘Your success depends on the risks you take. Your survival depends on the risks you avoid.‘
Dru Riley, “100 Rules — Personal Philosophy.” druriley.com. Accessed August 20, 2022
I might tweak some of these, such as 82 should be infinite games and build on the ideas of James Carse in Finite and Infinite Games. But, this is a good list.
“…I always resist the “classics is impractical” line that people love to come up with when they are critical of the higher study of these fields. You can study accounting. It’s authentically practical in one way. But when your father dies, your accounting degree is not going to help you at all to process that experience. Homer will help you. The Odyssey will help you. Great literature will help you think about mortality and losing loved ones. That seems very practical to me.
A broad education in which you’re deeply read in literature, and history, and philosophy, and mathematics, and science: this teaches us how to be human beings and it teaches us also how to be citizens. I know that sounds very idealistic, but if the current social and political situation in this country is in any way a marker of what a generation spent focusing on STEM does, then I think clearly we need a different answer. The crude preoccupation with moneymaking as the only goal of a college education is giving us a citizenry that is extremely degraded, as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s only the crudest and least interesting practicality that has no time for the humanities.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, “Daniel Mendelsohn on the Odyssey.” The Octavian Report. August 12, 2022
Of course, an important question is which Odyssey do you read, Emily Wilson’s, Richmond Lattimore’s or someone else’s? Another think that I found interesting is how they talked about life being tragedy and comedy modes of viewing the world mentioned a few days ago.
“DARVO is an acronym for “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”. It refers to a reaction that alleged perpetrators of wrongdoing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior.[1] Some researchers and advocates have indicated that it can be as a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.[2][3][4] An abuser (or alleged abuser) denies the abuse ever took place, attacks the person that alleged abuse (often the victim) for attempting to hold the abuser (or alleged abuser) accountable for their actions, and claims that they are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing what may be a reality of victim and offender.[2][4] It often involves not just “playing the victim” but also victim blaming.[3]
-Wikipedia contributors, “DARVO,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DARVO&oldid=1100548671 (accessed August 11, 2022).
Not a term I had heard before. h/t emptywheel. See also Identifying a Stupid Person.
Bookmarking. h/t Hacker news.
I saw this in a Reddit thread and thought I’d save it for later.
“A single, otherwise unremarkable public high school in Florida has won 13 out of the most recent 14 National Math Championships, a staggeringly successful dynasty for an otherwise average school. It’s accomplished this through treating math competition as any other sport, identifying talent as early as elementary school and developing them over the course of several years through a completely redesigned curriculum. An emphasis on speed also is crucial, and the results are pretty inarguable: The margin of victory at the national title over the past 14 years has averaged 315 points, which in 2021 jumped to 920 points.”
Walt Hickey, “Lottos, ShotSpotter, Mathletes.” Numlock News. July 15, 2022
The Wall Street Journal article is pretty interesting, I particularly liked this comment:
Will Frazer popped out of his flaming red Corvette as his students were trickling into the classrooms. A bond trader on Wall Street in the 1980s, Mr. Frazer retired young and moved to Florida, where he became a scratch golfer and lived the dream for a decade. Then he got bored.
He took a job at Buchholz coaching golf, switched to teaching math, quickly formed a math team, applied the lessons of his experience in finance and turned a bunch of teenage quants into a fearsome winning machine.
“The difference between what I do now and what I did on Wall Street is that I used to get paid money,” said Mr. Frazer, 63. “Now we get trophies.”
-Ben Cohen, “How a Public School in Florida Built America’s Greatest Math Team.” The Wall Street Journal. July 4, 2022
Paying someone to find and develop talent works not only for math, but pretty much everything in life. It makes you wonder why communities do not pay people to do this kind of thing for qualities they want more of. Want more STEM majors? Want more soccer players? Want chess champions? There’s a technique for that.
László Polgár also offers an interesting example because he was not able to select for top talent, he simply helped develop it in his own children. Presumably, if he had interest, there might be genetic factors in play, but I’d guess the bulk of his daughter’s success came from development. No reason this couldn’t be replicated in a million different ways. In the age-old question of Nature vs. Nurture, it would probably lead to a lot better outcomes if we tried a lot more nurture.
cafebedouin.org 