📚 Finished reading: Good Work by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
It is for the most part a reframing of what Schumacher has already written about the problems of extractive economies of scale and how intermediate technologies — to be rebranded “appropriate technologies” and, ultimately, “sustainable development” — can help remedy their dehumanizing effects. The difference is in the final chapter, “The making of Good Work”, written by one Peter N. Gillingham.
It starts with a — to the modern sensibilities rather offensive — comparison of people to different types of cattle. It quickly pivots to a discussion that is more relevant today than it was in the 1970s, about the pendulum swinging from institutions to individuals, and about the potential for a malignant entity to inhabit said crumbling institutions as a hermit crab would inhabit a dead shell. So it goes… There is much talk of people feeling the need to escape abstraction and get back to doing meaningful work in the “real world”. This was, let me remind you, written almost 50 years ago. And here I thought the Internet was to be blamed for everything.
There is next to no information about Peter Gillingham online. ChatGPT-o3 managed to dig up a few nuggets which ring true: this chapter would be his only publicly available work, the California-based Intermediate Technology Institute he led had folded within a decade of Schumacher’s death, and the 1970s oil crisis-inspired movement petered out, to be replaced by the 1980s Reagonomics, the 1990s end of history, the 2000s war on terror, and the 2010s social network boom. Of course, it is now the 2020s and the preceding four decades have all in their own way continued the hollowing out of the institutions. Americans continue to check out of capitalism, with mixed success. Everything old is new again.
So then, is this book a success or a failure? It declared the extraction party over 50 years too early and for the wrong reason: it wasn’t that the world ran out of oil, but rather that the consequences of its extraction became to dire (funnily enough, both Schumacher’s own Small is Beautiful and Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems hinted that this may end up happening). The book is out of print and for the most part out of the collective mind. The movements it promoted are either dead or so transformed as to be unrecognizable.
On the other hand, the themes keep being repeated: from Nassim Taleb’s promotion of localism and abhorrence of large scale, through John Vervaeke’s video essays on the meaning crisis, to Tim Harford writing about the corrosivness of commerce in the bastion of capitalism that is the Financial Times. There was, and still is, there there. Ignore it at your own peril.
Some good news to start the week:
- Project Hail Mary, my notes on the book here, is being turned into a movie and the trailer has just been released. (↬Marty Day)
- The directors are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of the Spider-Verse, which is excellent.
- The cinematographer is Greig Fraser of Dune, which is even better.
- The star is Ryan Gosling, which, well, you can’t win them all.
📚 Finished reading: A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, having no idea how it ended up in my Kindle library. I am glad to have opened it, as I now have some semblance of a framework for how this thing we call intelligence might work. Note that the newest developments in neuroscience are just a starting point, as most of the book deals with their implications for AI and the future of humanity. If that sounds like overreach, know that by the end of the book it is. Still, these wafer-thin speculations don’t detract from the book’s meatier parts.
Confirmation bias alert: the framework repeats almost word for word the thought I had a while back — and more recently — about AI, that true general intelligence needs to be able to interact with its environment. So I may be blind to some obvious deficiencies in the argument. But then again, great minds, etc.
Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.
Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.
📚 Finished reading: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, the intellectual basis for THS. An important book when it first came out in 1943 and even more important now when embryos are being selected for their longevity and human intelligence reduced to a large language model.
📚 Finished reading: The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis, which I started after a nudge from Kyla Scanlon. A book both timeless and timely, for the reasons she listed and many more on top.
📚 Finished reading: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. Much like Nassim Taleb who started with probability and statistics only to end in the territory of ethics and values, Meadows starts with algorithms and quantities but ends with higher purpose and transcendence. A book to be re-read.
After finishing The Space Trilogy I was wondering which of C.S. Lewis’s many books I should read next. Well, Kyla Scanlon has just nudged me in the right direction with her Economic Lessons from the Screwtape Letters:
In Screwtape, evil doesn’t arrive through fire and fury. It creeps in through ease, comfort, and optimization. Screwtape wants to nudge people into passivity as a way of capturing their souls. Let them scroll. Let them spend. Let them smooth away all friction until they wake up hollow and can’t remember why.
Sounds about right.
Today, I learned about The Chandler Project, a doomed attempt to build a next-generation “personal information manager”, and it is wonderful. Just look at this beauty! Sadly, the project went bust more than a decade ago — the last update was in 2009 — but many thanks to whomever is paying to keep the lights on.
The initial development and decline of Chandler was described in the book Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg which, yes, is now on the pile. (↬Thinking With Tinderbox)
📚 Thinking With Tinderbox continues to pay dividends, even though I am not learning anything about the app’s mechanics. One of the footnotes led me to About This Particular Outliner and its parent, ATP Macintosh and now I am thinking about the greatness of pre-2016 Internet. Quite the rabbit hole.