Blowing one's mind
I subscribe to Quora, which sometimes sends me interesting emails with questions and surprising crowd-sourced answers. In this morning's inbox was a request for recommendations of books to expand the mind. Two surprising results: I had read very, very few of the recommended books, and Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" was the hands-down consensus winner. Now I suppose I'll have to read it.
The recommendations were about 10-1 in favor of non-fiction, also surprising. After Kahneman, some of the biggest hits were Richard Feynmann's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman" (also a favorite of mine) and various Jared Diamond works, usually "Collapse" or "Guns, Germs and Steel." Only one person suggested "Lolita," and no one seemed to care for "The Tin Drum" or "Absalom, Absalom" or "The Abolition of Man." The science fiction recommendations mostly were things I wouldn't read on a bet. "Atlas Shrugged" made a fairly frequent appearance. Lots of Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Dawkins. I expected a higher profile for "1984."
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"Guns, Germs and Steel" seemed to be devoted to proving that humans are all the same and the major driver in development is environmental. From what I have seen of humans, that idea has a lot of holes in it.
Of course, most men don't set out to expand their minds- they want to build a bridge, or land a rocket on a comet, or hot rod a small block Chevy, or brew the perfect beer. In pursuit of these goals, some expansion will inevitably occur.....
It's good to want things.
It strikes me as pretty plausible that individual people on average are broadly the same in different times and places. It's tougher to claim that, when it comes to effective use of resources and especially the ability to project military and economic power, all cultures are broadly the same in different times and places. Diamond was confronting the assumption that Europeans kicked butt all over the globe because they were inherently better at manipulating resources--whether because they were genetically superior or because they'd stumbled on the right culture when everyone else's culture was primitive and useless. Maybe that was so, but it's worth considering the possibility that environmental differences played a big part in who happened to be on top of that game at the time when all the world's people were brought rather suddenly into contact with each other, from the end of the 15th century forward. Not all the arguments in "G, G, and S" stand up to vigorous scrutiny, but they're well worth considering in detail.
Diamond's book really ought to have been named "Germs and more Germs", because without those, the Europeans would never have got a foot hold in the 16th century in the new world.
Too many Natives. No Columbian exchange (at least, not the way it happened), no Pototsi, no influx of silver--the mind boggles at the implications.
In Africa, germs worked against Europeans instead of for them, for a change. In the end, guns and steel still made a big difference, but maybe not a decisive one until we got good enough at medical science to overcome some of the germs. But then, "medical science" is part of the characteristic European toolset.
Yeah, and who runs Africa these days?
Heh.
Africa hasn't exactly taken over the rest of the world, either. It's allowed to stew in its own mess: not a position of cultural triumph. If Africa got uppity, there's little doubt in my mind who would win that fight.
My oldest son still keeps up with Quora, but I have dropped it. Too fascinated with China, and one has to wade through too much silliness to get to good points. Answers are ranked by people who like Quora, so there is a distillation of whatever that "type" is. I think the "type" is young, tech-savvy, aspirational - and more pseudo than I would like. The booklist is a case in point. It is not an intellectual's nor an unconventional thinker's collection. There is little that is more than 20 years old. It is fashionably bright. Diamond is just plain wrong, and Gladwell often is as well. I loved Kahneman at first, but he hasn't warn well.
I've been reading Kahneman's book, staying somewhat interested, but not loving it. It's mystifying that it should have such an enthusiastic audience, particularly since the ideas aren't unique to him or unusually well expressed.
It does seem that the Quora subjects are heavily skewed toward tech issues, particularly coding. Also, there are a lot of very young people posing questions.
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