Author: Promise

The death of the public intellectual: is Hailey Bieber the new Susan Sontag?

1. In 1965, William F. Buckley Jr., a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservative debated James Baldwin, a black civil rights activist, on the question: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of African Americans?”. By the end of the debate, Baldwin had swayed the views of the mostly conservative, upper-class British audience in his favor.
2. Nowadays, the people shaping culture are the influencers. They aren’t writing essays or engaging in debates. They simply exist and the culture follows. It used to be public intellectuals shaping society’s ideas. Now, influencers shape society’s desires.
3. In contemporary times, debates are less about exchanging ideas and more about ‘owning’ the other side. In a way, debates are now more about performance instead of seeking truth.
4. The modus operandi of academics nowadays is to write paywalled papers for other academics. Those who try to venture out of the ivory tower to comment on society are often told to stay in their lanes or stay silent.
5. There’s the temptation to think that there is a scarcity of public intellectuals because everything there is to say has already been said. However, even if that was true, the ideas that have been shared have not yet been shared by you, right now, in this context.

The Ecstasy of Deep Influence: Extending Jonathan Lethem’s arguments to the LLM era

1. Originality isn’t some sacred, inviolable thing. Everyone is always remixing everyone else. That’s how it’s always been, and will continue to be.
2. Using LLMs now is like reading, Googling, or looking up a word in a thesaurus. Personally, I use it like I would Wikipedia
3. Your ideas were always stitched together from other people’s stuff. What makes your work yours isn’t the ingredients, it’s how your personal quirks flavor the mix.
4. The big issue isn’t that artists and authors don’t get paid when their output is used to train AI, but that there are just a handful of companies or nations controlling all the LLMs in the world.
5. The more you use LLMs, the more it changes how you think. It reflects you back at yourself. You shape it, and it shapes you. To fully unlock its capabilities, don’t lock eyes with it like it’s some digital god. Instead, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it and look through it, with it, towards something else. Treat it like a co-panelist on stage next to you. That’s how you avoid the AI swallowing your brain whole.
6. LLMs are like a supercharged version of social media, especially for those who have a large following. Both have an aggregated hivemind (LLMs greater by many factors). Both have emergent wisdom/madness of the crowd (Depending on what you post/prompt)

Heyman, G. M. (2009). Addiction: A disorder of choice. Harvard University Press.

Preface

Chapter 1 – Responses to Addiction

• 19th century opium users were categorized into three groups: “opium-eaters”, who drank tinctures made from opium and alcohol (aka, laudanum); opium smokers, who smoked opium as one would a cigarette; and, heroin sniffers, who sniffed powdered forms of the drug through their nostrils.
  • Opium-eaters were usually wealthy and well-to-do people who would typically get their fix from a doctor. They consumed their drugs in private and usually tried to keep their habit secret. In contrast, opium smokers and heroin sniffers were typically social outsiders, e.g., gamblers, prostitutes, delinquents and unemployed. Unlike the opium-eaters, both opium smokers and heroin sniffers engaged in their habit socially, in the company of other users.
• With time, a divide emerged in how society treated the different categories of opium use. Because opium smoking and heroin sniffing was done in the open and attracted social outsiders, it fell under the domain of law enforcement. On the other hand, opium-eating became more strongly associated with the medical profession. In other words, opium-eaters were seen as people who needed help, while other categories were seen as the scum of the earth.
• When the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was passed in the US, opiate and cocaine use were deemed illegal activities. Consequently, opium-eating and opium smoking all but disappeared there. The same fate didn’t befall heroin, though. Instead, criminal gangs took over the distribution of the drug causing its price to increase. With more money needed to get less heroin, users stopped sniffing and started injecting the drug directly into their veins to get high. [As a side note, reading this reminded me of Claude Brown’s autobiographical novel, ‘Manchild in the Promised Land’ where he describes how heroin decimated the Black community in Harlem, New York from the 1940s-50s].
• Some view addiction as a disease and that scientific research would eventually provide effective treatments for it. An unspoken assumption of this view, however, is that if an addiction is not a disease, then it must be the result of deliberate actions which must be appropriately punished (usually by law enforcement).

Chapter 2 – The First Drug Epidemic

• The behavioral effects of a drug vary as a function of the environmental setting and the individual.
• It is interesting that Ancient Egypt, Greek or Roman writers did not see opium as something that could be harmful to the individual or society. Instead, they praised its medicinal benefits.
• Europeans were introduced to tobacco smoking during the Columbian Exchange. When smoking got to the Chinese, they took the act a step further by mixing in opium. This is significant because smoking opium allows its active agent, morphine, get to the brain quickly. It is therefore no surprise that more people started consuming opium in this manner. For the first time, a large group of people started taking opium for its intoxicating effects, rather than its medicinal benefits. Even when the Chinese emperor banned the sale of opium in 1725, the decree was impossible to enforce due to how deeply ingrained it was in the Chinese society at the time.
• Numerous factors may have contributed to China, rather than Europe or South America, being the site of the first drug epidemic: (1) Maybe the Chinese had many people with disposable income and leisure time, as well as many people able to do trade with Europeans; (2) Perhaps cultural beliefs and norms were at play, for instance, Middle Age Europe saw opiates as medicine, while Middle Age China saw opiates as both medicine and aphrodisiacs; (3) Many Chinese cannot consume alcohol due to genetic factors that make them unable to process acetaldehyde. Perhaps smoked opium served as substitute for alcohol for attaining intoxication.
• During the Vietnam War, opium addiction rates among US soldiers was 7 times higher than marijuana addiction rates. This suggests that opiates are more addictive than marijuana. The biggest contributor to this observation seems to be how cheap and easy it was for the soldiers to access opium in Vietnam. Compared to being the US, there were also no stigma or sanctions associated with consuming it. There is the added fact that soldiers were surrounded by peers who also used opium.

Chapter 3 – Addiction in the First Person

• The appeal of addictive drugs is found in the uniqueness of the subjective experiences it can provide to the user.
• There is a category of addicts who fly under society’s radar because they act as functional members of society while regularly abusing opiates.

Chapter 4 – Once an Addict, Always an Addict?

• Studies aggregating nationwide survey data from the US appear to suggest that people are likely to stop consuming drugs at clinically significant levels in their late 20s – early 30s.
• The pharmacology of a drug appears to be responsible for determining when drug use transitions into abuse; on the other hand, individual factors (e.g., presence of other psychiatric disorders) appear to influence quitting addictive behaviors
• Whether addicts quit or continue to consume drugs is largely dependent on the ability to take advantage of nondrug alternatives available to them.
• When there are immediate and salient consequences for reducing drug use, e.g., job loss or gift vouchers, addicts will comply

Chapter 5 – Voluntary Behavior, Disease, and Addiction

• “We inherit genes; we do not inherit behaviors”.
• Addicts may learn to ignore their cravings when the incentive structures in their lives are modified. When the urge to use drugs is in conflict with the urge to do better work or be a better parent or pay the bills, drug use will decrease
• To determine whether an act is voluntary or involuntary, the root is not found in their genes or brain, but in their behavior.
• 17th century English clergymen adopted the view that addiction was a disease because they could not fathom how struggling church members could continue drinking despite having drinking-related problems. Although it is not immediately apparent, this view is a formulation of the neoclassical economic assumption that humans are inherently rational beings who always make decisions that are in their best interests. Accordingly, in this view, any deviations from rational behavior have to be due to disease.
• The key defining factor determining whether an act is voluntary is whether it varies as a function of consequences (e.g., costs, benefits, the opinions of others, cultural values, self-esteem, and other factors influencing decision-making). Involuntary acts, on the other hand, are mostly elicited by the preceding stimuli (e.g., urges) and is little affected by consequences.
• In an intervention where patients could earn vouchers for producing drug-free urine tests, drug use reduced. This is called contingency management. This pattern of reduced drug use even continued after the intervention was over.
• When cues predict that there won’t be any opportunity to use a drug, cravings decrease (e.g., there is usually no urge to smoke in a plane, despite the ‘no-smoking’ sign flashed). Yet, the same cues in another context (e.g., gas station) may signal an opportunity to use the drug, and the cravings increase.

Chapter 6 – Addiction and Choice

• Addiction depends on 3 factors: (1) general principles of choice and decision making; (2) behavioral effects of addictive drugs; (3) individual and environmental factors affecting choice
• Choice Principle I: The values of outcomes influence how people make choices, and people’s choices also change the value of outcomes over time. That’s why preferences are dynamic and change with time. New activities that were exciting at first can become boring and activities that were boring at some point in the past can be perceived as interesting.
• Choice Principle II: In any given context, it is possible to choose between available items one at a time (local choice), or to organize the items into sequences and choose between different sequences (global choice). Local choice is simple but ignores the dynamics between choice and changes in value. Global choice, on the other hand, is conscious of these dynamics.
• Choice Principle III: People always choose what they consider the better option. If they are in the local frame, that means choosing the option that currently has the higher value; if they are in the global frame, this means choosing the sequence or collection of items with the higher value
• People have a natural inclination to make choices in the local frame often because the arrangement of items of choice into sequences (i.e., global frame) is more abstract and not salient. However, it is possible to arrange conditions such that people choose in a global frame
• When decisions are made continually within the local frame, it can lead to overconsumption, which is one of the conditions for an addiction.
• In the local frame, the value of drug use to the lonely addict is always higher than the value of nondrug activities (e.g., working and positive nondrug social interactions) because of the subjective pleasures of intoxication and the pain of withdrawal. However, because of a combination of tolerance to drugs (i.e., needing a larger dose to get the same high), legal consequences, and social stigma, each instance of drug use reduces the value of the next instance of drug use in the local frame.
• In the global frame, the value of a sequence of drug use pales in comparison to the value of a sequence of nondrug activities (e.g., working and positive nondrug social interactions). Hence, the decision is made to engage in the nondrug activities instead.
• When addicts are regretting past behavior or anticipating future relapses, they are in the global frame.
• One reason explaining the temptation of the local frame is that the immediate benefits (i.e., the ‘high’ gotten from the addictive substance) is immediate, while the costs (e.g., hangovers, social stigma, legal consequences, poor health) are delayed, indirect, uncertain and abstract at the time of choice.
• It is difficult for addicts to quit if they are in the local frame because: (1) the benefits of nondrug activities are not immediate; (2) the benefits of the drug use are immediate and outweigh that of nondrug activities – even in the worst days of drug use!
• Successful quitting of an addiction requires a commitment to the global frame which only begins to accrue benefits when a pattern of engagement in nondrug activities, rather than a single instance, is established.
• In the last choice in a series of choices, the distinction between the local and global frame disappears. Thus, an addict that thinks ‘This is the last time I will take this drug’ is settling into the local frame where the value of the addictive substance outweighs nondrug activities.
• One day of drug use doesn’t render a person an addict. Rather, it is the continual treatment of all opportunities to use the drug as ‘one day’ that eventually leads to an addiction.
• Because the arrangement of items of choice into sequences (i.e., global frame) is more abstract, it usually take more deliberate effort to make them salient.
• Choices in the local frame correspond to the discrete activities we engage in from day-to-day, while choices in the global frame are usually abstractions that can only be accessed through the imagination or aids to imagination (e.g., trackers, planners, schedules) [As another side note, many of the spiritual exercises engaged in as part of religious practice, (e.g., meditation, praying, fasting, looking to qualifying for heaven or avoiding hell) all function, at a behavioral level, as a means of transitioning the individual from a local frame to the global frame].

Chapter 7 – Voluntary Behavior: An Engine for Change

• Dopamine, a neurotransmitter often invoked in addiction theories, does not distinguish between addictive substances and nonaddictive substances. Activities such as exercise and even a painful pinch of a rat’s tail (e.g., D’Angio et al., 1987) leads to the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens region of the brain.
• Substances that lend themselves to addiction have the following properties: (1) they have immediate benefits; (2) they have delayed or hidden costs; (3) they reduce the value of other nonaddictive activities in their lives; (4) they encourage the local frame or undermine the global frame; (5) they are still consumed, even if additional instances of consumption reduce the value of the next instance of consumption.
• Nonaddictive activities and substances are not behaviorally toxic. That is, they do not undermine the value of other activities or substances. For instance, day-to-day activities (e.g., work or physical exercise) does not undermine the value of healthy leisure activities. The converse is the case as well, healthy leisure activities do not undermine the value of work or physical exercise.
• Nonaddictive substances and activities, on the other hand, undermine the value of both the next instance of consumption, as well as the value of nonaddictive substances and activities in their lives. An addict hates the state of addiction, and may be unwilling to engage in work or other healthy alternatives
• Addictive substances or activities do not lead to easily lead to satiation or fatigue. This tendency eventually leads to tolerance where more of the addictive substance or activity is needed to provide the same level of satisfaction
• Addictive substances impair the ability to shift into the global choice frame.
• Choice depends on the context. The value of an activity or substance to a decision-maker is determined by both their intrinsic properties, as well as the properties of the competing alternatives.
• Choices that have higher value in the global frame are usually beneficial to the decision maker in the long run. However, because choices in the global frame are abstract, any physical and/or cognitive efforts made to make them more salient (e.g., planning, scheduling and tracking) are also valuable activities that will benefit the decision-maker in the long run.
• In their day-to-day lives, individuals do not weigh all the short-term or long-term consequences of each choice they make. What people typically do instead, is either adopt private rules of conduct or follow culturally transmitted norms for what constitute acceptable social behavior
• Certain religious practices also fall under the category of socially transmitted norms that govern behavior – even in private. Kendler et al. (1997) and Gartner et al. (1991) are few of the studies demonstrating the negative correlation between being engaged in religious practices and drug addiction or drug use when in stressful situations.
• When certain religious values are internalized, the individual is more likely to operate in a global frame where benefits and consequences of day-to-day choices no longer salient at the local level. Instead, the decision-making process is simplified into whether or not the religious prescriptions apply to their particular situation. That said, there are obviously instances where private rules of conduct might be beneficial for entering the global frame but are at odds with the prevailing social norms.
• One reason for relapses may be due to always expending cognitive effort on reviewing the costs and benefits of all alternatives at every point of decision making, instead of abiding by prudential rules of conduct (private or socially mediated) that make the global frame more salient.
• “[A]ddicts are not compulsive drug users. They choose to keep using drugs, and they can – and do – choose to quit”

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.

Introduction

1. The state made society more legible by taking complex social practices, such as naming customs or land tenure customs, and created a standard format to easily record and monitor these social practices.
2. Example from nature: Natural honeycombs form intricate patterns that don’t make it easy for the honey to be extracted. Artificial bee hives, on the other hand, are designed to solve the problem of the beekeeper, not the bees.
3. The most tragic instances of state-initiated social engineering had the following elements: (a) administrative ordering of nature and society; (b) high modernist ideology characterized by hubris about scientific progress and the expectation that scientific order underpins social order; (c) an authoritarian state able to use its full power to execute high-modernist ideology; (d) a passive/weak society unable to resist the authoritarian state
4. Any production process depends on informal practices and improvisations that cannot be captured in manuals. In fact, wholehearted adherence to the letter of the book is often one way to produce inefficiently
5. Métis = The idea that true knowledge comes from practical experience, as opposed to formal deductive theory

Part 1 – State Projects of Legibility and Simplification

Chapter 1 – Nature and Space

1. In fiscal forestry, the state replaces an actual tree and its myriad of possible uses with an abstract idea of a tree which can only be used as lumber or firewood.
2. Early agents of the state reduced the subjects into data points for the state, without taking their local context, practices and interests into account.
3. The state is incapable of knowing all that is going on at the local level.
4. As long as nature was perceived as abundant, it had no monetary value, and the illegibility of its ownership was not a problem. However, the moment nature was seen as ‘natural resources’, it became scarce and there was need to establish property rights.
5. Maps are designed to make the local context more legible to an outsider. For the locals, information on a map is already common knowledge.
6. Simplifications conducted by state agents are static and schematic – often only capturing information from the moment that simplification was made. This is a far cry from the more fluid social phenomenon state agents are trying to model.
7. Example from France in the 18th – 19th century: When state agents used the number of doors and windows on a building as a heuristic for estimating tax due from a residence, the locals started building houses with fewer doors and windows.

Chapter 2 – Cities, People and Language

1. The aerial view of a town built during the Middle Ages would not have had any discernable geometric form. This, however, did not mean it was confusing to the inhabitants.
2. Illegibility of the local context provides a measure of safety from outsiders – who typically would need a guide to navigate the locality.
3. Order seen from the ‘grand plan’ bears no resemblance to the order of life as experienced by the locals.
4. Legibility isn’t all bad. The legibility of 19th century Paris, for instance, was vital to the work of public health hygienists in preventing the spread of communicable diseases. But bad state actors can also take advantage of this, e.g., Nazi Germany took advantage of legibility to round up Jews.
5. The invention of permanent, inherited surnames was a state measure for making the local context more legible for the purpose of collecting tax and drafting people into the army.
6. The imposition of a singular official language is often the first step that makes the rest possible. When the state mandates an official language, the local context is devalued and those who are quick to master the official language benefit from the shift in power (e.g., English speakers in colonial Nigeria)
7. Even the creation of roads was for the benefit of the state agents, rather than the needs or movements of the locals.

Part 2 – Transforming Visions

Chapter 3 – Authoritarian High Modernism

1. Much of state-enforced social engineering efforts of the 19th and 20th century were due to progressive and often reactionary elites.
2. One precondition for high modernism was the reframing of society as a separate object that could be studied by the state.
3. The Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman’s useful metaphor of the garden: The garden is man’s attempt to impose his vision of order, utility and beauty on nature. What grows in a garden is a subset of what can potentially grow there.
4. High modernist beliefs are heavily future-oriented. The past is considered an impediment to the present and the present is the launching pad to the high modernist ideals. In practice, however, high-modernist plans are often abandoned which suggests that they are founded on poor assumptions.
5. High modernist beliefs are inspired by ‘productivism’ which is the idea that human labor is a mechanical system that can be broken down into energy transfers, motion and the physics of work.
6. Productivism appeals to the right and center of the political spectrum because it promises an increase in worker output. It also appeals to the political left because it promises to replace the capitalist with technical expertise or the state official.
7. Three factors resisting high modernist ideals: (a) belief that there is a sphere of private human activity where state agents should not interfere; (b) the private sector is too complex to be managed by state actors; (c) the presence of working institutions.

Chapter 4 – The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

1. No one…knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it – Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
2. It is easy to plan an urban zone if it had just one function. This works for roads, not homes. For instance, a kitchen cannot be reduced to ‘a place for food preparation’ because someone can decide to hang out with friends/family while they are cooking.
3. In high modernism, the wisdom of the ‘master plan’ is elevated above all other social institutions. The danger of this is that human problems of urban design do not have a singular solution. The solution often depends on the local context.
4. By designing Brasilia the way they did, the planners were also assuming that the elimination of disorder would lead to less disease, crime and pollution. Inadvertently, the designed the city to be inhabited by an ‘abstract’ man who did not exist in reality.
5. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that the tidy, geometric look of a city does not mean that it will meet the needs of the residents. Visual order is very different from functional order. The order of a thing should be determined from the purpose it serves.
6. Another excellent metaphor: An army on the parade ground is visually orderly but almost useless in the thick of a battle.
7. Social order is not the result of architectural order, or technical expertise. Rather, it is a function of an almost unconscious network of controls initiated by the people in the local context.
8. Jane Jacobs tells the story of an older man trying to abduct/seduce an 8- or 9-year-old girl. The crime couldn’t take place because there were many onlookers who could potentially intervene. No state agent was necessary.
9. Jane Jacobs also argued that formal public institutions of order function successfully when these informal avenues of social order are in place.
10. Intricate mingling of different uses are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order – Jane Jacobs.
11. “…we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s imagination to create community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by. ‘Fix the buildings, but leave the people…” – Stanley Tankel (1957)
12. Flaws of high modernism: (a) planners cannot predict the future; (b) a satisfactory neighborhood cannot be created without input from the people living in that context.

Chapter 5 – The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis

1. The words ‘mass’ or ‘masses’ also connotes the idea of mere quantity without order, cohesion or identity.
2. Once the term ‘masses’ is used to describe people, any differences in their history, political experience, ideology, ethnicity, religion and language are ignored.
3. Sometimes, Lenin used the contamination metaphor more literally and referred to the ‘masses’ with words borrowed from hygiene and the germ theory of disease.
4. Both the Communist and the Capitalist see the ‘masses’ as vital means for productions. The Capitalist wants the masses for efficient production of goods, while Communist wants to deploy them for efficient revolution. The Communist and Capitalist are more similar than they are willing to admit!
5. An assumption forming the foundation of Lenin’s text ‘State and Revolution’ was that the social life of the masses can be organized either by the business owners (bourgeoise) or the Party – but with no input from the masses themselves
6. Lenin explicitly called for a ‘unity of will’ enforced through diabolic means: ‘But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one…’
7. The data that informed Lenin’s high modernist ideals for agriculture did not originate from Russia. Rather, they came from Austria and Germany which were more technologically developed than Russia at the time.
8. Lenin strived to have empirical evidence fit with his theory. For instance, when small-scale Russian farmers were producing at high levels, Lenin claimed that this could only be because the farmers were overworking and starving themselves
9. Unlike Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg used metaphors that were complex and organic, where the whole cannot survive if a part dies.
10. Aleksandra Kollontay, another Luxemburg-esque Communist, proposed that state officials who had no practical factory experience should not hold leadership positions until they had some manual experience, i.e., skin in game.

Part 3 – The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production

1. States are often younger than the societies they want to administer.
2. At the beginning of the 20th century Rubber boom, British officials kept favoring rubber produced from estates with better scientific management – even though the rubber produced by the smallholders were more efficient and profitable.

Chapter 6 – Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams

1. Ernst Gellner argued that there were 2 facets of the Enlightenment – one asserting the sovereignty of the individual and the other, emphasizing the rational authority of experts.
2. Soviet Russia wasn’t merely interested in the physical transformation of society. They were also after a cultural transformation of the individual.
3. The advantage of large industrial farms over the smaller ones wasn’t efficiency and profitability, but political and economic clout. For their part, the small farms also had the advantage of being more flexible and adaptable to changing economic situations, as opposed to the larger farms
4. Soviet Russia leaders invited 3 Americans (Wilson, Ware and Riggin) to plan a 500000-acre wheat farm. The Americans did this from Chicago without ever setting foot on the actual farm in Russia. The project eventually failed (although it had high production in the first few years)
5. In practice, local collectivized farms in Soviet Russia often appealed their state-mandated quotas because they know if they met it, the state would raise the quotas in the next round of procurement
6. Soviet collectivization failed at attaining its high modernist ideals – despite high investments in research and infrastructure. This was due to: (a) unmotivated workers forced to work without incentives; (b) central state planning oblivious to local context; (c) political system didn’t give state agents the incentive to negotiate or adapt to the local population.

Chapter 7 – Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization

1. Social engineering is only possible when it considers the responses and cooperation of real humans.
2. Local Tanzanian farmers used polycropping/relay cropping techniques where they interplanted annual crops (e.g., coffee) with perennial crops (e.g., bananna). Despite empirical evidence demonstrating polycropping was more productive than monocropping, administrators and technical experts still had a preference for monocropping.
3. Tanzanian state agents were often rewarded based on how many ujammas (forced resettlement schemes) they formed. Hence, the people affected by the forced relocation were not as important as the number of ujamma villages formed.
4. The ujamma scheme was not as destructive as Soviet Russia because the Tanzanian state was relatively weak in comparison, and state agents were more reluctant to use force on the peasant farmers.
5. ‘Ideas cannot digest reality’ – Jean-Paul Sartre
6. It is easier to change an organizational chart (formal structure) than to change how an organization operates (its practices). That is why handbooks and guidelines cannot fully explain how an institution operates. That is also why it is possible for workers to go on strike by following the ‘letter of the law’ rather than its spirit.
7. A planned institution often generates a ‘dark twin’ that fulfils the needs not satisfied by the planned institution. For instance, slums tend to provide services personnel (e.g., cleaners, cooks) who cater to the needs of the elite who do administrative work in the planned city.

Chapter 8 – Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity

1. In his 1985 book, ‘Indigenous Agricultural Revolution’, Paul Richards argued that the results of modernized farming in Africa has been so poor that the slower, traditional approach needs to be reconsidered.
2. Traditional farmers are often knowledgeable about the variety of crops that can be grown in their local context. This knowledge is important for improving their chances of survival in a hostile, unpredictable environment.
3. Modernist agriculture increased the selection of only plant species that were responsive to fertilizers, which had the consequence of reducing the variety of crops planted.
4. Variety was further reduced by selectively breeding crops that were easier to plant and harvest mechanically. Taste and nutrient quality were treated as qualities secondary to machine compatibility.
5. Genetic uniformity makes crops susceptible to epidemics. Diversity, on the other hand, constrains the likelihood of such epidemics.
6. West African colonialists saw agricultural practices of the locals as sloppy and visually disorderly.
7. Increased use of pesticides is due to the rise of pests as genetic uniformity of mechanized farms increased.
8. Polyculture is likely to lead to Hicksian income (i.e., income that allows the same level of utility – even though price increases). It is also antifragile – it can absorb environmental stress without being damaged or devastated.
9. The proper test for any agricultural practice is whether or not it worked in the environment concerned.
10. The NPK fertilizer, while a great scientific discovery, could have iatrogenic effects. For instance, it can increase soil alkalization which ironically leads to soil infertility.
11. Robert Chambers (1983): “Indigenous agricultural knowledge, despite being ignored or overridden by consultant experts, is the single largest knowledge resource not yet mobilized in the development enterprise”
12. The logic of actual farming involves an innovative, practice-grounded response to variability in the environment, while the logic of scientific agriculture adapts the environment to centralizing models and formulas
13. “Instead of learning what the local conditions were and then making agricultural practice fit these conditions better, he had been trying to ‘improve’ local practice so that it would conform to abstract standards” – George Yaney (The Urge to Mobilize, 1982)
14. Those who simplify the environment to the point where rules can explain a lot – have a lot of power in that environment
15. Traditional farmers are open to learning from the work of science, while researchers tend to be unwilling to learn from the informal experiments of traditional practices.
16. Traditional farmers are not merely experimenting with different farming practices. They have skin in game – their livelihood depends on the results of those experiments.
17. Practical knowledge is not codified according to the scientific method.

Part 4 – The Missing Link

Chapter 9 – Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Métis

1. Formal order is dependent on informal processes.
2. Métis: The wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.
3. A firefighter’s job cannot be reduced to a routine, like what plays out with a clerk. A firefighter begins with the unpredictable and then devises the techniques for addressing the issues.
4. Local knowledge is partisan. This is because the holder of such knowledge will be directly affected by outcomes related to that knowledge. In other words, they have skin in game. Métis is typically exhibited by those with skin in game
5. Aristotle recognized that some domains cannot be reduced into a system of rational rules, e.g., navigation and medicine, where experience is more important than logical deductions.
6. The litmus test for Métis is practical success
7. Innovations of Métis often involve a recombination of existing elements.
8. Ingredients of practical knowledge: (a) pressing need; (b) promising leads that worked in another context; (c) army of freelance experimenters willing to try anything; (d) time to see experiments’ results; (e) sharing experimental results.
9. Downsides of Métis: (a) not democratically distributed and access to experience may be restricted (often due to social status); (b) can lead to inequalities because communities will disproportionately depend on those with Métis.
10. Ironically, standardized knowledge addresses the downsides of depending sole on Métis.

Conclusion

1. Rules of thumb for development planning: (a) Take small steps; (b) Favor interventions that can be easily reversed; (c) Choose plans that give room for unforeseen second-order effects; (d) Plan with the assumption that those with involved/affected will develop insight to improve the design.
2. High modernism isn’t all bad because: (a) it replaced some unjust/oppressive local practices; (b) it brought new egalitarian ideas, e.g., equality before the law, rights
3. When we replace natural capital with cultivated natural capital, we gain immediate productivity, as well as maintenance expenses and less redundancy, resilience and stability.

Durant, W., & Durant, A. (1968). The Lessons of History. Simon and Schuster.

Chapter 1 – Hesitations

Chapter 2 – History and the Earth

Chapter 3 – Biology and History

• Life is competition.
• Life is selection.
• Inequality is an innate part of life, and it tends to grow as civilization increases in complexity
• Freedom and inequality are sworn enemies. When you leave people free, inequality increases
• Utopias where equality of outcomes are rampant are doomed to fail. The best one can hope for is an equality of legal justice and educational opportunity
• Life must breed
• If population growth overtakes food supply, nature uses famine, pestilence and war to restore equilibrium

Chapter 4 – Race and History

Chapter 5 – Character and History

• One lifetime isn’t sufficient to dismiss societal customs and institutions that contain generational wisdom
• Conservatives resist change, radicals push for change. Both are good for the development of society

Chapter 6 – Morals and History

• Written history is often different from lived history

Chapter 7 – Religion and History

• Masses desire a religion rich in miracles, mysteries and myth
• Nature doesn’t agree with our human conceptualization of good and evil. What is good is what survives
• If another war affects our civilization as it currently is, the church will be humanity’s saving grace
• Religion and puritanism prevails when morals maintain social order; skepticism and paganism prevails when the power of law arises and government permits decline of the church and family without undermining the stability of the state
• No society has ever maintained moral life without religion

Chapter 8 – Economics and History

• Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians because agricultural population which produced warriors who fought to obtain land had been replaced by slaves working on farms owned by one man
• History is inflationary and money is the last thing a wise man will hoard
• Every economic system relies on some form of profit to incentivize productivity
• Except in war, men are usually judged by their ability to produce
• When the strength in the number of poor rivals the strength in ability of the rich, an unstable equilibrium occurs which is often resolved via either legislation distributing wealth, or revolution distributing poverty
• Concentration of wealth is natural and is periodically changed by violent or peaceful partial redistribution

Chapter 9 – Socialism and History

• All other things being equal, internal liberty is inversely related to external danger
• Marx application of the Hegelian dialectic to economic systems was incomplete. Instead of the dialectic leading to the complete control of socialism, it should have been seen as: thesis – capitalism; antithesis – socialism; synthesis – a hybrid of capitalism and socialism

Chapter 10 – Government and History

• Leadership by a majority is often impossible since the majority is seldom organized around towards a unified course of action. Leadership by a minority is consequently unavoidable and revolts from the majority only leads to the replacement of one minority by another.
• Aristocrats are more concerned with the art of life, while artists are devoted to the life of art
• The sanity of the individual depends on the continuity of his memories, while the sanity of the community depends on the continuity of tradition. Disruptions in this continuity leads to neuroticism at the individual and communal levels as the case may be
• Wealth arises, not by the accumulation of goods or the value of paper money or checks, but by maintaining control over procedures of production and exchange, as well as building trust in men and institutions. As a consequence, revolutions destroy, rather than redistribute wealth
• The only true revolution is one that leads to the development of the mind and character
• The excessive increase of anything leads to a reaction in the opposite reaction
• Because of human nature and the impersonal nature of economic markets, advances in economic development leads to a higher demand in superior skills which ultimately leads to the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of few
• Education has spread, but intelligence is retarded by the fertility of the simple
• Although men cannot be equal, their access to opportunity can be made more nearly equal

Chapter 11 – History and War

• The causes of war between nations are the same as the causes of competition between individuals. The state has the natural instincts of the individual, without the restraints of the individual. That is, the individual can submit to moral and legal codes, while the state has nothing restraining its tendencies

Chapter 12 – Growth and Decay

• In organic periods, men build; in critical periods, men destroy
• Organic periods are characterized by centripetal organization where culture unifies into a coherent artistic form; critical periods are characterized by centrifugal disorganization where culture and tradition decompose and ends in the chaos of individualism
• What determines whether a challenge will be met by a society is the presence of initiative and creative individuals with the clarity of mind and energy of will to make effective responses in new situations
• When inequality grows in an expanding economy, its society finds itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority unable to develop sophisticated standards of excellence and taste

Chapter 13 – Is Progress Real?

• Rather than asking whether one generation is better than the other, we should be asking whether the average man has increased his capacity to control the conditions of his life
• Education is not merely the memorization of facts, but the transmission of our mental, moral, technical and aesthetic heritage to as many people as possible for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, and enjoyment of life

In 1627, the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán painted an oil canvas depicting Christ crucified on the cross. In this painting, the focus is on Jesus and everything else is just a black shadow.

Fast forward to 1867, it was the turn of the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme to artistically represent the crucifixion scene. Here’s what he did:

Unlike de Zurbarán’s painting where Jesus was the center of attraction, Gérôme flips the arrangement such that everything else is in vivid detail while Jesus is not even present. The only way we can tell that this art piece is about the crucifixion is by looking at the shadows cast by Jesus and the two thieves on the bottom right of the painting!

By comparing art done at different time points, we can see the directions society’s values are shifting towards. We see how we’ve pretty much conspired together to dethrone God from the center of our lives, all the while shining the spotlight on ourselves as we try to take over the center stage.

I’ll end this with an excerpt from Charles Van Doren’s excellent book ‘A History of Knowledge’ where he articulates how art can capture shifts in society’s priorities:

“Piero della Francesca (1420-1492), exemplified this new vision…In Urbino, under the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, he produced some of the best of his mature works, among them the famous ‘Flagellation’ that has taunted and frustrated critics for nearly five hundred years…It is divided into two parts. On the left, in the background, near the vanishing point of the perspective, Christ, a small, forlorn figure, stands bound to a column, while Roman soldiers raise their whips to torture him. On the right, in the foreground, depicted in vibrant colors, stand three Renaissance dandies, conversing with one another (about what? money? women?). They pay no attention to the drama that is taking place behind them. Their eyes are turned away from the suffering of the Son of God, and they evidently do not hear his moans or the whistle of the scourges as they fall…Nevertheless, the painting does reveal a world in which earthly matters are more highly valued. Christ’s suffering, though not forgotten, has become almost absurdly unimportant. Significant now are youth, good looks, fine clothes, money, and worldly success (according to the viewer’s notion). And this belief, more than realism, naturalism, or verisimilitude, lay at the very center of the Renaissance style in art.”

Back in 2018, I was pursuing my master’s in public health. At the time, I had taken all the classes necessary for me to earn the degree. Yet, I wasn’t in a position to graduate because I still had my thesis to wrap up. To maintain my graduate student status, I chose to register for an independent study, where I was assigned two public health non-fiction books to read and reflect upon.

Since my reflection on the two books were not long enough to warrant further development into a manuscript for a scientific journal, I figured I’d share it here. I admit it’s also nice to see my thought processes back then and how they somewhat align with my current career as a researcher. In any case, below is an unedited reproduction of the reflection paper I wrote to earn a passing grade.

REFLECTION PAPER

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer were two books that caused a paradigm shift in the perception of my future role in the public health sector. Prior to reading the books, I knew that I wanted to go along the research path. However, I did not want to merely conduct research for its sake. Rather, I knew that I wanted my work to have national and international significance for this generation and for the generations unborn. I believe that the lessons I learned from these two books have equipped me with the tools needed to attain my long-term career goals.

The first thing I learned from studying the two books is the fact that new ideas will always be challenged by proponents of the status quo. I realized that there is always going to be opposition to change. This opposition to change does not mean that the opponents are evil people, or that they have ulterior motives. Usually, the opposition to change is due to the knowledge levels of the opponents at the time. In order to promote the buy-in of the proponents of the status quo into the proposed change, it is imperative for the change agent to make use of empirical evidence and clear communication to make opponents to see the blind spot without making them feel stupid. A classic example of this could be found in Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, where John Snow tries to convince the public health leaders and policy makers that cholera was water-borne, rather than transmitted through the air as was the medical belief of the day. To prove his point, John Snow did not immediately challenge the leading health authorities of the day, mocking their ignorance. Rather, John Snow took his time to research the data available on death patterns in his city, as well as painstakingly making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to get answers to difficult questions concerning the epidemiology of cholera. It was only after John Snow had gotten answers to his questions that he went on to publish a journal article documenting his findings. John Snow’s approach was enlightening to me because it is easy to be tempted to be arrogant and cocky when one makes an important discovery that refutes popular belief. Rather, he followed due process and permitted the normal scientific process to allow his findings to become mainstream.

From Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer, one of the lessons that stood out to me was from the management perspective. In 1965, the World Health Organization (WHO) wanted to find a way to eradicate smallpox. The WHO recruited the services of D. A. Henderson, who at the time was the head of surveillance at the Center for Disease Control (CDC), to assist in implementing their goal. I believe that among many other factors, one of the reasons that led to the eradication of smallpox was Henderson’s leadership and management style. Many times, people think that the road to significance is largely in isolation. However, this is not true, especially with the fact that it is not efficient for one individual to execute every facet of his/her goal alone. Henderson recognized this, and he developed a ruthlessly efficient system for hiring only the best people and giving them clear goals. As a result, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and the protocol used in achieving this goal still serves as a template for the WHO in the eradication or control of other worldwide epidemics.

Finally, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer both showed me how to prospect for innovative ideas. For a long time, I had always thought that innovative ideas came solely from deep thoughts. However, upon reading the two books, I realized that new ideas come by observing the mundane and looking for connections between those mundane observations. Indeed, innovation comes from drawing different conclusions from what everyone else has seen and thought of but did nothing about. This pattern was replicated numerous times in both The Ghost Map and Demon in the Freezer. For instance, John Snow was able to find holes in the miasma theory that foul smells were responsible for causing ailments by simply observing the fact that people whose jobs were to empty full sewers in the city of London were usually very healthy men. If diseases like cholera were transmitted by pungent smells, the sewer workers should have been the weakest. On the flip side, it is also worrying that innovations in the wrong hands can be used to unleash untold mayhem to the world. For instance, there are fears that terrorist organizations are in the process of using genetic engineering principles to modify the smallpox virus into something much more debilitating. In fact, there are valid concerns that future wars might involve the use of biological weapons such as genetically modified viruses and bacteria.

In conclusion, I consider Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer as two timely books I am glad to have read at this phase of my academic career. I am glad that my mindset concerning the proper way to introduce change, manage teams, and, source for innovation, has been positively expanded. In addition, I have also been made aware of the grave responsibility attached to producing research work of national and international significance.

References

Johnson, S. (2006). The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and The Modern World. Penguin.

Preston, R. (2003). The Demon in the Freezer. Fawcett Books.