macwright-com-59hl5f.txt (7495B)
1 [1]Tom MacWright 2 3 [email protected] 4 5 [2]Tom MacWright 6 7 • [3]Writing 8 • [4]Reading⇠ 9 • [5]Photos 10 • [6]Projects 11 • [7]Drawings 12 • [8]Micro 13 • [9]About 14 15 I read The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford on July 7, 2024 16 17 Review 18 19 This book sat on my digital bookshelf for months. I had forgotten what prompted 20 me to buy it, and the title made me think that it would be a 21 pop-psych-economics book that repeats the title in every paragraph, like [10] 22 many [11]others I had [12]come across. 23 24 Crawford is definitely floating around the topic of distraction: that’s the 25 hook that makes this book relevant and marketable. 26 27 I just read a few reviews on Goodreads before writing this, breaking my rule of 28 never reading book reviews before reading and reviewing books. People seem to 29 be annoyed at how he doesn’t stick to the topic, and they’re divided on whether 30 the “hard philosophy” in this book is too hard or too soft. I wish I hadn’t 31 read the reviews. 32 33 The summary: I loved this book. Its little discussions of things like the 34 importance of real-world difficulty in teaching us that we are physical, 35 limited creatures who do not have all-powerful wills. The take on 36 individuality: Crawford writes about the modern impulse to always prove 37 ourselves as competent, competitive, and entrepreneurial, and how this differs 38 from the older ideas of simply having a job, a role in society, and being 39 judged mainly on whether you’re a morally good person, not whether you’re a 40 genius or a hero. 41 42 I thought that the interludes into philosophy were perfect: they included 43 enough depth to get a handle on what the great thinkers were saying, but didn’t 44 presume that the reader had a grasp on Kant or Kierkegaard already. I 45 occasionally read philosophy now and read some of the classics in college 46 (especially loved Kant and Spinoza), but I’m not prepared to judge whether 47 Crawford is right or wrong in his points. 48 49 Quite apart from the business appeal of MOOCs for universities (payroll is 50 a lamentable thing), mechanizing instruction is appealing also because it 51 fits with our ideal of epistemic self-responsibility. 52 53 The discussion of education and “epistemic responsibility” was fantastic. It 54 connects so much to the idea of “unschooling” which is really popular with one 55 of my social circles. (for the new-to-it, [13]unschooling is an informal 56 learning style in which students are expected to learn from natural life 57 including play, and there are often teachers present but there is no set 58 curriculum. Unschooling has a foothold in technology because of books like [14] 59 Mindstorms and the idea that kids can self-educate with computers. It also has 60 a strong relationship with libertarianism in the sense that freedom is a common 61 value, and schools are described as coercive, and also that an education system 62 based on unschooling would require fewer institutions, especially those of the 63 government-run variety. I am emphatically not a libertarian and view those 64 overlaps as a major reason to be skeptical.) 65 66 Crawford argues that enlightenment-era thinking as well as the particularly 67 American Emerson/Thoreau-era philosophers think that only self-attained 68 knowledge really counts, and they undervalue culture and social bonds in 69 general, but especially those between teachers and pupils. 70 71 That is what computer games seem to do for our quasi-autistic cohort of 72 young men; it is what machine gambling does for those who have gone down 73 that particular path. Perhaps such pursuits help us manage the anxiety and 74 depression that come when experiences of genuine agency are scarce, and at 75 the same time we live under a cultural imperative of being autonomous. 76 77 There’s also a really solid discussion of gambling and its role in society. 78 I’ve been thinking about gambling a lot recently. I don’t gamble, and have no 79 intent or inclination to ever gamble. But I’ve seen gambling dynamics appear in 80 a lot of unexpected places. 81 82 For example - there’s a fintech called [15]Yotta that recently failed and has 83 potentially lost its customers money. It was a [16]“lottery-based savings 84 account”, which is a series of words I’d never expect together. This is a whole 85 category called [17]prize-linked savings accounts. It’s crazy. 86 87 The power of gambling is scary to understand, but I think that this book makes 88 a very strong argument that all of the psychic energy that flows into gambling 89 comes from the lack of genuine agency, opportunity, and certainty in the rest 90 of society. 91 92 Sidenote: this book uses autism as a metaphor or descriptor for behaviors and 93 thoughts, quite a lot. I didn’t find this very inappropriate or incorrect, but 94 if you don’t want to read a book that talks about that, proceed with caution. 95 96 The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good 97 you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in 98 something like kilowatt hours—the raw capacity to make things happen. With 99 this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to 100 weariness—weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become 101 one’s fullest self. We call this depression. 102 103 This idea of the cause of depression - the weariness of having to prove oneself 104 capable - resonated hard with me. Maybe there’s something true and vital here, 105 or maybe he and I have the same kind of sad, who is to say! 106 107 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 108 109 This is a book about a bunch of different topics that float around the modern 110 condition, capitalism, attention, and individuality. The whole thing was really 111 engaging for me, and extremely thought provoking. I found myself reconsidering 112 my conception of myself, work, friends, and values. It might do the same for 113 you! 114 115 Or it might not! I was in the right head space for this read, and was happy to 116 follow the sometimes-meandering trails. At times, this book can read like an 117 Adam Curtis documentary - tying together big ideas and statements about modern 118 times that seem a little too cute to be true. 119 120 But it’s on a short list of books that I finished and immediately thought about 121 re-reading in a few months. 122 123 Details 124 125 • The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford 126 • ISBN13: [18]9780374535919 127 • Published: 2015 128 • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 129 130 131 References: 132 133 [1] https://macwright.com/ 134 [2] https://macwright.com/ 135 [3] https://macwright.com/writing/ 136 [4] https://macwright.com/reading/ 137 [5] https://macwright.com/photos/ 138 [6] https://macwright.com/projects/ 139 [7] https://macwright.com/drawings/ 140 [8] https://macwright.com/micro/ 141 [9] https://macwright.com/about/ 142 [10] https://macwright.com/2018/10/02/against-charity 143 [11] https://macwright.com/2022/02/09/laziness-does-not-exist 144 [12] https://macwright.com/2022/08/01/against-creativity 145 [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling 146 [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) 147 [15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/21/synapse-collapse-nearly-109m-in-yotta-customer-deposits-vanish.html 148 [16] https://moneywise.com/banking/banking-reviews/yotta-review 149 [17] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/prize-linked-sweepstakes-savings-accounts 150 [18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources?isbn=9780374535919