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