Man fears time, but time fears the pyramids.
Unknown author. The Architecture Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. New York: DK Publishing, 2023. (see page 22)
More from the picture books are underrated file.
Category: Thinkers
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His annual letter has arrived at last.
Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome tax collector; it’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations – epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. As a consequence, people who dwell in the mountains tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans or Highland Scots.
Wang, Dan. March 4, 2023. https://danwang.co/2022-letter/Can’t help but read this in the light of a Star Wars pilot script. Imperials, rebels, dissenters? Wasn’t Hoth a giant ice mountain? Or at least it had a mountain range. Also, see the dwarves from the Hobbit. Proper dissenter-rebels they were too.
Extending the observation further. Are mountain visitors dissenters, rebels, and subversives? Or only permanent residents?
Plenty of mind expanding ideas and observations in this year’s edition.
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Most people blog and write online to share what they know. To look smart. It’s understandable. It’s human nature.
But I enjoyed online writer extraordinaire Adaobi‘s approach. Asking the online world questions.
Her question straight out – how does one become a polymath?
– How can I develop an up-to-date taste for what “good” looks like faster?
Adaobi, Adaobi’s Newsletter. Questions: How to be a polymath. January 22, 2023
– How can I reverse engineer great work faster?
– How can I access my subconscious faster?
– How can I ponder on multiple things simultaneously?
– How can I identify top-tier talent in new fields?
– How do I choose which skills to cultivate in a new field?
– How can I develop a better sense of bad ideas?
– How do I avoid dogma?
– How can I ask better questions?Pair with her excellent post Overlooked Problems
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This is the first line/verse from Beowulf that captured me:
I have never seen so impressive or large
an assembly of strangers. Stoutness of heart,
bravery not banishment, must have brought you to
Hrothgar.”
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc“Stoutness of heart” depicts strength, resilience. Something to aspire to.
If you’re looking to read more classics this year, Seamus Heaney‘s translation of Beowulf is an approachable entry point.
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There are many reasons to learn about India. India is the world’s second most populous country and has a rich and diverse culture. It has a long and fascinating history, and has made significant contributions to science, mathematics, literature, and the arts. Understanding India and its people can give you a greater appreciation for the diversity of the world and can broaden your perspective. Additionally, India is an emerging economic and political power, so learning about the country can help you to understand the global landscape.
OpenAI. ChatGPT. Accessed on January 15, 2023. Available at https://chat.openai.comCertainly not a response with the level of detail and nuance as Shruti Rajagopalan’s conversation with Dallas Floer. But still an important tool to experiment with.
Also, GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Here’s how ChatGPT explained it to me:
- Generative: The model is capable of generating human-like text. It can produce coherent and contextually relevant responses given a prompt.
- Pre-trained: Before being fine-tuned for specific tasks, the model goes through a pre-training phase. During this phase, it learns from a massive amount of text data, gaining a broad understanding of language patterns and structures.
- Transformer: The Transformer is a type of deep learning architecture introduced in the paper “Attention Is All You Need” by Vaswani et al. It utilizes attention mechanisms to process input data in parallel, making it highly efficient for tasks like language modeling.
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Ideas of India became one of my favorite podcasts in 2022.
In the 2022 in Review episode producer Dallas Floer’s posed the question to Shruti Rajagopalan.
Why should we talk about India more?
Three summaries from their conversation:
- Avoid cultural boo-boos. India is much more diverse than our immediate social circles. If you at the moment have young children, there’s a high likelihood they will marry someone Indian.
- India’s population is young, and getting younger. The global talent pool will continue disperse from there.
- As India’s infrastructure continues to develop, Indians will soon dominate the internet, YouTube, twitter, streaming apps, etc.
Read the full section of Shruti Rajagopalan and Dallas Floer‘s conversation below:
Why Learn About India?
FLOER: I have a general question—and I think this rounds out this first part of the discussion nicely—but why should we talk about India more? Why should more people be listening to, not just your expertise, but anyone who spends their time doing research and talking about India?
RAJAGOPALAN: The world demographics are changing, and I think we are not good at looking at the 30-, 40-year horizon, because of Twitter and all the other things we talked about. We’re so in the moment of what’s happening now. If you look at global demographics—and I recently started a Substack, it’s called “Get Down and Shruti,” and the first post was on this topic—the developed world is depopulating, or at least, the fertility rates are dropping quite rapidly. In fact, China will start depopulating next year, and it’s so far the largest country in terms of population.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: India will not depopulate until 2065. India’s population, which is right now 1.4 billion, will continue to grow and then start to go down only in 2065 when it peaks. Over the next 40 years, China will lose a quarter of a billion people and India will gain a quarter of a billion people. That’s like the size of Brazil and three-quarters the size of the United States, so that’s big numbers. What this means is India is very young; it’s only going to get younger as the world gets older.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: One in five young people in the world actually live in India, and half the Indian population is below 25. Even for very self-serving reasons, if people have nothing to do with India, the global talent pool, the workforce is going to come from India. And as India starts peaking, then it’s going to come from Africa. That’s where we need to pay more attention. The world just doesn’t pay enough attention to India or Africa, so that’s the big picture.
The other part of it is, India is also a subcontinent. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s stitched together as a collection of people with different—it’s actually, religiously, the most diverse place in the world. It’s linguistically the most diverse place in the world. There’s, of course, caste heterogeneity. For these reasons, it’s difficult to understand India. Thinking that India is your buddy from accounting or IT in your office, that’s like one type of India and one type of Indian that you may meet in your social circle or in the neighborhood or in the office place.
India is actually very diverse and requires a lot of context to actually understand. If the future is India, and you’re going to have more people coming to universities, and there’s a good chance that some of the older listeners in this episode, their children end up marrying an Indian they met in college.
FLOER: Sure.
RAJAGOPALAN: Even if the base reason is you don’t want to make a cultural boo-boo in front of your future in-laws, you’ve got to know some cultural context. You’ve got to know a little bit more about India. I think, for various reasons, of course, if you’re a university or if you’re hiring, if you work in the AI or tech space, all the talent there is coming from India. So for different groups, India might be more or less relevant. If you work in the climate space, you should really focus on India. It’s going to be one of the largest-growing spaces, which means we need to worry about technology and how to control carbon emissions. It’s different for different people, but I think everyone should pay more attention to India.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: More generally, the baseline has to increase. And then, depending on what you do, you may want to zero in on certain kinds of books and podcasts and experts. Most Indians now have access to electricity. About 800 million-plus Indians have access to a smartphone, so now they’re on the internet. We are slowly getting to a point where the internet will also get dominated by Indians. In terms of natural language processing, more people sound like me than sound like you, Dallas. More people will spell like me than spell like you and so on.
I think, with an overwhelming number of Indians on the internet, people will also see that landscape change faster than immigration or them visiting India. Their Netflix front page will change quite dramatically and so on.
Floer, Dallas. (2022, December 22). Ideas of India Podcast, episode 69: 2022 in Review [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://ideasofindia.libsyn.com/eoy-2022Read the full transcript in full here
Listen to the podcast episode in full here:
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First appearing in his Essay “On Living in an Atomic Age“. Lewis answers the question – how to live in a time of uncertainty?
Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plagued visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night….The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. (see page 14)Whatever 2023 brings, let’s heed these words.
Do human things. Live.
Happy New Year!
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I think reading and annotating books is thing I do best – it’s my most sharply honed skill. But that in itself has no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting.
Jacobs, Alan. Homebound Symphony, my skillz. December 13, 2022.I’d argue reading and annotating books does have market value. It’s the soil that allows all the other “market value” skills to grow from.
To be a professor, writer, and observer, one must read and capture thoughts in the margins well. Honing this skill must lead to new, important insights, no?
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Excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore:
I find it really useful to write and draw while talking with someone, composing conversation summaries on pieces of paper or pages of notepads. I often use plenty of color annotation to highlight salient points. At the end of the conversation, I digitally photograph the piece of paper so that I capture the entire flow of the conversation and the thoughts that emerged. The person I’ve conversed with usually gets to keep the original piece of paper, and the digital photograph is uploaded to my computer for keyword tagging and archiving. This way I can call up all the images, sketches, ideas, references, and action items from a brief note that I took during a five-minute meeting at a coffee shop years ago-at a touch, on my laptop. With 10-megapixel cameras costing just over $100, you can easily capture a dozen full pages in a single shot, in just a second.
Cowen, Tyler. The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. New York: Plume, 2010 (see page 97)Ed Boyden’s note taking practice seems both exhausting and exhilarating. Tedious and satisfying. He’s not only writing notes, but drawing them as well.
It’s taken him far though. He’s gone from blogger for the Technology Review to the Professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Media Arts and Sciences, and Biological Engineering, and an HHMI investigator at MIT.
For someone who understands so much about the brain, is Boyden’s drawing function of his note-taking deliberate? A tool to help him remember and synthesize information?
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Below is the list of the books that most shaped C.S. Lewis’s world view. Originally published in the Christian Century, but captured here from Jason M. Baxter‘s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind:
- Phantastes – George MacDonald
- Everlasting Man – G.K. Chesterton
- Aeneid – Virgil
- The Temple – George Herbert
- Prelude – William Wordsworth
- The Idea of the Holy – Rudolf Otto
- Consolation of Philosophy – Boethius
- Life of Johnson – James Boswell
- Descent into Hell – Charles Williams
- Theism and Humanism – Arthur James Balfour
George MacDonald’s Phantastes stands out. The subtitle is: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women. I’ve never read it, but an entire book on Faeries, written by a Christian Congregational minister?
The sheer intellectual power of these authors is striking. I don’t think anyone of them were only writers. Maybe Virgil.
Taking a deeper look we learn Arthur James Balfour was a statesman and Prime Minister.
Charles Williams wrote poems, novels, and plays, but was also a theologian and literary critic. “Inklings” member too.
Rudolf Otto was a theologian, philosopher, and scholar.
Boethius? Boethius was a Roman senator, consul, historian, philosopher, Saint, and Martyr.
Intellectual titans, the lot of them.
Floodlights and Goalposts 