Wednesday, July 30, 2003
All mundane things that can be automated should be automated.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Barbarians can read!
Ted wrote:
Hey guys, I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. EXCELLENT BOOK! I highly recommend it. A lot of food for thought. It analyzes the last 13,000 years of human history in very broad strokes, but seems to capture the main forces shaping human history. A few things that struck me about the book:
1. Today’s distribution of power has a lot to do with accidents of geography and ecology.
2. Innovations occur all the time all over the world. However, they don’t always catch on, sometimes due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to a society’s peculiar whims. The most successful inventions are rarely great leaps of technology in response to a need, but more often are adaptations of existing technologies for some new, originally unintended purpose.
3. You may have heard or concluded that there’s an optimum balance between chaos and uniformity. Well, here’s more evidence for it: China’s uniformity may have been its downfall. China apparently was technologically more advanced than Europe during Europe’s middle ages, to the point of undertaking long-distance oceanic trade with India. Had China ventured further, it could have ended up colonizing Africa, the Americas, and even parts of Europe. However, China was entirely controlled by a single ruler, as it had been since AD 200. Around 1300 or 1400, there was a power struggle, after which the faction controlling overseas trade (interestingly enough, Ken, this faction was controlled by eunuchs!!!) lost the struggle. As a result, the winning faction destroyed the fleet and ALL the shipyards in ALL of China, and it was a couple hundred years before China regained its ocean-going capability. In the meantime, Columbus was soliciting at least 5 different European rulers for funds for his expedition, and getting laughed out of each one’s court until he finally convinced the Spanish to fund him. Had Europe been ruled by a single ruler, most likely Columbus would have been out of luck. But the fact that the different European states were competing with each other made them more likely to take risks. The author speculates that Europe’s fragmentation was caused by its geography: 5 large peninsulas and 2 large islands, crisscrossed by mountains. However, each “fragment” was large enough to support critical masses of people to maintain complex societies, and trade was easy enough between these fragments to allow a high exchange rate of ideas. China was more easily traversable, so ideas spread quickly, but it was too easy for a monopoly to form (yes, I’m intentionally using the word “monopoly”), thereby stifling expression of other nascent, competing ideas. Meanwhile, archipelagos such as Polynesia were too fragmented, each fragment being too small in general to support large numbers of people (although there were exceptions), and therefore never became powerful enough to become significant world powers.
Well, enough of my thoughts – go read this book!
Ted wrote:
Hey guys, I just finished Guns, Germs, and Steel. EXCELLENT BOOK! I highly recommend it. A lot of food for thought. It analyzes the last 13,000 years of human history in very broad strokes, but seems to capture the main forces shaping human history. A few things that struck me about the book:
1. Today’s distribution of power has a lot to do with accidents of geography and ecology.
2. Innovations occur all the time all over the world. However, they don’t always catch on, sometimes due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to a society’s peculiar whims. The most successful inventions are rarely great leaps of technology in response to a need, but more often are adaptations of existing technologies for some new, originally unintended purpose.
3. You may have heard or concluded that there’s an optimum balance between chaos and uniformity. Well, here’s more evidence for it: China’s uniformity may have been its downfall. China apparently was technologically more advanced than Europe during Europe’s middle ages, to the point of undertaking long-distance oceanic trade with India. Had China ventured further, it could have ended up colonizing Africa, the Americas, and even parts of Europe. However, China was entirely controlled by a single ruler, as it had been since AD 200. Around 1300 or 1400, there was a power struggle, after which the faction controlling overseas trade (interestingly enough, Ken, this faction was controlled by eunuchs!!!) lost the struggle. As a result, the winning faction destroyed the fleet and ALL the shipyards in ALL of China, and it was a couple hundred years before China regained its ocean-going capability. In the meantime, Columbus was soliciting at least 5 different European rulers for funds for his expedition, and getting laughed out of each one’s court until he finally convinced the Spanish to fund him. Had Europe been ruled by a single ruler, most likely Columbus would have been out of luck. But the fact that the different European states were competing with each other made them more likely to take risks. The author speculates that Europe’s fragmentation was caused by its geography: 5 large peninsulas and 2 large islands, crisscrossed by mountains. However, each “fragment” was large enough to support critical masses of people to maintain complex societies, and trade was easy enough between these fragments to allow a high exchange rate of ideas. China was more easily traversable, so ideas spread quickly, but it was too easy for a monopoly to form (yes, I’m intentionally using the word “monopoly”), thereby stifling expression of other nascent, competing ideas. Meanwhile, archipelagos such as Polynesia were too fragmented, each fragment being too small in general to support large numbers of people (although there were exceptions), and therefore never became powerful enough to become significant world powers.
Well, enough of my thoughts – go read this book!
We begin our journey with the books below:
The Blank Slate
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life -- by Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Vintage) -- by Robert Wright
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence -- by Ray Kurzweil
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
The Bell Curve
Artificial Life by Stephen Levy
Zen Speaks: Shouts of Nothingness by Tsai Chi Chung
The Blank Slate
The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life -- by Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Vintage) -- by Robert Wright
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence -- by Ray Kurzweil
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
The Bell Curve
Artificial Life by Stephen Levy
Zen Speaks: Shouts of Nothingness by Tsai Chi Chung
