Recent books: One World Schoolhouse and Tao Te Ching (The Book of Tao)

I’m reading more books, but finishing fewer of them. The trend needs to stop, but like a shopping addict at a Bloomingdale’s friends and family sale, I just can’t stop buying books! Books on books!

Some of my current reads: Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (short stories of his years in Paris), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

And I just bought Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Book 1), a series which is all the rage in Scandinavia and has finally landed State-side. Excited about this one.

But on to completed books, just two in May and June:

One World Schoolhouse by Salman Khan

This book tells Sal’s now widely-known story of how he started Khan Academy, and his vision for education which includes sensibly innovative proposals (eg, mixed-age classrooms) that most students will probably never see in their lifetimes.

It’s short, easy to read, and full of memorable anecdotes. My heartiest recommendation.

Tao Te Ching (The Book of Tao) by Lao Tzu

What can I say…it’s old (written in the 6th-century BC) and it’s a foundational text for taoism and Chinese philosophy.

Reading it is like walking on the staircase in that Escher painting. You think you’re going up, only to arrive back where you started, or worse, you don’t even know if you’re going up or down or if its a staircase at all.

But you can feel the beauty and power of its words. I’m on my second read-through, but like reading the Bible or any other old and influential and “mystical” text, its meaning comes to you in tiny bits and pieces as you chew on it, savor the flavor, and let it soak in life’s saliva. Yeah…you’re welcome.

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. – Mark Twain

The rich now work more than the poor

A recent Economist article explains how this happened.

Centuries ago, working long hours was generally seen as something done by the poor and uneducated.

Today, the opposite is true. As we’ve shifted from a manual labor society to a knowledge society, richer peoples’ work hours have continually grown while poorer folks’ hours have stagnated or even declined.

Some notes from the article:

  • In the 1800s, the average English manual laborer worked 64 hours a week
  • In 1965, the unemployment rate for high school graduates was 2.9% higher than college graduates; today it’s 8.4% higher
  • In 2005, college graduates had less leisure time than those with only a high school diploma
  • In 2013, college graduates worked 2 hours more each day than those with only a high school diploma
  • Why has this happened?
    • 1. Substitution effect – higher wages increase the opportunity cost of leisure
    • 2. Changing views on work – leisure used to be a badge of honor, something most people strived for; those with plenty of leisure time, such as the aristocratic/landed/upper class, spent their time doing things like writing, philanthropy, and art; today, hard work is viewed in a similar way
  • Employment prospects have declined for the poor, for those with low skill and low education levels

“I come to work to relax,” one interviewee tells Ms. Hochschild. And wealthy people often feel that lingering at home is a waste of time.

“Less educated people are not necessarily buying their way into leisure,” explains Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago. “Some of that time off work may be involuntary.”

Random quotes: “I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass” – Walt Whitman

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. […] When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. […] And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. – Corinthians 13

a classic.

Remember, there’s no courage without fear – Bill Paxton in Edge of Tomorrow

great movie.

Do or do not. There is no try – Yoda

heard from Brad Feld in his ETL podcast

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are – Anais Nin

I had an impression that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets – Somerset Maugham

now THAT is a well-written passage…

Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. – Miyamoto Musashi

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education. – John Alexander Smith

what the English call rot, we call bullshit

I loaf and invite my soul. I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass – Walt Whitman

loafing is underrated especially in these times…

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. – Clay Shirky

something I hope to always remember

He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged. – Ben Franklin

Of the quotes I’ve seen attributed to Ben Franklin, this one I question most

One of the best heuristics I found when deciding to invest/pass on a startup is whether I would seriously consider joining it, if asked. – Max Levchin

yes!

To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their hearts’ content. – Masaru Ibuka in Sony’s Purposes of Incorporation

“work to their hearts’ content”. what a wonderful phrase

Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will come – Isaiah 58:8 (my own altered translation)

There might be tens of thousands of people who conceive the possibility of the same invention at the same time.
But less than one in ten of them imagines how it might be done.
Of these who see how to do it, only one in ten will actually think through the practical details and specific solutions.
Of these only one in ten will actually get the design to work for very long.
And finally, usually only one of all those many thousands with the idea will get the invention to stick in the culture.
At our lab we engage in all these levels of discovery, in the expected proportions.
-Danny Hillis via What Technology Wants

In physical talents he was a pauper when he started; by grace of his intellect he is incomparably the richest of all the animals now. But he is still a pauper in morals — incomparably the poorest of the creatures in that respect. The gods value morals alone; they have paid no compliments to intellect, nor offered it a single reward. If intellect is welcome anywhere in the other world, it is in hell, not heaven. – Mark Twain

Becoming an artist is the best way to avoid annoying, ordinary society – Seijuro Hiko in Rurouni Kenshin

enjoyed the anime

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt.

“cold and timid souls”…

The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country, the New York Times is read by the people who think they run the country, […] the San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure whether there is a country or if anybody’s running it, and the Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country

Kevin Kelly on the rise of nerds and the Third Culture

Kevin KellyI’m a recent admirer of Kevin Kelly’s writing. This article, where he explains the emergence of a third, “nerd culture” (in addition to the science and art cultures), is thoughtful and inspiring. Below are some excerpts and my reactions.

—

Science as the outsider culture:

When we say “culture,” we think of books, music, or painting. Since 1937 the United States has anointed a national poet laureate but never a scientist laureate.

Ironically, science continually creates tools that enable new art forms: radio, TV, computers, smartphones.

But it’s no longer just science vs art. A third culture has emerged, driven largely by computers.

It’s a pop culture based in technology, for technology. Call it nerd culture.

Nerds now grace the cover of Time and Newsweek. They are heroes in movies and Man of the Year. Indeed, more people wanna be Bill Gates than wanna be Bill Clinton.

(I think there is growing backlash against this “nerd culture”…if anything, it’s a sign that nerd culture is crossing that chasm and people are feeling transition pain)

Cultures create new jargon. Let’s “google” something. The language of text messaging.

Science is the pursuit of truth. Art is the exploration of humanity. Nerds are about novelty and creation.

Scientists would measure and test a mind; artists would contemplate and abstract it. Nerds would manufacture one.

This nerd culture builds tools, ignores credentials and admires crazy.

C. P. Snow had imagined a third culture where scientists interacted directly with artists. Nerd culture is both a step towards that vision, and something entirely different.

A really good dynamic computer model—of the global atmosphere, for example—is like a theory that throws off data, or data with a built-in theory. It’s easy to see why such technological worlds are regarded with such wariness by science—they seem corrupted coming and going.

But it will only grow, because computers and internet.

As large numbers of the world’s population move into the global middle class, they share the ingredients needed for the third culture: science in schools; access to cheap, hi-tech goods; media saturation; and most important, familiarity with other nerds and nerd culture.

“The effect of concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained” – Freeman Dyson

I disagree with Kelly on the following:

Indeed, raw opportunity may be the only thing of lasting value that technology provides us. It’s not going to solve our social ills, or bring meaning to our lives.

It seems clear to me that the manifestations of technology (the internet, mobile phones, cheap PCs, home appliances) have made Joe- and Jane-citizen richer, smarter and more comfortable. Computer simulations of cancer-fighting drugs…accurate pricing data for third world farmers and fishermen…vast libraries of digital books for schoolchildren around the world…these are all examples of how technology addresses social ills.

(it may just be semantics; for example, Kelly might mean that even the world’s fastest computer is worthless without a competent user, and the computer itself is the product of human minds and hands)

Kelly ends with this beautiful thought:

The culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of art, now has another orientation to contend with, one grown from its own rib.

Daniel Goleman on the value of focus and empathy

I started watching this 1-hour lecture with low expectations, but was blown away by Dan’s info-packed, beautifully-articulated talk on the importance of focus and empathy and the psychology and science behind them.

I generally avoid the nonfiction bestseller lists these days, but I just downloaded samples of Emotional Intelligence and Focus. My Kindle queue hates me…

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” – Herbert Simon

My notes:

  • two groups of people were asked to give speeches; one group on the Good Samaritan parable; on their way to the lecture hall, people in each group “accidentally” bump into a stranger that needs their help; it didn’t matter whether the good samaritan parable was their speech topic (and thus on their minds) or another unrelated, control topic; what mattered was how much time pressure they were under (boy can I relate to this)
  • your intuition, your gut instinct is what one scientist calls “somatic markers”
  • there are 3 types of empathy:
    • cognitive empathy – knowing what another person knows
    • emotional empathy – immediately feeling what another person feels; reading and processing their emotions
    • empathic concern – “I know how you think and how you feel, and I’m pre-disposed to help” (Goleman believes this is a defining quality of leaders)
  • what matters in meditation is not focus, it’s bringing your mind back when it wanders; the “bringing it back” strengthens connectivity in your attention circuitry
  • before puberty, parents are primary in a kid’s life; after, it’s all about friends and peers
  • First-Person Shooter games strengthen a kid’s vigilance (ability to detect threats, process stimuli quickly) but also their hostile attribution bias (if another kid bumps into them, they will think it’s on purpose)
  • a study in the UK showed attention control (how focused you can be on the task in front of you) was more correlated with career success than family background or education level
  • in that famous study of whether kids could resist eating one marshmellow to be rewarded for their patience with two marshmellows, there was a 200 point difference in SAT scores when tracked over time; the crazy part? the kids all attended Bing Nursery School at Stanford, so I presume most were children of Stanford parents or faculty and admin — which means they had access to, on average, plenty of academic resources and parental attention
  • emotions are contagious and spread by:
    • expressivity of person
    • power and hierarchy
    • stability of emotions (which is why a monk can calm an angry person)
  • Goleman asks, why is it that a culture defaults to giving a pill to solve what is essentially a skill deficit? (attention, for example, is a skill that can be taught and practiced and improved)
  • behavioral inhibition, aka being “shy”; researchers thought it was genetic, but found a strong tie to parenting style: there are parents who publicly say things like “oh, she’s shy” and inhibit their kid from taking risks, and then they wonder why their kids don’t like public speaking and aren’t so outgoing; the parents that tell their child to “go ahead and try it anyway” raise more outgoing, more extroverted children