Uncategorized

Cabinet of Curiosities: Claude Levi-Strauss

In Show Your Work, his terrific book on online presence,  Austin Kleon suggests, among many many other things, that a blogger might write about something from his or her “Cabinet of Curiosities” every once in a while.

I want to do a CofC entry every Monday if I can (because I won’t yet have much to say about my work for the week but I probably will have yet another curiosity to unfold).  So here goes CofC #1

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss for reasons having to do with 7 Hard Problems.  He is a very important “structuralist” thinker from the mid-20th century, and structuralism was very important in forming my views.  Louis Althusser, whom I’ll be writing more about this week, was also a structuralist, although, as he would point out, a “materialist” one instead of an “idealist” one like Levi-Strauss.

What’s the difference between a materialist and an idealist, you say?  Materialists believe that objective reality is more important than our minds.  Idealists believe that our minds are more important than objective reality.  Extreme idealists believe that external reality is a figment of our imaginations.

Levi-Strauss wasn’t that bad, but he did believe that he could figure out universal laws of thought.  And his scheme for doing so was to investigate the myths of “primitive” peoples, mostly from South America (where he had done fieldwork as an anthropologist).

What I’m doing is slogging through “The Raw and the Cooked”, a Levi-Strauss production containing things like this (his opening sentence):

The aim of this book is to show how empirical categories — such as the categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc., which can only be accurately defined by ethnographic observation and, in each instance, by adopting the standpoint of a particular culture — can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them in the form of propositions.

Aside from soliciting your sympathy for what a tough job I have, I’m pointing this out because of this grand objective: to illuminate universal laws of thought.

Another Levi-Strauss work, “Tristes Tropiques” (shown above) is much more accessible, and is essentially like Darwin’s “Voyage of the Beagle”, an aid to understanding the man and his quest behind the work.

Could you live a long and happy life without reading either of these Levi-Strauss books?  For sure.

But hopefully I’ve aroused your curiosity enough to go to the Levi-Strauss Wikipedia page and have a gander.

(BTW, not certain if he has any connection to the Levi Strauss of jeans fame whom we know a bit better…)

7 Hard Problems, Lifehacking

Themes for work and learning, week of Oct 21

I’ve decided to reboot my “themes for study and learning” blogs, with a couple of twists:

  1. Weekly instead of Monthly.  I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with the monthly themes; they were too diffuse and too easy to put off.  A weekly rhythm is more actionable?
  2. The Theme is tied to my weekly main goal.

So this week the main goal is vomitout a section for my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems.”

Perhaps some context is in order.

I’ve decided to get serious this fall about a book project I’ve blogged about in the past: “7 Hard Problems”, a book about solving a bevy of difficult personal and societal problems — the contradiction between individual wealth and the common wealth, for example, or global vs. local.  You can read the one-pager if you like.

The first order of business was to finish the one-pager, which I did early in the summer.   This fall I’m trying to put together a book proposal.  I’ve got an outline and a fair amount of sample material, so it’s time to work on other sections of the book proposal.

I’ve put off working on what I call the braggables section of the proposal — how many followers I have, how peerless my insights are, why any publisher would be foolish to refuse me — because I have a hard time bragging about myself, but it is time to put it off no longer.

So I’m starting this week with an easier braggable section, something about why I’m the right person to write this book.

That’s the work theme for the week.  I’m going to slog away at it Monday through Thursday.

Part of slogging away is reading some stuff about publicity, about self-promotion, and about platforms online and off-.  So I’ll be digging into the publishing/TED talk/platform/persona literature this week, starting with stuff about how to do TED talks and how they help the publicity effort.  If you have suggestions in this area, please comment.

In addition to working away at the theme, I’m continuing my reading for the book itself.  I’ve been reading Lenin and Philosophy (or, rather, re-reading it, since I read it many years ago under circumstances I explain in “7 Hard”).  There’s a handsome new edition out now with a generous preface by Frederic Jameson.  So that’s reading objective #2 for the week: finish Althusser.

Finally, I’m wrapping up a book I’ve been reading before bed, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life…” by James Hollis, a Jungian shrink.  I’ve been reading about a book a week on the topic of “what the hell to do with myself in ‘retirement'”, and picked this one because I’ve always had a soft spot for Jung and because it was recommended by another book I read in this area.  Hollis has taken much more than a week to finish, partly because his style is a little ponderous, but partly because it doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep at the end of a day.

So that’s it.  This week, trying to set out why I’m the right person to write “7 Hard Problems”.

I’ll sum up how things went on Thursday.

 

Deep Work, DIY, Entrepreneurship

Themes for Study and Learning in May

Here were the April themes, together with April results:

So my project for April is to fan out from here and see what research can tell us (me) about the “success factors” for entrepreneurs.

At least some of them are:

  1. Effectual thinking and opportunities  I read maybe ten papers from the literature on effectual thinking, and I continue my strong suspicion that it’s a fundamental requirement for successful entrepreneurs
  2. Purpose and greed  Didn’t read much here.
  3. Always replace yourself at every step of the enterprise Didn’t read much here
  4. I’m almost through Schumpeter’s book on “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy”  As one of my sources said, most of his wisdom is contained in a couple of very catchy quotes and a lot of the material in CSD is dated.
  5. Started to read “Ecce Homo” by Nietschze
  6. Finished “Burn the Business Plan,” by Carl Schramm (longtime head of the Kauffman Foundation).  Lots of ideas about what does and does not make for a good entrepreneur (he does not like business plans, ecosystems, or incubators, for example), but there is almost no pointers to substantiation for any of his points.  I’ve got a query in to him about research backing his conclusions, but haven’t heard back for a couple of weeks.
  7. Halfway through Herbert Simon’s “Sciences of the Artificial”
  8. Not for “study and learning”, but I read Ta Nahisi Coates’ “We Were Eight Years in Power” with great interest.  In particular, I was quite interested in the case he makes for the centrality of white supremacy and slavery in U.S. history.

I think the plan for May is

  1. Continue with the entrepreneurship readings: Finish Simon,  read “Built to Last” by Collins and Porras, and “Grow”, by Jim Stengel.
  2. I’m going to try to read “Origin of Species” by Darwin, because I really should before I die.
  3. I’m trying to do a raft of DIY projects around the house in May, so I’ll do plenty of task-oriented reading (or maybe mostly YouTube viewing) in pursuit of that.

Always welcome your thoughts and comments.

 

Uncategorized

Themes for Study and Learning in April

2 Comments

Recap for March:

Here were the March themes.

 

  1. Team Formation in startups.  What’s a good team, how do founders pick teams, and how might they do so more effectively.
  2. “Purpose” and startups.  I believe that startups have to stand for something more than making money (although they should also make money!), for practical as well as idealistic reasons.  I want to review the literature and evidence for this point of view.  I guess I’ll start here with “Built to Last”.
  3. “Know-how” and startups.  I want to review the literature on better outcomes for startups where the founder(s) know something special about the domain where they are working, something that gives them an unfair advantage.

Progress:

  • To begin with, I was kind of whistling in the breeze that these were my themes.  What I found out was that I needed to learn how to research these topics rather than simply opine on them.
  • Which I did do (learn how to research them).  I used my adjunct affiliations to access a boatload of online catalogs, databases, and other resources, and essentially search through the scholarly work on entrepreneurship to begin to characterize what makes a successful entrepreneur.
  • I myself have strong feelings about what makes for a successful entrepreneur, which colored my selection of the three themes above.  But what I did was to set myself the goal of finding out what the scholars in the field thought, as opposed to what I thought.

I was particularly drawn to the work at Saras Sarasvarthy at the UVA Business School.  A major theme running through all of her work is the existence among entrepreneurs of a different kind of thinking.

Instead of reasoning about possible causes in order to bring about a certain effect (which she calls “causal thinking”), entrepreneurs deploy much more of what she calls “effectual thinking”, which reasons from means forward to ends.

A causal thinker, interested in blockchain, will ask: “What is the most attractive market I can enter that could use blockchain as an enabling technology?”

An effectual thinker, working on the same problem, would ask: “What steps can I take with my network, my know-how, and my insight into blockchain, in order to understand the next step to a successful business?”

(I hope I haven’t done (too much) violence to the concepts!)

Dr. Sarasvarthy did her graduate work with Herbert Simon, a man I knew as a pioneer in AI.  Some of his work informed her interest in effectual reasoning.

I’m not sure how effectual thinking plays into my project, but I believe at this point that it’s a fundamental element in the entrepreneur’s toolkit.

So my project for April is to fan out from here and see what research can tell us (me) about the “success factors” for entrepreneurs.

At least some of them are:

  1. Effectual thinking and opportunities
  2. Purpose and greed
  3. Always replace yourself at every step of the enterprise

I think I’ll stop here.

As usual, please let me know your thoughts.

Entrepreneurship, Workhacking

Themes for Study and Learning in March

2 Comments

So, first a recap for February:

  1. Future of Work.  This is robots, guaranteed annual income, future of labor, AI, etc.  Did almost no reading in this area in February.  I could give a lot of excuses, but, bottom line, it just didn’t happen.
  2. Antiquity.  I’m interested in the glory that was Greece (and Rome :-)), why it got hammered, and what we can learn about classicism, faith, science, curiosity, paganism, etc.  Read “The Swerve”, some of “The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox”, and most of “Rubicon”.  Did some posting on the topics.
  3. Morning Routines.  I’m trying (yet again) to “Kaizen” my morning routine, so I’ll be looking at stuff like Tim Ferris’ “Tools of Titans”, Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals”, etc.  I re-read the descriptions of the Pomodoro Technique from the founder and from others.  I understood better why some of the quirky things about Pomodoro are in there — always completing a Pomodoro, for example, and how to combine little tasks into a single Pomo — and generally upped my game here.  At the very end of the month, started thinking about a daily routine variant when on the road, since I’m going on the road a bit more lately.  Basically it’s a matter of making the daily routine portable and pruning things that make no sense on the road (e.g., emptying my study inbox).

OK, so now the new themes for March, which reflect a “swerve” toward a somewhat different project for the year, which I’ll describe in a subsequent post.

  1. Team Formation in startups.  What’s a good team, how do founders pick teams, and how might they do so more effectively.
  2. “Purpose” and startups.  I believe that startups have to stand for something more than making money (although they should also make money!), for practical as well as idealistic reasons.  I want to review the literature and evidence for this point of view.  I guess I’ll start here with “Built to Last”.
  3. “Know-how” and startups.  I want to review the literature on better outcomes for startups where the founder(s) know something special about the domain where they are working, something that gives them an unfair advantage.

As usual, please let me know your thoughts.

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity

Antiquity 3: Reading “Rubicon”

1 Comment

I’m almost done with Tom Holland’s “Rubicon”.  Close enough to the end — we are at the point of Caesar’s showy campaigns in Gaul and the collapse of his first Triumvirate with Pompey and Crassus — to see how the stories are going to work out.

I know now how to a break the spirit of a citizen of the Roman Republic: pour shit on his head.  Or, more to the point, exile him from Rome.  The latter was apparently enough to break the spirit of Cicero, who goes from “pretty square guy” to “mouthpiece for Pompey and Caesar” after just a bit of exile.

(I’m being flip.  How would any of us react to exile, forced separation from our families, the country that gave us life and defines us, etc. etc.?  Not well.)

But a lot of the work of destroying the Roman Republic wasn’t done by threats or blows or exile alone but by the ceaseless slow work of corruption.  Holland tells us the same story a dozen times: a member of the Roman Senate is scared by threats and then seduced by a lucrative governorship or proconsul stint.  He forgets his civic virtues (or, worse, re-imagines his civic virtues to consist of the very things he is doing to betray them).

A pretty potent parable.  Makes me think our Republic doesn’t have much of a chance.

 

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity

Antiquity 2: The Death of the Roman Republic

(Lest anyone think I’m being systematic here, I’m not.  I jumped to the “Death of the Roman Republic” because, of the twenty books I have on deck to read (about antiquity and other topics) “Rubicon” called out to me to be read.)

So it is not hard to find parallels between the collapse of the Roman Republic in 27 BC and the potential collapse of the American Republic in the era of Trump.

What a book like “Rubicon” (by Tom Holland) does is to frame the establishment of the Roman Empire (which is what happened in 27) with:

  1. The story of the ~100 years which preceded 27
  2. Some themes which the author posits about the Roman Republic — the tension between competitiveness and civic-mindedness, for example — which made the Romans unable to save their democracy
  3. The massive corruption ensuing from the colonies and their corrosive effect on Roman politics and elites.

Americans, too, have been corrupted by our Empire, although our corruption takes a different form than the “loot and slaves” of the Romans.  We are probably in graver danger from the power of super-national corporations that can move capital and jobs rapidly from less complaisant geographies of the world to more complaisant ones.

Just about halfway through “Rubicon”, to be followed by Mary Beard’s SPQR and then — if it doesn’t put me to sleep — “The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire”, by M. Rostovtzeff.  If you know some better sources, please let me know.

7 Hard Problems, Antiquity, Modern European Thought

Antiquity 1: The End of the Middle Ages

3 Comments

I cleverly avoided studying “Western Civ” in both high school and college.  A pity, because, although I had studied it in grade school — and thought a grade-school course was enough — it wasn’t.  It would have behooved me to have a go at either Exeter or Harvard, where I would have gotten a world-class exposure.

Instead I’m coming back to it late(r) in life, now in my sixties, and having to play catch-up.  The downside of doing so is that I may not have enough time.  The upside is that I’m a better steward of my time and more in touch with my purposes.

My purpose is 1) to get a hold on how “the modern era” (the era of science, humanism, liberal democracy) arose out of the seemingly unpromising Middle Ages and 2) to figure out and savor exactly what was stunning about what they thought back in antiquity.

(I’m aware that “the Middle Ages” is a catch-all term for 1000 years of history — from, say, the Fall of Rome to 1500 — of wildly varying character.  That topic is also grist for the mill: you see why I’m worried about time?)

So, I’ve read “The Swerve”, by Stephen Greenblatt, and I’m in the midst of “Rubicon”, by Tom Holland and “The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox”, by Stephen Jay Gould (posthumous).

Gould makes the case that the transition from “the Middle Ages” to “the Scientific Revolution” was not a simple struggle between science and dogma but rather a two-step process (at least!), consisting of:

  1. Humanism in revolt against Dogma: in this phase the humanists looked to “Antiquity” (Greece and Rome) for new wisdom that had been forgotten/suppressed by the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christendom.  Both Greenblatt and Gould make the case that there was both forgetting and suppressing.
  2. Science in revolt against Humanism: Humanism, the reverence from the Ancient, became a dogma in its own right, and science-oriented thinkers in Europe (and, in time, America) touted the virtue of direct observation over reverence for the past.

Greenblatt provides lots of supporting detail which seems to support this point of view.  He is, however, after a different quarry: he wants to emphasize:

  1. What a near thing it was that we ever recovered Lucretius’ Epicurean masterpiece “On the Nature of Things”
  2. How vile the Christianity of the 1500’s was
  3. What had to happen in order for the science-based order to come into being.

These to me represent a more complicated point of view than I’ve been accustomed to, but for historians I’m sure it’s a glib oversimplification.  At any rate, that’s what some reviewers said per the Wikipedia article on Greenblatt’s book.  I’ll take it as my working theory for the time being.

So: 1) there is Truth beyond The Church and 2) Seek Truth from skeptical theories about Nature.

I want to read Lucretius now, of course, but first I want to find out more about Rome (and then probably about Greece).

7 Hard Problems

Themes for study and learning in February

1 Comment

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done this!  I had no idea, and although, of course, the other stuff I’ve been doing has been boundlessly important, I’m sorry to have let this one go.

So, themes for study in February:

  1. Future of Work.  This is robots, guaranteed annual income, future of labor, AI, etc.
  2. Antiquity.  I’m interested in the glory that was Greece (and Rome :-)), why it got hammered, and what we can learn about classicism, faith, science, curiosity, paganism, etc.
  3. Morning Routines.  I’m trying (yet again) to “Kaizen” my morning routine, so I’ll be looking at stuff like Tim Ferris’ “Tools of Titans”, Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals”, etc.
Uncategorized

Thinking outside the box about the Equifax breach

Gus Hurwitz had a thoughtful post about the Equifax breach on the American Enterprise Institute blog.

(Full disclosure: Like most techies, I flirt with Libertarianism but basically don’t think much of it.  Living in Washington DC, which effectively has no government, has taught me a lot about the limitations of the philosophy)

Instead of piling on to Equifax, and pummeling them for not having had better security practices, he instead points out that breaches are quite mundane, and that the vectors whereby breaches occur are quite mundane.  In this case, it sounds as if yet another contractor allowed yet another intrusion because of yet another failure to apply known patches.

What Hurwitz points out, in essence is that the occurrence of these “outlying” events is almost certain in systems of enough size and complexity.  Your one server will almost never go down.  Your 10,000-server farm is certain to have numerous servers down at any point in time.

To put it another way, the attackers on a system like Equifax’ don’t have to coordinate.  They can all try at various times and in various ways, and eventually they will succeed.

The defenders, on the other hand, being a centralized group with a castle and a moat, have to be perfect in their defense or the enemy will get in.  Centralized systems have a very hard time fighting decentralized systems.

So Hurwitz asks an interesting question: how can we make the defense of a system like Equifax’ be more decentralized?

One answer is: notify a consumer when their credit data gets pinged, and require the consumer to affirm that the ping was genuine.

I just signed up, in the wake of the breach, for a service that does just that.  Unfortunately, the service is only alive for 90 days and doesn’t auto-renew.  So I have to remember to do so.  Yet another attack surface.  But better than nothing.

Why not have such a service be the default?

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience