What books or articles have you read recently that fundamentally shifted the way you think about the world, and how you interact with it (work, social, play, whatever)?
Been reading Vonnegut again. Every tried him? Nothing Earth shattering in his works, but he examines what it means to be a human, and mostly concludes there ain’t much meaning.
Sound depressing? Far from it! Vonnegut exposes the bullshit in our wider societal and political systems, but he brings it home to our individual lives. Slaughter House 5 is his most well known work, and not to be missed!
Been thinking about his thoughts on how we’re suffering from not having larger families.
“OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.
What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.
Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.
A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.
But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.
When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”
I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.
They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.
Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
And I just wrote this while listening to my wife talk to all her friends and family for an hour, overseas and local. One of my coworkers had to go back to Kenya for his mom’s funeral. He expected no less than 600 people to show out for a week long event, planned months in advance. Imagine that!
So when people on here are afraid of people I say, “You’re not enough people!”
Great quote, excellent lesson, agreed.
I liked Slaughterhouse 5, bud fuck it was depressing. I loved Cat’s Cradle. Only read a few other short stories, I think…
I offered this elsewhere, but I just finished The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. It introduces the reader to the philosophical and psychological concepts developed and popularized by Alfred Adler. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be possibly transformative for my own life and outlook.
Seems to get some mixed reviews, lots of people on goodreads sayng it writes off the concept of trauma?
The Half Life History Series by Kyle Hill. They are about lesser known accidents involving ionizing radiation and are absolutely fascinating, all be it tragic. Overall his channel made me curious about nuclear energy and radiation and I now have a much better (but still basic) understanding of the topic.
And I feel I am a minority here, but due to his videos I think we should hold on to nuclear energy a little longer, decomission coal power plants first, whilst expanding solar, wind or tidal energy. (I hope these are the correct terms, english is not my native language) We already have nuclear waste to take care of, what’s ten more years worth of nuclear waste if it means that we can radically cut CO2 emissions.
The opening of the wikipedia article on feedback systems:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback
The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled carefully when applied to feedback systems:
Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole.
Almost all real world systems are feedback systems, from biology, to politics and government, to interpersonal relations. Yet people’s instinct is almost always to try and reason through things using cause and effect when that’s often not helpful. When people realize this, they often say 'oh it’s a chicken and egg thing’s or ‘oh it’s impossible to say who did what’ and throw up their hands and give up. But it’s not impossible to analyze feedback systems, nor to figure out relative contributions to them, nor to figure out ways to break out of cycles. But you need to impartially examine the system as a whole, you can’t just try and play the blame game.
Haha, absolutely agree, and thanks for a second reason to spruik !complexity@lemmy.world in one thread 😍
Thanks for reminding me to add this here! Wiki link from another lemmy user a few days ago I found incredibly helpful in reframing things from “right vs left” to a broader, less politicized view that just speaks to human nature: tolerance vs intolerance - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Not entirely sure how this relates to feedbacks… But if you’re interested in the paradox of tolerance, you might also find this interesting - reframing the problem as a social construct removes the paradox: https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-contract/
(note: I just skimmed that version, there might be better versions of this argument out there)
I read it a couple years ago, but Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein. It did such a good job helping me understand what happened with the conspiracy mirror world that rose up during Covid.
More recently? Yes, You Are Trans Enough by Mia Violet helped me come to understand myself a lot better.
I’m currently reading 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman and it really hits home.
Burkeman is a former productivity guru that has tried all kinds of productivity tools and lifehacks only to realize that trying to get more efficient only results in keeping you even more busy.
People are always striving for that next step to get to a mythical point in life where they think they can relax and enjoy life, and for most of us, that point never comes, because we’re too busy trying to get there
Sounds like an interesting read. The premise makes sense. Take the washing machine for example. Before the advent of the automatic washer, women spent most of their time cooking and doing laundry. Incredibly time consuming manual labor.
Washing machines freed up a ton of time but also require complex infrastructure to operate. Same for any other “time saving” appliance.
The comforts and conveniences enjoyed by much of modern society are unparalleled by any other point in history but just maintaining all those comforts and conveniences is a ton of work in itself.
One example he gives is Facebook - it allows you to keep track of events you might like to go to, which seems convenient, but then it will show you hundreds of other events you might want to go to, much more than a single person can visit.
Another example is food delivery - in the US there was even one company advertising with the fact that when you order food, you can do so without having to interact with anyone. While that might be convenient, a lot of neighborhoods lose cohesion, because people stop meeting each other at the local takeout or have a small interaction with the people behind the counter there. The gist of it is, that it’s okay for some things to be a little less convenient, because there is always a cost involved.
What he promotes is to accept that you can’t get everything done. You have limited time, and sometimes you’ll have to accept that the laundry might pile up while you are working on your book/application/… whatever.
It also puts in perspective what you are actually working for - he quotes the parable of the businessman and the Greek fisherman to illustrate.
I’ve done almost the opposite lol. I’ve got my shit dialed I can get paid more for less. We gotta live life, not be a slave to it.
Agreed, but automation is not always the same as increased efficiency.
What does the name refer to?
4000 weeks is about the average lifespan
I’ve been working on deconstructing my childhood, being raised as a young earth creationist. I long since dropped theism, but am still trying to clean up some of the side effects. The talk.origins newsgroup has been invaluable. So many of the things I was taught, I didn’t even know were specifically creationist BS because they were all I heard from the time I was a baby.
I’m always down for recommendations on “adults should know this basic science 101”.
I can recommend A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking as a good scientific read with very clear and simple explanation of the topic.
Interesting. I grew up in a science-heavy family, and eventually became a scientist. A LOT of what’s been changing my worldview recently has been a kind of deprogramming from science - reductionist science. Complexity theory in particular, as well as breaking down the dominant cultural view of linear technological progress.
I don’t have anything really super useful at the 101 level, but I’ll definitely plug some of the stuff on !complexity@lemmy.world community - it’s not necessarily introductory material, but some of it is super accessible and fun to engage with (especially some of the videos).
It took me a long time to recover from the cult I was raised in, too. Every time I think I’ve got it all out of my system, some new insight comes to light and shocks me all over again. Like reading Chris Hedge’s 2006(or 7, I forget) book Totalitarianism in America. It goes over how the Dominionism Cult my mom was in in the 90s started in the 70s and is behind the US’s current political takeover attempt.
Just keep educating yourself like you have been, and you’ll be alright 💜 Just don’t get down on yourself when more ingrained dogma pops up, be glad you noticed it instead!
There’s some great podcasts out there that really focus on the science. Science VS comes to mind, as does Factually
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a great read that really explains how to think rationally, and also fixes some issues with the source material.
For a really fun rabbit hole, follow author Eliezer Yudkowsky to LessWrong, his community blog/forum/rationalist community, to the Zizians with their attempted seasteading and string of murders.
Behind the Bastards did a four-part series on the Zizians, I highly recommend it
On the Dutch version of the Correspondent, there is a recent series of articles on how young people with ideals are lured into zero-impact bullshit jobs by big corporations. In case any Dutch readers are watching along: the author’s name is Simon van Teutem. There’s also a book by the same author with the same message, although I have not read it yet.
Although I am nearing 50, it has struck a certain nerve with me. The author puts into words a certain opinion that I have been having the last few decades in a more poignantand hopefully impactful way than I will ever be able to.
Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson.
So fun.
What’s the gist?
It wasn’t recent, but I remember being wide-eyed when I read Manna by Marshall Brain. But even then, I knew the optimistic half was very optimistic and… Yeah. Now it depresses me to think about it. In terms of worldview, it made me consider that optimism at least.
What’s the gist? Or, what did it change about your worldview?
Bearing in mind it came out in 2003? It basically predicted how the rich would try to use AI to replace as many of the working poor as possible. It was incredibly bleak, talking about how as the software and hardware advanced, more and more people’s job’s were destroyed and slowly people were rounded up into government housing projects. If memory serves, it was almost like a prison.
Then the main character/narrator gets to escape to Australia (which is kind of lol but I digress) where they used AI to create a utopian post-scarcity society, and it went over all the way you could use things like brain-interfacing chips to make life easy and wonderful; how people shared what resources they had so everyone had plenty. You could basically 3-D print yourself a house if you wanted.
Seeing how things have developed much more closely to one timeline than the other is very depressing. But it definitely woke me up to thoughts like “Tech is not inherently evil but can be used in very evil ways.” (Which feels like not much of a revelation but I was a teenager then, so it was a shock at the time.)
Oh yeah, that sounds like a trip.
As an Aussie, I approve.
