Not about this book in particular, but I wanted to thank you for creating this amazing resource. As someone who obsessively bought every MIR title he could while growing up in Delhi, do take a bow.
268 karma · joined October 17, 2014
Been using it for several months now and it’s my default reading location and I read a lot. Reading is essential to my life and work and I have been looking for a solution that solves all my information consumption problems. Readwise has a good chance to be that solution as long as they don’t go the way of Google or Evernote.
One continuing irritation: PDF reading on iPadOS isn’t as good as dedicated apps (I use PDF Expert). Highlighting works fine, but writing by hand using the Pencil is nowhere near as responsive or accurate as PDF Expert. I hope you invest resources into making PDF consumption the best in class - it’s the only thing preventing me from fiully embracing Reader as a complete solution.
A suggestion - not arising from irritation, but a matter of positioning - much of the communication of Readwise/Reader’s utility is around productivity, of reading to optimize information uptake or insight maximization. I would prefer if it also highlighted creativity and imagination. I read to make new connnections and (hopefully) think new thoughts that I haven’t thought before. It’s an idyllic vision of the vocation of reading but one that has a long history in the annals of bibliophilia. Perhaps you should target not just the Tech Bro, but also the Romantic Reader.
PS: an unexpected delight - I liked how I was onboarded by an existing user and had to turn around a couple of weeks later and help onboard the next generation. If done well, Readwise/Reader can become an essential social reading app for nerds, with the tool being the hub for a community of serious readers. Books are already read in circles - perhaps you should try to replace Google+ as well as Google Reader
"For a long time I felt somewhat unique in this regard, but COVID has made my longstanding reality the norm for many more people. Their physical world is defined by their family and hometown, which no longer needs to be near their work, which is entirely online; everything from friends to entertainment has followed the same path."
The unbundling of physical and digital reality is certainly happening, but I also think new forms of rebundling are also happening. Before COVID, I would never dream of calling my daughter in the next room, but now I do it all the time - not (only) because I am lazy, but because the call or text is less intrusive than knocking on the door and therefore has better UX.
To see what's happening as only:
1) "the real world is the combination of the digital world and the physical world and that the real world is not just the physical world."
or
2) "the Metaverse is the set of experiences that are completely online, and thus defined by their malleability and scalability"
is to downplay the combinatorial possibilities of dis-aggregating and recombining the digital and the physical. It feels to me that a certain 'computational style' is becoming widespread tacit knowledge and shouldn't be identified only with the digital/online/virtual.
PS: https://mirtitles.org/ is a treasure trove for people who like books from the Soviet Era.
Not conservative in the political sense as I read it but in the sense of being slow moving, of having a sense of history and tradition, honoring both. And a place where creativity as well as radicalism is tempered with caution.
I don't think that's compatible either with 'disruptive innovation' or with 'cancel culture' both of which strike me as two aspects of the same phenomenon. Or with 'publish or perish' for that matter.
To give just one example, rates of alcoholism are higher in South India - both in TN and Kerala [1] - where endemic poverty of the Madhya Pradesh kind doesn't exist.
We can agree that addiction is widespread and there's been a world wide shift in the spending habits of people who earn less than a dollar a day. Banerjee/Duflo's Nobel Prize is based on that work [2]. Some relevant quotes:
> Yet the average person living at under $1 per day does not seem to put every available penny into buying more calories. Among our 13 countries, food typically represents from 56 to 78 percent of consumption among rural households, and 56 to 74 percent in urban areas. For the rural poor in Mexico, slightly less than half the budget (49.6 percent) is allocated to food.2
> Of course, these people could be spending the rest of their money on other commodities they greatly need. Yet among the nonfood items that the poor spend significant amounts of money on, alcohol and tobacco show up prominently. The extremely poor in rural areas spent 4.1 percent of their budget on tobacco and alcohol in Papua New Guinea; 5.0 percent in Udaipur, India; 6.0 percent in Indonesia; and 8.1 percent in Mexico.
> Perhaps more surprisingly, spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals.
5% is a lot on alcohol, but cannot be the major cause of poverty, festivals being an even bigger outlay. We also know that in India those spending habits are gendered, which is why prohibition campaigns have been very popular among women voters.
Nevertheless, the idea that the poor are poor because of their 'poor values' is one of the oldest tropes in the book. Please don't spread stereotypes that are neither grounded in data nor in actual lived experience.
What kind of saint could he become?
Surely not a religious saint when religiosity is declining and sainthood is suspect. Not a secular saint either, for he doesn't have the marks of 21st century secular sainthood: lack of ego, public spirit, concern for justice etc.
The only option I can see: his resistance to state power and unwillingness to escape his fate brings him close to Socrates, so perhaps there's that route. If only he had a great prose stylist as a student.
Of the various Catholic halomakers I know (and I don't many, being neither a Catholic nor a saint), only St. Francis comes across as a straightforward candidate for contemporary sainthood.
Even the very highest levels of human achievement are historically conditioned and might appear to later generations as idolatry.
2. From all appearances, he gave the money away out of generosity rather than the need for recognition. Didn't strike me as celebrity self aggrandizement.
3. He felt both the what and the how are worth publicizing. He's a known 'thought leader' after all.
Of the three, only the third is remotely objectionable. I think it's ok to say good things about oneself doing good things.
I bet it's correlated with generosity and more likely to be so than the mean spiritedness that comes from wagging a finger at those who are putting themselves out there.
Nusli Wadia, the man he was supposedly getting killed, is the head of an important textile firm himself and the grandson of the founder of Pakistan.
The scandal of which this episode is but one battle, led to the downfall of Rajiv Gandhi's government and triggered the long downfall of the Congress party, which is how Dhirubai's son Mukesh finds himself so close to the current regime whose predecessors, ironically, benefited enormously from the alleged chumminess between the father Ambani and Rajiv.
Wretched hive of scum and villainy seems a bit overwrought though; par for the course for robber barons and way less scummy and violent than Andrew Carnegie or Cecil Rhodes and other titans of western industry.
Plus they haven't caused coups in Central American countries. Yet. Though I wouldn't mind if Mukesh bhai bought England and replaced the Union Jack with the Tricolour.
And if I like the service but find some aspect of it annoying, I spend half an hour composing a thoughtful response to said email. Nine times out of ten it's crickets. Of course it was a mass email sent to zillions of budding saber rattlers but the lack of acknowledgement, let alone a proper reply, sours me on the service for ever.
2. More technical, but a valuable introduction to analytic methods in classical Indian thought: Jonardon Ganeri's 'Philosophy in Classical India: An Introduction and Analysis' [2]
These are, of course, scholars writing in a scholarly vein. Two books about Guru figures with deep spiritual experience are:
3. Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, translated into English as 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna'[3]
4. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi [4]
Finally, to take a comparative route:
5. Roberto Calasso's 'Ka' which is his take on the Vedic-Puranic-Itihasic Corpus as a whole [5].
and to understand how India meets Greece via Persepolis and Egypt:
6. Thomas McEvilley's 'Shape of Ancient Thought' [6]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Philosophy-Dr-Chakravarthi-Ra...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Classical-India-Introducti...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Sri-Ramakrishna-Swami-Nikhilan...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Talks-Ramana-Maharshi-Realizing-Happi...
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Ka-Stories-Mind-Gods-India/dp/0679451...
[6]https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Phi...
Here's the opposite argument: universities will eat bootcamps for lunch because in the post-COVID era they will be hungry for the same dollar and I would much prefer getting a Harvard Online degree than from Fullstack Camp TM.
There's no doubt that higher education will be transformed by the COVID19 crisis but it's extremely unlikely (in my view) that the shifts will go along the lines predicted by Silicon Valley 'product thinkers.' There's a reason why Universities have lasted longer than civilizations.
Is wrong for several reasons. As a Samkhyavadin of the arithmetic kind, let me count some of them:
1. What's 'uncontested' would be strongly contested by both their classical interlocutors such as the Mimansakas and by modern scholars - for example, for linguistic reasons mentioned in one of the other comments.
2. Not sure what 'complete' philososophy means, but we might assume that some account of reason and logic is part of a complete philosophical system, in which case the Samkhyavadins like many of their counterparts, took the lead from the Naiyayikas, who were closely related but distinct. Same for grammar, where everyone took their lead from Panini and the grammarians.
3. I think calling it 'Vedic Philosophy' doesn't do justice either to the Vedas or to Philosophy. For example, the accurate, elaborate and intricate performance of ritual action is central to the Vedic experience. We can't reduce that to philosophical beliefs about dualism or monism without serious harm to the original practices. It's a sign of modernity that beliefs (such as dualism) are given precedence over ritual performance.
3. Words like 'derive' and 'axioms' suggest an overly mathematical relationship which would be impossible to justify. Even the Upanisads aren't derived from the Vedas in any axiomatic sense. The Prakriti-Purusa dualism finds a precedent in the Rig Veda which says "Two birds associated together, and mutual friends, take refuge in the same tree; one of them eats the sweet fig; the other abstaining from food, merely looks on" - try deriving the Soul from that imagery.
In fact, the most well known Samkhya (influenced) text isn't the Karika but the Mahabharata, including the Gita, with Arjuna playing the role of Prakriti and Krishna that of Purusa. Which is why - to use a deductive argument - Arjuna fights even when he doesn't want to and Krishna doesn't even when wants to.
I know I am being pedantic, but I find that these kinds of reductive Whig histories of Indian knowledge traditions perpetuate the problems they are trying to remove. Far more interesting, say, from the perspective of modern philosophy of mind, is the somewhat technical question: why did most Indian traditions consider mind, aka Manas, to be a physical entity? What does it say about their account of knowledge since Manas is an Indriya, i.e., an instrument of knowledge. What does it mean for knowledge to be physical and yet normative, i.e., how can something physical be true or false?"
To reduce these subtleties to 'Hindu Philosophy' or even to six schools of Astika philosophy is deeply problematic.
At that time you were interested in the cognitive abilities of bacteria, but looks like you took a different but equally successful path.
Congratulations!
More recently, we used Notion - where 'we' = a group of professional volunteers; professional in that everyone had skills to contribute and volunteer in that no one is being paid for those contributions - to create a Citizen-to-Citizen long term support platform for those impacted adversely by the COVID19 epidemic. In India in case you're wondering.
The challenges are many:
1. Make it clear that we see ourselves not as a charity but as a citizen to citizen support network - today it could be that person, but tomorrow it could be you. We have to design around the dignity of the recipient and the donor.
2. We need to identify potential beneficiaries whose needs are verifiable. Which means involving organizations that work with migrant laborers at scale (to take a key demographic) and can verify and on-board those potential beneficiaries.
3. We need to pull together the back-end and front-end technology to make donations without intermediaries, i.e., there's no middleman receiving and storing the money - it's a direct transfer from one individuals account to another individual's account. No administrative fees and with any luck we could even see if the credit card fees can be waived.
4. Compelling and easy to grasp design that inspires trust in potential donors and even more importantly, builds solidarity between the donor and the recipient. We are all in this together, aren't we?
5. A communications strategy that brings in donors and creates a democratic narrative around donations.
Each one of these needs several individuals and sometimes several organizations to collaborate and agree upon a course of action. Notion helped us do that layer by layer, with the top level principles leading naturally to more technical decisions and an easy way to share content with non-technical but nevertheless insightful leaders in organizations that are providing essential services.
We first tried doing it with a combination of Google docs, Github repositories and other pieces of chewing gum and string, but once we shifted to Notion we never looked back. So much so that the next project this group is attempting is Notion native.
But despite my innate Indian nationalism I think the time has come to stop writing articles (or even having thoughts) like the one linked above.
Yes, many cultures, including several represented in the Indian subcontinent, had deep and important ideas. It's even likely that in some disciplines - the mind sciences being the most obvious - there are many ideas and practices that are waiting to transform and revolutionize 'western' science, whatever that might mean.
But the knee jerk chauvinistic instinct that says all science (& democracy & sliced bread) arose in Greece and the Indian/Chinese/Middle-Eastern response to counter that with continued fractions in the Lilavati (as well as spaceships and chimeras) has run its course in my view. Plain common sense and generosity suggests that insights have mingled across people's for millennia. One of my favorite sources for that belief: Thomas McEvilley's superlative "Shape of Ancient Thought." [1]
If anything, the events of the past weeks show that we are still stuck in a parochial mindset when the big problems of the present and the foreseeable future are all human in the expansive sense of that term. And why human - I would rather rather we started thinking with any number of other species that have something to teach us.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Phi...
It's a Burger King for god's sake - what do you expect? If you want the mainstream to embrace your values you don't want to damage the chances of increasing acceptance just because the ad copy wasn't a 100% accurate.
Unfortunately none of them thought of turning themselves into royalty; they were content being traders and hustlers. It strikes me that it would be very hard to perform that act of self-transformation today with Google and Facebook monitoring my every move.
I also think we should be looking at d/dx(green) rather than |green| to detect the influence of wealth and power, especially in parts of the world where unchecked growth has decimated green space. Which is to say, don't perform your comparisons based on tree cover now but the change in tree cover over time, say, using satellite data over the years.
Common sense suggests that by looking at the ebb and flow of greenery, we will find that the spots where the wealthy and the powerful live are less likely to see trees cut down and more likely to see new trees planted.
Edit: it's quite possible that what's called PPH now is the inheritor of the space I used to go to, but it's not the same space as far as I can tell from online photos.