The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Reads like an undergraduate research paper under the review of a post-modernist philosopher.
The book has one wonderful chapter on the business and craft of repairing, building pipe organs.
The the remainder of the book is treating a narrow slice of academic life, lectures, cafeteria, gymnasium, and social media as if they are the essence of modern culture.

An important distinction that he overlooks is the difference between culture and nature. He treats to idea of resentful surrendering to the person of a ruler, authority, the same as surrendering to a fact of nature. He claims that "people" (I wonder whom he is referring to?) resent surrendering to the facts of nature as an extension of the ideas of learning to think for themselves. He considers independent thinking to be a dismissal of thinkers of the past, but independent thinking is coming to understand what other thinkers say, not ignorance of them, (except maybe August Comte who reportedly thought he would not bother to study Aristotle and invent all of philosophy on his own).

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Quote from W.E.B. Du Bois, "Black Reconstruction," 1935

Quote from W.E.B. Du Bois, "Black Reconstruction," 1935

Page 702.

The effect of caste on moral integrity of the Negro race in America has thus been widely disastrous; servility and fawning, gross flattery of white folk and lying to appease and cajole them; failure to achieve dignity and self-respect and moral self-assertion, personal cowardliness and submission to insult and aggression; exaggerated and  despicable humility; lack of faith of Negroes in themselves and in other Negroes and in all colored folk; inordinate admiration for the stigmata of success among whiter folk; wealth and arrogance, cunning dishonesty and assumptions of superiority; the exaltation of laziness and indifference as just as successful as the industry and striving which invites taxation and oppression; dull apathy and cynicism; faith in no future and the habit of moving and wandering in search of justice; a religion of prayer and submission to replace determination and effort.

Review of Sam Harris's "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion"

The value of this book for me is that reading his words leading to "no self" suddenly clicked for me in terms of my own deeper sense of what this is about and being able to live in "no self" at any moment I want. Would I have gotten it without having years of daily meditation, self-remembering exercises, and periodic silent retreats sponsored by various spiritual organizations? I don't know. Perhaps it simply comes with maturity and time? I believe that some disciplines call Harris's "no self" the true Self with capital "S" or the "impersonal Self" shared by all beings. 

This book is a quick and easy read. Some of his high level remarks seem skewed, but he explains and elaborates later in the book, e.g. logical conflicts between religions. I believe that he occasionally confused poetic metaphor with assertion of facts, e.g. his critique of Gurdjieff's cosmology, the moon eats us, the old and new testaments of the Bible. He seems to be blind to the distinction between sermons for the students and sermons for the "coarse" folks (the "coarse" adjective from the Confessions of Saint Augustine). This same distinction has been made by commentators about the teaching of the Buddha, some sermons for the common folks, different sermons for the students.

Harris's discussions about neurology are fascinating. He stays in the essence of the problem. Many researchers, such as Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, get detoured into non-essential, but easier to access phenomena. On the other hand the only book I read by Dennett was "Consciousness Explained." Dennett suggested that if readers wanted to get to the really essential questions of consciousness, they should read his "The Intentional Stance." I haven't read this yet.

George Orwell's Essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War"

Timely quotes from England 78 years ago!

"As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned off and on like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.  In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety."  (Page 145.)/(last paragraph of section 1)

"Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present [1942], there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously.  And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed." (Page 146.)/(second paragraph of section 2.

References

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, Narrative Essays, Compiled by George Packer, Harcourt Inc. 2008.

https://orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1

Advanced Calculus Of Real Valued Functions Of A Real Variable And Vector Valued Functions Of A Vector Variable, by Hans Sagan

I studied most of this book in the 1970's, returning to it now that I have the time to really savor the logic of calculus.

I have three reasons for this study:

1 - Intellectual pleasure, 

2 - desire to find the transitions in my own mind from imagination to concept, 

3 - desire to read Penrose's "Road to Reality" with better understanding than I bring to it now. 

CAUTION: Does not go well with a glass of 🍷.

As I work my way through this book, more reflections to come.

In the study of functions, I discovered an innate bias: I am repelled by the idea of a function as ordered pairs. It took me several weeks of work to grasp this.  I was rooted in the classic physcist"s mindset of continuous curves found in the orbits of the planet's.  The next hundred pages cover the implications this definition!

Comments on Greenspan's "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World"

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I recently finished Greenspan’s book, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” Contemplating the differences between Greenspan and Ayn Rand, I recognize now, even though Ayn Rand spells it out clearly but I never grokked it, is that Greenspan writes and thinks about how people actually behave, Rand writes and thinks about how people ought to behave. She writes about the potential for heroic lives, Greenspan writes about market behavior and voting behavior. It is the voting behavior that is less than rational, but needs to be accounted for to generate government policy.

The lesson for me in this is that I have been frustrated most of my life by expecting other people, especially employees and newscasters, to aspire to living heroically. I can be more patient with the people I meet, friends and neighbors and family.

There are just too many quotable lines from this book, here is a sampling.
Quotes:
"This implies that in a free society governed by the rights and responsibilities of its citizens, the vast majority of transactions must be voluntary which, of necessity, presupposes trust in the word of those with whom we do business --- in almost all cases, strangers." Page 256.
"Reputation and trust ... [are] the core requirements of market capitalism." Page 256.
"... government regulation cannot substitute for individual integrity." Page 256.
"... the problem of central planning in a market economy -- the market will always undermine any attempt at control." Page 62
Quote from Reagan, "Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." Page 87.
"... U.S. Department of Labor and its predecessor since 1888. ... for those households with a third of the nations's average income ... (their spending exceeds income by 30 percent)." Page 270. {This is an example of keeping up with the Jones, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping.... Greenspan notes that the idea was first described in Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class" }


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Comments on "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feyman" by Jame Gleick

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Could not put it down! Inspiration for aspiring scientists and independent thinkers.

Even the biographical description of his parents arrival in New York was fun reading. Very well written, includes an excellent summary of the history of physics during Feynman's lifetime. Gleick gives short biographies of Feynman's fellow physicists that helps provide greater context for understanding Feynman's work and life.

Several intriguing lines from the hardcover edition:
pg 306 "If a Caltech experimenter told Feynman about a result reached after a complex process of correcting data, Feynman was sure to ask how the experimenter had decided when to stop correcting, and whether that decision had been made before the experimenter could see what the effect it would have on the outcome. It was all too easy to fall into the trap of correcting until the answer looked right. To avoid it required an intimate relationship with the rules of the scientist's game. It also required not just honesty, but a sense that honesty requires exertion."

My comment is that this quote brings to mind Admiral Rickover's statement in one of his early books about about technology, that advanced technology (i.e. nuclear power) requires a greater degree of moral rectitude than earlier technologies. I am sure that most nuclear engineers who get a call from their duty officer in the middle of the night recognize "a sense that honesty requires exertion" to find out what is really happening. Rich Luke, new construction engineer of the USS Honolulu SSN718, explained that this what makes a good engineer, to be able to push for the true answer inspite of personal fatigue and sense of urgency to keep things moving.

pg 325 Gleick reveals his bias with "Scientists still speak unashamedly of reality, even in the quantum era, of objective truth, of a world independent of human construction, and they sometimes seem to be the last members of the intellectual universe to do so. Reality hobbles their imaginations." Glieck documents that Feynman did believe in objective truth, that could be described in many ways.

pg 326 Gleick's discussion of "genius" includes this interesting quote from the literary, artistic mind set: "Would that I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken." -- a quotation attributed to Khakheperresenb, an Egyptian scribe of the Middle Kingdom (circa 2000 B.C.)

pg 353, Feynman teases Russian physicist Ivanenko by asking him what is the integral of e to the minus x squared from minus infinity to plus infinity? Silence. "Ivanenko what is one and one?" {My comment: The integration comes out to square root of pi. I thought this was a pretty good joke, if you know your calculus. I had to look up the answer here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWOGf...}


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