Exactly. You can’t make the kid read something, but if he doesn’t know the book exists he’s not going to read it for sure.
Martin Sustrik
Karma: 2,704
Wow. Worm? That’s pretty dark. Also a million words or so. Does your kid enjoy it?
That brings back memories. We used to have an english Encyclopaedia as well. Similar story. I still recall how gloomy an impression it made on me. It felt like the world might be a weird, dark and dangerous place, at least compared to the rosy picture that the local communist propaganda was trying to paint.
Thanks! A lot of stuff to check here.
The context is: The kid reads encyclopaedia for fun, really interested in the history of technology, likes Randall Munroe books, but I was looking for fiction to provide a more complex and nuanced view of world, going beyond the bare technicalities.
Thanks! Asimov I am trying right now. I find the robot stories quite naive nowadays, but it seems that it may be just the right level of complexity not to overwhelm the kid and make him abandon the book on the one hand and yet keep him interested on the other. Foundation series I am going to try next. I recall reading it at 15, so maybe 11 is a bit early, but yes, its mechanistic view of society can make you interested in social sciences even if you are naturally a STEM type. Ender’s game—great! I forgot about that one. As for The Martian not sure, it feels a bit too complex, but maybe it’s worth a try.
HPMOR has quite a complex story, not sure I would have been able to follow/enjoy it at 11.
b> Many cities and some countries are doing great things, but the EU likes to slow everything down
If it was that simple, its a whole mess with both EU and member states implicated:
In 2008, the EU established a European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) with the aim of replicating the success of institutions like MIT. If you have not heard of it, it is not your fault. The effort went badly from the start, as EU countries couldn’t agree on where to put it. So, in true EU fashion, governments compromised by breaking it into pieces and spreading it across multiple cities. So much for agglomeration effects.
But, it seems to me that to a greater extent than in the US, the money isn’t being captured by European GDP, and in many cases the projects using such technology that enable further growth are happening outside European borders.
Case in point: Germany subsidizing early development of solar. But there is longer any production of solar panels in Germany.
The traditional European approach is to wait for someone or something to raze your city and then rebuild with newer stuff and a better plan.
I think I’ve even seen a study about areas bombed out during WWII performing better economically today.
Agreed. But the popular narrative is that all the EU bureaucrats want is to regulate and then regulate some more. The sentence in question is supposed to say that it is not necessarily so, in accord with what you are saying.
Sorry, this is an internal European discourse about the European economy slowing down compared to the US. The “eurocrat” wording is a bit tongue-in-cheek thing. The reality is more about the coordination problems associated with scaling down the regulation. Compare the news like this: “Macron Warns EU ‘Could Die’ Within 3 Years Due to Overregulation, Welfare Burden, Underinvestment” https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/macron-warns-eu-could-die-within-3-years-due-to-overregulation-social-welfare-burden-underinvestment-5734718?rs=SHRNCMMW
At your service!
Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let’s say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.
Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:
For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.
Significant portion of referendums is solved by negotiation (see article) and does not reach the voter at all.
Even if the voter is not properly informed they can either not vote (with no quorum that has no impact on the result) or vote “no” (which means “keep the status quo”).
Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that’s how it’s going to be.
It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can’t really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.
Coincidentally, here’s Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:
Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.
There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period—which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.
Let me try a different example:
Let’s say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.
The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55% voters vote for them, yet they get 80% of MPs. They don’t care about meta level and are not willing to sacrifice object-level interests for it.
The situation is stable for the time being. There’s no “political will” to enact proportional voting. So you wait.
At some point the voting patterns change and the ruling party suddenly faces defeat in the upcoming elections. Now they would do better with the proportional voting system.
They care only about the object level, that is, winning the election, and proportional voting is as good means to win as is majority voting.
You, on the other hand, care only about the meta level. You may lose the upcoming election if proportional system is adopted, but you think it’s still worth it.
Suddenly the two parties are aligned, each side prefers the proportional system, albeit for different reasons. The proportional voting gets adopted.
Unfortunately no, they didn’t. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian “exit”).
LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don’t know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!
If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system—would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.
Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?
Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.
Isn’t it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?
Isn’t it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who’s willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.
Yes, I am seeing that as well. Technical/philosophical stuff is fine, but the psychology in adult fiction is too complex for an 11-years old to enjoy.