The Great Mental Models, Volume Two – Shane Parrish

The Great Mental Models, Volume Two – by Shane Parrish (Farnam Street)
Recommendation: 9/10. Date read: 1/18/21.

The Great Mental Models series by Farnam Street blows me away. The second book in this series focuses on the hard sciences including chemistry, biology, and physics. They do a tremendous job articulating the laws and models in a way that makes sense for those without a Ph.D. And rather than simply stating the law and sticking with the abstract, they translate how it applies to situations in your everyday life. They explain how laws of reciprocity translate to relationships, the ways in which inertia requires us to overcome the allure of what’s easy, and how an ecosystem translates to the most effective, creative, and collaborative working cultures.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Relativity:
“The limits of perspective are fundamental to how the world works. Considering multiple perspectives is the best chance we have to understand what is really going on.”

“What matters is understanding the complexity and value of multiple perspectives. No one sees it all. Multiple perspectives layered together reduce blind spots and offer us a more textured and truer sense of the underlying reality.” 

Reciprocity:
Life is an iterative and compounding game…it pays to go positive and go first.

“The more people you help, the more people you will have willing to help you.”

“If you want people to be thoughtful and kind, be thoughtful and kind. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them. The best way to achieve success is to deserve success.”

Thermodynamics:
First law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. Consider how this applies in death. 

“Entropy reminds us that energy is required to maintain order. You need to anticipate things falling apart and focus on prevention.”

Exposure: “Mixing cultures gives them common ground. We move toward social equilibrium when we share ideas and values that have the same foundations.”

“Art is born out of as well as encapsulates the continuing battle between order and chaos. It seeks order or form, even when portraying anarchy.” John Yorke

Storytelling: “Every act of perception is an attempt to impose order, to make sense of a chaotic universe.”

Inertia:
“We stay at jobs we hate, avoid meaningful conversations with people of different opinions, and almost never change the religion our parents imposed on us at birth. All because it is easier to stay on our current path, however stagnant and unfulfilling it might be.”

Amount of effort required to change a habit is greater proportional to the length of time we’ve had it. This applies to both good habits and bad habits. Once you’ve established decades of good habits, it compounds and becomes difficult to stop your own success. The same applies in the opposite direction. 

Velocity:
Direction > speed

“If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him.” Seneca

Alloying:
Stacking skills is a force multiplier: “Alloying is about increasing strength through the combination of elements.”

Evolution:
“On the human timescale, adaptability is about recognizing when the way you have done things in the past is becoming less and less successful in a changing environment.” 

What got you here won’t keep you here or allow you to get to the next level. Personal growth is a lifelong effort and requires taking new risks: “You can’t stop adapting, because no one around you is stopping…Staying the same as we are often means falling behind.” 

“Success is measured by persistence.” Geerat Vermeij

Experimentation for its own sake matters: “We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.” Marie Curie

Antifragile: “Complacency will kill you. However, it’s not strength that survives, but adaptability. Strength becomes rigidity…Real success comes from being flexible enough to change, to let go of what worked in the past, and to focus on what you need to thrive in the future.”

Ecosystem:
Culture = the key to perseverance. Bill Walsh leading the 49ers: “Walsh recognized that a football organization’s culture is ultimately the system that will determine if a team can sustain the effort needed to win a championship.” Walsh believed, “everyone has a role, and every role is essential.” But they all had to be pointing in the same direction.

“The stronger and more resilient a system, the easier it can adapt and bounce back.” For Walsh it wasn’t about superstars or certain formations, “It was about building a culture that could be flexible in effectively responding to ever-changing environmental pressure.”

Self-preservation:
“Freeze mode usually takes over when the accumulation of stressors is so great that we can no longer really function.” 

Man’s search for meaning: “For humans, survival is not merely a binary like dead/alive. We don’t want to just continue breathing, but to have a life that we perceive as having meaning, value, or at least a point.”

Replication:
Commander’s intent: “Sharing the information necessary to empower subordinate commanders on the scene.” Too rigid and the person doing the work can’t adapt and innovate to execute against the strategy when circumstances change. Encourages troops to consider the why behind an order and the underlying strategy. 

Four elements of commander’s intent: formulate, communicate, interpret, and implement. The first two are the responsibilities of the senior commander. The second two are the responsibilities of the subordinate commander. 

Commander’s must consider four criteria:

1. Explain the rationale (the why): vision + strategy

2. Establish operational limits: constraints

3. Get feedback often: listen and learn

4. Recognize individual differences: leverage individual strengths

Incentives:
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” Charlie Munger

“An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often-tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.” Stephen D. Levitt

Least effort principle:
“Change is costly for most organisms. It can be easier to keep doing whatever has guaranteed their survival so far than to try something new that might fail and waste energy or endanger them. The instinct to minimize energy output can lead us to be resistant to change or risk-taking. “

Default thinking tendencies (aka heuristics): “Using this model as a lens helps us better understand our default thinking tendencies, and how our patterns of movement impact our physical environments.” 

The Alchemy of Us – Ainissa Ramirez

The Alchemy of Us – by Ainissa Ramirez
Recommendation: 8/10. Date read: 12/22/20.

Details eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and ties together not only how the invention came about, but how each invention came to shape humanity and culture. It’s an interesting examination of how technology is both a reflection of the environment it was born in and how it can alter the ways we think about and interact with the world for generations. Ramirez breathes life into each invention with stories from interesting figures throughout history—if you enjoy Bill Bryson, you’ll enjoy this. It’s also a sobering reminder of ethical considerations and responsibilities that those building technology have in our society.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Technology shapes us for generations:
Prose was shortened by the telegraph—removed all unnecessary words avoided flowery language and adjectives. Shaped American English. At a telegrapher’s office when news broke, there was a 15-minute limit and messages had to be brief (you were also charged per word). Led to code language in newsrooms (POTUS, SCOTUS, OK). 

Technology reflects biases of the time:
Early film was only developed to properly capture the characteristics and features of white individuals. Pictures of blacks were always underexposed and lost features of their faces/turned them into ink blots. 

“Technologies we make are not innocuous and their use is not always for the greater good. Technologies, such as photographic film, also capture the issues and beliefs and values of the times.” AR

“These devices capture the biases that exist in our world and, in turn, speak to whom a culture values. As our technologies become more pervasive in our lives, whom they were built for and optimized for will be an important discussion.” AR

Depth:
“If we were to read a book, we would be fully submerged in the details and nuance of another world and swim in the deep end. The internet, however, is a worldwide wading pool. We slosh in the superficial because we have reached a critical point for what our brains can hold.” AR

Creativity:
“Creativity is not just the warehousing of ideas, but a process of giving the brain time to simmer on these ideas. Creativity requires preparation, but it also needs incubation.” AR

Creativity requires you to be exposed to and absorb the world. But it also requires time alone so you’re able to achieve a state of relaxed concentration and give yourself the cycles to examine and reassemble the fragments in your own way. 

The way most use the internet hinders deep thinking: “Our hunting and gathering minds exist in an age where there is nothing to physically hunt or gather, so our brains get trapped in the cycle of hunting and gathering ‘follows’ and ‘likes’ on social media.”

Degrees Kelvin – David Lindley

Degrees Kelvin – by David Lindley
Date read: 9/25/19. Recommendation: 7/10.

A biography of mathematical physicist and engineer, Sir William Thomson (1824-1907). This is a challenging read to get through, especially if you’re not well-versed in thermodynamics or electromagnetism (I’m not). But there’s a compelling story at the heart of Thomson’s life, and that’s what kept me going. Thomson was undeniably brilliant. At 22 he was appointed chair of natural philosophy at Glasgow, and by 31 he helped lay the foundations of thermodynamics. But his early brilliance turned into resistance and obstructionism as he grew older. He refused to keep up with the times and grew out of touch with the latest developments in science. He was remarkably and adamantly wrong about quite a few important topics: he doubted the existence of atoms, believed earth was no more than 100 million years old, and had reservations about radioactivity. Thomson’s story is a cautionary tale of clinging to an antiquated worldview. Everyone tends to think their formative years were sacred. Don’t fall into this trap. If you cling to your era and your generation too tightly, you blind yourself to new ideas.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Sir William Thomson (1824-1907), first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords (Lord Kelvin). At 22 became the professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow which he would hold for more than 50 years.

Combining theoretical with practical:
In 1845, Kelvin worked in the Paris laboratory of Victor Regnault to measure the thermal properties of steam and improve steam engine design. Steam power was critical during the industrial revolution. Opened Kelvin’s eyes to practical science and the implications of the theory of heat in technology. Shifted from a mathematician to a scientist during this time. 

Telegraphy introduced him to a world of innovation and patents that helped him generate money through consulting and advising. Mixed science with business meetings. Made his mark in the world of commerce and enterprise. 

Multidisciplinary:
Kelvin was a scientist + technologist, academic + entrepreneur, philosopher + practical thinker. 

Divide in his reputation (from young to old):
In newspapers and publications, his scientific knowledge was remarkable. At meetings and conferences, he was a crank. 

Refused to keep up with the times and grew out of touch with the latest developments in science. And he was remarkably wrong about quite a few important topics: doubted the existence of atoms, believed earth was no more than 100 million years old, had reservations about radioactivity. 

And he was relentless in his defense of incorrect positions such as the 100m year assessment of earth. Wrote to the London Times in 1906 arguing against radioactivity (even though it was widely accepted that radioactive decay involved the transmutation of one element into another). 

Everyone tends to think their formative years were sacred, don’t fall into this trap. Don’t cling to your era and your generation too tightly or you blind yourself to the latest developments. Kelvin is a perfect example of someone who grew out of touch as the years passed.

Brilliance at a young age (laying foundations of thermodynamics all before he turned 31, exploring the nature of electricity and magnetism) turned into resistance and obstructionism as he grew older. 

Took a very “mechanical” view of the universe that limited his imagination and rendered him an antique. 

Michael Faraday:
Part of Kelvin’s brilliance and folly was the fact that he couldn’t understand or contemplate an idea until he was able to put it in a mathematical form. Michael Faraday, by contrast, took a complete opposite approach because he didn’t know mathematics. Faraday’s power was one of pure imagination - he devised theories in pictures

At 13, Faraday apprenticed under a bookseller and read whatever he could get his hands on. Electricity and chemistry peaked his interest, bought glass jars, and began to run his own experiments. He was fanatical and orderly in taking notes. Completely dedicated to self-improvement. Similar narrative to Benjamin Franklin.

Drawdown periods and isolation: Faraday wasn’t a regular at meetings and conferences and he turned down numerous offers for professorial positions. “After spending his early research years mainly on chemical work (notably he succeeded in liquefying chlorine), he moved into electrochemistry (reactions stimulated by the passage of electric current through solutions) and thence into his pioneering and utterly original studies of electricity and magnetism.” DL

Vision: Faraday shaped modern view of electromagnetic field more than anyone else. “He was a magnificent experimenter, but guiding his experiments was a powerful vision of electromagnetism. He had one of the great theoretical minds in physics.” DL (this is what Kelvin lacked)

Constructing a theory:
Kelvin’s method: “Apply sound reasoning to empirical knowledge and thereby create a theory that was sweeping and general but at the same time founded on fact.” DL

“He had an exceptional ability to sort and clarify, to resolve confusion and contradiction, and many of the standard elements of classical thermodynamics trace back to his definitions and arguments.” DL

Development of thermodynamics:
Great example of how murky discoveries in science can be. Rarely can one person be credited with a discovery. Rankine, Thomson, Clausius, Carnot, Joule, all made major contributions. Helped establish thermodynamics as a fundamental discipline of physical science. 

Richard Feynman – Six Easy Pieces

Six Easy Pieces – by Richard Feynman
Date read: 8/2/19. Recommendation: 8/10.

Perhaps the most accessible introduction to physics that there is. Six Easy Pieces highlights the easiest, foundational chapters from The Feynman Lectures on Physics – a book based on Feynman’s lectures to undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology between 1961-1963. The chapters discuss atoms, basic physics, how physics fits in with other sciences, energy, gravity, and quantum behavior. Feynman’s ability to reduce complex subjects into simple pieces and stories, weaving in his humor and showmanship along the way, made him such a fascinating, approachable teacher.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Features the six most accessible chapters from The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963). 

Intro on Feynman:
Demonstrated balance in his practicality and showmanship. “Feynman was driven to develop a deep theoretical understanding of nature, but he always remained close tot he real and often grubby world of experimental results.” Paul Davies

Similar to Benjamin Franklin, broke arbitrary rules at will, viewed his world and social environment as a series of puzzles and challenges.

“For Feynman, the lecture hall was a theater, and the lecturer a performer, responsible for providing drama and fireworks as well as facts and figures.” David L. Goodstein

On his teaching methods: “First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will results more or less by common sense.” Feynman

What distinguished Feynman was his ability to reduce deep, abstract ideas to something you could begin to wrap your mind around.

Fundamentals of physics:
Experimentation: “The principle of science: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth.’”

“The sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.”

Imagination: But you also need imagination to take hints, guess at patterns beneath them, and run another round of experiments to check your guess. Similar to product development. 

The most important hypothesis in all of science: “Everything is made of atoms…there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.” 

How to tell if a guess is right: 1) When nature has arranged to be simple with few parts so we can predict what will happen. 2) Measure against less specific rules derived from them. Bishop always on a red square, always check on our idea about the bishop’s motion by looking for that. 3) Approximation.

If it’s not science, it’s not necessarily bad:
Avoid getting trapped into a shallow perspective: ”If something is said not to be a science, it does not mean that there is something wrong with it; it just means that it is not a science.”

The small and large operate according to entirely different laws:
Things on a small scale behave like nothing you have any direct experience with.

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything – by Bill Bryson
Date read: 6/15/19. Recommendation: 10/10.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the most important books on my shelf. After graduating from university, it’s the first book that reminded me how much I loved reading. It was the catalyst for me to begin building back up my reading habits and I’ve read it multiple times since. At its heart, it’s a book about science and some of life’s biggest questions. Bryson tackles everything from the cosmos and physics to ice ages and evolution. He’s a brilliant writer and storyteller, which helps make complex topics like particle physics more accessible and relatable for novices, like me. The pages are filled with jaw-dropping facts and stories of those enshrined in (or forgotten by) the annals of science. The amount of knowledge in this book is incredible. But the most important thing you’ll come away with is a renewed sense of perspective. It’s a great reminder of just how insignificant we are and how precious life is.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Newton, Principia, and Unlikely Inspiration:
In 1683, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren made a scientific wager on celestial objects. It was known that planets orbited in a particular kind of oval, but no one understood why. Wren offered a prize worth forty-shillings. Halley became obsessed with the problem and went to Isaac Newton, hoping he could help. Newton had already calculated the ellipse but couldn’t recall where he put the formula. Halley urged him to put it into a paper. The result was Newton’s crowning scientific achievement–Principia–which explained orbits mathematically, outlined three laws of motion, and, for the first time, identified gravity. Halley paid for the book’s publication out of his own pocket when The Royal Society backed out due to financial struggles. Impact of Newton’s laws is hard to overstate…explained ocean tides, motion of planets, the trajectory of cannonballs, why we aren’t lost to space as the planet spins beneath us. 

Lord Kelvin, Polymath, Master of the Long Game:

• Admitted to Glasgow University at the age of 10.

• Graduated from Cambridge, won top prizes for rowing and mathematics, launched a musical society.

• At the age of 22, became professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow for the next 53 years. 

• Wrote 661 papers, gained 69 patents, contributed to every branch of the physical sciences.

• Suggested the method that led to the invention of refrigeration, created scale of absolute temperature, invented boosting devices to send telegrams across oceans. 

Radioactivity and Early Adopters:
Many assumed radioactivity had to be beneficial since it was so energetic. It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938. Up until that point manufacturers put radioactive thorium in toothpaste and laxatives. Until the 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in Finger Lakes (NY) featured the therapeutic effects of its “Radioactive mineral springs.”

Einstein:
Early life revealed little of what was to come. Didn’t learn to speak until he was three. Failed college entrance exams on first try. 

Took advantage of being underemployed: 1902 took job at Swiss patent office and stayed for 7 years. Challenging enough to engage his mind, but not enough to distract him from physics. Here he produced the special theory of relativity in 1905.

Drawdown periods: For originality, tune out. Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” had no footnotes or citations. It was like he reached the conclusions by pure thought, without listening to outside opinion. 

Little recognition early on: As an outsider, he was largely ignored in the physics community, despite solving several of the deepest mysteries of the universe. Proceeded to apply and get rejected as a university lecturer and high school teacher.

Theory of relativity: Space and time are not absolute. They’re relative to both the observer and the thing being observed. Faster one moves, the more pronounced effects become. The faster we accelerate, the more distorted we are, relative to an outside observer. 

Spent the second half of his life searching for a unified theory of physics, but failed. Physics has two bodies of laws, one for the very small, one for the universe at large.

Discovery by Bridging Ideas
Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest-scholar with a Ph.D. from MIT, was the first to suggest that the universe began as a single geometrical point, a “primeval atom” which burst into existence and had been moving apart ever since. Referred to this as his “fireworks theory.” It was the first hint at the Big Bang. Combined his knowledge of Hubble’s discovery of the universe expanding and increasing speed in every direction, and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 

Plate Tectonics:
“Look at the globe and what you are seeing is really a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 percent of the Earth’s history.” BB

“The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.” Derek V. Ager

Disasters + Extinctions:
Last super volcano eruption took place 74,000 years ago in Toba, northern Sumatra. It was followed by six years of volcanic winter. Carried humans to brink of extinction, no more than a few thousand individuals. Modern humans arose from a very small population (explains our lack of genetic diversity). Some evidence shows for the next 20,000 years, human population never grew beyond a few thousand at a given time. Huge amount of time to recover from our perspective of time. But not from Earth’s. 

 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. Average lifespan of a species is about four millions years.

 Permian Extinction: 245 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs and 95% of animals known from fossil records disappear. Closest we’ve come to total obliteration. 

Life is Precious: 
“From the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the top of the highest mountain, the zone that covers nearly the whole of known life, is only something over a dozen miles–not much when set against the roominess of the cosmos at large.” BB

Excellent Location: “We are, to an almost uncanny degree, the right distance from the right sort of star, one that is big enough to radiate lots of energy, but no so big to burn itself out swiftly…We are also fortunate to orbit where we do. Too much nearer and everything on Earth would have boiled away. Much farther away and everything would have frozen.” BB

Earth would have been uninhabitable if it had been just 1 percent farther or 5 percent closer to the sun. Think about Venus (sun’s warmth reaches it two minutes before us).

“We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are only here because of time extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.” BB

“The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.” BB

“If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here–and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also a singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.” BB

The Power of Being an Outsider:
Watson and Crick (no formal training in biochemistry) beat out many top insiders as they worked to discover the structure of DNA. 

Alexander von Humboldt:
Observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

Origins:
Five million years ago, Panama rose from the sea, bridging North and South America, which disrupted warmer currents between the Pacific and Atlantic, and changed precipitation patterns across 50% of the world. Africa began to dry out and apes climbed down from trees in jungles to find a new way of life in the savannah.

One million years ago, upright beings left Africa and spread across the globe. Averaging 25 miles a year. 

Modern human is still 98.4% genetically indistinguishable from the modern chimpanzee. More difference between zebra and horse. 

The Invention of Nature – Andrea Wulf

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World – by Andrea Wulf
Date read: 8/18/18. Recommendation: 9/10.

The story of one of the most profound polymaths you've probably never heard of. Humboldt was a Prussian explorer, writer, geographer, and naturalist born in 1769. He revolutionized the way we view the natural world by making connections and framing nature as a unified whole. He viewed everything as reciprocal and interwoven, challenging the human-centered perspective that ruled up until that point in time (i.e. 'nature is made for the sake of man'). Humboldt's fascination with nature brought together art and science, combining exact observation with painterly descriptions, which helped make science far more popular and accessible. His work also influenced generations of scientists and writers including the likes of Charles Darwin, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. It's easy to see why Humboldt was so influential–the stories Wulf tells of his expeditions and adventures well into old age, are both fascinating and inspiring. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My Notes:

Born in 1769 into a wealthy Prussian aristocratic family, discarded a life of privilege to discover for himself how the world worked.

A multidisciplinary approach:
Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world by making connections everywhere. He shaped our modern understanding of nature through his comprehensive/multidisciplined approach. "In this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation." AVH

In nature (and in our individual lives) getting the overall conditions right is essential if we want to thrive.
-Neither our lives nor the forces of the natural world are siloed, independent components. Everything is interwoven.

Childhood tendencies:
-Escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants/animals/rocks.
-Would come back with pockets full of insects and plants, nicknamed 'the little apothecary'

Republic of Letters:
-During the new Age of Enlightenment, scientists around the world started an intellectual community that transcended national boundaries, religion, language. Used letters to pass along new ideas and scientific discoveries. Ruled by reason, not by monarchs.

Relationship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
-Despite Humboldt being 20 years younger, they became scientific sparring partners.
-Not a traditional master/apprentice relationship. One based on mutual respect, admiration, collaboration, and reciprocity.
-Goethe worked more intensely than he had in years after he met Humboldt.
-Goethe encouraged Humboldt to combine art and science.
-Goethe said that a single day with Humboldt brought him further than years on his isolated path.

"Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice familiar to his soul." -AVH

Humboldt challenged the human-centered perspective that had ruled humankind's approach to nature for millennia (i.e. Aristotle: "Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.") He viewed everything as reciprocal.

Journey through Venezuela in 1800 would change the course of his life. This is where his fascination with the natural world married science and art.

No scientist had referred to nature like this (thanks to Goethe's influence)
Rapids of Orinoco: "Coloured bows shine, vanish, and reappear." Always measured and recorded, but brought the scene to life.

"What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements" AVH

Chimborazo Expedition:
-Snowcapped volcano in Ecuador, 21k feet (believed to be highest mountain in world)
-2,500 mile journey from Cartagena to Lima through harsh landscapes pushed their physical limits
-They were supposed to return home from Quito, but the ship that was supposed to come took a different route than they expected. Rather than despair, became an opportunity with Humboldt's perspective. Allowed them to set out for the volcanoes. 
-"Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn't just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental. Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the 'deep wounds' that pure 'reason' sometimes created."

Naturgemälde, a lesson in the importance of the way you present/depict information;
-Drawing of Chimborazo that illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected.
-By picking a particular height of the mountain, you could trace connections across the table to see temperature, humidity, species of plants/animals at different altitudes.
-No one had shown such data visually before, showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. 

Unified Whole:
-He wasn't interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Less concerned with classifying the world into taxonomic units with a strict hierarchy and categories, like the scientists before him.
-To prove this, he couldn't look at it just as a botanist, geologist, or zoologist. Had to take a multidisciplinary approach and leverage each.

Racial Equality - Reflected his expanded worldview from being well traveled, greater empathy and greater tolerance when you've interacted with different people/societies/cultures. 
-Humboldt believed slavery was a disgrace and the greatest evil.
-All members of the human race were equal, from the same family (much like plants). Humankind just one small part. But nature itself is a republic of freedom (where he differed from Thomas Jefferson).

Location matters:
Returning to Europe after his adventures he chose Paris. Hub of like-minded thinkers, scientific societies, and Europe's publishing center (for fast distribution so he could share his new ideas). 

Broad appeal, reaching new audiences:
Scientists and thinkers were impressed by his publications and lectures, fellow writers adored his adventurous stories, while the fashionable world of Parisian society was delighted by his charm and wit.

Personal Narrative:
-Humboldt's book that followed his voyage chronologically to South America.
-First travel book to ever combine exact observation with a painterly description of landscape.
-Previous writers only measured, or collected plants, or gathered economic data from trading centers.
-Took readers onto the crowded streets of Caracas, across the dusty plains of the Llanos, and deep into rainforest along the Orinoco. Capturing imaginations along the way.
-Influenced British literature and poetry with his depictions of South America (Frankenstein, Don Juan).
-This was the book that inspired Charles Darwin to join the Beagle, and he knew it by heart.

Berlin Lectures:
-1827 arrived back to Berlin (reluctantly) after leaving Paris.
-Gave 76 free lectures over the course of 6 months that were unlike anything Berlin had ever seen. 
-Exhilarating, utterly new. By not charging an entry fee, packed audiences ranged from royal family to students, servants, scholars, bricklayers, and half of those attending were women. Democratized science.
-Took his audience on a journey - talked about poetry, astronomy, geology, landscape painting.
-One of his greatest achievements was making science accessible and popular.

Relishing adventure into old age:
-At age 59 on his journey through Russia, rarely showed signs of fatigue. He would walk for hours, crawl into deep shafts, chisel off rocks, scramble up mountains, then set up instruments at night for astronomical observations. *Similar to Ben Franklin, thriving on adventures in old age.

Humboldt's influence on Darwin:
-Showed Darwin how to investigate the natural world from within and without, not just from isolated approach of zoologist, etc.
-Both had the rare ability to focus on smallest detail then pull back to examine global patterns. Flexibility in perspective allowed them both to understand the world in a completely new way.
-Laid the groundwork for his theory of evolution.

Launch point for Darwin:
-Voyage of the Beagle by far the most important event of his life and determined his whole career, as he acknowledged.

Years of dedication:
-Voyage of the Beagle took five years. Much like Humboldt's voyages, these were years of painstaking work. 

Self-awareness:
-When Humboldt began work on his most influential book, Cosmos, he was aware that he didn't and couldn't know everything. Recruited an army of expert scientists, classicists, and historians to help.

Black coffee = "concentrated sunshine" AVH

Cosmos:
-Three sections: 1) Celestial phenomena, 2) Earth (geomagnetism, oceans, earthquakes, geography, meteorology), 3) Organic life (plants, animals, humans).
-Brought together a far greater range of subjects than any other previous book.
-Shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers, and poets.

Humboldt's last words at age 89: 
"How glorious these sunbeams are! They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!"

"Voyages on foot, Humboldt said, taught him the poetry of nature. He was feeling nature by moving through it."

"Not only was his life colorful and packed with adventure, but his story gives meaning to why we see nature the way we see it today. In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt's insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary." 

Enlightenment Now – Steven Pinker

Enlightenment Now – by Steven Pinker
Date read: 4/28/18. Recommendation: 8/10.

As the title suggests, Pinker makes the argument for reason, science, humanism and progress–the four themes that tie together thinkers of the enlightenment. He focuses on all the ways the world is improving, stating the case for optimism in a similar vein as The Rational Optimist (Matt Ridley) and The Moral Arc (Michael Shermer). It's a refreshing dose of perspective in a world that seems increasingly convinced that the end is near. Using statistics to back his position, Pinker tackles a range of subjects including inequality, political ideology, wealth, happiness, morality, and religion, to name a few. All this is not to suggest that progress is utopia, we should always strive to improve, but we should also appreciate how far we've come. The only drawback to the book is its density, which makes its ideas less accessible than I had hoped.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world.

Obliviousness to the scope of human progress can lead to symptoms that are worse than existential angst. *Cynicism that institutions of modernity have failed and every aspect of life is in a deepening crisis turns us toward atavistic alternatives.

"Optimism is the theory that all failures–all evils–are due to insufficient knowledge." -David Deutsch

Thinkers of the enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human. Four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

"If triangles had a god they would give him three sides." -Montesquieu

[Enlightement] was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages "the belief that an external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia."

The invention of farming around ten thousand years ago multiplied the availability of calories from cultivated plants and domesticated animals, freed a portion of the population from the demands of hunting and gathering, and eventually gave them the luxury of writing, thinking, and accumulating their ideas.

Axial Age: Around 500 BCE, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief...It was not an aura of spirituality that descended on the planet but something more prosaic: energy capture. *Agricultural and economic advances provided more calories per person and shifted focus from short-term survival to long-term harmony. 

To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.

Political ideology undermines reason and science. It scrambles people's judgment, inflames a primitive tribal mindset, and distracts them from a sounder understanding of how to improve the world.

Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind. *Why news distorts people's view of the world.

Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times. As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, "Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory."

*American journalism defines "serious news" as "what's going wrong" which has led millions to quit believing in incremental system change and instead seek revolutionary, smash-the-machine change.

In the mid-18th century, life expectancy in Europe and the Americas was around 35, where it had been parked for the 225 previous years...By 1950, it had grown to around 60 in Europe and the Americas.

For an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

For most of human history, the strongest force of death was infectious disease...but starting in the late 18th century with the invention of vaccination and accelerating in the 19th with the acceptance of germ theory of disease, the tide of the battle began to turn. Handwashing, midwifery, mosquito control, and especially the protection of drinking water by public sewerage and chlorinated tap water would come to save billions of lives.

"We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not." -Nathan Rosenberg

In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.

National income correlates with every indicator of human flourishing...*longevity, health, nutrition, peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.

Not surprisingly, as countries get richer they get happier; more surprisingly, as countries get richer they get smarter.

"From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough." -Harry Frankfurt

The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy–the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource...which has to be divided up in zero-sum fashion. [But] since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer too.

In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV. (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.) *50% had a dishwasher, 60% computer, 66% washing machine, 80% air conditioner and cell phone.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth.

In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world's people have become better off.

Ecomodernism:
-Some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When people use energy...they must increase entropy somewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution, and other forms of disorder.
-Industrialization has been good for humanity. It has fed billions, doubled life spans, slashed extreme poverty.
-The tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. 

Dematerialization: Progress in technology allows us to do more with less...forty consumer products replaced by a single smartphone...the sharing economy.

Half of the world's homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and a quarter are committed in just four: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela...The lopsidedness continues down the fractal scale. Within a country, most of the homicides cluster in a few cities...Within cities, the homicides cluster in a few neighborhoods; within neighborhoods, they cluster in a few blocks; and within blocks, many are carried out by a few individuals. 

Horse-drawn era: The engine of city mayhem was the horse....horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times.

As indefensible or unworkable ideas fall by the wayside, they are removed from the pool of thinkable options, the political fringe is dragged forward despite itself. That's why even in the most regressive political movement in recent American history there were no calls for reinstating Jim Crow laws, ending women's suffrage, or recriminalizing homosexuality. 

Although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.

"The entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. It wasn't long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death...Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51." -Morgan Housel

Mindless consumerism? Not when you remember that food, clothing, and shelter are the three necessities of life, that entropy degrades all three, and that the time it takes to keep them usable is time that could be devoted to other pursuits. 
*Housework fell almost fourfold from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011. Laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours in 1920 to 1.5 in 2015.

In 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.

Happiness is the output of an ancient biological feedback system that tracks our progress in pursuing auspicious signs of fitness in a natural environment. We are happier, in general, when we are healthy, comfortable, safe, provisioned, socially connected, sexual, and loved.

Goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely...but there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become. 

We now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer. 
*But none of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become.

Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

[AI] advances have not come from a better understanding of the workings of intelligence but from the brute-force power of faster chips and bigger data, which allow the programs to be trained on millions of examples and generalize to similar new ones. 

Progress it not utopia...there is room–indeed, an imperative–for us to continue that progress.

"We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason...On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" -Thomas Macaulay, 1830

Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as a zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. 

Education instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdotes, and emotional demagoguery. 

We are a cognitive species that depends on explanations of the world. Since the world is the way it is regardless of what people believe about it, there is a strong selection pressure for an ability to develop explanations that are true. Reasoning thus has deep evolutionary roots. 

Certain beliefs (i.e. climate change) become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are. We all identify with particular tribes or subcultures...make an enormous difference to the respect the person commands in his or her social circle.

Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

A challenge of our era is how to foster intellectual and political culture that is driven by reason rather than tribalism and mutual reaction.

Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don't come easily to us and that we're better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight.

Historical scholarship has amply demonstrated that holy scriptures are all-too-human products of their historical eras, including internal contradictions, factual errors, plagiarism from neighboring civilizations, and scientific absurdities.

Today, of course, enlightened believers cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that's just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.

Atheism is not a moral system. It's just the absence of a supernatural belief, like an unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu. The moral alternative to theism is humanism.

People are vulnerable to cognitive illusions that lead to supernatural beliefs, and they certainly need to belong to a community.

The problem begins with the fact that many of the precepts of Islamic doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic...Of course many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too. One needn't debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents take them.

The stranglehold of the Islamic religion over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has impeded their economic, political, and social progress.

Islam is not a race...Religions are just ideas and don't have rights. Criticizing the ideas of Islam is no more bigoted than criticizing the ideas of neoliberalism or the Republican Party platform.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of this, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era.