Action Figure Daniel

Category: Notes

  • “Screaming on the Inside” by Jessica Grose

    • As work shifted to industry, women stayed at home, but idleness is devil’s work so “motherhood” became their work
    • Being able to administer pain killers shifted birthing from midwives to hospitals
    • Self-care time was added on top of existing expectations
    • Redefining GDP to only include transactions where cash changes hands diminished the role of women in society
    • Bringing advertisers to blogs stripped them of controversy
    • The migration from blogs to Instagram shifted the emphasis to visuals

  • “Winners Takes All” by Anand Giridharadas

    • Much of today’s “social change” is about steering changes away from solutions that harm the wealthy
    • Entering the world of money to address the problems caused by money
    • Ask what has been done before asking what can be done
    • “Win-win” is about solving problems without addressing root causes
    • Americans are more productive than ever, but that productivity is captured by the elite
    • Connecting networks (like Uber and Facebook) are a double standard if they can dictate terms and disavow control
    • Voices of the critics are neglected while we embrace the voices that “ride the wave”
    • “Thought leader”
      • Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator
      • Personalize the political
        • Learn to zoom in and tell narratives
    • Beliefs naturally shift in accord with interests
    • The powerful benefit the most from lawlessness
    • We are often trying to solve our problems with the same tools that made them
    • Never ask the wealthy to do less harm
    • Carnegie argued that the rich should be allowed to make as much money as possible, any way possible, and then give away that money better than the poor would
    • Some where’s vs Every where’s
      • Some where’s motivate us to action and hide the scale of the problems
    • Globalist have “correct” answers that are arrived at by consensus not democracy
    • Politics is meant to create ideas that are easy to like but difficult to love
    • Globalization is, in part, trying to bypass or compensate for local politics that are not working
    • Private investments can crowd out public funding
    • “You should do it because it is the right thing to do, but it is not enough to do the right thing, so it is also good business”
    • “I can speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children”

  • “The Hidden History of American Oligarchy” by Thom Hartman

    • The Civil war about promoting slavery nationwide
    • Southern oligarchs turned to debt and the KKK to promote control
    • Criminalized debt forces people to keep working through “debt peonage”
    • Student debt not being discharged through bankruptcy heightened this peonage
    • Add in targeted usage of anti-drug laws
    • Convict labor is discreetly legal slavery
    • Medical debt is uniquely American
    • Organizations devolve into an oligarchy when they are large enough to maintain a managerial class
    • “We are keeping you safe”
      • They must make sure we know who we are being kept safe from
    • Control the language to control the conversation
    • Violence against humans is always difficult, you have to “other” them first
    • Always take militias

  • “Being Wrong” by Kathryn Schulz

    • I error therefore I am
    • We “know” erroring is human but strive avoid admitting it
    • “You can either be ‘right’ or be in a relationship”
    • How often are we actually wrong?
    • We never feel wrong, we feel when we recognize we are wrong
    • Specific mistakes are difficult for us to see and thus appear as an “act of God”
    • To eliminate errors, we must know when we are wholly wrong and not just temporarily wrong
    • Are errors tangents to the journey to truth or parts of the journey?
    • “Err” meant “to move” and eventually gave us “error” and “erratic”
    • “Wondering jew” was a curse from Christ to a Jew who teased Christ while carrying the cross
    • Memories are poorly understood
      • Memories are recreated every time we remember them
      • (This makes them volatile, especially if they are interrupted when we are trying to resave them)
    • We have a story maker and a fact checker in our brains
    • Confabulation is when we make up a story while our fact checker is not available
    • “There is no accounting for taste” but we tend to make accounts up
    • “Belief” is an overt conviction
    • We downplay things we want to dismiss as “self-serving” but drum up things we want to promote by stating it is truth
    • Everyone that does not agree with us is because they are ignorant
    • “Lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack”
    • Wrong bets are not bad bets
    • Inductive reasoning saves us a lot of thinking effort
      • Be careful with tortured reasoning
    • Most of our beliefs are “beliefs second-hand”
    • We tend to “see” (alter our perception of the world) to adapt to how those around us see the world
    • Our society has a “disagreement deficit”
      • (That is, we lack the ability to politely disagree and remain friends)
      • Cure, quarantine, or expel
      • The original “Zealots” killed each other rather than risk capture
    • Too many ideas and not enough convictions
    • Doubt is a mental luxury
    • Belief is the default; we must think to dismiss something
    • We manufacture confidence to avoid having to reconsider if we could be wrong
    • We revise our memories to better align with our current beliefs
    • Theories are replaced but never dismissed unless a new theory is available
    • Error detection tends to start with the smallest possible error rather than bigger issues
    • Civilizations operate on the principal of shared expertise
    • Denial is a response to feelings not facts
    • We assume because we see people from the outside that we can know them from the outside
    • We can never know what people are like on the inside
    • (“We judge ourselves by our intentions; We just others by their actions”)
    • “You don’t know me, but I know you”
    • In love, we feel
      • Recognition
      • Timelessness
      • Reunification
      • Necessity
    • “Everyone complains about their memory. No one complains about their judgement.”
    • Loving is more like sharing a story than sharing a soul
    • Our desire to be right is really our desire for our beliefs to adhere outside ourselves
    • “Stories and theories may be all that we have that God does not”

  • “How the other half learns” by Robert Pondiscio

    • A lack of reading comprehension is often from a lack of shared experience
      • (If we know enough about what is going on, we can figure out the pieces we do not know)
    • Education standardization is good
    • Instructions should be clear and not subject to interpretation
    • Paternal discipline is different from “No excuses”
    • Ethics are critical to success
    • Focus on outputs more than inputs
    • Once children have basic skills, “reading tests” are basically background information checks
    • Test based accountability has become an end to itself
    • “Is test prep cheating?”
    • Car manufactures focused only on driver-side safety until 2016 because insurance only tested and rated the driver-side
    • Schools are where kids go to EXPERIENCE societal engagement not just to learn it