But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us to repent and then clarifies this with the parable narrated Luke 13:6-9. In this story, a man finds that a tree he had planted would not produce fruit. In his disappointment, he asks his gardener to cut the tree down to create room for other plants. Yet, the gardener intercedes on behalf of the fruitless tree and asks for one more year to try to make it productive.

Obviously, this is not just a story about trees. I believe, with every fiber of my being, that from the moment we were conceived, God embedded tons of potential within each and every one of us. Some tap into this potential and are on track to fulfilng their purpose. Yet, many others sit on their talents and let life pass them by. In other words, they are just encumbering the earth. That’s why Jesus tells us to repent, which, in the original Greek in which the New Testament was written, is closer to “Change the way you act by changing the way you think”.

Repenting is more than just ‘not sinning’; it’s more about a reorientation in your mind that changes how you approach your every waking moment. When you’re aware that we live in a world that is filled with amoral randomness, you have to deliberate about doing everything in your power to lead a life that bears fruit and ultimately gives glory to God.

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.”

The parallels between Ancient Israelites living in the early Iron Age (circa 1200 - 1000 BCE) and people living in current times are plain as day to Christians. Like the Israelites, we all have the tendency to remember God when things are hard, but at the slightest hint of consistent calm, we forget Him and indulge ourselves in every pleasure we can imagine - until we run into trouble again. The lesson is clear: Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

But what effect was God’s spiritual instructions having at a physical, sociomaterial level that translated into seasons of peace for the Israelites living during the period of Judges?

We can hypothesize.

Long before the Saul-David-Solomon timeline, ancient Israel was a collection of tribes that were more or less individually autonomous. People identified more closely with their tribes or clans than with Israel as a state.

From a material perspective, God’s laws were a unifying force for the Israelites. Whenever His spiritual instructions were kept salient in their minds, through sacrifices, rituals, and reciting the Torah, the Israelites saw themselves as a covenated people who were the objects of God’s affection, while others were strangers to Him. This identity would have been vital in coordinating the activities of a dozen or so tribes towards taking over the Promised Land.

As the Israelite tribes settled in the Promised Land, they would have been competing with the local Canaanites for scarce resources, such as farmable lands, accessible water sources and maybe trade networks. And for their part as older settlers, the local Canaanites had one advantage. They did not have any covenant with God but, over generations, they would have accumulated knowledge about the local region, such as its seasonal patterns or mineral deposits. There’s also a good chance that the Canaanites would have encoded this knowledge into their religious practices (e.g., Baal worship).

In times of peace, the temptation is always there to get comfortable and, perhaps, not take steps to reinforce cultural memories. If the Israelites did this, God’s spiritual instructions would have stopped being salient in the minds of each succeeding generation of Israelites. This would have dissolved the perceptions they had of themselves as God’s covenanted people, while also weakening the unity between the tribes that could have facilitated coordinated political and military action. And when Israelites started intermarrying the local Canaanites and assimilating their cultural practices, there would have been a palpable shift in allegiance away from the God of the unified Israelite tribes and towards the local idols.

One refrain in the book of Judges I find fascinating is the idea that “every man did what seemed right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6. 21:5). This means that when the external shocks inevitably came (e.g., war, famine, drought, etc.), it was hard for the Israelites to coordinate themselves ideologically, religiously, politically and militarily to withstand these pressures. Some local power would have taken advantage of the situation and subjected the Israelite tribes to heavy taxation and forced labor - until God raises someone to coordinate the Israelites to resist the oppression, negotiates peace and then the cycle repeats itself….

Preface

1. Cultural materialism drops the Hegelian motion of dialectic contradictions and adds reproductions and ecological variables to the material conditions under study (p. ix)

2. Marx was the first to formally propose that the material means of subsistence forms the foundation upon which society is formed (p. ix)

3. Marxism-Leninism, unlike Marx’s scientific materialism, overemphasized the dialectic over the objective and empirical (p. x)

Chapter 1

1. Francis Bacon emphasized the process of induction for gathering and organizing facts. However, facts are unreliable without a theory guiding its organization and discrimination of relevant and irrelevant information. At the same time, theory without facts is meaningless (p. 7)

2. True science balances induction, empiricism and positivism, on one hand with deduction and rationalism on the other (p. 8)

3. “Observation must be for or against a view if it is to be of any service” – Charles Darwin (p. 12)

4. Operationalism is required in the social sciences due to the field’s tendency to define its concepts and constructs fuzzily (p. 15)

5. Karl Popper posited that good science falsifies hypothesis rather than just verifying hypothesis. In other words, good science hypotheses expose themselves to the possibility of being proven wrong (p. 16-17)

6. Imre Lakatos posits that research programs should be evaluated based on their effectiveness at solving the field’s puzzles (p. 23)

Chapter 2

1. Marx and Engels laid the foundation for demystifying social life by focusing on the material conditions that made them happen in the first place (p. 30)

2. Emic operations evaluate the perspective of the native informant/participant of a social participant of a social practice, while etic operations evaluate the perspectives of an external observer who is not part of a culture engaged in some social behavior (p. 32)

3. Harris provided an example of emic and etic explanations of the phenomenon of high mortality rates of male cattle in a community in southern India. When locals were asked why male cattle died more, they said the male cattle ate less than the female ones. This is an emic explanation. However, the etic explanation was that since the community didn’t need male cattle for transportation or to work farms, they knowingly /unknowingly culled them (p. 33)

4. Sometimes, it could be challenging to provide etic descriptions of mental life as the external observer does not know what is going on inside the minds of the natives when they are engaged in a particular social behavior (p. 40)

5. Harris acknowledges that scientists and other “observers” bring their own biases into providing etic descriptions, but to claim “all knowledge is emic” is to claim that there is no real way to know/study the world and that everything is relative (p. 45)

Chapter 3

1. Cultural materialism starts with an etic human population located in an etic time and space (p. 47)

2. Cultural materialism posits that every society must solve the problem of production (i.e. subsistence), the problem of reproduction and the coordination of relationships within and between societal groups (p. 51)

3. Harris’s taxonomy is as follows: (a) Mode of production which deals with producing food and energy, given the constraints of technology and the environment; (b) Mode of reproduction which deals with moderating the population size; (c) Domestic economy which deals with coordination of production and reproduction within a societal group; (d) Political economy which deals with the coordination of production and reproduction between societal groups; (e) Behavioral superstructure which deals with symbols, values, religion, etc. (p. 52-54)

4. Harris taxonomy can be further simplified into: (a) Infrastructure: (Modes of production and modes of reproduction); (b) Structure: (Domestic and political economy); (c) Superstructure (p. 52)

5. Language plays a vital role in coordinating activities at all levels of Harris taxonomy (p. 54)

6. “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” – Karl Marx (p. 55)

7. Harris espouses infrastructural determinism where modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine domestic and political economies, which, in turn, probabilistically determines superstructure (p. 55)

8. Cultural materialism theories see infrastructure as the root cause of everything else (p. 55)

9. Harris prioritizes infrastructure because of the fact that humans have to balance energy consumption with production and reproduction. This is an iron clad law of nature that provides solid ground for any form of theory building (p. 56)

10. Patterns of reproduction and production are grounded in nature and can only be changed by the expenditure of energy (p. 58)

11. Harris is not downplaying innovation rather he argues that they cannot take hold unless the material condition for their adoption is also present (p. 59)

12. “We want what we will but we do not will what we do not want” – Arthur Schopenhauer (p. 60)

13. Although groups survive at the expense of the individuals, the direction of cultural change cannot be predicted by summing up the greatest good for the greatest number (p. 61)

14. Harris lists out 4 human behavioral constants: (a) People prefer more calories than less; (b) People prefer expending less energy than more; (c) People find sex pleasurable; (d) People prefer more love and affection to less (p. 63)

15. Harris’s critique of Marx was that the later focused on emic properties of the structure, e.g., capital, profits, etc., instead of prioritizing etic explanations (p. 55)

16. Cultural evolution has three main characteristics: (a) Increasing energy budgets; (b) Increasing productivity; (c) Increasing population growth (p. 67)

17. Unlike classical Marxism, cultural materialism sees the production of children as part of infrastructure (p. 66)

18. Harris argues that increases in efficiency brought about by innovations in technology hasn’t let to saving labor, but to increasing energy budgets which has been used to increase the population (p. 67)

19. Harris argues that changes in infrastructural levels are more likely to spread throughout other levels than vice versa (p. 71-72)

20. Harris clarifies that he’s not saying changes at the structural or superstructural levels cannot change things at other levels (p. 72)

21. Harris argues innovations at the level of structure or superstructure are unlikely to change the system if it is not compatible with the existing infrastructure (p. 73)

Chapter 4

1. Nomothetic = General causes and effects; Idiographic = Particular individual instances (p. 78)

2. Harris argues that hunter-gatherers were mobile because they had no control where the fauna and flora were likely to grow. This infrastructure, in turn, led to those groups having a coordination and organization (i.e., structure) that was small, mobile and camplike (p. 80)

3. Harris also argues that more complex family structures are not found among the hunter-gatherers because of the infrastructure (i.e., limited resources and seasonal variations in fauna and flora) (p. 80)

4. Harris argues that hunter-gatherer societies who were in an environment where resources were plentiful were more likely to use lactation rather than abortion or infanticide as a means for population control (p. 83)

5. Harris agues the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture was likely facilitated by global changes in the climate (p. 86)

6. Harris also argues that the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural societies was also due to the incentive of producing more children who could assist with farming operations to increase yield while not necessarily depleting energy demands (p. 88)

7. Harris argued that pre-state societies differed in their structural and superstructural components based on the soil nutrient needs (infrastructure) in their local contexts (p. 89)

8. In Harris model, “big men” facilitate complexity at the level of social coordination. They do this by: (a) Intensifying production; (b) Redistributing harvest surpluses; (c) Coordinating to get more resources (through trade or war) (p. 92)

9. In Harris model, “big men” can also perpetrate inequality usually caused by a shift from egalitarian redistribution to asymmetrical redistribution (p. 92)

10. Infrastructure involving flora like grains and fauna like ruminant animals were also likely to have structures where asymmetric distribution was done by “big men”.  Incidentally, regions where this happened were also the societies that first shifted into statehood (p. 94)

11. Harris argued that the following circumstances led to the shift from chiefdoms to state: (a) A large energy base to cater for the needs of a permanent police/military subgroup; (b) A peasant base unable to easily leave the group in search for less densely populated regions (p. 101)

12. Elites spent considerable costs in constructing artifacts that supported superstructures (e.g., temples, altars, etc.) That convinced peasants that the elite were benevolent. Obedience from mystification was cheaper than obedience via police force (p. 102)

13. Harris argued that feudal kings of Europe were overall weaker than emperors in hydraulic societies (i.e., societies living near a river source) because the feudal kings had no control on who rain fell on, while the hydraulic emperors could set up controls to prevent waters from the rivers from flowing to the hinterlands. In other words, geography isn’t destiny, but it constrains the kind of social coordinated structures that evolve in an area (p. 105)

14. Harris argued that the political structures that evolved based on decentralized non-hydraulic societies allowed the rise of a merchant class that led to modern day capitalism (p. 105)

15. Dowries were common in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, while bride price was common in pre-industrial Africa. Harris argues that a dowry society is a symptom of reproductive pressure, i.e., it is to discourage (unconsciously) overpopulation while bride price is a symptom of a society that was sparsely populated and had a lot of land that could be cultivated (p. 107)

16. Harris also argues that religions prosper because the ruling elite who adopted them benefitted materially from it – either through making the poor care less about material benefits, (“heaven is the goal”) or through making it cheaper to maintain law and order (“all life is sacred”) (p. 110)

17. Harris argues that the taboo surrounding eating human flesh developed from the availability of domestic animals for food; and the value of prisoners of war as a source of manpower (p. 110)

18. Harris argues that capitalism in Europe developed in response to the depletion of feudal modes of production (p. 111)

Chapter 5

1. Behavior is not exclusively genetically determined (p. 120)

2. Cultural repertories evolve independently of natural selection. For instance, Edison’s inventions would have spread even if had remained childless (p. 122)

3. Under normal biological circumstances, all behavioral innovations that persist in offspring do so because they contribute to fitness and reproductive success (p. 122)

4. In humans, natural selection increased human cognitive capabilities and simultaneously downplayed the dependence on genetic transmission to preserve behavioral innovations (p .123)

5. The bulk of human behavioral repertoire can be acquired through cultural rather than genetic, transmission (p. 125)

6. Harris argues that the idea that males desire multiple sexual partners while females only desire one is a product of domination of males in the political economy. In societies where women have independent wealth and power, they also tend to have multiple sexual partners (p. 129)

7. The idea that young humans have a long socialization period has less to do with genes and more to do with the breath of social traditions to learn (p. 129)

8. At the emic level, some cultures deem males more valuable than females, but at the etic level, it’s really just population control (p. 133)

9. Semantic universality: The ability to communicate about infinite classes of events regardless of when or where they occur (p. 134)

10. Natural selection has favored a behavioral genotype where programming acquired through personal/social learning has dominated programming acquired via genetic change (p. 134)

11. Harris posits that ecological conditions at the infrastructural level increase or decrease biophysiological costs and benefits of certain innovative behaviors – not that certain behaviors are genetically preprogrammed to occur in certain conditions that increase fitness (p. 137)

12. Among the elite in medieval Europe, India and China, preferential female infanticide was practiced to consolidate wealth and avoid paying dowries. On the other hand, among the peasant class, there were less occurrences of female infanticide because the females could provide manpower for labor (p. 138)

Chapter 6

1. Cultural materialism and dialectical materialism disagree on what makes up infrastructure (p. 141)

2. “… hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first eat and drink before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc., and therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or driving a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case” – Frederick Engels (p. 141-142)

3. Hegel was an idealist who believed that things were the express manifestations of ideas. He also believed that things that exist today are all destined to change into its opposite. In addition, Hegel posited that the contradictions between an idea and its opposite doesn’t lead to a back-and-forth between the duo, but to a progression towards some complete ideal (p. 142-143)

4. For Marx, it is the modes of production (not ideas) that are destined to change into its opposite as everything progresses towards a classless utopia (p. 143)

5. Marx posited that contradiction of capitalism is that capitalists have to exploit labor to make profit. To stay competitive, at some point, they invest the profits into machines which takes the place of laborers. This investment of profits reduces the amount of profits available for the capitalists. So, to maximize profits, the capitalists have to double down and exploit labor further.  If this continues, wealth becomes concentrated with the capitalist while the laborers become more and more resentful with the falling standards of living. The more the capitalist exploits labor, the more likely laborers ought to organize themselves to destroy the capitalist system. In Marx’s system, capitalism creates the opposite that destroys it (p. 143-144)

6. Harris argues that the weakness of a dialectical epistemology is that every event contains an indefinite number of components which all have an indefinite amount opposites/negations. This means that the most critical opposites cannot be identified and a dialectical relationship cannot be falsified (p. 145)

7. Evolution is the process of change. Harris argues that labelling any change as ‘dialectical’ doesn’t provide any additional information (p. 146)

8. Lenin attacked empiricism because he wanted to overstate the revolutionary component of Marxist thought (p. 150)

9. Capitalism is full of stresses, but Harris argues that its problems won’t be solved by classless and stateless societies (p. 150)

10. Harris concedes that contradiction, negation and opposites are useful descriptors when discussing changes that play out in the struggle between classes or between nations. But he doesn’t agree that the descriptors are useful in any system where there is change (p. 151)

11. Dialectical materialism, according to Harris, is committed to the expectation that a classless society will emerge from capitalism – regardless of how much evidence demonstrates that to not be the case (p. 157)

12. Marx and Engels were not able to fit the data from non-European and precapitalist history into their model (p. 162)

Chapter 7

1. “Structure” in structuralism means the mental superstructure in cultural materialism’s taxonomy (p. 165)

2. Emile Durkheim proposed the idea that society has a “collective consciousness,” i.e., the ideas that are external to an individual but can influence the behavior and thoughts of individuals in that society (p. 166)

3. Structuralists believe that the mind has molds (which they call structures) and culture fills these molds with the ideas pertaining to that culture. Structuralism is the attempt to explain the “collective consciousness” as a mental dialectic (p. 167)

4. Structuralism, according to Harris, is not concerned with the empirical proof, but with understanding the collective consciousness (p. 169)

5. “History shows that to treat as heroes people who abominate empirical reality is to risk destruction” – Marvin Harris (p. 170)

6. In structuralism, there are hidden meanings underneath different thoughts. The hidden meanings are always reduced to two opposing ideas. These opposite ideas, according to according to structuralism, always exist in the collective unconscious. So, in this model, the structure underneath the institution of marriage is exchanged between the opposite ideas of “us” and “them” or “mine” and “yours” (p. 167, 171)

7. Structural anthropologists posit that people select food based on the message underlying the food (e.g., “roasted” food vs “boiled” food represents the message of “nature” vs “nurture”). Cultural materialists, on the other hand, posit that food preparation practices are probabilistically determined by the kind of infrastructure in place (e.g., Asian cultures developed rapid frying in response to fuel shortages in densely populated areas) (p. 188, 190)

Chapter 8

1. Unlike cultural materialists, structural Marxists do not see the need to separate the “relations of production” (Harris’s structure) from the “forces of production” (Harris’s infrastructure) (p. 220)

2. The Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist model couldn’t predict how the socialist revolutions took place in industrially backward nations (i.e., early 20th century China & Russia) rather than in the more industrially developed nations at the time (e.g., US, Germany, or Japan) (p. 221)

3. Marx’s model has some ambiguity because it doesn’t distinguish between the mental-emic and the behavioral-etic components of social systems. Although Marx acknowledged the role of the religious superstructure, the other factors in his base which he attributed causality to also had “imaginary” properties. For instance, capital is a mystified form of labor; commodities hide the labor processes it took to create them. These elements of Marx’s model look more Hegelian idealism rather than materialist (p. 225)

4. In the cultural materialist’s formulation, the physical control of the masses labor through physical control of the state’s police-military apparatus (another form of labor) is what allows the emic-mental structure of capitalism (i.e., contracts, rent, money, interests, and profits) to exist in the first place (p. 226-227)

5. The mystification/fetishization of social stratification in a socio-cultural system is a consequence of controlling the physical instruments of coercion (i.e., the people who work as police and armies) (p. 228)

6. Harris contends that the type of social and economic systems that developed in the Andes versus in Brazil was not only due to the Catholic ideologies of the early Europeans who colonized them, but more due to the ecological factors (highlands in the Andes versus tropics in Brazil) and demographics (different population characteristics in the Andes and in Brazil which led to the importation of African slaves in the latter vs dependence on the local population in former) (p. 230)

7. In Aboriginal Australia, marriage rules (i.e., political economy in Harris model) is dependent on the environmental factors. The drier the land the more disperse the bands and the more necessary it is to establish multi-band networks through inter-band marriage (p. 231)

8. Another school of thought adjacent to structural Marxism is ‘substantivism’ which argues that economic concepts identified from observing capitalist societies cannot be applied to pre-state/primitive societies because of the differences in the social relationship in both societies. Substantivists argues that extending capitalist derived concepts to pre-state societies makes the analyst to force-fit every society into the image of the capitalist (p. 234)

9. An extension of substantivist thought is the idea that economic process and concepts do not exists outside the social system that instituted it. The corollary of this is the idea that economic ideas such as surplus cannot be empirically/objectively determined because it only exists in the collective consciousness of the people in a society (p. 235-236)

10. Some substantivists extend their ideas to say that concepts such as classes, and exploitation of one class by another has no existence outside the collective consciousness of the people of the society (p. 237)

11. “Primitive” societies such as those in pre-colonial Africa are “underproductive” not because they tended to adjust their labor intensity to just produce whatever will serve their subsistence needs. Instead, cultural materialism argues that continual intensification of any given society’s mode of production would eventually lead to diminishing returns. In a “primitive” society that depends on labor intensity, rather than technology to increase productivity, continual accumulation of labor (either through forcing locals or getting slaves from neighboring societies) does not dramatically increase productivity, but will likely increase the chances of political instability in retaliatory, attacks from neighboring enemies. As a consequence, “underproduction” shouldn’t be looked at only from the perspective of the environment’s carrying capacity but from the perspective of intensification of the available modes of production before diminishing returns kick in (p.240)

12. Harris argues that cows were present in India in the pre-Vedic times (4000-2000 BC) as evidenced by the presence of charred cattle bones found in houses from the era. From the Vedic era (2000 - 800BC), killing and eating cattle became ritualized. Within this era sects arose within the area that prioritized the ritual/sacrificial use of cattle (like Levites in the Bible) over its other uses. These were the Brahmins. Buddhism and Jainism soon arose in the area that challenged Brahmin practices through its condemnation of animal sacrifices. Harris attributes this conversion from religious groups that routinely sacrificed cattle to those that didn’t to the intensification of production and increased population which led to deforestation and its attendant changes in environmental conditions. In these conditions, Harris argues that cattle became more valuable for its ability to pull plows than for its meat – hence the rise of taboos arising in religions in the region to prevent cattle from being eaten (p. 249-253)

13. Pork was preferred to beef was in the U.S. up until the 19th century when beef started to take ascendancy due to technological developments like the refrigerated railroad can that delivered beef across the nature (p. 255)

14. Harris argues that dogs and humans are only eaten in cultures where alternative sources of meat are scarce. Otherwise, societies preferred cattle, sheep, and poultry that gain weight (more meat) from merely eating grains (p. 255)

Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

• No notes

Chapter 11

• No notes

Preface

The conviction that humanity can be socially engineered led to some of the greatest atrocities (p. xvi – xvii)

Part 1

Blank slate: The idea that the human mind has no structure and it can only be influenced by society or ourselves (p. 2)

Chapter 1

1. John Locke is ascribed the idea tabula rasa. He came up with the idea as a reaction to those who thought man was born with an innate idea of concepts. (p.5).

2. Locke’s counter-idea was empiricism with focus on building ideas from experience. By implication, this meant that nobody (royals and nobles) was a custodian of wisdom. Everybody learns from experience (p.5).

3. The noble savage arises from some blend of Hobbes and Rousseau who posited that humans are by nature savages and institutions and society have some form of civilizing effect on human nature (p.8).

4. “Ghost in the machine” arose from Rene Descartes’ refusal to accept mechanistic explanation of behavior which would undermine freewill. For Descartes, there have to be a mind controlling behavior (p.9).

5. Empiricism = Blank Slate; Romanticism = Noble Savage; Dualism = Ghost in the machine (p.10)

Chapter 2

1. Pinker’s critique of behaviorism was for the flavor that only focused on event behavior (i.e., the variety of John B. Watson) (p.19)

2. Pinker claims behaviorists seek to explain behavior without acknowledging genetics or evolutionary history (p.20).

3. Pinker claims strict behaviorism is dead in psychology (p.21)

4. Franz Boas posited that differences in behavior doesn’t come from their physical or genetic make up but from culture. He believed everyone has the same mental capabilities – even though cultures are different (p.22-23)

5. Pinker argues that in the Black Slate paradigm, society is reified and blamed for peoples’ bad actions (p.26).

Chapter 3

1. Consilience is the unification of knowledge (p.30)

2. 5 contributions of the cognitive revolution to explaining the mind:

3. Information, computation and feedback grounds the physical world in the mind (p.31)

   • A blank slate doesn’t do anything; the mind does things; therefore, the mind cannot be a blank slate (p.34)

   • A wide range of behavior can emerge from the limited programs in the mind (p.36)

   • All humans run on the same mental software that enables us learn the peculiarities of our different situations or cultures (p.37)

   • The mind is the complex system with many interacting parts with different agendas/goals (p.39)

4. Citing evidence using brain tissue studies of Albert Einstein, gay men, convicted murders, Pinker argues that some differences in behavior is not totally due to learning from the environmental culture (p.44)

5. Identical twins (living together or apart) test similarly on almost every trait. Whereas, kids of the same age who are adopted and raised from infancy in the same household tend to ne dissimilar. This may suggest that differences in mind come from difference in guess (p.47)

6. Pinker provided studies demonstrating that both behavioral tendencies and actual behavior may be inheritable (p.50)

7. Pinker argues that humans’ minds was an adaptation favored by natural selection (p.53).

8. Proximal cause = The mechanism; Ultimate/final cause: the adaptive rationale (p.54)

Chapter 4

1. An analysis of innate mental capabilities isn’t an alternative to the explanatory power of learning and culture, but an attempt to explain the mechanisms underpinning those other processes. (p.60)

2. Theory of mind: A mind that can infer what another’s goals are (p.61)

3. “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other” – Eric Hoffer (p.63)

4. Culture is simply accumulated local wisdom (p.63)

5. The social reality in a group depends on the cognitive abilities of the individuals who make up the group (p.65)

6. Four levels of analyzing mental life: (a) Function (in the evolutionary sense); (b) Real-time mechanism; (c) Development at the individual level; (d) Development at the species level (p.70)

Chapter 5

1. Pinker doesn’t see learning making changes in the brain as a big deal (p.85-87)

2. Pinker also uses a wide range of evidence to demonstrate how parts of the brain can shape themselves without sensory input (p.97)

3. The number of genes in a genome has nothing to do with the level of complexity the organization expresses in behavior (p.100)

Part 2

Chapter 6

1. Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1971 paper: As the proportion of variance in social studies explained by non-genetic factors go down, the proportion explained by genetic factors (e.g, intelligence, talent) will go up. (p.107)

2. People interpreted the Hernstein study as implying that blacks were less intelligent than whites (p.107)

3. Determinism (math): A system whose prior states cause subsequent states with certainty; Determinism (social sciences): people have a tendency to act in a particular way in certain circumstances. Pinker doesn’t believe in determinism as used in social sciences (p.113)

4. A gene doesn’t always cause a particular behavior and it’s not only the cause of that behavior. Rather it increases the probability of a particular behavior occurring in comparison to other genes (p.114).

Chapter 7

1. “… the notion that there should be one set of truth’s available to everyone is modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work” – Irving Kristol (p.131)

2. “Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is “the opium of the people”; they add a heartfelt, “thank God!”  - Ronald Bailey (p.131).

Part 3

1. Four anxieties about human nature: (a) If people are innately different, there would be justification for discrimination and opposition; (b) If people are innately immoral, there is no point improving humanity; (c) If it’s all just biology, free will is a myth and people can’t be held accountable; (d) If it’s all just biology, life can’t have meaning (p.139)

Chapter 8

1. The moral appeal of the Blank slate arises from the reasoning that if we’re all blank, we’re all equal (p.14)

2. If people are innately different, there evils may arise from that: (a) It becomes rational to discriminate against people that don’t look like you; (b) It becomes rational to blame them for their lot in life; (c) People might entertain eugenics to remove people with undesirable traits out of society (p.142)

3. “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart” – Confucius (p.142)

4. Genes affect personality and intelligence, although those differences apply to group averages and there’s overlap between group members (i.e., groups who have high averages in a trait will have some members scoring low on that trait) – (p.144)

5. Pinker argues that because the more information we have about a person’s qualifications, the less we default to decisions based on race or gender averages, the best cure for discrimination is more accurate tests of mental abilities. – (p.147)

6. Example of where discrimination has been justified in practice: benefits of racially diverse workplaces outweigh the costs of discriminating against white people (p.148)

7. Greater rewards go to people with greater inborn talents if people are willing to pay for the fruits of those talents (p.149)

8. The fact that inborn talents contribute to social status does not mean it is the only contribution (p.150)

9. Evolutionary success and goodness do not mean the same thing (p.150)

10. If people differ in talent, some will still find themselves in poverty – even in a society that manages to eliminate discrimination. Pinker argues that this will be an injustice that would be overlooked if we don’t admit in the first place that people have innate differences in ability (p.151)

11. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” – Charles Darwin (p.151)

12. A non-blank slate implies a tradeoff between freedom and material equality (p.152)

13. 20th century eugenics was a cause of the left. The conservatives of the time hated it because they saw it as man trying to play God (p.153)

14. Hitler read Marx. Pinker argues the former got from the latter the ideology that history is a story of conflict between groups and certain groups are inferior to others (non-Aryans & Bourgeoise) and humanity will only be better if these inferior groups are stamped out. (p.157)

15. Marxist features attributable to the blank slate ideology: (a) People are the same, therefore anyone who is materially better off must have gotten there through greed or theft; (b) If the mind is a blank slate, a society that wants to cultivate a certain kind of mind also controls the people’s experiences; (c) If the people are shaped by their social environments, growing up in a materially better environment irredeemably corrupts their minds, values and tastes; (d) Self-interest is learnt and not a part of human nature. Self-interested actions simply imply greed or laziness and must be punished by the state; (e) Individuals are dispensible. It is the society as a whole that must be prioritized (p.157-158)

Chapter 9

1. The view that human nature is wicked could lead to the fear that social reform is a waste of time (p.159)

2. Naturalistic fallacy: If it’s in nature, it is good; Moralistic fallacy: If it is good, it must be found in nature/biology (p.162)

3. Pinker argues that if the mind is a blank slate, every inner desire will translate to an overwhelming urge that would lead wicked actions. However, if the mind is a system, there are components whose drives can be contacted by other components. (p.166)

4. Pinker argues that peaceful coexistence doesn’t come from stamping out their selfish desires, but by pitting long-sighted mental components against short-sighted ones (p.169)

5. Pinker argues that since we are not just products of the environment, there will always be costs to changing human behavior (p.169)

Chapter 10

1. “No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the ground that it was human nature” A. A. Milne (p.175)

2. There is dilemma: if behavior is determined (biologically, randomly or otherwise), then we can’t claim responsibility for our actions (p.178)

3. Some legal theorists posit that criminal law is just controlled implementation of humanity’s desire revenge (p.182)

Chapter 11

1. Pinker argues that: (a) The wrongness of discrimination is not only because everyone has the same traits; (b) The wrongness of violence is not because people are not naturally predisposed to it; (c) Being responsible for one’s actions should not be only because people’s motives aren’t always clean; (d) The meaningfulness of people’s motives shouldn’t be because biology cannot explain certain aspect of it (yet) (p.193)

Part 4

Chapter 12

1. Social constructionists believe that reality is socially constructed through language, stereotypes and media. They believe that people can’t view reality directly, but access it through lenses colored by the prevailing culture. Consequently, anyone claiming to know the truth is only trying to exert power through the backroad of offering an alternative lens to view reality. (p.198)

2. Naïve realism: we see things as they are (p.199)

3. Naive realism isn’t true due to the visual illusions (p.199)

4. If one claims the mind has the innate ability to form categorizations based on some reality, it can also be used to provide grounds for justifying stereotypes of race and gender that can be used to discriminate out-group members (p.201)

5. Pinker admits some stereotypes may be inaccurate, but criticizes moral relativists for wanting to do away with the idea that some categorizations humans make are actually grounded in objective reality (p.202)

6. Stereotypes are not typically inaccurate, but will definitely be inaccurate if a person has no direct, firsthand experience with the stereotyped group; or belongs to a group that sees the stereotyped group as an outgroup (p.204-5)

7. Stereotypes may end up being accurate also as self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, at a time in America, blacks were not seen to be fit as leaders. But this was due to institutional barriers (e.g. schools that refused admission to black students). This meant that there were less educated black people – thus, justifying the stereotype about black people not being fit for leadership. (p.207)

8. Social constructionists also argue language has the power to constrain thought. Pinker counters this by arguing that the mind has properties that are independent of input through senses (p.207)

9. Deconstructionists are another group who argue that language is a system that has no connection reality. As a result, the ruling power can manipulate its use to preserve power or oppress others. (p.208)

10. Pinker argues that creating new words for minorities and other disadvantaged groups suggests that words and attitudes are so intermingled that the only way to change peoples’ attitudes is to change the words. (p.211)

11. Euphemism treadmill: when new words used to replace changed words also become changed themselves because of association (p.212)

12. Pinker argues that the euphemism treadmill suggests that concepts, not nominal labels are what stand out in the mind (p.213)

Chapter 13

1. Pinker provides a list of cognitive faculties and institutions: (a) An intuitive physics to understand objects and how they move in the world; (b) An intuitive biology to understand the innate essence of all living things; (c)An intuitive engineering for converting things to tools to achieve a goal: (d) An intuitive phycology to understand and interact with other people; (e) An intuition about space to orient the self in the physical space; (f) An intuition about numbers to estimate quantities of things; (g) An intuition about probability to deal with uncertainties; (h) An intuition about economics to exchange things; (i) A mental database and logic to represent ideas; (j) Language to share ideas (p.220-221)

2. Pinker argues that education is a technology that makes up for knowledge that are not innate or intuitive (p.221)

3. Pinker argues that fear of GMOs arises from human intuitions about biology applied to plants – whereas, in the real sense, GMOs aren’t necessarily inferior to natural plants because of how they were bred (p.231)

4. Alan Fiske taxonomy of human transactions: (a) Communal sharing: share without keeping track; (b) Authoritative ranking: Dominant members of the group take from lower-ranking members; (c) Equality matching: exchange goods that are similar or comparable; (d) Market pricing: modern economic system of rents, wages, prices and interests (p.233-234)

5. Physical fallacy: The belief that the value of an object comes from its innate characteristics, rather than what someone would pay for it. (p.237)

6. Famines still occur, not necessarily due to population explosion but because of man-made interventions that prevent food from getting to those who need it (p.237)

7. Pinker argues that the Malthusian prophecy underestimated how technological progress increases availability and efficiency of resources (p.237)

8. Paul Rome’s perspectives: (a) Constraint on human prosperity isn’t material resources but ideas, e.g. petroleum used to be a water contaminant before becoming fuel; (b) Ideas, unlike material resources, e.g. food, fuel, etc., are non-rival goods. This means that they can be duplicated without depleting the original stock (p.238)

Chapter 14

1. Family love can evolve into nepotism (p.234)

2. Leaders from history who have tried to rally a social group around a cause have typically used family terms, e.g., brethren, brothers to facilitate solidarity (p.247)

3. Pinker argues that the idea that human are innately communal stems from the noble savage doctrine (p.255)

4. In the ultimatum game, proposers tend to offer almost half of the total while respondents reject anything less than at least half (p.256)

5. Hunting in hunter-gatherer societies is treated as a public good. If the hunter who makes the largest catch refuses to share, he is punished with gossip and ostracism, and if he shares, he is rewarded with prestige (p.258)

Chapter 15

Part 5

Chapter 16

1. According to Pinker, from sociological perspective, individuals are mere parts of the larger society, while from the economic perspective, society is an arrangement emerging from some sacrificing their autonomy for security from others flexing their autonomy (p.285)

2. Thomas Sowell’s “Two visions”: (a) Tragic vision: An individual is limited on his/her own and must depend on social arrangements; (b) Utopian vision: An individual’s limitations arise from the society, but a better society would let humanity reach its potential (p.287)

3. Research from Frans de Waal and colleagues show that low-ranking primates can coordinate to depose the alpha primate (p.298)

4. Failings of the US constitution according to Pinker: (a) Silent on genocide of native Americans; (b) Silent on slavery of African Americans; (c) Silent on women rights; (d) Sees equality of opportunity as the only way to distribute wealth; (d) Not stipulating the values and customs needed for a democracy to work (p.298)

5. Pinker argues that traditions and adopted not just to human nature, but also the prevalent material and economic conditions. Therefore, respecting human nature doesn’t mean keeping all kinds of past traditions (p.299)

6. Robert Frank’s policy recommendation: Instead of taxing income, governments should tax consumption. This would prevent the hedonic treadmill (p.303)

Chapter 17

1. Although aggressive parents raise aggressive kids, Pinker argues that aggression may also be a trait that is inherited (p.310)

2. Pinker argues that the public health approach to stemming violence may not be effective (p.312)

3. Pinker argues that the roots of violence doesn’t have to be reduced to just genetics as this would mean blaming ethnicities with more violence on average for having “bad genes”; he also argues that even if people have inherited a “gene of violence” it doesn’t mean they can’t help but get violent (p.315)

4. Because of human nature and human history, the question is not, “why are people aggressive” but “how do people learn not to be aggressive?” (p.316)

5. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita study: Analyzed 25 conflicts in the past 200 years and found that the aggressor made the accurate decision to initiate the attack (p.319)

6. ‘Lex talionis’: Law of retaliation (p.324)

7. Societies that herd animals tend to have an honor culture, likely due to livestock easier to steal than farmlands. A herdsman who takes an insult is signaling that his possessions can be taken from him without issue (p.327)

8. Inner city African American neighborhood tends to have high levels of violence because they have an honor culture. However, since they were never herdsmen, they likely picked it up from the descendants of Scottish and Irish herdsmen who settled in southern United States (p.328-329)

9. “Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the absence of legal recourse” – Jeff Grogger (p.329)

10. Considerations for human conflict resolution: (a) Submit to the rule of law; (b) Have conflicting parties back down without losing honor; (c) Realize people can deceive themselves, and you can do the same to yourself; (d) See overlaps between your interests and those of others (p.336)

Chapter 18

1. Reasons for gender equality in recent years: (a) Expansion of moral circle to include women rights; (b) Technological and economic progress; (c) Economic value of brains over brawn; (d) Increase in human lifespan; (e) Affordability of extended education; (f) Feminism (p.337-338)

2. Gender equality doesn’t imply that all genders are psychologically identical, but that people in either gender shouldn’t be judged based on average characteristics of their group members (p.340)

3. Two school of feminism: (a) Equity feminism: Opposes gender discrimination; (b) Gender feminism: Posits that women are enslaved by a system of male dominance (p.341)

4. Gender feminism is committed to the following claims: (a) Gender differences are not grounded in biology but are socially constructed; (b) Power is the single source of human motivation and we understand society by understanding how power is used; (c) To understand human interactions, don’t look at the individuals but look at the groups they belong to (p.341)

5. According to Pinker, the only way inequality of outcome is proof of inequality of opportunity is if all members of comparative groups were blank slates, and thus identical in all psychological traits (p.353)

6. Not all sex differences in various occupations are caused by gender discrimination (p.355)

7. Average differences in ability may be irrelevant, but average differences in preferences of members in each gender are not irrelevant (p356)

8. “If you insist on using gender parity as you measure social justice, it means you have to keep many men and women out of the work they like best and push them into work they don’t like” – Linda Gottfredson (p.359)

9. The noble savage influence is seen in those who see the motive to rape not coming from human nature (which they see as natural and good) but from social institutions (p.362)

Chapter 19

1. Heritability: Proportion of variance in a trait that corresponds with genetic differences (p.334)

2. Judith Harris argues in her “Group socialization theory” that behavioral tendencies don’t just come from genes or what parents model in the home, but from what peers’ model during the during the process of socialization (p.390)

Chapter 20

1. Thorstein Veblen posited that the psychology of taste is driven by conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste (p. 406)

2. In art, modernism was a reaction to the certainty and complacency of the Victorian era. Post modernism, on the other hand, argues that there are many perspectives on reality and one is not necessarily better than the other (p.410-411)

3. “Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness but storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape” – A.S. Byatt (p.419)

Part 6

Pinker argues that post modernism is inconsistent because it claims to deconstruct power but refuses objective standards that could be used to hold those in power accountable.

Here’s another angle. Because Bible stories are polysemous (i.e., they can be understood at multiple levels because they are compressed narratives), it is easy to overlook Job’s default outlook on life and how this might have contributed to his situation.

Every morning, as the story goes, Job would wake up and the first thing he would do is offer sacrifices to atone for the sins of his children.

Like, it’s not even 8 am yet, what sins could his kids have possibly committed that early in the day?

And to make matters worse, Job wasn’t atoning for things like lying, anger, selfishness, or lust - you know, regular human foibles. No, he went super hard:

“Perhaps my children have…cursed God in their hearts.” Wow. Just wow.

The consensus among Bible scholars is that the story of Job is set around the same time as the era of the patriarchs (i.e., Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). I’ve read through the entire Bible quite a few times and, as far as I can tell, there’s not even one record of these guys offering sacrifice for sin. If anything, they often sacrificed as a commemorative act of worship.

Not Job though. His default outlook towards life was one that only saw the worst case scenario. He even says that much later in the story when a series of misfortune hits him back-to-back:

“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.”

At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with being prepared, but I feel there’s an energy you attract when you’re always fixated on the negative and everything that could go wrong. And maybe that’s what the story of Job is getting at if you read it at a psychological level.

Unfortunately, this view of God is what continues to push people outside the church away from God, while leaving the people in the church frustrated with the seemingly endless list of chores they have to do to make Him happy.

I believe many do not know that God IS already happy with them, in the same way a Father is pleased with His children.

I believe many don’t realize that the real Gospel is that God desires to pursue a loving relationship with every individual on the face of the planet, and that the sin issue HAS BEEN settled.

I believe God is not looking at humans and thinking, “Filthy, puny humans. I’ll destroy them with cancer”.

I believe He’s not looking at humans and just seeing filth and sin. Rather, I believe God’s heart is aching for a loving Father-to-child relationship. I believe that many pastors don’t do a good job in teaching God’s true Nature, as expressed in the Bible.

But that’s not all.

In the absence of good teaching from the Church, I believe many people have learnt to adopt a monistic, materialistic outlook that fails to acknowledge the existence of both a physical and spiritual world.

Despite having a Ph.D. in the social sciences, I still believe that reality is much more than the three-dimensional space and time.

To borrow from Kantian philosophy, I believe there are the phenomena which we can experience with our five senses and logic, and there are the noumena,which is beyond the scope of our senses.

I believe these noumena are described explicitly in the Bible. Yet, I believe most people continue to miss it because of their paradigm - even more so in West.

I believe there are realms of joy, love, peace and happiness that will never be experienced until one accepts that there is a spiritual reality that is accessible to humans. Sadly, this is not taught in many churches and as a result, I believe many people lead spiritually dry lives devoid of freshness that the Holy Spirit provides.

To bridge this gap, I believe many have resorted to tools and gimmicks that may provide some diagnostic utility, but never really answer the underlying problem. Until we become sensitive to the existence of a spiritual realm, I believe we will keep running after different fads to solve a problem only the Holy Spirit can cure

While the foundations of my identity as a Christian and a researcher are solid, it is only in the past two years or so that I started really resonating with my identity as an African. To get to that point, I have been more deliberate about consuming materials (books, papers, blogs and videos) related to African history.

Here’s a few highlights that stood out to me from Cheta Nwanze’s short piece from 2023 titled ‘On Colonialism’:

• “While I don’t buy the fluff that it was Mary Slessor that ended the killing of twins, after all, the practice had been banned in the Calabar area 38 years before she arrived there, the truth is that her work helped make the practice of infanticide less acceptable. The real truth is that the Obong of Calabar who banned it in the first place lacked the state capacity to implement it, so it was the colonisers who implemented the ban ultimately.”

• “Circa 1850, when the Europeans slowly began to inch into Africa, in the area now Nigeria, there were three great powers, Benin, Oyo and Sokoto. Two of these were on the decline, and one had descended into civil war. Sokoto had, at the time, the largest slave population on Earth, and there is no record of any discussion within the Caliphate about the abolition of slavery, conversations which had become heated at the time halfway around the world and would a decade after lead to the American Civil War. In short, slavery in Sokoto continued until deep into the 20th century. It was European influence that put a stop to it.”

• “Having said all of this, the biggest damage that European adventurism did to us is the damage of putting incompatible peoples together in so-called nation-states, and then proceeding to drive a wedge deep amongst us in order to solidify their rule. The second great evil they did from my perspective, was to solidify the idea of collective guilt. Those “punitive expeditions” regularly embarked upon by people like Hugh Trenchard formed the basis of what we call policing in Nigeria today.”

A behavioral perspective is interested in explaining behavior by observing the interactions between an agent and its environment.

Unlike other perspectives that try to explain human behavior by resorting to intrapsychic and cognitive subsystems, personality traits, and neuroscience, a behavioral perspective is focused on action - what people do when they interact with each other and the environment.

II.

Unless you are a neuroscientist or a brain surgeon, you’re not going to get access to a person’s brain every time you want understand their behavior. Besides, the only way you can be aware of a person’s personality or cognitive disposition is by observing their actions. This is even more apparent in our age of big data where companies are able to send you tailor-made content and ads by simply understanding the pattern of your actions on their sites over time.

Its focus on action is exactly what makes a behavioral perspective appealing. Some events in the environment incentivize action, making certain kinds of behavior more likely to happen. Other events in the environment disincentivize action, reducing the chances of other kinds of behavior happening. By focusing on how the presence or absence of incentives and disincentives influences action, we have a potentially fruitful way to understand the root causes of behavior.

III.

Behavior always entails the passage of time and the expenditure of effort. For a pattern of behavior to continue, the time and effort involved in it must either help you attain pleasure and satisfaction, or help you stop and avoid pain. Conversely, to reduce the chances of a behavioral pattern playing out, engaging in it must be painful, while not engaging in it will at least stop the pain - even if this experience is not particularly pleasurable.

Problems arise when an individual spending time and effort in a particular type of behavior is never certain that he will either be rewarded with pleasure and satisfaction or punished with pain.

IV.

Consider the example of people driving in a busy city. There are white lines on the road, marking the different traffic lanes. The red, amber and green lights controlling the flow of traffic are also in excellent condition.

In some regions in the world, a driver can be confident that as long as he spends his time and effort engaged in keeping his car in his lane, he will escape a disincentive in the form of a fine, or even worse, a car accident. The driver is certain that as long as he drives when the traffic light facing him is green, other drivers are seeing red and he will pass the intersection safely. In short, the conditions where incentives and disincentives can be accessed are predictable.

This is not the case in other parts of the world. You may get into a car accident even if you’re staying in your lane and driving at the speed limit. When you encounter a green light at an intersection, you cannot be sure that the other drivers seeing red would stop. As it turns out, it is difficult to differentiate between the situations where incentives will be delivered and the occasions where disincentives will be delivered.

V.

The earlier example involving driving in a city translates easily to economic conditions. Consider taxes, for instance. In some regions of the world, if you are below a certain income level, you’re incentivized to pay taxes because you get a a tax refund from the government. Thus, even though you have a low income, and paying taxes feels like a further reduction in your income, you still have an incentive to pay your taxes. Why? Because you can count on the government giving you a refund if you are below an income threshold. Similarly, the wealthy are incentivized to pay their taxes when the government establishes the physical and legal infrastructure that allows businesses to thrive - enriching both the pockets of the wealthy and the lived experiences of the masses. Again, this plays out because of how predictable the incentives are. All these translates easily translates into socioeconomic development.

1. In 1965, William F. Buckley Jr., a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservative debated James Baldwin, a black civil rights activist, on the question: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the expense of African Americans?”. By the end of the debate, Baldwin had swayed the views of the mostly conservative, upper-class British audience in his favor.

2. Nowadays, the people shaping culture are the influencers. They aren’t writing essays or engaging in debates. They simply exist and the culture follows. It used to be public intellectuals shaping society’s ideas. Now, influencers shape society’s desires.

3. In contemporary times, debates are less about exchanging ideas and more about ‘owning’ the other side. In a way, debates are now more about performance instead of seeking truth.

4. The modus operandi of academics nowadays is to write paywalled papers for other academics. Those who try to venture out of the ivory tower to comment on society are often told to stay in their lanes or stay silent.

5. There’s the temptation to think that there is a scarcity of public intellectuals because everything there is to say has already been said. However, even if that was true, the ideas that have been shared have not yet been shared by you, right now, in this context.

1. Originality isn’t some sacred, inviolable thing. Everyone is always remixing everyone else. That’s how it’s always been, and will continue to be.

2. Using LLMs now is like reading, Googling, or looking up a word in a thesaurus. Personally, I use it like I would Wikipedia

3. Your ideas were always stitched together from other people’s stuff. What makes your work yours isn’t the ingredients, it’s how your personal quirks flavor the mix.

4. The big issue isn’t that artists and authors don’t get paid when their output is used to train AI, but that there are just a handful of companies or nations controlling all the LLMs in the world.

5. The more you use LLMs, the more it changes how you think. It reflects you back at yourself. You shape it, and it shapes you. To fully unlock its capabilities, don’t lock eyes with it like it’s some digital god. Instead, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it and look through it, with it, towards something else. Treat it like a co-panelist on stage next to you. That’s how you avoid the AI swallowing your brain whole.

6. LLMs are like a supercharged version of social media, especially for those who have a large following. Both have an aggregated hivemind (LLMs greater by many factors). Both have emergent wisdom/madness of the crowd (Depending on what you post/prompt)

Preface

Chapter 1 – Responses to Addiction

• 19th century opium users were categorized into three groups: “opium-eaters”, who drank tinctures made from opium and alcohol (aka, laudanum); opium smokers, who smoked opium as one would a cigarette; and, heroin sniffers, who sniffed powdered forms of the drug through their nostrils.

  • Opium-eaters were usually wealthy and well-to-do people who would typically get their fix from a doctor. They consumed their drugs in private and usually tried to keep their habit secret. In contrast, opium smokers and heroin sniffers were typically social outsiders, e.g., gamblers, prostitutes, delinquents and unemployed. Unlike the opium-eaters, both opium smokers and heroin sniffers engaged in their habit socially, in the company of other users.

• With time, a divide emerged in how society treated the different categories of opium use. Because opium smoking and heroin sniffing was done in the open and attracted social outsiders, it fell under the domain of law enforcement. On the other hand, opium-eating became more strongly associated with the medical profession. In other words, opium-eaters were seen as people who needed help, while other categories were seen as the scum of the earth.

• When the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was passed in the US, opiate and cocaine use were deemed illegal activities. Consequently, opium-eating and opium smoking all but disappeared there. The same fate didn’t befall heroin, though. Instead, criminal gangs took over the distribution of the drug causing its price to increase. With more money needed to get less heroin, users stopped sniffing and started injecting the drug directly into their veins to get high. [As a side note, reading this reminded me of Claude Brown’s autobiographical novel, ‘Manchild in the Promised Land’ where he describes how heroin decimated the Black community in Harlem, New York from the 1940s-50s].

• Some view addiction as a disease and that scientific research would eventually provide effective treatments for it. An unspoken assumption of this view, however, is that if an addiction is not a disease, then it must be the result of deliberate actions which must be appropriately punished (usually by law enforcement).

Chapter 2 – The First Drug Epidemic

• The behavioral effects of a drug vary as a function of the environmental setting and the individual.

• It is interesting that Ancient Egypt, Greek or Roman writers did not see opium as something that could be harmful to the individual or society. Instead, they praised its medicinal benefits.

• Europeans were introduced to tobacco smoking during the Columbian Exchange. When smoking got to the Chinese, they took the act a step further by mixing in opium. This is significant because smoking opium allows its active agent, morphine, get to the brain quickly. It is therefore no surprise that more people started consuming opium in this manner. For the first time, a large group of people started taking opium for its intoxicating effects, rather than its medicinal benefits. Even when the Chinese emperor banned the sale of opium in 1725, the decree was impossible to enforce due to how deeply ingrained it was in the Chinese society at the time.

• Numerous factors may have contributed to China, rather than Europe or South America, being the site of the first drug epidemic: (1) Maybe the Chinese had many people with disposable income and leisure time, as well as many people able to do trade with Europeans; (2) Perhaps cultural beliefs and norms were at play, for instance, Middle Age Europe saw opiates as medicine, while Middle Age China saw opiates as both medicine and aphrodisiacs; (3) Many Chinese cannot consume alcohol due to genetic factors that make them unable to process acetaldehyde. Perhaps smoked opium served as substitute for alcohol for attaining intoxication.

• During the Vietnam War, opium addiction rates among US soldiers was 7 times higher than marijuana addiction rates. This suggests that opiates are more addictive than marijuana. The biggest contributor to this observation seems to be how cheap and easy it was for the soldiers to access opium in Vietnam. Compared to being the US, there were also no stigma or sanctions associated with consuming it. There is the added fact that soldiers were surrounded by peers who also used opium.

Chapter 3 – Addiction in the First Person

• The appeal of addictive drugs is found in the uniqueness of the subjective experiences it can provide to the user.

• There is a category of addicts who fly under society’s radar because they act as functional members of society while regularly abusing opiates.

Chapter 4 – Once an Addict, Always an Addict?

• Studies aggregating nationwide survey data from the US appear to suggest that people are likely to stop consuming drugs at clinically significant levels in their late 20s – early 30s.

• The pharmacology of a drug appears to be responsible for determining when drug use transitions into abuse; on the other hand, individual factors (e.g., presence of other psychiatric disorders) appear to influence quitting addictive behaviors

• Whether addicts quit or continue to consume drugs is largely dependent on the ability to take advantage of nondrug alternatives available to them.

• When there are immediate and salient consequences for reducing drug use, e.g., job loss or gift vouchers, addicts will comply

Chapter 5 – Voluntary Behavior, Disease, and Addiction

• “We inherit genes; we do not inherit behaviors”.

• Addicts may learn to ignore their cravings when the incentive structures in their lives are modified. When the urge to use drugs is in conflict with the urge to do better work or be a better parent or pay the bills, drug use will decrease

• To determine whether an act is voluntary or involuntary, the root is not found in their genes or brain, but in their behavior.

• 17th century English clergymen adopted the view that addiction was a disease because they could not fathom how struggling church members could continue drinking despite having drinking-related problems. Although it is not immediately apparent, this view is a formulation of the neoclassical economic assumption that humans are inherently rational beings who always make decisions that are in their best interests. Accordingly, in this view, any deviations from rational behavior have to be due to disease.

• The key defining factor determining whether an act is voluntary is whether it varies as a function of consequences (e.g., costs, benefits, the opinions of others, cultural values, self-esteem, and other factors influencing decision-making). Involuntary acts, on the other hand, are mostly elicited by the preceding stimuli (e.g., urges) and is little affected by consequences.

• In an intervention where patients could earn vouchers for producing drug-free urine tests, drug use reduced. This is called contingency management. This pattern of reduced drug use even continued after the intervention was over.

• When cues predict that there won’t be any opportunity to use a drug, cravings decrease (e.g., there is usually no urge to smoke in a plane, despite the ‘no-smoking’ sign flashed). Yet, the same cues in another context (e.g., gas station) may signal an opportunity to use the drug, and the cravings increase.

Chapter 6 – Addiction and Choice

• Addiction depends on 3 factors: (1) general principles of choice and decision making; (2) behavioral effects of addictive drugs; (3) individual and environmental factors affecting choice

• Choice Principle I: The values of outcomes influence how people make choices, and people’s choices also change the value of outcomes over time. That’s why preferences are dynamic and change with time. New activities that were exciting at first can become boring and activities that were boring at some point in the past can be perceived as interesting.

• Choice Principle II: In any given context, it is possible to choose between available items one at a time (local choice), or to organize the items into sequences and choose between different sequences (global choice). Local choice is simple but ignores the dynamics between choice and changes in value. Global choice, on the other hand, is conscious of these dynamics.

• Choice Principle III: People always choose what they consider the better option. If they are in the local frame, that means choosing the option that currently has the higher value; if they are in the global frame, this means choosing the sequence or collection of items with the higher value

• People have a natural inclination to make choices in the local frame often because the arrangement of items of choice into sequences (i.e., global frame) is more abstract and not salient. However, it is possible to arrange conditions such that people choose in a global frame

• When decisions are made continually within the local frame, it can lead to overconsumption, which is one of the conditions for an addiction.

• In the local frame, the value of drug use to the lonely addict is always higher than the value of nondrug activities (e.g., working and positive nondrug social interactions) because of the subjective pleasures of intoxication and the pain of withdrawal. However, because of a combination of tolerance to drugs (i.e., needing a larger dose to get the same high), legal consequences, and social stigma, each instance of drug use reduces the value of the next instance of drug use in the local frame.

• In the global frame, the value of a sequence of drug use pales in comparison to the value of a sequence of nondrug activities (e.g., working and positive nondrug social interactions). Hence, the decision is made to engage in the nondrug activities instead.

• When addicts are regretting past behavior or anticipating future relapses, they are in the global frame.

• One reason explaining the temptation of the local frame is that the immediate benefits (i.e., the ‘high’ gotten from the addictive substance) is immediate, while the costs (e.g., hangovers, social stigma, legal consequences, poor health) are delayed, indirect, uncertain and abstract at the time of choice.

• It is difficult for addicts to quit if they are in the local frame because: (1) the benefits of nondrug activities are not immediate; (2) the benefits of the drug use are immediate and outweigh that of nondrug activities – even in the worst days of drug use!

• Successful quitting of an addiction requires a commitment to the global frame which only begins to accrue benefits when a pattern of engagement in nondrug activities, rather than a single instance, is established.

• In the last choice in a series of choices, the distinction between the local and global frame disappears. Thus, an addict that thinks ‘This is the last time I will take this drug’ is settling into the local frame where the value of the addictive substance outweighs nondrug activities.

• One day of drug use doesn’t render a person an addict. Rather, it is the continual treatment of all opportunities to use the drug as ‘one day’ that eventually leads to an addiction.

• Because the arrangement of items of choice into sequences (i.e., global frame) is more abstract, it usually take more deliberate effort to make them salient.

• Choices in the local frame correspond to the discrete activities we engage in from day-to-day, while choices in the global frame are usually abstractions that can only be accessed through the imagination or aids to imagination (e.g., trackers, planners, schedules) [As another side note, many of the spiritual exercises engaged in as part of religious practice, (e.g., meditation, praying, fasting, looking to qualifying for heaven or avoiding hell) all function, at a behavioral level, as a means of transitioning the individual from a local frame to the global frame].

Chapter 7 – Voluntary Behavior: An Engine for Change

• Dopamine, a neurotransmitter often invoked in addiction theories, does not distinguish between addictive substances and nonaddictive substances. Activities such as exercise and even a painful pinch of a rat’s tail (e.g., D’Angio et al., 1987) leads to the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens region of the brain.

• Substances that lend themselves to addiction have the following properties: (1) they have immediate benefits; (2) they have delayed or hidden costs; (3) they reduce the value of other nonaddictive activities in their lives; (4) they encourage the local frame or undermine the global frame; (5) they are still consumed, even if additional instances of consumption reduce the value of the next instance of consumption.

• Nonaddictive activities and substances are not behaviorally toxic. That is, they do not undermine the value of other activities or substances. For instance, day-to-day activities (e.g., work or physical exercise) does not undermine the value of healthy leisure activities. The converse is the case as well, healthy leisure activities do not undermine the value of work or physical exercise.

• Nonaddictive substances and activities, on the other hand, undermine the value of both the next instance of consumption, as well as the value of nonaddictive substances and activities in their lives. An addict hates the state of addiction, and may be unwilling to engage in work or other healthy alternatives

• Addictive substances or activities do not lead to easily lead to satiation or fatigue. This tendency eventually leads to tolerance where more of the addictive substance or activity is needed to provide the same level of satisfaction

• Addictive substances impair the ability to shift into the global choice frame.

• Choice depends on the context. The value of an activity or substance to a decision-maker is determined by both their intrinsic properties, as well as the properties of the competing alternatives.

• Choices that have higher value in the global frame are usually beneficial to the decision maker in the long run. However, because choices in the global frame are abstract, any physical and/or cognitive efforts made to make them more salient (e.g., planning, scheduling and tracking) are also valuable activities that will benefit the decision-maker in the long run.

• In their day-to-day lives, individuals do not weigh all the short-term or long-term consequences of each choice they make. What people typically do instead, is either adopt private rules of conduct or follow culturally transmitted norms for what constitute acceptable social behavior

• Certain religious practices also fall under the category of socially transmitted norms that govern behavior – even in private. Kendler et al. (1997) and Gartner et al. (1991) are few of the studies demonstrating the negative correlation between being engaged in religious practices and drug addiction or drug use when in stressful situations.

• When certain religious values are internalized, the individual is more likely to operate in a global frame where benefits and consequences of day-to-day choices no longer salient at the local level. Instead, the decision-making process is simplified into whether or not the religious prescriptions apply to their particular situation. That said, there are obviously instances where private rules of conduct might be beneficial for entering the global frame but are at odds with the prevailing social norms.

• One reason for relapses may be due to always expending cognitive effort on reviewing the costs and benefits of all alternatives at every point of decision making, instead of abiding by prudential rules of conduct (private or socially mediated) that make the global frame more salient.

• “[A]ddicts are not compulsive drug users. They choose to keep using drugs, and they can – and do – choose to quit”

Introduction

1. The state made society more legible by taking complex social practices, such as naming customs or land tenure customs, and created a standard format to easily record and monitor these social practices.

2. Example from nature: Natural honeycombs form intricate patterns that don’t make it easy for the honey to be extracted. Artificial bee hives, on the other hand, are designed to solve the problem of the beekeeper, not the bees.

3. The most tragic instances of state-initiated social engineering had the following elements: (a) administrative ordering of nature and society; (b) high modernist ideology characterized by hubris about scientific progress and the expectation that scientific order underpins social order; (c) an authoritarian state able to use its full power to execute high-modernist ideology; (d) a passive/weak society unable to resist the authoritarian state

4. Any production process depends on informal practices and improvisations that cannot be captured in manuals. In fact, wholehearted adherence to the letter of the book is often one way to produce inefficiently

5. Métis = The idea that true knowledge comes from practical experience, as opposed to formal deductive theory

Part 1 – State Projects of Legibility and Simplification

Chapter 1 – Nature and Space

1. In fiscal forestry, the state replaces an actual tree and its myriad of possible uses with an abstract idea of a tree which can only be used as lumber or firewood.

2. Early agents of the state reduced the subjects into data points for the state, without taking their local context, practices and interests into account.

3. The state is incapable of knowing all that is going on at the local level.

4. As long as nature was perceived as abundant, it had no monetary value, and the illegibility of its ownership was not a problem. However, the moment nature was seen as ‘natural resources’, it became scarce and there was need to establish property rights.

5. Maps are designed to make the local context more legible to an outsider. For the locals, information on a map is already common knowledge.

6. Simplifications conducted by state agents are static and schematic – often only capturing information from the moment that simplification was made. This is a far cry from the more fluid social phenomenon state agents are trying to model.

7. Example from France in the 18th – 19th century: When state agents used the number of doors and windows on a building as a heuristic for estimating tax due from a residence, the locals started building houses with fewer doors and windows.

Chapter 2 – Cities, People and Language

1. The aerial view of a town built during the Middle Ages would not have had any discernable geometric form. This, however, did not mean it was confusing to the inhabitants.

2. Illegibility of the local context provides a measure of safety from outsiders – who typically would need a guide to navigate the locality.

3. Order seen from the ‘grand plan’ bears no resemblance to the order of life as experienced by the locals.

4. Legibility isn’t all bad. The legibility of 19th century Paris, for instance, was vital to the work of public health hygienists in preventing the spread of communicable diseases. But bad state actors can also take advantage of this, e.g., Nazi Germany took advantage of legibility to round up Jews.

5. The invention of permanent, inherited surnames was a state measure for making the local context more legible for the purpose of collecting tax and drafting people into the army.

6. The imposition of a singular official language is often the first step that makes the rest possible. When the state mandates an official language, the local context is devalued and those who are quick to master the official language benefit from the shift in power (e.g., English speakers in colonial Nigeria)

7. Even the creation of roads was for the benefit of the state agents, rather than the needs or movements of the locals.

Part 2 – Transforming Visions

Chapter 3 – Authoritarian High Modernism

1. Much of state-enforced social engineering efforts of the 19th and 20th century were due to progressive and often reactionary elites.

2. One precondition for high modernism was the reframing of society as a separate object that could be studied by the state.

3. The Polish sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman’s useful metaphor of the garden: The garden is man’s attempt to impose his vision of order, utility and beauty on nature. What grows in a garden is a subset of what can potentially grow there.

4. High modernist beliefs are heavily future-oriented. The past is considered an impediment to the present and the present is the launching pad to the high modernist ideals. In practice, however, high-modernist plans are often abandoned which suggests that they are founded on poor assumptions.

5. High modernist beliefs are inspired by ‘productivism’ which is the idea that human labor is a mechanical system that can be broken down into energy transfers, motion and the physics of work.

6. Productivism appeals to the right and center of the political spectrum because it promises an increase in worker output. It also appeals to the political left because it promises to replace the capitalist with technical expertise or the state official.

7. Three factors resisting high modernist ideals: (a) belief that there is a sphere of private human activity where state agents should not interfere; (b) the private sector is too complex to be managed by state actors; (c) the presence of working institutions.

Chapter 4 – The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

1. No one…knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it – Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

2. It is easy to plan an urban zone if it had just one function. This works for roads, not homes. For instance, a kitchen cannot be reduced to ‘a place for food preparation’ because someone can decide to hang out with friends/family while they are cooking.

3. In high modernism, the wisdom of the ‘master plan’ is elevated above all other social institutions. The danger of this is that human problems of urban design do not have a singular solution. The solution often depends on the local context.

4. By designing Brasilia the way they did, the planners were also assuming that the elimination of disorder would lead to less disease, crime and pollution. Inadvertently, the designed the city to be inhabited by an ‘abstract’ man who did not exist in reality.

5. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs argued that the tidy, geometric look of a city does not mean that it will meet the needs of the residents. Visual order is very different from functional order. The order of a thing should be determined from the purpose it serves.

6. Another excellent metaphor: An army on the parade ground is visually orderly but almost useless in the thick of a battle.

7. Social order is not the result of architectural order, or technical expertise. Rather, it is a function of an almost unconscious network of controls initiated by the people in the local context.

8. Jane Jacobs tells the story of an older man trying to abduct/seduce an 8- or 9-year-old girl. The crime couldn’t take place because there were many onlookers who could potentially intervene. No state agent was necessary.

9. Jane Jacobs also argued that formal public institutions of order function successfully when these informal avenues of social order are in place.

10. Intricate mingling of different uses are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order – Jane Jacobs.

11. “…we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone’s imagination to create community. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard to come by. ‘Fix the buildings, but leave the people…” – Stanley Tankel (1957)

12. Flaws of high modernism: (a) planners cannot predict the future; (b) a satisfactory neighborhood cannot be created without input from the people living in that context.

Chapter 5 – The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis

1. The words ‘mass’ or ‘masses’ also connotes the idea of mere quantity without order, cohesion or identity.

2. Once the term ‘masses’ is used to describe people, any differences in their history, political experience, ideology, ethnicity, religion and language are ignored.

3. Sometimes, Lenin used the contamination metaphor more literally and referred to the ‘masses’ with words borrowed from hygiene and the germ theory of disease.

4. Both the Communist and the Capitalist see the ‘masses’ as vital means for productions. The Capitalist wants the masses for efficient production of goods, while Communist wants to deploy them for efficient revolution. The Communist and Capitalist are more similar than they are willing to admit!

5. An assumption forming the foundation of Lenin’s text ‘State and Revolution’ was that the social life of the masses can be organized either by the business owners (bourgeoise) or the Party – but with no input from the masses themselves

6. Lenin explicitly called for a ‘unity of will’ enforced through diabolic means: ‘But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one…’

7. The data that informed Lenin’s high modernist ideals for agriculture did not originate from Russia. Rather, they came from Austria and Germany which were more technologically developed than Russia at the time.

8. Lenin strived to have empirical evidence fit with his theory. For instance, when small-scale Russian farmers were producing at high levels, Lenin claimed that this could only be because the farmers were overworking and starving themselves

9. Unlike Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg used metaphors that were complex and organic, where the whole cannot survive if a part dies.

10. Aleksandra Kollontay, another Luxemburg-esque Communist, proposed that state officials who had no practical factory experience should not hold leadership positions until they had some manual experience, i.e., skin in game.

Part 3 – The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production

1. States are often younger than the societies they want to administer.

2. At the beginning of the 20th century Rubber boom, British officials kept favoring rubber produced from estates with better scientific management – even though the rubber produced by the smallholders were more efficient and profitable.

Chapter 6 – Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams

1. Ernst Gellner argued that there were 2 facets of the Enlightenment – one asserting the sovereignty of the individual and the other, emphasizing the rational authority of experts.

2. Soviet Russia wasn’t merely interested in the physical transformation of society. They were also after a cultural transformation of the individual.

3. The advantage of large industrial farms over the smaller ones wasn’t efficiency and profitability, but political and economic clout. For their part, the small farms also had the advantage of being more flexible and adaptable to changing economic situations, as opposed to the larger farms

4. Soviet Russia leaders invited 3 Americans (Wilson, Ware and Riggin) to plan a 500000-acre wheat farm. The Americans did this from Chicago without ever setting foot on the actual farm in Russia. The project eventually failed (although it had high production in the first few years)

5. In practice, local collectivized farms in Soviet Russia often appealed their state-mandated quotas because they know if they met it, the state would raise the quotas in the next round of procurement

6. Soviet collectivization failed at attaining its high modernist ideals – despite high investments in research and infrastructure. This was due to: (a) unmotivated workers forced to work without incentives; (b) central state planning oblivious to local context; (c) political system didn’t give state agents the incentive to negotiate or adapt to the local population.

Chapter 7 – Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization

1. Social engineering is only possible when it considers the responses and cooperation of real humans.

2. Local Tanzanian farmers used polycropping/relay cropping techniques where they interplanted annual crops (e.g., coffee) with perennial crops (e.g., bananna). Despite empirical evidence demonstrating polycropping was more productive than monocropping, administrators and technical experts still had a preference for monocropping.

3. Tanzanian state agents were often rewarded based on how many ujammas (forced resettlement schemes) they formed. Hence, the people affected by the forced relocation were not as important as the number of ujamma villages formed.

4. The ujamma scheme was not as destructive as Soviet Russia because the Tanzanian state was relatively weak in comparison, and state agents were more reluctant to use force on the peasant farmers.

5. ‘Ideas cannot digest reality’ – Jean-Paul Sartre

6. It is easier to change an organizational chart (formal structure) than to change how an organization operates (its practices). That is why handbooks and guidelines cannot fully explain how an institution operates. That is also why it is possible for workers to go on strike by following the ‘letter of the law’ rather than its spirit.

7. A planned institution often generates a ‘dark twin’ that fulfils the needs not satisfied by the planned institution. For instance, slums tend to provide services personnel (e.g., cleaners, cooks) who cater to the needs of the elite who do administrative work in the planned city.

Chapter 8 – Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity

1. In his 1985 book, ‘Indigenous Agricultural Revolution’, Paul Richards argued that the results of modernized farming in Africa has been so poor that the slower, traditional approach needs to be reconsidered.

2. Traditional farmers are often knowledgeable about the variety of crops that can be grown in their local context. This knowledge is important for improving their chances of survival in a hostile, unpredictable environment.

3. Modernist agriculture increased the selection of only plant species that were responsive to fertilizers, which had the consequence of reducing the variety of crops planted.

4. Variety was further reduced by selectively breeding crops that were easier to plant and harvest mechanically. Taste and nutrient quality were treated as qualities secondary to machine compatibility.

5. Genetic uniformity makes crops susceptible to epidemics. Diversity, on the other hand, constrains the likelihood of such epidemics.

6. West African colonialists saw agricultural practices of the locals as sloppy and visually disorderly.

7. Increased use of pesticides is due to the rise of pests as genetic uniformity of mechanized farms increased.

8. Polyculture is likely to lead to Hicksian income (i.e., income that allows the same level of utility – even though price increases). It is also antifragile – it can absorb environmental stress without being damaged or devastated.

9. The proper test for any agricultural practice is whether or not it worked in the environment concerned.

10. The NPK fertilizer, while a great scientific discovery, could have iatrogenic effects. For instance, it can increase soil alkalization which ironically leads to soil infertility.

11. Robert Chambers (1983): “Indigenous agricultural knowledge, despite being ignored or overridden by consultant experts, is the single largest knowledge resource not yet mobilized in the development enterprise”

12. The logic of actual farming involves an innovative, practice-grounded response to variability in the environment, while the logic of scientific agriculture adapts the environment to centralizing models and formulas

13. “Instead of learning what the local conditions were and then making agricultural practice fit these conditions better, he had been trying to ‘improve’ local practice so that it would conform to abstract standards” – George Yaney (The Urge to Mobilize, 1982)

14. Those who simplify the environment to the point where rules can explain a lot – have a lot of power in that environment

15. Traditional farmers are open to learning from the work of science, while researchers tend to be unwilling to learn from the informal experiments of traditional practices.

16. Traditional farmers are not merely experimenting with different farming practices. They have skin in game – their livelihood depends on the results of those experiments.

17. Practical knowledge is not codified according to the scientific method.

Part 4 – The Missing Link

Chapter 9 – Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Métis

1. Formal order is dependent on informal processes.

2. Métis: The wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment.

3. A firefighter’s job cannot be reduced to a routine, like what plays out with a clerk. A firefighter begins with the unpredictable and then devises the techniques for addressing the issues.

4. Local knowledge is partisan. This is because the holder of such knowledge will be directly affected by outcomes related to that knowledge. In other words, they have skin in game. Métis is typically exhibited by those with skin in game

5. Aristotle recognized that some domains cannot be reduced into a system of rational rules, e.g., navigation and medicine, where experience is more important than logical deductions.

6. The litmus test for Métis is practical success

7. Innovations of Métis often involve a recombination of existing elements.

8. Ingredients of practical knowledge: (a) pressing need; (b) promising leads that worked in another context; (c) army of freelance experimenters willing to try anything; (d) time to see experiments’ results; (e) sharing experimental results.

9. Downsides of Métis: (a) not democratically distributed and access to experience may be restricted (often due to social status); (b) can lead to inequalities because communities will disproportionately depend on those with Métis.

10. Ironically, standardized knowledge addresses the downsides of depending sole on Métis.

Conclusion

1. Rules of thumb for development planning: (a) Take small steps; (b) Favor interventions that can be easily reversed; (c) Choose plans that give room for unforeseen second-order effects; (d) Plan with the assumption that those with involved/affected will develop insight to improve the design.

2. High modernism isn’t all bad because: (a) it replaced some unjust/oppressive local practices; (b) it brought new egalitarian ideas, e.g., equality before the law, rights

3. When we replace natural capital with cultivated natural capital, we gain immediate productivity, as well as maintenance expenses and less redundancy, resilience and stability.

Chapter 1 – Hesitations

Chapter 2 – History and the Earth

Chapter 3 – Biology and History

• Life is competition.

• Life is selection.

• Inequality is an innate part of life, and it tends to grow as civilization increases in complexity

• Freedom and inequality are sworn enemies. When you leave people free, inequality increases

• Utopias where equality of outcomes are rampant are doomed to fail. The best one can hope for is an equality of legal justice and educational opportunity

• Life must breed

• If population growth overtakes food supply, nature uses famine, pestilence and war to restore equilibrium

Chapter 4 – Race and History

Chapter 5 – Character and History

• One lifetime isn’t sufficient to dismiss societal customs and institutions that contain generational wisdom

• Conservatives resist change, radicals push for change. Both are good for the development of society

Chapter 6 – Morals and History

• Written history is often different from lived history

Chapter 7 – Religion and History

• Masses desire a religion rich in miracles, mysteries and myth

• Nature doesn’t agree with our human conceptualization of good and evil. What is good is what survives

• If another war affects our civilization as it currently is, the church will be humanity’s saving grace

• Religion and puritanism prevails when morals maintain social order; skepticism and paganism prevails when the power of law arises and government permits decline of the church and family without undermining the stability of the state

• No society has ever maintained moral life without religion

Chapter 8 – Economics and History

• Roman Empire was invaded by barbarians because agricultural population which produced warriors who fought to obtain land had been replaced by slaves working on farms owned by one man

• History is inflationary and money is the last thing a wise man will hoard

• Every economic system relies on some form of profit to incentivize productivity

• Except in war, men are usually judged by their ability to produce

• When the strength in the number of poor rivals the strength in ability of the rich, an unstable equilibrium occurs which is often resolved via either legislation distributing wealth, or revolution distributing poverty

• Concentration of wealth is natural and is periodically changed by violent or peaceful partial redistribution

Chapter 9 – Socialism and History

• All other things being equal, internal liberty is inversely related to external danger

• Marx application of the Hegelian dialectic to economic systems was incomplete. Instead of the dialectic leading to the complete control of socialism, it should have been seen as: thesis – capitalism; antithesis – socialism; synthesis – a hybrid of capitalism and socialism

Chapter 10 – Government and History

• Leadership by a majority is often impossible since the majority is seldom organized around towards a unified course of action. Leadership by a minority is consequently unavoidable and revolts from the majority only leads to the replacement of one minority by another.

• Aristocrats are more concerned with the art of life, while artists are devoted to the life of art

• The sanity of the individual depends on the continuity of his memories, while the sanity of the community depends on the continuity of tradition. Disruptions in this continuity leads to neuroticism at the individual and communal levels as the case may be

• Wealth arises, not by the accumulation of goods or the value of paper money or checks, but by maintaining control over procedures of production and exchange, as well as building trust in men and institutions. As a consequence, revolutions destroy, rather than redistribute wealth

• The only true revolution is one that leads to the development of the mind and character

• The excessive increase of anything leads to a reaction in the opposite reaction

• Because of human nature and the impersonal nature of economic markets, advances in economic development leads to a higher demand in superior skills which ultimately leads to the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of few

• Education has spread, but intelligence is retarded by the fertility of the simple

• Although men cannot be equal, their access to opportunity can be made more nearly equal

Chapter 11 – History and War

• The causes of war between nations are the same as the causes of competition between individuals. The state has the natural instincts of the individual, without the restraints of the individual. That is, the individual can submit to moral and legal codes, while the state has nothing restraining its tendencies

Chapter 12 – Growth and Decay

• In organic periods, men build; in critical periods, men destroy

• Organic periods are characterized by centripetal organization where culture unifies into a coherent artistic form; critical periods are characterized by centrifugal disorganization where culture and tradition decompose and ends in the chaos of individualism

• What determines whether a challenge will be met by a society is the presence of initiative and creative individuals with the clarity of mind and energy of will to make effective responses in new situations

• When inequality grows in an expanding economy, its society finds itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority unable to develop sophisticated standards of excellence and taste

Chapter 13 – Is Progress Real?

• Rather than asking whether one generation is better than the other, we should be asking whether the average man has increased his capacity to control the conditions of his life

• Education is not merely the memorization of facts, but the transmission of our mental, moral, technical and aesthetic heritage to as many people as possible for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, and enjoyment of life

Since my reflection on the two books were not long enough to warrant further development into a manuscript for a scientific journal, I figured I’d share it here. I admit it’s also nice to see my thought processes back then and how they somewhat align with my current career as a researcher. In any case, below is an unedited reproduction of the reflection paper I wrote to earn a passing grade.

REFLECTION PAPER

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer were two books that caused a paradigm shift in the perception of my future role in the public health sector. Prior to reading the books, I knew that I wanted to go along the research path. However, I did not want to merely conduct research for its sake. Rather, I knew that I wanted my work to have national and international significance for this generation and for the generations unborn. I believe that the lessons I learned from these two books have equipped me with the tools needed to attain my long-term career goals.

The first thing I learned from studying the two books is the fact that new ideas will always be challenged by proponents of the status quo. I realized that there is always going to be opposition to change. This opposition to change does not mean that the opponents are evil people, or that they have ulterior motives. Usually, the opposition to change is due to the knowledge levels of the opponents at the time. In order to promote the buy-in of the proponents of the status quo into the proposed change, it is imperative for the change agent to make use of empirical evidence and clear communication to make opponents to see the blind spot without making them feel stupid. A classic example of this could be found in Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, where John Snow tries to convince the public health leaders and policy makers that cholera was water-borne, rather than transmitted through the air as was the medical belief of the day. To prove his point, John Snow did not immediately challenge the leading health authorities of the day, mocking their ignorance. Rather, John Snow took his time to research the data available on death patterns in his city, as well as painstakingly making use of both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to get answers to difficult questions concerning the epidemiology of cholera. It was only after John Snow had gotten answers to his questions that he went on to publish a journal article documenting his findings. John Snow’s approach was enlightening to me because it is easy to be tempted to be arrogant and cocky when one makes an important discovery that refutes popular belief. Rather, he followed due process and permitted the normal scientific process to allow his findings to become mainstream.

From Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer, one of the lessons that stood out to me was from the management perspective. In 1965, the World Health Organization (WHO) wanted to find a way to eradicate smallpox. The WHO recruited the services of D. A. Henderson, who at the time was the head of surveillance at the Center for Disease Control (CDC), to assist in implementing their goal. I believe that among many other factors, one of the reasons that led to the eradication of smallpox was Henderson’s leadership and management style. Many times, people think that the road to significance is largely in isolation. However, this is not true, especially with the fact that it is not efficient for one individual to execute every facet of his/her goal alone. Henderson recognized this, and he developed a ruthlessly efficient system for hiring only the best people and giving them clear goals. As a result, smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and the protocol used in achieving this goal still serves as a template for the WHO in the eradication or control of other worldwide epidemics.

Finally, Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer both showed me how to prospect for innovative ideas. For a long time, I had always thought that innovative ideas came solely from deep thoughts. However, upon reading the two books, I realized that new ideas come by observing the mundane and looking for connections between those mundane observations. Indeed, innovation comes from drawing different conclusions from what everyone else has seen and thought of but did nothing about. This pattern was replicated numerous times in both The Ghost Map and Demon in the Freezer. For instance, John Snow was able to find holes in the miasma theory that foul smells were responsible for causing ailments by simply observing the fact that people whose jobs were to empty full sewers in the city of London were usually very healthy men. If diseases like cholera were transmitted by pungent smells, the sewer workers should have been the weakest. On the flip side, it is also worrying that innovations in the wrong hands can be used to unleash untold mayhem to the world. For instance, there are fears that terrorist organizations are in the process of using genetic engineering principles to modify the smallpox virus into something much more debilitating. In fact, there are valid concerns that future wars might involve the use of biological weapons such as genetically modified viruses and bacteria.

In conclusion, I consider Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, as well as Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer as two timely books I am glad to have read at this phase of my academic career. I am glad that my mindset concerning the proper way to introduce change, manage teams, and, source for innovation, has been positively expanded. In addition, I have also been made aware of the grave responsibility attached to producing research work of national and international significance.

References

Johnson, S. (2006). The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and The Modern World. Penguin.

Preston, R. (2003). The Demon in the Freezer. Fawcett Books.

Introduction

1. Accurate intuition of experts is usually the result of prolonged practice, rather than a reliance on heuristics

2. Herbert Simon quote: “The situation has provided a cue. This cue has given the expert access to information stored in the memory and the information provided the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition”

3. Valid intuition happens when experts have learned to recognize familiar cues in situations and act out in the appropriate manner

4. Without experience, intuition is likely to be inaccurate

5. Humans, when faced with a difficult question, use heuristics to answer a simpler question

PART 1

Chapter 1

1. Mental work is usually deliberate, orderly and effortful (System 2)

2. System 1 is fast and automatic while System 2 is orderly

3. System 1 is instinctive (similar behavior in lower animals) while System 2 requires attention and is disrupted when attention is denied

4. Intense focus (effortful System 2) affects attention to other stimuli, e.g., the Gorilla Experiment

5. System 1 generates impression while System 2 turns these impressions, intuitions and intentions into beliefs

6. System 2 arises when one’s mental model of the world is violated/unexpected. It also helps self-motivating behavior

7. System 1 is susceptible to biases. It is impulsive, while System 2 is responsible for self-control

8. Muller-Lyer illusion – Interesting how the visual illusion is still perceived as an illusion (System 1) – even though System 2 knows the reality

Chapter 2

1. System 2 is lazy and there is a reluctance to apply effort to get it to function

2. Eckhard Hess quote: “The pupil of the eye is the window to the soul”

3. Pupils dilate in mental effort and stop when the individual resolves the task or gives up

4. Mundane conversation (a System 2 task) is conducted at a comfortable pace which is preferred by System 2

5. During intense mental activity, System 2 focuses the bulk of the attention of the task while allotting lesser levels of attention to less important tasks

6. With increase in skill and proficiency, demand for attention reduces and System 2 is able to return to its preferred pedestrian rate

7. Law of Least Effort: If there are several ways to attain a goal, most people prefer the easiest route

8. More effort is placed on System 2 whenever the individual is under time pressure

Chapter 3

1. System 2 likes to work at a pedestrian rate and when a demand is placed on it, less attention is devoted to other tasks which are taken over by the more impulsive System 1

2. Anything that places more demand on System 2 will allow System 1 to take over

3. Ego depletion: After using System 2 on Task A, one is not willing to use System 2 again on Task B. Note that ego depletion is not cognitive busyness. The former can be increased with the right incentives while in the latter, using short term memory cannot be incentivized to improve performance

4. People with active minds do not allow System 1 to take over the “bat and ball” problem, while those with a lazy System 2 accept System 1’s intuition

5. If people believe a conclusion, they also accept the supporting arguments, even if they are wrong. All these are a waste of a lazy System 2

6. Intelligence is not just the ability to reason, but the ability to recall relevant material in the memory an deploy attention as needed (System 2’s task)

Chapter 4

1. Associative activation: When an idea triggers other ideas in the brain. For instance, seeing “banana” and “vomit” brought up memories of similar events in the past and also prepares one for future possible events that have now become subjectively more likely

2. Embodied cognition: You think with the body and brain

3. Despite multiple ideas being activated in the mind, only a few register in to one’s consciousness

4. Priming is an example of determinism (behaviorism perspective)

5. System 2 thinks it’s in charge and it knows the reason for action. Priming phenomenon triggers associative activation that influences System 1 (intuitive, impulsive “dark matter”) and System 2 has no access to them. [Note: Studies on priming have replicated poorly in recent years]

6. System 1 provides impressions that turn to beliefs, impulses that turn into choices and actions. It triggers associative activation that links the past, present and future expectations

Chapter 5

1. System 2 enjoys cognitive ease. In the event of cognitive strain, System 1 mobilizes System 2. Cognitive strain occurs when effort is needed and there are unmet demands

2. Cognitive ease usually facilitates creativity as System 2 is not under stress. Cognitive strain, on the other hand, promotes the activity of System 2 – however this compromises intuition and creativity

3. Greater cognitive ease is experienced when stimuli that have been seen before are seen again. The cognitive ease is triggered by the feeling of familiarity. The way the stimuli is presented influences the degree of cognitive ease that is experienced

4. The impression of familiarity is produced by System 1 and System 2 makes judgement based on that impression

5. Repeating falsehood reduces cognitive ease and System 2 assimilates that as belief 

6. Persuasive stimuli in the form of messages should be

• Legible

• Use simple language

• Memorable (rhymes are good)

• Names that are easy to pronounce

7. Most people are guided by System 1 and not know where their impressions come from

8. Cognitive ease is associated with good feelings (System 1)

9. Mere Exposure Effect: Repetition of stimuli promotes cognitive ease which in turn is likely to produce positive emotions (System 1)

10. Happy mood reduces the control of System 1 on performance

Chapter 6

1. System 1 maintains and updates your model of the world

2. Your model is made up of associated ideas that determine your interpretation of the present, as well as your expectations

3. Norm Theory: Very little repetition is needed for a new experience to be deemed normal. We have norms for different categories and these norms provide background for the detection of anomalies

4. System 1 tries to identify cause and effect automatically while System 2 accepts the explanation

Chapter 7

1. When uncertain, System 1 bets on an answer and the bets are guided by experience

2. System 1 does not keep track of alternatives, while doubt requires mental effort (a function of System 2)

3. To understand a statement, you have to know what the idea means if it is true.

4. When System 2 is busy, we tend to believe almost anything 

5. Confirmation bias: People tend to look for data that is compatible with beliefs they currently hold

6. Halo Effect: Tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person (including things that have not been observed)

7. Information that is not retrieved might as well be non-existent. System 1 constructs the best possible story that incorporates ideas activated and not those inactivated

8. System 1’s mantra is “What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)”

9. Knowing little makes it easy to fit everything that one knows into a coherent pattern

10. Overconfidence: Not allowing for the possibility that evidence critical to judgement is missing

11. Framing Effect: Different ways of presenting the same information evokes different emotions (and responses)

12. Base-rate neglect: Forgetting the denominator of the population you are interested in

Chapter 8

1. System 2 receives questions or generates them: It does this by directing attention and searching the memory for answers

2. System 1 continually generates assessment of a situation without focusing on a specific intention or using up effort

3. System 1 substitutes one judgement (a hard one) with another (usually a simpler one)

4. For System 1, good moods and cognitive ease are indicative of safety and familiarity

5. System 1 also functions in providing rapid judgement in determining whether a person is a friend or foe. People sometimes use this in determining who to vote for

6. Basic assessments automatically done by System 1 during language use include:

• Computation of similarity and representativeness

• Attribution of causality

• Evaluation of the availability of association and exemplars

7. System 1 represents categories by a prototype/exemplar and can do well with averages, but not sums (An example is people choosing to donate the same amount to save 2000, 20000 or 20000 birds)

8. System 1 has two categories of assessment: 

• Continuous routine assessments (e.g., seeing the shape of objects in 3d)

• Voluntary assessments (e.g., assessing how happy you are)

9. System 1 also does intensity matching

Chapter 9

1. People’s normal disposition is to have an intuitive feeling/opinion about everything that comes one’s way

2. People tend to have answers to questions they do not understand completely, and they do this by relying on evidence they can neither explain nor defend

3. System 1 replaces a hard question with an easier one. This is called substitution

4. Heuristic: This is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though imperfect answers to difficult questions

5. Mental shotgun refers to the tendency to compute more than necessary/intended, e.g., replacing hard questions with an easier one

6. Intensity matching: Automatically creating scales of intensity of emotions to judge something

7. A judgement that is based on a substitution will invariably be biased

8. Affect heuristic: People allowing their likes and dislikes to determine their beliefs about the world

9. Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2, however, when it comes to affect (emotions), its search for emotions is constrained to the information that is consistent with existing beliefs

PART II

Chapter 10

1. System 1 likes to make causal connections, even when those connections are not there

2. A random event doesn’t have an explanation. But a collection of random events may behave in a regular fashion

3. System 1 will produce representations of reality that makes sense (often basing this on the Halo Effect, as well as the assumption that the Law of Large Numbers work for small samples 

4. System 1 likes looking for causal relationships when in the real sense, nothing in particular causes an event to happen – chance selects it from a series of alternatives

5. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all

6. We pay more attention to the content of a message, rather than their reliability. As a result, we end up with a view of the world that is simpler than what the data can justify

Chapter 11

1. Two forms of anchoring:

• One that occurs in the process of adjustment (System 1)

• One that occurs due to the priming effect (System 2)

2. In System 2, anchoring is a deliberate attempt to find reasons to move away from the anchor

3. People adjust less when their memory resources are depleted

4. In System 1, anchoring could occur with no corresponding subjective experience

5. System 1 tries to conduct a world where the anchor is a true number. It does this via associative coherence, where any prime will evoke information compatible with it

6. Searching for arguments against the anchor is useful during negotiations and is controlled by System 2

7. Anchoring occurs when one is unconscious (in the case of priming) and it also occurs when you are aware because you can no longer imagine how you would have thought in the absence of the anchor

Chapter 12

1. Availability heuristic: Judging frequency by the ease with which instances come to mind

2. Availability heuristic replaces “size or frequency of event” with “how easily can I recall this instance”

3. Make efforts to reconsider your impressions by asking “Am I believing this because of recent events?”

4. Self-assessment is dominated by the ease with which certain examples come to mind

5. The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it

6. When people find that fluency (i.e., ability to recall the instance of an event) is worse, they doubt the frequency of the event was as high as they initially thought

7. Judgements are no longer influenced by ease of retrieval if the difficulty of recall is attributed to other random/false explanations

8. System 1 sets expectations and is surprised when those expectations are violated

9. System 2 can reset the expectations of System 1 so that events that used to be surprising to System 1 are no longer surprising

Chapter 13

1. Our expectation about the frequency of an event is distorted by the prevalence and the emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed

2. Affect heuristic: Simple question of “How do I feel about it?” replaces the more difficult question “What do I think about it?”

3. The availability cascade: When bias flows into policy. The importance of an idea is judged by the fluency and the emotional charge of the idea that comes to mind

4. The mind has limited abilities to deal with small risks: We either ignore them totally or give them too much weight. Nothing in-between

5. Probability neglect: Exaggerating ease of recalling disaster, but ignoring their frequency in the grand scheme of things

Chapter 14

1. Base rates: The denominator 

2. Questions about probabilities trigger shotguns that cause us to answer a simpler question

3. Representativeness bias: using stereotype characteristics of a group to make decisions about an individual without considerations about base rates

4. Enhanced activation of System 2 reduces representative heuristic

5. Two factors cause System 2 to fail: ignorance and laziness

6. When you have doubts about the quality of an evidence; let your judgement of probability stay close to the base rate

7. Bayesian statistics helps with base rate calculations. 

8. Keys to Bayesian reasoning:

• Anchor judgements on a plausible base rate

• Question the diagnosticity of your evidence (is it valid? Is it measuring what it should?)

Chapter 15

1. Conjunction fallacy: People judge a conjunction of 2 events (A and B) to be more probable than one of the event (A) in direct comparison

2. Representative outcomes combine personality description to produce coherent stories which are not necessarily the most probable, but most plausible

3. Large sets are values more than smaller sets in joint evaluation but less in single evaluations

Chapter 16

1. Two types of base rates:

• Statistical base rates: Facts about a population to which a case belongs; not relevant to individual case

• Causal base rates: Changes views about how the individual case came to be

2. System 1 represents categories as norms

3. Neglecting valid stereotypes may result in suboptimal judgements

4. Inferences drawn from causal base rates include:

• Stereotypical trait

• Feature of a situation that affects an individual’s outcome

5. People do not draw from base-rate information an inference that conflicts with their other beliefs

6. Nisbett & Burgida (1975): People feel relieved of responsibility when they know others have heard the same request for help

7. In the absence of any useful information, the Bayesian solution is to stay with the base rates

8. People exempt themselves from the experimental conclusions that surprise them

9. People are naturally unwilling to reduce the particular from the general but they are willing to infer the general from the particular (Nisbett & Burgida, 1975)

10. The test of learning psychology is not whether you have learned a new fact, but whether your understanding of situations have changed

Chapter 17

1. The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day

2. Whenever correlation between 2 scores are imperfect, there will be regression to the mean

3. System 2 finds the relationship between correlation and regression difficult to understand and learn partly because of System 1’s desire to find causal interpretations

Chapter 18

1. Intuitive predictions are insensitive to actual predictive quality of evidence

2. When people are asked for prediction, they replace the question with one about evaluation of evidence

3. Intuitive predictions need to be corrected because they are not regressive and are therefore blind

Chapter 19

1. Narrative fallacy: Flawed stories about the past shape views of the world and of the future

2. The human mind does not deal with nonevents. We tend to exaggerate the role of skill and underestimate the part that luck played in the outcome

3. People build the best possible story from the information available to them. And if it is a good story, they believe it

4. People have an unlimited ability to ignore their ignorance

5. We understand the past less than we believe we do

6. Once you have a new view of the world, you forget what you used to believe before your mind changed

7. Hindsight bias: The tendency to revise the history of one’s beliefs in the light of what actually happened

8. We blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and give them little credit when good decisions turn out good

9. The worse the consequence, the greater the hindsight bias

10. The illusion that one understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future

Chapter 20

1. Confidence is a feeling which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it

2. People ignore base rate information when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience

3. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future

4. We think we are able to explain the past by focusing on social movements, technological developments and the abilities of certain great men. Not true.

5. Errors of prediction are inevitable because their world is unpredictable

6. High subjective confidence (System 1) should not be trusted as an indicator of accuracy

7. Short-term trends can be forecast and behaviors can be predicted with fair accuracy from previous behaviors. But behavior in tests and in the real world are determined by context-specific factors

Chapter 21

1. Domains with significant degree of uncertainty and unpredictability are called “low-validity environments”. In these environments, accuracy of experts was matched or even exceeded by a simple algorithm

2. Sometimes, complexity reduces validity and many times, experts introduce unnecessary complications

3. Additionally, humans find it difficult to make consistent decisions. When provided with the same information, humans will give conflicting answers

4. Decisions are context-dependent (System 1)

5. Slight changes in context can impact decisions greatly

6. When predictability is poor, inconsistency is destructive

7. To maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments [Note: Building from first-principles]

8. Intuition adds value after a disciplined collection of objective information via algorithms

Chapter 22

1. In his book, Sources of Power, Gary Klein posited that experts do not limit their options to a pair. Rather, they draw from a repertoire of patterns (System 1’s associative memory) and mentally simulate different options (System 2)

2. The situation has provided a cue (discriminative stimuli); the cue has given the expert access to information stored in the memory (repertoire) and the information provides an answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition [Kahneman’s twist to Simon’s quote earlier in the book]

3. Acquiring expertise in a difficult skill is harder and slower than learning to read because hard skill usually consists of more “letters” in the “alphabet” and the “words” contain more “letters”

4. How skill is developed

• An environment that is regular to be predictable

• An opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

5. Intuitions cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment

6. Whether professionals gave a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as the sufficient opportunity to practice

7. If the environment is regular and the decisionmaker has had a chance to learn its regularities, the associative machinery will recognize situations and generate quick and accurate predictions

8. Klein summarized all these in the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model

Chapter 23

1. Inside view vs Outside view. People who have information about an individual case (inside view) are reluctant to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs (outside vide)

2. Planning fallacy: A focus on unrealistic best-case scenarios which could be improved by consulting statistic on similar cases

3. Taking the outside view is the cure for the planning fallacy

Chapter 24

1. People who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident and to take more risks than they realize

2. An optimistic temperance encourages persistence in the face of obstacles

3. People may achieve higher average returns by selling their skills to employees than by setting out on their own

4. Hubris hypothesis: Executives of an acquiring firm are less competent than they think they are

5. Overconfidence: In estimating a quantity, choosing to rely on information that easily comes to mind and constructing a coherent story around it that makes sense

6. Inadequate appreciation of the uncertainty of the environment leads economic agents to take risks that they should avoid

7. An appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality

8. The premortem is a partial remedy for overconfident optimism

Chapter 25

1. People are neither fully rational nor completely selfish and their stakes are anything but stable

2. Gambles represent the fact that consequences of choices are never certain

3. Bernoulli’s theory did not consider reference points

Chapter 26 – Prospect Theory

1. In the utility theory, the utility of gains and losses are allowed to only differ in their signs (+ or -). There is no way to represent the fact that the disutility of losing $500 could be greater than the utility of winning the same amount – though, of course it is.

2. One’s attitude to gains and losses does not arise from an evaluation of one’s wealth. Rather, people simply prefer winning to losing and dislike losing more than winning

3. The missing variable in Bernoulli’s model was the reference point – the earlier state relative to which gains or losses are evaluated

4. The 3 cognitive features of the Prospect Theory include:

• Neutral reference point, also called the adaptation level

• Principle of diminishing sensitivity

• Loss aversion – treating threats more than opportunities facilitate survival (evolutionary framework)

5. In mixed gambles, where both a gain and a loss are possible, loss aversion causes extremely risk-averse choices. In bad scenarios where a sure loss is compared to a larger loss that is probable, diminishing sensitivity causes risk seeking

6. Criticism of prospect theory – It cannot account for disappointment and regret.

Chapter 27

1. The indifference curves assume that utility is determined by the present situation

2. The standard utility theory also assumes that preferences are stable over time (i.e., points on the indifference curve will provide the same utility over time). On the other hand, prospect theory asserts that people on points in an indifference curve will eventually prefer the status quo

3. Indifference curves do not predict two things:

• Tastes are not fixed

• The disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, consequently inducing a bias that favors the status quo

4. Utility theory proposes that your utility for a state of affairs depend on that state and not on your history

5. Endowment effect: Willingness to buy or sell is dependent on reference point. If the item is owned, one considers the pain of giving it up. If the item is not owned, one considers the pleasure of owning it

6. Experienced traders ignore the endowment effect. They have learned to ask the right question: “How much do I want X, compared to other things I could have instead?”

7. In prospect theory, being poor is living below one’s reference point. They are always in losses

Chapter 28

1. The amygdala is activated in response to threats

2. In many situations, the boundary between bad and good is a reference point that changes over time and depends on immediate circumstances

3. One of the ways negativity dominance is expressed is loss aversion

Chapter 29

1. When you form a global evaluation of a complex subject, you assign weights to its characteristics. Some characteristics influence your assessments more than others do.

2. The more probable an outcome, the more weight it should have. The expected value of a gamble is the average of its outcomes, each weighted by its probability. This is the expectancy principle

3. Possibility effect: Highly unlikely outcomes are weighted more disproportionately than they deserve

4. Certainty effect: Outcomes that are almost certain are given less weight than their probabilities justify

5. Contrary to the expectation principle, the decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of those outcomes.

6. People attach values to gains and losses, rather than to wealth and decision weights they assign to outcomes are different from probabilities

7. Diminishing sensitivity makes the sure loss more aversive and the certainty effect makes the gamble less aversive. In the same vein, when outcomes are positive, the sure thing is more attractive, while the gamble is less attractive

8. Paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly

Chapter 30

1. People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events, and they overweigh the unlikely events in their decisions. This is because of cognitive ease, focused attention and confirmation bias

2. A rich and vivid representation of outcome reduces the role of probability in the evaluation of an uncertain prospect

3. Denominator neglect: A focus on the numerator but not the denominator

4. Low probability events are more heavily weighed when described in weighted frequencies rather than in abstract terms

Chapter 31

1. People tend to be risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domains of loss

2. Every simple choice formulated in terms of gains and losses can be deconstructed in innumerable ways into a combination of choices, yielding preferences that are likely to be inconsistent

3. It is costly to be risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses. This makes you more liable to pay a premium to obtain a sure gain rather than face a gamble, and also willing to pay a premium to obtain a sure loss

4. People consider decisions in two main kinds of frames:

• Narrow framing, which is a sequence of two simple decisions considered separately

• Broad framing, which is a single comprehensive decision with 4 options

5. Deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes

Chapter 32

1. Disposition effect: People sell winners rather than losers. 

2. The rational behavior would be to sell the stock that is less likely to do well in the future

3. An argument against seeking winners is that stocks that have recently gained in value are more likely to go on gaining for a short while

4. Sunk cost error: The decision to continue investing in a losing account when better investments are available

5. Intense regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did

6. People expect to have stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that is produced by action than to the same outcome when it is produced by inaction

7. The taboo tradeoff against accepting any increase in risk is not an efficient way to use the safety budget

Chapter 33

1. Preference reversal occurs because joint evaluation focuses attention on an aspect of the situation which is less salient in a single evaluation

2. Judgement and preference are coherent within categories but potentially incoherent when the objects evaluated belong to different categories

Chapter 34

1. For Econs, the objects of their choice are states of the world which are not affected by the words used to describe them

2. Amygdala – Emotional arousal functions. Active when the choice conforms to the frame

3. Anterior cingulate – Conflict and self-control. Active when one doesn’t do what comes naturally

4. Frontal area – Combines emotions and reasoning to guide decision making

5. Decision makers tend to prefer the sure thing over the gamble when outcomes are good and reject the sure thing and accept the gamble when outcomes are negative

6. Broader frames and inconclusive accounts generally lead to more rational decisions

Chapter 35

1. Peak end rule: Global retrospective rating is predicted by average level of pain at the worst moment of the experience and at the end

2. Duration neglect: The duration of a procedure has no effect on the total ratings of the total pain

3. Experiencing self is different from the Remembering self. Memories are all we keep from our experience of living and the only perspective we can adopt as we think about our lives is that of the remembering self

4. The memory that the remembering self keeps is a representative moment influenced by the peak and the end

Chapter 36

1. The Remembering self composes stories and keeps them for future reference

Chapter 37

1. The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time

Chapter 38

1. Affective forecasting: The belief that the rate of X is high, but the statistics do not apply to one

2. Mood heuristic is one way people answer the life satisfaction question

3. The score one assigns to one’s life is determined by a small sample of highly available ideas and not a careful weighting of all domains of one’s life

4. A hybrid view of both the Experiencing and Remembering selves should be considered in defining happiness

5. Focusing illusion: Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it

6. The Remembering self is subject to massive focusing illusions about life that the experiencing self endures quite comfortably

7. Miswanting: Bad choices arise from errors of affective forecasting.

Conclusion

1. “And of course you also remember that the two systems do not really exist in the brain or anywhere else. “System 1 does X” is a shortcut for “X occurs automatically.” And “System 2 is mobilized to do Y” is a shortcut for “arousal increases, pupils dilate, attention is focused, and activity Y is performed.”

1. ‘Tyranny of Small Decisions’ was inspired by Alfred Kahn’s (1966) use in describing consumers’ choice whereby individual acts of consumption, when viewed as an aggregate would not be preferred by the decision maker

2. Bickel and Marsh use the term ‘Tyranny of Small Decisions’ to describe how individuals suffer because of a narrow temporal outlook on life. They argue that an individual’s narrow or broad temporal context is determined by their environmental context

Behavioral economic principles that influence one’s temporal horizon

1. Availability of reinforcers – This can be reduced by:

   • Decreasing the magnitude of the reinforcer

   • Increasing the price, effort or response cost to acquire the reinforcer

   • Decrease the probability of acquiring the reinforcer (i.e., make it less predictable)

   • Delay the delivery of acquiring the reinforcer

   • Increasing sanctions or punishments for acquiring the reinforcer

2. Competing reinforcers – When competing alternatives are immediately available, they reduce the time or effort allocated to the initial reinforcer.

Small Decisions: Origins, Decline & Resurgence

1. In addition to incorporating new information from the environment through learning, humans are also able to acquire information through accumulated knowledge obtained from culture.

2. Whatever similarities between humans and nonhumans are coded in the genes, whatever is not shared was likely acquired via acculturation

3. It is likely that the extent to which a human discounts the future is a function of cultural contingencies

The beginning and its end

1. Hunting and gathering is consistent with a narrow temporal horizon since both activities are opportunistic and when found, reinforcers (meat and grains) are immediately available

2. In agricultural societies, people had to plan ahead by planting seeds today to reap a harvest tomorrow

3. Hunter-gathering is neither labor-intensive (Lee, 1968, 1979), nor likely to cause poor individual health (Cashdan, 1989; Hansen, 1976). The individuals in agricultural societies had shorter lives and were less healthy (Cohen, 1977). Besides, farming was more labor-intensive

4. Factors leading to a transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies (Diamond, 1997)

   • Decreased local availability of wild food

   • Increased availability of domesticated plants

   • Cumulative development of technologies through a Lamarckian cultural mechanism where knowledge can be passed on to the next generation

   • Positive feedback mechanism between food production and labor, rendering hunting-gathering as a less attractive proposition

5. In short, a long temporal horizon developed because of a reduction in environmental resources that could support a narrow temporal horizon

6. The development of writing also facilitated the transmission of information even more efficiently. This occurred in the agricultural societies, rather than the hunting-gathering ones.

Time’s Cycle and Time’s Arrow

1. In ancient civilizations, time was deemed cyclical, implying changelessness and continuity. Whitrow (1989) reported that ancient Egyptians marked time with the ascension of a new Pharaoh

2. Concerning the Greeks, Whitrow (1989) noted that they were backward looking because certainty could only be found in the past, while the future was filled with uncertainty

3. With Christianity, Whitrow (1989), noted a shift in how time was perceived. Instead, history and the future were seen as the unfolding of God’s purposes. In this worldview, people can be saved now to partake in the future Kingdom of God

4. According to Stark (1997), Christianity’s temporal worldview developed due to:

   • Christianity moved away from Jerusalem which already housed Judaism with a similar set of beliefs

   • Christians’ behavior in traumatic times, such as caring for the sick during epidemics when other religions abandoned the ill. Christians were motivated by the temporally distal reward of eternity in heaven

   • Christianity’s tendency to provide a social safety net by providing for the less privileged

Modern Times

1. Factors such as consumerism, reduced civic participation, as well as increased isolation is reducing the temporal horizon

2. O’Malley (1990) – ‘Preindustrial societies enjoyed less of a distinction between work and leisure…They intermingled constantly in the course of living. A […] farmer, finishing one task, went straight to work on another, and even at rest, the farmer remained a farmer, there was relatively little sense of ‘time off’

3. Clocks spread into life through industrialization whereby factory work divided work time from leisure time

4. Wage earners started enjoying free time which soon became commercialized. This invariably led to a less restrictive culture with moral relativism where sanctions and punishment for a short time horizon were lifted

5. Time spent on the internet [TV is the dated example used in the book] has a low cost and immediate availability. This competes with other social relationships which eventually lead to less concern about others. This may be self-reinforcing, especially when a lack of concern for others lead to spending more time on the internet

The Culture of Poverty

1. Lewis (1966) – “The culture of poverty is not just a matter of deprivation or disorganization, a term signifying the absence of something. It is a culture in the traditional anthropological sense in that it provides human beings with a design for living, with a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so serves a significant adaptive function…Wherever it occurs, its practitioners exhibit remarkable similarity in the structure of their families, in interpersonal relations, in spending habits, in value systems, and in their orientation in time”

2. Environments containing a high prevalence of risk and uncertainty, as well as an isolation from mediating structures such as family, neighborhood or religion have been characterized by the prevalence of short-term behaviors

3. When instability is the norm, it may not be in the interest of the individual to behave in a way that shapes the future, especially when the future is not certain

The Relation Between Deviant Behavior and Short Temporal Horizons

1. F.T. Melges (Time and the Inner Future, 1982): “Time is both a medium and a perspective. It is a medium through which we live as the future becomes present. As the future becomes present, we become aware of duration and succession. Also, by transcending the present and looking at it from the past or future, we gain perspective on the present. These time processes are fundamental to our construction of reality. If they are disturbed, our view of reality may become distorted”

2. Alcoholics have a shorter sense of awareness (i.e., a short Future Time Perspective [FTP]) and were shown to have a less coherent organization of future events (Murphy & DeWolfe, 1986)

Proposed Solutions/Policy Implications

How can cultural changes be imposed in a way that is self-reinforcing?

• Provide incentives to attend self-control trainings

• Long-term coaching

• Constant surveillance (e.g., by families, communities, religious organizations, etc.) with predictable contingencies

• Resolve sources of environmental instability

According to Girard, people do not know what to desire. Instead, they get their idea of what is valuable by looking at others.

For instance, someone may desire a designer bag because they saw a cool model flaunting the said bag in a YouTube ad. Another person might want to become a medical doctor because they watched Ellen Pompeo convincingly portray the character of Dr. Meredith Grey on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. In both cases, desire is socially mediated rather than arising from individuals’ rational deliberations and cost-benefit analyses.

Girard intuited that the ability of a model to inspire imitation is tied to the physical and/or psychological distance between the desiring subject and the model.

The model oozing charisma and coolness to sell designer bags in an ad will probably not have the same effect on her family and friends who frequently see her goofy side. It’s possibly the same reason why people lose respect for their role models when they get up close and personal with them. The aura fades away and the imperfections come to the fore.

This is also something that plays out a lot on social media. Nowadays, phones and internet access aren’t things that only the rich and elite enjoy. Even people from economically disadvantaged countries are active on social media. Yet, social media is a cesspool precisely because it has made physical distance irrelevant. If he were alive today, I think Girard would say that access to smart phones and high-speed internet has made us equals. And because we’re now equals, even small differences between us loom larger in our minds – leading to conflicts, rivalries and cycles of toxicity that characterize social media as we know it today.

“But here’s something funny—according to a bunch of recent research, Democrats and Republicans don’t seem to know who they’re hating. For example, Democrats underestimate the number of Republicans who think that sexism exists and that immigration can be good. In return, Republicans overestimate how many Democrats think that the US should have open borders and adopt socialism. Both parties think they’re more polarized than they actually are. And majority of both sides basically say, “I love democracy, I think it’s great,” and then they also say, “The other party does NOT love democracy, they think it’s bad.”

In other words, Democrats and Republicans are much more similar than they think. Yet, they fixate on their differences.

However, US Democrats and Republicans are not the only ones who do this.

I am currently reading through Apostle Paul’s first letter to the early Corinthian church. I’m amazed at how tribal they also seemed to be. Members of the Corinthian church likely lived in the same city. They probably also had the same ethnicity. And, at the very least, they shared the same faith in Jesus. Yet, for all their similarities, these church folk chose to create factions based on something as mundane as who had baptized them. Instead of just being Christians, they wanted to be Paulians, Apollians and Peterians!

So, why do we humans have a tendency to be tribal?

In psychology, there’s a decision-making heuristic called the isolation effect (p. 271). When people have the opportunity to choose between two options, they develop a kind of selective blindness to what those options have in common. For instance, when you go to a supermarket for cereal or toothpaste, the similarities between the brands fade away from your consciousness and their differences stand out. Perhaps the very same process is hijacked when we’re deciding on where to pitch our tents ideologically.