"This year, I’ve had another big load on my time: I’m writing my first book! Thus far it’s called Outsmart: The Future of Thought in the Age of Machines — a title possessed of such purple, sci-fi bombast that even though I wrote it myself, I still crack up every time I say it out loud. As you might imagine, coming from me, the book is a generally optimistic assessment of how digital tools are generating new ways for us to learn things, muse over them, and act on them. But the point is that it’s another time hog: Researching and writing a book has required such nose-to-the-grindstone work — to say nothing of nose-to-the-grindstone procrastination — that it has crowded out whatever time I might have had for blogging. Authors frequently describe the process of book-writing as similar to giving birth to a child, a metaphor I always found faintly icky; but, hey, maybe they were right. I’ve got three kids now, and no blog.

Yet as I’ve worked away on the book, I’ve increasingly begun to feel intellectually claustrophic. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like a cabin fever of the mind. The symptoms: I’ll get obsessed with a particular line of research, chewing away at it for days or weeks, only to realize it’s a) kind of half-baked or b) super interesting but not at all useful to my work. Or I’ll read a fascinating white paper, write a bunch of notes on it, but never crystallize a solid analysis.

I now think the problem is I’m not doing enough thinking in public."

"The rhetoric of social mobility helps to legitimize  class hierarchies, by maintaining the pretence that  management is a technical skills. In fact, bosses' power derives from other sources.And what's worst of all is that such hierarchies might not be needed anyway. In many firms, "management" is either a redundant function - because good companies run themselves - or it's worse than useless."

"Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

"Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world."

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

"I strongly suspect these patterns are driven mostly by customers, i.e., that more accurate professionals would be less successful in inspiring confidence by others in them. If you are a successful professional, that is probably in part because of your unjustified arrogance."

"This would seem to argue that some old patterns endure, and that’s true. But think of the twists suggested by this new premium on human basics. Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed two days a week. Would that influence where you lived? Would the mountains or the shore start looking good to you? Suppose you decided that you could get all the face-to-face you needed three days a month. Would the Caribbean start looking good to you?"

"We've all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly said that "data is the next Intel Inside." But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data?

In this post, I examine the many sides of data science -- the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets."

"Many 401(k) investors last year bailed out of stocks, often the day after big market drops, Hewitt found, with nearly 20 percent of investors switching their assets -- all getting out of stocks. This means they locked in losses, selling low after buying high during the run-up of previous years."

"And I worry that the idea that learning in relation to history can easily be kept within some type of bounds implies, to a degree, that the importance of history is its factual content. Generations of captive history students, face-down and drooling on their desks, indicate that approaches of this nature are not only unfortunately limited, but also a fatal blow to any intrinsic interest in examining historical/cultural change."

"In recent research experiments, Derek Rucker and Adam Galinsky, found that people who felt powerless were willing to pay more money for luxury or status items than people who’d been conditioned to feel more powerful and in control."

"Religion was also the main issue in the events leading up to Murray's break with the Randians: although Murray was an agnostic, his wife, JoAnn, was (and is) a Presbyterian. Apprised of this, Rand grilled Joey on the reasons for her religious faith and suggested that she read a pamphlet put out by the Randians that "disproved" the existence of God.

When Joey refused to recant her heresy, Murray was told that he had better find himself a more "rational" mate. That was enough for Murray. The break was finalized by his formal "trial" held by the Randian Senior Collective, which Murray declined to attend."

"Deep Capture is a work of investigative journalism examining the growing threat to our financial system posed by illegal naked short selling, stock manipulation, and the destruction of public companies."

"But for Shlaes, as for the Liberty Leaguers, government isn't big unless it restricts big business; then big government is bad."

"I think there’s a counter to this phenomenon… but Project Bamboo won’t like it. I think the counter is to forget about the Old Guard altogether; they’re a lost cause. Instead, focus on the third-wayers and the graduate students. This isn’t a fun thing to do, because third-wayers and grad students don’t have the kind of institutional power that funds and runs a Bamboo Consortium. Much creative thinking about sustainability will be required. However, third-wayers arguably get more bang for their buck for participating in Bamboo than any of the Old Guard can, since the Old Guard is mired in traditionalist tenure-and-promotion practices, and the third-wayers tend not to be. (I’m sure not, for example.) There’s a road here; it’s just a rocky one."

"These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. ..."

"[…] In the nineteen-thirties, unions had launched a number of health-care plans, many of which cut across individual company and industry lines. In the nineteen-forties, they argued for expanding Social Security. In 1945, when President Truman first proposed national health insurance, they cheered. In 1947, when Ford offered its workers a pension, the union voted it down. The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible. Walter Reuther, as Nelson Lichtenstein argues in his definitive biography, believed that risk ought to be broadly collectivized. Charlie Wilson, on the other hand, felt the way the business leaders of Toledo did: that collectivization was a threat to the free market and to the autonomy of business owners. In his view, companies themselves ought to assume the risks of providing insurance."

"At this moment in history growing numbers of citizens—including many who never before questioned the status quo—are willing to explore perspectives that once would have seemed radical. Millions of Americans are now making shifts in their personal lives such as buying organic foods, trying alternative medicine, collaborating in creating software, and beginning to search for something that offers a greater sense of meaning in the world. They may not yet understand the idea of the commons, but they are looking for something different in their lives.

The time seems ripe today for a decisive shift in worldview. People everywhere are yearning to tap the potential of the human spirit to create a better world, and the dream of a commons-based society holds great practical potential to transform that hope into constructive action."

"Tell people what you need: OK, this one seems like it should be pretty obvious, but I'm starting here because this is where far too many people miss the boat. Whether it's for fear of imposing or being told no, or a feeling that they should be able to "do it themselves," the biggest mistake people make when it comes to helping people help them is not asking."

"Seriously, it would help, if you want to complain about the declining quality of the humanities, to not be a historical dunderhead on a fantastic scale..."

"... But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room..."

"Strange as it may seem, torturers and their apologists really do care."

"A public realm needs scarcity: without constraint we devolve into the weak forces of diffusion..."

My hesitation is the underlying assumption that a "book" is equivalent to a "series of words". Nice redistribution system; hard to reassemble in the end, though.