Join 📚 Fabien's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Fabien's read, .
This is also why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilisation. When things really work, everybody adopts them.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari
pioneers such as Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) propagated treatments like bloodletting and the use of mercury as an elixir. These treatments were devised with the best of intentions, and in line with the best knowledge available at the time. But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. Bloodletting, in particular, weakened patients when they were at their most vulnerable. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test – and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: ‘Bloodletting cured him!’ And if a patient died, the doctor would say: ‘He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!’
Black Box Thinking
Matthew Syed
When the Boston high school teacher33 Ling-Se Peet used the Right Question Institute’s “Question Formulation Technique” for the first time in her humanities class, she began by laying out a provocative premise to her twenty-five students: Torture can be justified. In the parlance of Rothstein and Santana, this opening statement is known as a Q-focus because its purpose is to provide a focal point for generating questions from the students. Peet’s class was divided into small groups, and each group’s initial task was to come up with as many questions as possible, within a time limit, pertaining to that statement. After reviewing a set of rules (write each question down, don’t debate or try to answer questions, just keep trying to think of more questions), the students in each group began to come at that premise from a variety of angles. Some questions aimed at bringing clarity to the issue: How do you define torture? When is torture used? Some were offbeat yet intriguing: Can torture make you happy? Other questions expanded the scope of the discussion: Does torture have anything to do with justice? Who are most likely to be tortured? The kids had no experience doing this type of questioning exercise, but according to Peet, after some initial reservations about the rules (some felt that questions ought to be answered as soon as they were raised), the questions began to flow freely within each group, with each written down by a group member. Then the students were directed to the second stage of the exercise: They were instructed to change open questions to closed ones, and vice versa—so that, for example, an open question that began as Why is torture effective? might be changed to a closed one: Is torture effective? The purpose of this part of the exercise, according to Rothstein, is to show that a question can be narrowed down in some cases, or expanded in others. As students do this, he says, they begin to see that “the way you ask a question yields different results and can lead you in different directions.” Next, the students were asked to “prioritize” their questions: to figure out which three were the most important to move the discussion forward. Rothstein and Santana stress the importance of this “convergent” part of questioning. They feel it’s not enough to encourage students to toss out questions endlessly; to question effectively, they must learn how to analyze their own questions and zero in on ones they would like to pursue further. Some of the questions from the student groups that made it through to this final stage included Why does torture work? Who decides whether torture should be justified or not? How can someone’s pain be the price for the outcome you want? By the end of the session, Rothstein observed, some of the kids “looked spent.” The process is difficult, he acknowledges, because “it requires them to do something they’ve never done—to think in questions.”
A More Beautiful Question
Warren Berger
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise