Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
The Self-Reinforcing Stigmatization of Public Spaces (Like Libraries)
Summary:
Public libraries are facing various physical problems due to under-investment.
They are often the last option for people who lack access to basic services. Libraries are used as shelters for the homeless, warm places for those suffering from addiction, and even childcare centers.
This over-reliance on libraries to solve societal issues has stigmatized these public spaces.
The lack of investment in addressing core problems has turned libraries into spaces of last resort.
This sends a message to affluent Americans that if they want a gathering place, they should build their own in the private sector.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There's neighborhood libraries. The building is there. The buildings are generally not updated. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, but a lot of new books. Stomachs still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. There's all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically because we've under-invested in them. Libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net. If you wake up in the morning in the American city and you don't have a home, you're told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you're suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They'll send you to a library. If you need to use a bathroom, you'll go to a library. If you don't have child care for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you're old and you're alone, you might go to the library. We've used the library to try to solve all these problems that deserve actual treatment. How many times have you talked to someone who said it's basically a homeless shelter? What's happened is we've stigmatized our public spaces because we've done so little to address core problems that we've turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a Hand. As we do that, we send another message to affluent middle-class Americans, and that is if you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector.
The Infrastructure of Community
How to Keep Time
Source of the Meaning Crisis: Contradictions Between Societal Progress and Global Crises
Summary:
The current societal malaise and victimhood culture are attributed to a complex interplay of factors, including a disconnection from the positives of societal progress and the simultaneous awareness of global crises like climate change.
The author explains that while the world is objectively getting better, the incessant exposure to negative news triggers hyper-vigilance and threat response, leading to a cognitive dissonance between feeling alive and needing to practice triage. This contradictory experience fosters a sense of confusion and psychological distress in individuals, creating a state of being 'crazy making.'
Transcript:
Speaker 2
You because you wrote a book recently called recapture the Rapture, which is trying to address the seeming sort of psychological ills of our society. Can you try and sort of summarize what your thesis is on why it seems like victimhood culture has become so dominant? Disconnection, general malaise people are having, is it, is it a function of, you know, fear of the future? We've been hearing, you know, doom and gloom from climate change and all these other growing risks? Or is it something more fundamental going on inside a psychologically that is giving rise to this? I mean, I think without a doubt, like, what on earth is going wrong these days? And why are so many people sad, suffering, disconnected?
Speaker 1
I think that's just a massive, multi-variable situation. But one of the things that I mentioned in that book was just things are getting exponentially better, and things are getting exponentially worse at the very same time. And trying to map to intersecting, contradicting, overlapping, exponential curves. Confusing. Back as the imagination. I mean, with the whole three-body problem in physics, which I know you must be deeply aware of, everybody, it's very hard to be like sun and moon and stars, you know, like you get you. Panotales, ah! Yeah, and we are eight billion bodies, all with volition, you know, and pesky human nature. So trying to map what is going on as things are simultaneously Stephen Pinker and Hans Rosling, and all the lot of like, if it bleeds, it leads, you've been massively misled. The world is safer, better, cheaper, more prosperous than it's ever been. Ta-da. And you're like, oh, thank God. And then you click over to polar bears and, you know, throw it to Glacier and all of these things, you're like, oh, no, which is it? Right. So as we have that initial experience, which naturally triggers hyper-vigilance and threat response, oh, shit. Right? Are we coming alive? All this wonderful stuff. My own personal life, my personal growth, my relationships, my career, where am I coming alive? That's the inquiry I'm in. Or are we staying alive? And I need to be practicing triage, right? And in a threat response and toggling back and forth between those two is crazy making.
#11 - Jamie Wheal — Tackling the Meaning Crisis
Win-Win with Liv Boeree
The Map is not the Territory
Summary:
Humans often confuse maps with territories, despite evidence from various disciplines.
We wrongly assume that what we measure is what matters, but our values may not have quantifiable metrics. Biometric data can oversimplify complex discussions on health.
This conundrum becomes more significant when considering governance on a larger scale.
How do we count and operate a nation state wisely?
Can social science inform smarter political economies? We must escape the false clarity of information systems that lack collective wisdom.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
There are maps and there are territories and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know What we should measure and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn't even always have a metric and even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can include the other factors that determine health or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions Of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively. What should we count to wisely operate a nation state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape this seductive but false clarity of systems that reign information but do not enhance collective wisdom?
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise