The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcanic ash that chokes out the sunlight, diseases that affect the staple crops or the draft animals and peasants needed to bring them in from the fields, even wars that displace farmers and intentionally ravage agricultural land. If it’s just you and your neighbors, you can go where there’s food. If it’s just your province, you can import food from elsewhere. But really large-scale events (and/or really constrained trade networks) mean there’s nowhere to get food
Beautifully written. Halfway through I got the idea that "Wizards" and "Prophets" can be used as stand-in terms for "Progressive" and "Conservative". Progressive people want to push the envelope, abhor rules they deem archaic and in general just want to change the status quo, whereas conservative people are cautious and think hard about how a change in status quo can have negative effects - they in effect gatekeep the most ludicrous ideas. We really need both to advance in a manner that will harm us least. This see-saw seems ineffective, but in reality has built the societies with the highest quality of life on planet earth. It goes without saying that a democratic society with free spech is a requirement for this to work - there has to be a fair marketplace of ideas and the possibility to change course via elections.
This more or less holds if you consider "conservative" and "progressive" merely as dispositions or attitudes towards change, but I don't find it terribly useful because you can easily end up saying something like "conservatism means opposing Khrushchev's reforms in the Soviet Union" at which point why even bother using that word? The terms as we generally use them combine a sense of political left/right with an attitude towards change, and in the West in the 20th century they happened to line up with each other in a particular way that no longer really applies.
They're too tied to current-day political alignments (long as we're using Gygax as a source of metaphors), particularly in the USA where the two-party system says 'pick everything in column A or everything in column B'. A lot of 'wizards' would probably lean right in terms of wanting business to innovate new technologies, whereas the 'progress is less important than wealth distribution' and 'avoid cultural appropriation' people on the left sound more like 'prophets'.
Or “Clever dicks” and “Wise persons”. Don’t ignore clever dicks, and don’t always try to oppose them with their own style of argument(if they’re right they’ll slaughter you, and if they’ve made a mistake and are honest, pointing it out should work) but always try to see the bigger picture.
The place where Wizards and Prophets shake hands is breakthroughs in ways of being curious/synthesizing data about the world.
To look closely at a local system can still draw on habits of ethnography/statisitics/debiasing where someone has a global breakthrough, and then, rather than prescribe a universal program of action, you have a universally at-least-semi-helpful mindset to see where you actually are.
It's a way of conceptualizing/diagramming a disagreement that doesn't offer you One! Weird! Trick! for debunking errors or people, but a way to be more attentive to the individual in front of you and his or her *specific* ways of thinking differently than you.
yeah, all data are theory-laden and there’s a lot of “information” out there that’s worse than useless because it’s predicated on such incorrect metaphysics that it’s not even wrong, so anything that helps you articulate what your core disagreement actually is probably helps.
Excellent and thought-provoking review; how long will Borlaug be the most important person that most people have never heard of?
The Wizard and the Prophet do seem to appear everywhere once you start looking for them. Still, I don't love the actual names, which are presumably coined by Mann. I would prefer to call them the Engineer and the Priest.
"Wizard" seems wrong to me because of the association with magic, ritual and the viscera of the ancient world. We did have people who called themselves wizards or shamans or witch doctors, but they no longer exist in the developed part of the world thanks to the restructuring of society wrought by Mann's "Wizards." I prefer the term "Engineer," because the Engineer sees the world as a series of problems to be solved; a world of inputs and outputs. The best Engineers figure out how to bootstrap what they have into something better, but can often lose the forest for the trees.
As to the Prophet, this also seems to be poor choice of names. If you read Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, it's hard to see him calling himself anything other than a Prophet. Yet Mann would clearly call Andreessen a Wizard (where I would prefer the term Engineer). Perhaps Mann is thinking of the Old Testament tradition of prophets--men who mostly attacked the decadence of those living in the fleshpots of the cities, but today we use the term for any who make predictions about the future. And many of our most successful prophets are those who promise a bright future brought about with technology. I prefer the term "Priest," because priesthood is fundamentally concerned with the sacred and the holy, with rituals and traditions. The objections to change--its unnaturalness, its strangeness, its _wrongness_ are priestly objections.
Finding the balance or marriage between these two energies is on my mind a lot these days.
I especially appreciated this part: "And this obviously poses a huge problem for the bureaucracies that have embraced Vogt’s apocalyptic message — if we don’t change what we’re doing, and soon, we’re all going to die! — because executing local and particular solutions require actually knowing things."
Clinging to the universalist idea of "a solution" prevents finding appropriate responses in diverse environments. Shaky first draft math metaphor: It's like trying to approximate some superwonky function with a straight line/flat plane. At best you'll intersect with the actual function a few lucky times. In switching to an approach where you approximate the function at specific points using more terms, you'll get a better fit, but it won't necessarily be applicable to other parts of the curve/surface.
In accepting a localized approach, you can still apply extremey sophisticated techno-scientific wizardry, you just lose any faith in proclaiming any universality to your solution and to high-mindedly force it upon other environments. The optimizing forces of wizardy are subsumed, asked to hone in on a specific point rather than maximize across the board with a single solution.
This approach tastes like the "McGilchrist Manouvre" (https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/introducing-the-mcgilchrist-manoeuvre) of "right hemisphere (particular and holistic) -> left hemisphere (analytic and reductionistic) -> right hemisphere". Instead of the "left only" approach of universalist optimization, where the corrosive powers of the life-blind and tool-fixated, maximizing left hemisphere are not supervised by the life-aware, values-aware, sees-the-whole right hemisphere. A "right only" approach looks more like handing the reigns of power to a child wielding a horoscope.
I think McGilchrist gets it right. The Wizard (the LH, ironically the Apprentice) always needs to be under the guidance of the Prophet (the RH, the Sorcerer). “Yes that’s so clever, brilliant, but is it actually a good idea?”
I do think McGilchrist gets it right. The RH is the prophet (ironically the Sorcerer 😂) and the LH is the Wizard (the Apprentice). The Wizard must always work under the Prophet’s guidance. Yes that’s brilliant, so clever, but is it really such a great idea. And then there’s Chesterton’s fence . . .
Yep! I have great sympathy for Chesterton’s fence, but in its original form I don’t think the argument is sufficiently strong to hold off the (often very legitimate) objections from the more progressively minded. However, last few decades of research on cultural evolution has a lot of explanatory power for how culture can contain solutions that are far more ingenious than any mind or group of minds can come up with on their own, and that how useful cultural adaptations have a degree of opacity to them that begs a certain amount of humility from anyone eager to move the fence. The Psmith review of Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is an excellent peek into this amazing literature. I think moving past Chesterton toward the nuance provided by cultural evolutionary studies is the way to go to be able to speak about these things also with those who are ideologically/constitutionally committed to a more progressive, fence-moving stance.
Yes, being a Prophet without just being a tedious no-machine is something I've had to work on. The main way I try to get the best of both worlds is to focus on the tightness of the feedback loop. If the thing you're doing can be locked into a small shed and not touch the outside world until you stumble out cackling "I've done it!"; fantastic, Wizards all the way. It's a good and right thing to look for the leverage points of the universe and see what happens when you push.
Where Wizardry goes wrong is when you're looking at the *model* and using that as your sense for the feedback loop. Models are not tools for sensemaking and bad things happen when you try. An analysis of whether your plan worked that invokes a quality metric of your own creation is essentially nothing at all. Science first and foremost has to ground out in anecdote. So now I'm extremely respectful to the stories of Wizards that involve a thing they actually noticed changing in a predictable way due to their interventions. But I'm still openly contemptuous of any sort of "if we burn the commons for more parking, the Blumbo-Dingweed score will go up 30%, how could we not?" argument, which is the best part of being a Prophet.
The Land Institute or Neal Spackman seem like Wizard/Prophet hybrids. In many ways Doomer Optimism is a hybrid project, but it begins fundamentally with a Prophet mindset.
How is DO a hybrid project? It seems Prophet-esque all the way through to me. They just don’t ascribe to depressed "we’re all going to die!" visions stemming from the univeralist approach to Propheteering, instead looking to cultural modes that are more life-affirming and also very Prophet-y in their bids for sacredness, wholesomeness, respect for tradition etc.
Our approach is opposed to the idea of "leaving nature alone." The whole DO ethos is that humans need to manage and intervene in nature. That agriculture, forestry, etc are good. I'm thinking of someone like Peter Allen, who wants to bring back oak savannas to North America by introducing elephants into the upper midwest. Or Neal Spackman, who has an ambitious world vision of mangroves and aquaculture.
Another James C. Scott book with an anti-Wizard approach is Seeing Like a State.
It seems to me that in those areas where governments don't coerce, we should generally be in favor prophetmaxxing and wizardmaxxing. The market will generally do a good job of figuring out what works best. And then in those areas where governments do coerce, we shouldn't be prophetmaxxing or wizardmaxxing, because that's what leads to famines, overregulation, stagnation, perverse incentives, unintended consequences, etc.
I think the above is, overall, a Prophet mindset, but I'm not sure.
Scott’s points about high modernism and legibility strike me as being more like saying “Soylent isn’t nutritionally complete” — that is, an argument that this is a bad plan on its own terms, not a disagreement with the worldview. But I confess that Seeing Like A State is one of those books that everyone I know has read so I’ve mostly just picked up by osmosis.
Yes, my comment was poorly worded. I think that Scott's book sets forth Prophet-like views and criticizes certain Wizard-like activities without being explicitly "anti-Wizard."
Yea, I think Scott's argument, particularly in SLaS, is more akin to telling a teenager thinking of spiking the punch with at a dance with LSD* "Look man, this isn't going to turn out at all like you think it is, and you are just going to ruin everyone's time."
He is a good example of a better Prophet in a way, although he recognizes and argues what many Prophets don't, that what works doesn't scale up. Many examples of Prophets most people give don't seem to recognize that if something doesn't scale up, it isn't a solution.
*Even I am not old enough to have first hand experience of this sort of thing, but you get the idea.
I mean, there are people who try to steal what the others accomplish, and others who try to take it by force...
Thieves and Fighters, of course. ;)
Also:
Ironically, if biotech actually *could* grow you a convincing body of the other sex, I would argue everyone should spend a year as a man and a woman before making up their minds which to be.
Excellent review as usual, and a very good description of the two sides of the human coin, or the tension and tradeoffs we have to make.
I do want to pick one particular nit: "the slow-moving, sclerotic meritocracies of our regulatory/NGO complex aren’t staffed by those people." The word "meritocracies" is not the one I would use there. Actual merit has little to do with their selection and promotion system. Credentiocracy or even just bureaucracy probably is closer to the truth.
I agree that it’s not a particularly accurate term (I complained about this a little in our Napoleon review) but it’s the word we use for the current regime. After all, aristocracies weren’t actually populated by the best people either.
Agreed, but I think we should endeavor to use the correct term, lest people who are not so aware of the situation take us at our word and think that "merit" is bad. Or that the morons running such organizations have actual merit.
The Left in particular tends to change the words it applies to itself. I am still salty they stole "liberal" and people just accepted it, and now we have people saying "freedom is bad!"
That looks great, thank you! I’ll pick up a copy for my kids. (Mann himself has a good kids’ version of _1491_, which I think is called Before Columbus.) I can never calibrate reading levels on this stuff or remember whether I read Guns Germs and Steel at 11 or 15, so the actually “young readers” version is always useful…
You want a good kids' version of a serious adult book, check out 'Prisoners of Geography'. In some cases it's actually better than the adult version as the big maps make the point better.
There were all those jokes about how he would die before his mom did, and the poor guy managed to survive just long enough to get a few years in as king before cancer does him in. That really sucks.
Commenting to say that the critique of the '15-minute city' reads very much like a conservative desperately trying to convince herself that the liberals' new thing is bad even though everything about it sounds nice, because "it just won't work trust me".
"[I]mposing restrictions on who can go where, when." ?? Be serious lol.
Yes, a very enjoyable read, and yes, I didn't love the 15 minute city part. I actually agree with Jane that to the extent such a proposal means handing more power to planners and bureaucrats, they'd simply screw it up, but I'm more sanguine on the market. Evidently we used to be able to produce these places, and the few around today are what escaped the wholesale destruction those planners (and other forces, I'm sure) have wrought. Maybe the market could build more of these nice walkable suburbs if we actually let it? Similarly, getting rid of single family zoning is removing restrictions, not adding them. I want to reform zoning because I want planners to have *less* power, not more.
Exactly. The drivers behind the 15-minute city thing are traditional YIMBY types who just want to deregulate the housing market and let the market do its thing. Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it's not like conservatives are pro-market anymore ...
A lot of it comes down to suspicion of the people pushing the arguments. And I get it when the person pushing it is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America or something. But, you know, Strong Towns was founded by fiscal conservatives, and while New Urbanists are all over the political spectrum, many are tradition-minded and/or market-friendly conservatives like myself. Moreover, even if the eat-the-rich DSA dues payer is giving a pro-market argument they don't really believe... intellectual honesty still requires answering the argument on its merits. So it's immensely frustrating listening to smart conservative friends plug their ears to everything I say and rail about the conspiracy to destroy their neighborhoods by such dastardly means as repealing regulations, cutting red tape, and restoring market signals.
I've gone very far afield of what Jane actually said in this review so please don't read this as imputing anything to her. It's only a conversation I've had many times over the last few years, and I'm just short of despair over it.
For myself a lot of the suspicion also comes from the number of 15 minute city types who are secretly "ban cars" types. The conversation often seems to go "wouldn't all these little town centers where everything is within 15 minutes or less be great? You could walk every where! All we'd need to do is make it impossible to drive there!" at which point they lose me.
When the people pushing the 15 minute city are the same people who push every other soulless, mind-numbing technocratic initiative, it’s hard not to believe that the 15 minute city will be another soulless, mind-numbing technocratic initiative.
And the restrictions are right there in the descriptions.
Do we have non-technocratic/bureaucratic options for building cities? We're not gathering together the village to raise a barn anymore; it seems to me that the technocratic way is the *only* contemporary way cities grow, so you just need to pick your poison.
Beautifully written. Halfway through I got the idea that "Wizards" and "Prophets" can be used as stand-in terms for "Progressive" and "Conservative". Progressive people want to push the envelope, abhor rules they deem archaic and in general just want to change the status quo, whereas conservative people are cautious and think hard about how a change in status quo can have negative effects - they in effect gatekeep the most ludicrous ideas. We really need both to advance in a manner that will harm us least. This see-saw seems ineffective, but in reality has built the societies with the highest quality of life on planet earth. It goes without saying that a democratic society with free spech is a requirement for this to work - there has to be a fair marketplace of ideas and the possibility to change course via elections.
This more or less holds if you consider "conservative" and "progressive" merely as dispositions or attitudes towards change, but I don't find it terribly useful because you can easily end up saying something like "conservatism means opposing Khrushchev's reforms in the Soviet Union" at which point why even bother using that word? The terms as we generally use them combine a sense of political left/right with an attitude towards change, and in the West in the 20th century they happened to line up with each other in a particular way that no longer really applies.
They're too tied to current-day political alignments (long as we're using Gygax as a source of metaphors), particularly in the USA where the two-party system says 'pick everything in column A or everything in column B'. A lot of 'wizards' would probably lean right in terms of wanting business to innovate new technologies, whereas the 'progress is less important than wealth distribution' and 'avoid cultural appropriation' people on the left sound more like 'prophets'.
Or “Clever dicks” and “Wise persons”. Don’t ignore clever dicks, and don’t always try to oppose them with their own style of argument(if they’re right they’ll slaughter you, and if they’ve made a mistake and are honest, pointing it out should work) but always try to see the bigger picture.
One sounds nastier than the other, and I think Mann was trying to be neutral and be like 'these have strengths and weaknesses'.
I should say I’m more often a “clever dick” than a “wise person”😂
The place where Wizards and Prophets shake hands is breakthroughs in ways of being curious/synthesizing data about the world.
To look closely at a local system can still draw on habits of ethnography/statisitics/debiasing where someone has a global breakthrough, and then, rather than prescribe a universal program of action, you have a universally at-least-semi-helpful mindset to see where you actually are.
I like the Double Crux approach to mapping disagreements as an example of this Wizard-Prophet collaboration: https://www.rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-crux
It's a way of conceptualizing/diagramming a disagreement that doesn't offer you One! Weird! Trick! for debunking errors or people, but a way to be more attentive to the individual in front of you and his or her *specific* ways of thinking differently than you.
yeah, all data are theory-laden and there’s a lot of “information” out there that’s worse than useless because it’s predicated on such incorrect metaphysics that it’s not even wrong, so anything that helps you articulate what your core disagreement actually is probably helps.
Excellent and thought-provoking review; how long will Borlaug be the most important person that most people have never heard of?
The Wizard and the Prophet do seem to appear everywhere once you start looking for them. Still, I don't love the actual names, which are presumably coined by Mann. I would prefer to call them the Engineer and the Priest.
"Wizard" seems wrong to me because of the association with magic, ritual and the viscera of the ancient world. We did have people who called themselves wizards or shamans or witch doctors, but they no longer exist in the developed part of the world thanks to the restructuring of society wrought by Mann's "Wizards." I prefer the term "Engineer," because the Engineer sees the world as a series of problems to be solved; a world of inputs and outputs. The best Engineers figure out how to bootstrap what they have into something better, but can often lose the forest for the trees.
As to the Prophet, this also seems to be poor choice of names. If you read Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, it's hard to see him calling himself anything other than a Prophet. Yet Mann would clearly call Andreessen a Wizard (where I would prefer the term Engineer). Perhaps Mann is thinking of the Old Testament tradition of prophets--men who mostly attacked the decadence of those living in the fleshpots of the cities, but today we use the term for any who make predictions about the future. And many of our most successful prophets are those who promise a bright future brought about with technology. I prefer the term "Priest," because priesthood is fundamentally concerned with the sacred and the holy, with rituals and traditions. The objections to change--its unnaturalness, its strangeness, its _wrongness_ are priestly objections.
I confess that “Wizard” seemed perfectly natural to me because, well, what ELSE are you going to call an INT caster? 🤓
https://upandoutcomic.tumblr.com/post/58361752130/shouldve-gone-with-the-cloak-of-intelligence
I read through the whole review waiting for the D&D joke. I'm impressed you kept it in this long.
I kind of wondered if Mann was thinking about it or not.
Finding the balance or marriage between these two energies is on my mind a lot these days.
I especially appreciated this part: "And this obviously poses a huge problem for the bureaucracies that have embraced Vogt’s apocalyptic message — if we don’t change what we’re doing, and soon, we’re all going to die! — because executing local and particular solutions require actually knowing things."
Clinging to the universalist idea of "a solution" prevents finding appropriate responses in diverse environments. Shaky first draft math metaphor: It's like trying to approximate some superwonky function with a straight line/flat plane. At best you'll intersect with the actual function a few lucky times. In switching to an approach where you approximate the function at specific points using more terms, you'll get a better fit, but it won't necessarily be applicable to other parts of the curve/surface.
In accepting a localized approach, you can still apply extremey sophisticated techno-scientific wizardry, you just lose any faith in proclaiming any universality to your solution and to high-mindedly force it upon other environments. The optimizing forces of wizardy are subsumed, asked to hone in on a specific point rather than maximize across the board with a single solution.
This approach tastes like the "McGilchrist Manouvre" (https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/introducing-the-mcgilchrist-manoeuvre) of "right hemisphere (particular and holistic) -> left hemisphere (analytic and reductionistic) -> right hemisphere". Instead of the "left only" approach of universalist optimization, where the corrosive powers of the life-blind and tool-fixated, maximizing left hemisphere are not supervised by the life-aware, values-aware, sees-the-whole right hemisphere. A "right only" approach looks more like handing the reigns of power to a child wielding a horoscope.
I think McGilchrist gets it right. The Wizard (the LH, ironically the Apprentice) always needs to be under the guidance of the Prophet (the RH, the Sorcerer). “Yes that’s so clever, brilliant, but is it actually a good idea?”
I do think McGilchrist gets it right. The RH is the prophet (ironically the Sorcerer 😂) and the LH is the Wizard (the Apprentice). The Wizard must always work under the Prophet’s guidance. Yes that’s brilliant, so clever, but is it really such a great idea. And then there’s Chesterton’s fence . . .
Yep! I have great sympathy for Chesterton’s fence, but in its original form I don’t think the argument is sufficiently strong to hold off the (often very legitimate) objections from the more progressively minded. However, last few decades of research on cultural evolution has a lot of explanatory power for how culture can contain solutions that are far more ingenious than any mind or group of minds can come up with on their own, and that how useful cultural adaptations have a degree of opacity to them that begs a certain amount of humility from anyone eager to move the fence. The Psmith review of Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is an excellent peek into this amazing literature. I think moving past Chesterton toward the nuance provided by cultural evolutionary studies is the way to go to be able to speak about these things also with those who are ideologically/constitutionally committed to a more progressive, fence-moving stance.
Yes, being a Prophet without just being a tedious no-machine is something I've had to work on. The main way I try to get the best of both worlds is to focus on the tightness of the feedback loop. If the thing you're doing can be locked into a small shed and not touch the outside world until you stumble out cackling "I've done it!"; fantastic, Wizards all the way. It's a good and right thing to look for the leverage points of the universe and see what happens when you push.
Where Wizardry goes wrong is when you're looking at the *model* and using that as your sense for the feedback loop. Models are not tools for sensemaking and bad things happen when you try. An analysis of whether your plan worked that invokes a quality metric of your own creation is essentially nothing at all. Science first and foremost has to ground out in anecdote. So now I'm extremely respectful to the stories of Wizards that involve a thing they actually noticed changing in a predictable way due to their interventions. But I'm still openly contemptuous of any sort of "if we burn the commons for more parking, the Blumbo-Dingweed score will go up 30%, how could we not?" argument, which is the best part of being a Prophet.
The Land Institute or Neal Spackman seem like Wizard/Prophet hybrids. In many ways Doomer Optimism is a hybrid project, but it begins fundamentally with a Prophet mindset.
How is DO a hybrid project? It seems Prophet-esque all the way through to me. They just don’t ascribe to depressed "we’re all going to die!" visions stemming from the univeralist approach to Propheteering, instead looking to cultural modes that are more life-affirming and also very Prophet-y in their bids for sacredness, wholesomeness, respect for tradition etc.
Our approach is opposed to the idea of "leaving nature alone." The whole DO ethos is that humans need to manage and intervene in nature. That agriculture, forestry, etc are good. I'm thinking of someone like Peter Allen, who wants to bring back oak savannas to North America by introducing elephants into the upper midwest. Or Neal Spackman, who has an ambitious world vision of mangroves and aquaculture.
Aha, got it, your comment makes sense to me now.
Prophets create only sermons and bureaucracies, they are psychologically incapable to come with clever solutions.
Organic and sustainable agriculture sounds good but it barely works and can't scale.
Another James C. Scott book with an anti-Wizard approach is Seeing Like a State.
It seems to me that in those areas where governments don't coerce, we should generally be in favor prophetmaxxing and wizardmaxxing. The market will generally do a good job of figuring out what works best. And then in those areas where governments do coerce, we shouldn't be prophetmaxxing or wizardmaxxing, because that's what leads to famines, overregulation, stagnation, perverse incentives, unintended consequences, etc.
I think the above is, overall, a Prophet mindset, but I'm not sure.
Scott’s points about high modernism and legibility strike me as being more like saying “Soylent isn’t nutritionally complete” — that is, an argument that this is a bad plan on its own terms, not a disagreement with the worldview. But I confess that Seeing Like A State is one of those books that everyone I know has read so I’ve mostly just picked up by osmosis.
Yes, my comment was poorly worded. I think that Scott's book sets forth Prophet-like views and criticizes certain Wizard-like activities without being explicitly "anti-Wizard."
Yea, I think Scott's argument, particularly in SLaS, is more akin to telling a teenager thinking of spiking the punch with at a dance with LSD* "Look man, this isn't going to turn out at all like you think it is, and you are just going to ruin everyone's time."
He is a good example of a better Prophet in a way, although he recognizes and argues what many Prophets don't, that what works doesn't scale up. Many examples of Prophets most people give don't seem to recognize that if something doesn't scale up, it isn't a solution.
*Even I am not old enough to have first hand experience of this sort of thing, but you get the idea.
I mean, there are people who try to steal what the others accomplish, and others who try to take it by force...
Thieves and Fighters, of course. ;)
Also:
Ironically, if biotech actually *could* grow you a convincing body of the other sex, I would argue everyone should spend a year as a man and a woman before making up their minds which to be.
I am under no illusions this is a typical view!
What’s your Enneagram type?
2w1.
Excellent review as usual, and a very good description of the two sides of the human coin, or the tension and tradeoffs we have to make.
I do want to pick one particular nit: "the slow-moving, sclerotic meritocracies of our regulatory/NGO complex aren’t staffed by those people." The word "meritocracies" is not the one I would use there. Actual merit has little to do with their selection and promotion system. Credentiocracy or even just bureaucracy probably is closer to the truth.
I agree that it’s not a particularly accurate term (I complained about this a little in our Napoleon review) but it’s the word we use for the current regime. After all, aristocracies weren’t actually populated by the best people either.
Agreed, but I think we should endeavor to use the correct term, lest people who are not so aware of the situation take us at our word and think that "merit" is bad. Or that the morons running such organizations have actual merit.
The Left in particular tends to change the words it applies to itself. I am still salty they stole "liberal" and people just accepted it, and now we have people saying "freedom is bad!"
Enjoyed the review!
This other one is for a younger audience, but you should check out the recent Borlaug biography “Hero for the Hungry.”
That looks great, thank you! I’ll pick up a copy for my kids. (Mann himself has a good kids’ version of _1491_, which I think is called Before Columbus.) I can never calibrate reading levels on this stuff or remember whether I read Guns Germs and Steel at 11 or 15, so the actually “young readers” version is always useful…
You want a good kids' version of a serious adult book, check out 'Prisoners of Geography'. In some cases it's actually better than the adult version as the big maps make the point better.
Thanks for the shout out for King Charles - a much misunderstood and maligned man, mostly by Wizards 😂
There were all those jokes about how he would die before his mom did, and the poor guy managed to survive just long enough to get a few years in as king before cancer does him in. That really sucks.
Enjoyable read (as always).
Commenting to say that the critique of the '15-minute city' reads very much like a conservative desperately trying to convince herself that the liberals' new thing is bad even though everything about it sounds nice, because "it just won't work trust me".
"[I]mposing restrictions on who can go where, when." ?? Be serious lol.
Yes, a very enjoyable read, and yes, I didn't love the 15 minute city part. I actually agree with Jane that to the extent such a proposal means handing more power to planners and bureaucrats, they'd simply screw it up, but I'm more sanguine on the market. Evidently we used to be able to produce these places, and the few around today are what escaped the wholesale destruction those planners (and other forces, I'm sure) have wrought. Maybe the market could build more of these nice walkable suburbs if we actually let it? Similarly, getting rid of single family zoning is removing restrictions, not adding them. I want to reform zoning because I want planners to have *less* power, not more.
Exactly. The drivers behind the 15-minute city thing are traditional YIMBY types who just want to deregulate the housing market and let the market do its thing. Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, it's not like conservatives are pro-market anymore ...
A lot of it comes down to suspicion of the people pushing the arguments. And I get it when the person pushing it is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America or something. But, you know, Strong Towns was founded by fiscal conservatives, and while New Urbanists are all over the political spectrum, many are tradition-minded and/or market-friendly conservatives like myself. Moreover, even if the eat-the-rich DSA dues payer is giving a pro-market argument they don't really believe... intellectual honesty still requires answering the argument on its merits. So it's immensely frustrating listening to smart conservative friends plug their ears to everything I say and rail about the conspiracy to destroy their neighborhoods by such dastardly means as repealing regulations, cutting red tape, and restoring market signals.
I've gone very far afield of what Jane actually said in this review so please don't read this as imputing anything to her. It's only a conversation I've had many times over the last few years, and I'm just short of despair over it.
For myself a lot of the suspicion also comes from the number of 15 minute city types who are secretly "ban cars" types. The conversation often seems to go "wouldn't all these little town centers where everything is within 15 minutes or less be great? You could walk every where! All we'd need to do is make it impossible to drive there!" at which point they lose me.
When the people pushing the 15 minute city are the same people who push every other soulless, mind-numbing technocratic initiative, it’s hard not to believe that the 15 minute city will be another soulless, mind-numbing technocratic initiative.
And the restrictions are right there in the descriptions.
Do we have non-technocratic/bureaucratic options for building cities? We're not gathering together the village to raise a barn anymore; it seems to me that the technocratic way is the *only* contemporary way cities grow, so you just need to pick your poison.
Houston, IIRC, is not a technocratic city. My info is old and may be wrong.
… so what are your enneagram type and color season?
2 and Soft Autumn. :)