Recent Posts:
The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality
https://youtu.be/2tn8x-EbAlI Predicament of Mankind (Video 7 minutes) The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality by Doc Hall Many more issues threaten the environment than climate change, although that one exacerbates all others, and it dominates...
Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization by Paul Raskin
Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization by Paul Raskin Paul Raskin is the founding president of the Tellus Institute, a Boston “think tank” that began an initiative called The Great Transition in 2002. That initiative is a vision of how an...
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies by William T. Vollmann
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies, by William T. Vollmann William T. Vollmann (Bill) is a prize-winning professional writer, noted for being adventurous researching his books. For his first, he embedded with the Mujadin fighting the Soviets invading...
Radical Change
https://youtu.be/prvK6WH_mRk Radical Change (Video 13 minutes) Timed Out: The Environmental Fan is Loaded In the past month, climate scientists emerged from scientific cocoons clanging alarms that climate change is a runaway. If we shut off man-made emissions...
Talking Water
https://youtu.be/vZRbahiNvTc Talking Water (video 18 minutes) Talking Water -- Water, Water Everywhere The video explains history of water use and some of the complexities of today's water issues, but water is both a common subject and a profound mystery. We can never...
Are You Sure You Know Why That Happened?
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie Judea Pearl is professor of computer science at UCLA with a long, distinguished career in software and artificial intelligence. This book is his third in a series on causality. Dana...
New Mythology for a New Humanity
https://youtu.be/cTKg9tevVrM A New Myth (Video 5 minutes) A New Mythology for the 21st Century Say “mythology” and we think of Greek mythology or indigenous tribal stories, but we think we follow facts and logic. Actually the 21st century is soaked in myths that we...
Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or How Capitalism Works and How It Fails, by Yanis Varoufakis and Jacob Moe
Why Economic Theories Are Screwing Us Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails, by Yanis Varoufakis and Jacob Moe Yanis Varoufakis will be heard from again. He attracted global attention as the Finance Minister of Greece...
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber
The Whole Economy is Full of It Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber Although an American and by training an anthropologist, David Graeber is a professor at the London School of Economics. He’s not a stereotypical economist. He's a rebel in the growing gang of...
The Psychology of Compression Thinking
https://youtu.be/oGRMK8dBeYo The Psychology of Compression Thinking (Video 7 minutes) The Psychology of Compression Thinking The basic points of Compression Thinking have changed little over the past five years. Their internal logic and consistency seem sound. But...
Effective Learning is Inefficient
The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do by Edward Tenner Edward Tenner, researcher of history and critic of technology, writes regularly for The Atlantic. Noted for a prior book, Why Things Bite Back, Tenner popularized the idea of unintended consequences....
Is it All Empty Vanity?
Are We All Avatars in a Big Simulation? Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Jean Glaser and Sheila Faria Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, a contributor to post-structuralism, along with the better-known Jacques Derrida....
Jack Ward and Doc Hall converse about the implications of Compression Thinking
https://youtu.be/ZCM39I3trd8 (Video 38 minutes) In this video Jack Ward and Doc Hall converse about the implications of Compression Thinking.
Is Truth Just a Better Lie?
https://youtu.be/QoHPdKxGYp8 Truth by Doc Hall (Video 7 minutes) Is Truth Just a Better Lie? The arts of human deception have ever resided within us. On-line technology multiplies opportunities to practice them. Every morning before breakfast I trash a half-dozen or...
The Viral Ugliness of Internet Trolling
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right by Angela Nagle Angela Nagel is an Irish social critic specializing in the subcultures of the on-line interactive world, something that this reviewer and probably most readers don’t...
Being Roiled and Rolled by Big Data
Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data Hardcover by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge Schönberger is a professor at Oxford and Ramge is a technology writer who has by-lines in The Economist. This book is not their first dance with Big Data. Their...
Toxic Assets
https://youtu.be/819p5dYTiN8 Toxic Assets (Video 3 minutes) Toxic Assets by Doc Hall The basic thinking behind our system of business is piling up problems faster than we can resolve them. It is has become so toxic that neither money nor magic technology can sustain...
Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality by Andrew Newberg
Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality by Andrew Newberg Andrew Newberg is an MD and Professor of Emergency Medicine and Radiology, and Director of Research, Marcus Institute of Integrative Health, Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in...
Fables from the Bees
https://youtu.be/aVkOVtUZu_c Fables of the Bees (Video 5 minutes) Fables from the Bees by Doc Hall We can learn a lot from bees. Complex and intriguing, the little critters have inspired many human analogies to their habits of life. However, fables about bees may also...
Stop Favoring Quantity Over Quality
An old adage is that if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. General managers experience this as a “silo problem.” Each functional specialist has a different perspective, but few comprehensively grasp the situation, and personal experience shapes...