WSJ reviews “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation”: “The central puzzle of the book is what the contemporary philosopher William Seager has called a “ticking time bomb”: the intellectual division between the objective and the subjective. Natural science was able to make such great strides after the Middle Ages only because it left the analysis of thoughts and feelings to poets and philosophers, focusing instead on measurable observables. The strategy worked a treat until it hit two brick walls. The first is the nature of consciousness. Modern neuroscience, at first, stuck to examining the brain events that corresponded to conscious experiences: the “neural correlates of consciousness.” But at a certain point it became clear that such a focus left out a good deal. How is it possible that mushy cells give rise to sensations, emotions and perceptions? The science of mind had to ignore precisely what it was supposed to explain because a purely objective account of consciousness cannot encompass its subjective character. And then—a second and related problem—physicists discovered that they couldn’t leave conscious minds out of their equations.”
Economist on where the modern state came from: “Rhree economists think they have some empirical answers. According to Robert Allen of New York University, Abu Dhabi, Leander Heldring of Northwestern University and Mattia Bertazzini of the University of Nottingham, the key to understanding the emergence of modern politics is not a metaphor, but the constantly shifting courses of ancient rivers in Iraq. The first states, they argue in a paper published in the American Economic Review, were glued together not as shelters from violence, as Hobbes believed, but by economics. The banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates, Iraq’s two longest rivers, are home to some of the world’s oldest settlements. Mesopotamia, which 5,000 years ago refined the first known system of writing, earned the area the reputation of “the cradle of civilisation”. The paths of these rivers shift, as floods and droughts cause their beds to flood. When a shift came, some ancient farmers were left without water for their crops. Mr Allen and his co-authors investigate whether the timing of changes to a river’s course had anything to do with when the number and size of settlements grew. They do so by looking at the effect of the first recorded shift in 2,850BC. This presented farmers with something close to the choice imagined by philosophers when theorising about the state of nature. Those left behind by the river could revert to nomadism. Or they could band together to build irrigation systems to ferry water from distant rivers.”
New Yorker on board game design. ““Designers are becoming more focussed on the experience the players are having, and are using a stronger tool kit to build better games,” Geoff Engelstein, who teaches board-game design at New York University and co-authored the encyclopedia of game mechanics, told me. In older games, he said, such as Risk and Monopoly, the goal was, frequently, to tear everyone else down, but in newer games this is often impossible; in the train game Ticket to Ride, for example, you can’t destroy other players’ tracks. It’s also become less common to lose a turn, which makes players less engaged, and games are increasingly designed to prevent blowouts by winners. Rob Daviau, the co-designer of Pandemic Legacy, the current No. 2 game on BoardGameGeek, is a co-owner of Restoration Games, a company that republishes older games while updating their mechanics. One common shift, he said, is from post-decision luck to pre-decision luck. Instead of striking a monster and then rolling the dice to see if you’ve caused damage, you roll the dice first, then have to get creative about how to use what you’ve rolled.”
Ray Dalio: “There are five big, interrelated forces that are driving, and always did drive, big changes in the world order, and they are: the debt/money/economic force that is manifested in market and economic movements, the internal conflict force that is most obviously manifested in political conflict, the external conflict force that is most obviously manifested in geopolitical wars, acts of nature that are most obviously manifested in climate change, and humanity’s inventiveness, especially of technology development that is most obviously manifested in AI development.”
