Nature's Frameless Painting on the Wall

Nature's Frameless Painting on the Wall by Charles Bayless

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The winter sunshine coming in through the living room window and onto the wall.

Tools, IP, and Process Knowledge

From 2019 Letter by Dan Wang.

My essay How Technology Grows argues that technological capabilities ought to be represented in the form of an experienced workforce. We should distinguish technology in three forms: tools, direct instructions (like blueprints and IP), and process knowledge. The third is most important: “Process knowledge is hard to write down as an instruction: you can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it’s hard to make a great dish.”

[snip]

Today, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they engage more than anyone else in the technological learning process. Few Chinese firms are world-leading brands. But workers in China are using the latest tools to manufacture many of the most sophisticated products in the world. They’re capturing the marginal process knowledge, and my hypothesis is that puts them in a better place than anyone else to develop the next technological advancements. To be more concrete, Chinese workers will be able to replicate the mostly-foreign capital equipment they currently use, make more of their own IP, and build globally-competitive final products.

Tools, IP, and Process Knowledge. I like the framing.

What is the root problem to a corporate problem? Tools (resources to solve the problem)? IP (knowing how to solve the problem)? Process Knowledge (knowing what the problem is)? Depends on the context but usually insiders identify Tools and IP more often than Process Knowledge but my experience is that knowing the nature of the problem is more often the root cause.

Data Talks

New paper asks people around the world about their fundamental motivations. Despite evolutionary psychology's focus on sex, status, and disease, people around the world say family is far more important to them--even MTurkers: https://t.co/u81sDgccLE pic.twitter.com/D0PASNZWbt

— Thomas Talhelm (@ThomasTalhelm) December 3, 2019

I see wonderful things

My god! How did I not know about the goblin shark? pic.twitter.com/Hu6H7KUjtB

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) December 1, 2019

December by Elsa Beskow

December by Elsa Beskow

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Off Beat Humor

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Data Talks

Most people accept that most traits are partially heritable – but they underestimate how heritable they are. An exception is breast cancer, which is much *less* heritable than most people think. https://t.co/C3pMcjXQZ8 pic.twitter.com/xx70wiyxTo

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 3, 2019

I see wonderful things

Fraaaaaank!!! 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/Vnc2b4pCqg

— CCTV_IDIOTS (@cctv_idiots) December 1, 2019

Snow in Islington, 2018 by Melissa Scott-Miller

Snow in Islington, 2018 by Melissa Scott-Miller

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Classics and class

From Classics for the people by Edith Hall. Explores one of the more fascinating educational epochs circa 1850-1950 when working class people in Britain were as likely as any others to have read and discussed the classics.

Working-class libraries and archives, the writings of autodidacts and the annals of adult education have been analysed by several scholars since Richard Hoggart’s pioneering The Uses of Literacy and R D Altick’s The English Common Reader, both published in 1957; the most famous, focused primarily on literature in English, are David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1981) and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). But Classical materials have also been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks. Classical topics were included on the curricula of Mutual Improvement Societies, adult schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, university extension schemes, the Workers’ Educational Association, trade unions and the early Labour Colleges. These initiatives did much to counter the sluggish legislative response to workers’ demands for education: it was not until the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 that even rudimentary instruction in literacy and numeracy, let alone access to classical culture, became universally and freely available to children under 13.

But there had long been other ways to learn about the Greeks and Romans. Museums in Britain were visited by a far wider class cross-section than their Continental equivalents, where the admission of visitors to the princely galleries was closely monitored. There was a sense that art and archaeology somehow belonged to the nation rather than exclusively to wealthy individuals; free admission was customary. A Prussian traveller in London was disturbed to find in 1782 that the visitors to the British Museum were ‘various … some I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people, of both sexes, for as it is the property of the nation, everyone has the same right … to see it, that another has’. And classical sculptures such as the Parthenon frieze and the Venus de Milo were endlessly reproduced in forms accessible even to the poorest Briton: plaster reproductions in municipal museums across the nation, cheap self-education magazines such as Cassell’s Popular Educator, and volumes published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, available in libraries of Mechanics’ Institutes. Lower-class visitors’ memoirs often imply that what they saw in museums nurtured an impulse towards self-education.

In her concluding paragraph there is an observation which sparks a different thought. Emphasis added.

The experiences of classical antiquity by the historical British working class have been messy, complicated and diverse. They have, by turns, been inspirational and depressing, too. But, finally, they can also help us think about the place of the ancient Greeks and Romans within the modern curriculum. Classical education need not be intrinsically elitist or reactionary; it has been the curriculum of empire, but it can be the curriculum of liberation. The ‘legacy’ of Greece and Rome has been instrumental in progressive and enlightened causes, both personal and political. Understanding the ancient world can enrich not only the imagination and sociocultural literacy but also citizenship skills and the power of argumentation and verbal expression. Recovering the working-class classicists of the past can also function as a rallying cry to modern Britain to support the case for the universal availability in schools of classical civilisation and ancient history, and for the revival of the proud tradition of free or affordable university extension schemes across the nation.

I agree. But the thought this sparks is that this was true before. In other words, there wasn't really much of a thinking class before 1700, principally because prosperity was markedly limited in depth and extent. There notably few people who could anticipate the prospect of a life of intellectual effort or leisure.

Our Founding Fathers were among the first of that ilk. They were financially precarious but less so than in earlier generations. We are struck by just how sophisticated was their reading as a predicate to their thinking about the structure of a new nation founded in liberty and freedom.

In 1750, a plantation owning Jefferson or heirs to merchant fortunes could be reading broadly and from the original classics. By 1850 it was possible for anyone from any strata of society. Classics were associated with the wealthy classes because at the beginning of the Great Economic Transformation circa 1750, only the upper class could afford it.

But once upon a time, a hundred years into the Great Economic Transformation, the classics became universally accessible. It was not a matter or difficulty or accessibility. It was a matter of general prosperity. But then, for reasons unknown to me, the perception of class re-intruded.