excerpt via @jerrycolonna’s guest post, the management team
the magic, the alchemy, occurs when what we do mixes with who we are
…and is cooked by the heat of what we believe.
(Source: bijan)
new artist
… announcing the genesis of The Whitness
led by Mama’s Love guitarist, Whit Murray, The Whitness features a select cadre of Berklee’s finest.
stay tuned!
find The Whitness on: facebook | twitter
the explanation for why the sky is blue involves so much of the natural sciences: the colors within the visual spectrum, the wave nature of light, the angle at which sunlight hits the atmosphere, the mathematics of scattering, the size of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, and even the way human eyes perceive color.
it’s most of science in a question that a young child can ask.
”Out of the Mouths of Babes, or, Why is the Sky Blue?
my favorite explanation is one that I sought as a boy. it is the explanation for why the sky is blue. It’s a question every toddler asks, but it is also one that most great scientists since the time of Aristotle, including da Vinci, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, and even Einstein, have asked.
one of the things I like most about this explanation—beyond the simplicity and overtness of the question itself—is how long it took to arrive at correctly, how many centuries of effort, and how many branches of science it involves.
JAM OF THE WEEK after thursday
Bruce Springsteen’s 1981 song The River depicts the uncertainty of the future in difficult economic times, where a river once flowing slowly dries out, symbolically matching the protagonist’s own dreams.
rumored to have been written about Springsteen’s sister and her husband, the song recounts the story of a young couple forced to adapt to their changing and increasingly bleak reality. The River appeared on the album of the same name, a record that would ultimately mark an important shift in Springsteen’s songwriting and pave the way for the dark and morose classic, Nebraska.
~ nickba
properly understood, political correctness is our greatest political problem. we always have this question of how to build a society in which important problems can be thought through and tackled.
it’s a mistake to simply fixate on the problem of political correctness in its narrow incarnation of campus speech codes; it’s a much more pervasive problem. for instance, part of what fuels the education bubble is that we’re not allowed to articulate certain truths about the inequality of abilities.
many of our destructive bubbles are linked to political correctness, and that’s why Strauss is so important today.
”on inequality
in the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. it’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out.
…politics
so you have these two different blind spots on the Left and Right, but I’ve been more interested in their common blind spot, which we’re less likely to discuss as a society: technological deceleration and the question of whether we’re still living in a technologically advancing society at all.
i think, therefore, that our problems are completely misdiagnosed. the debates are all about macroeconomics, about how much money we should print. i think you can print more money and have inflation, or stop printing money and have deflation. bad inflation involves commodity prices and inputs, and bad deflation involves people’s wages, salaries and house prices.
but the middle-way Goldilocks version, where commodity prices and consumer goods go down and wages go up, seems very farfetched. i don’t see how that sort of outcome can be crafted in a world with no growth.
…clean tech
there certainly are a lot of areas of technology where, if it were progressing, we would expect a lot of jobs to be created.
the classic example would be clean technology, alternate energy technology. if you were to retool the economy toward more efficient forms of energy, one would realistically expect that to create millions of jobs. the problem with that retooling is that the clean technology just doesn’t work—namely, it doesn’t do more for less. it costs much more, so it isn’t working—at least not yet.
…education
there’s an education bubble, which is, like the others, psychosocial. there’s a wide public buy-in that leads to a product being overvalued because it’s linked to future expectations that are unrealistic. education is similar to the tech bubble of the late 1990s, which assumed crazy growth in businesses that didn’t pan out. the education bubble is predicated on the idea that the education provided is incredibly valuable. in many cases that’s just not true.
here and elsewhere people have avoided facing the fact of stagnation by telling themselves stories about familiar things leading to progress. one fake vector of progress is credentialing—first the undergraduate degree, then more advanced degrees. like the others, it’s an avoidance mechanism.
bubbles end when people stop believing the false narrative and start thinking for themselves. so many students are not getting the jobs they need to repay their debts, are moving back in with their parents, and the contract both parties signed up for is being revealed as false.
…governance
we have different kinds of challenges on the government side. one is a little more philosophical in nature: we tend to think the future is indeterminate. but it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing and subject to rational planning.
if it’s fundamentally unknowable, it doesn’t make sense to say anything about it. to put it in mathematical terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics.
so, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets—the random walk down Wall Street. you can’t know where things are going; you only know they’re going to be random.
I think some things are true about this statistical view of the future, but it’s extremely toxic for any kind of rational planning.
[…]
if there is going to be a government role in getting innovation started, people have to believe philosophically that it’s possible to plan. that’s not the world we’re living in. a letter from Einstein to the White House would get lost in the mail room today. nobody would think that any single person would have that kind of expertise.
