Here's the second half of the opening chapter, in which you'll meet a murderess, learn about the extraordinary octopus, and consider what might have happened if the Oort cloud hadn't oscillated a bit.
Such a flow to your writing -- engaging, intriguing, evocative. If it proves to be a fluke I read these first two chapters, I'm delighted. Fluke will be a Christmas present to a few on my list. Who knows what changes that may bring. Cannot wait to read the rest of the book.
Congratulations on getting another surely-excellent book into the world. I think of your work often and deeply admire what you teach.
Second: I asked you a few weeks ago if you had an origin story that may have contributed to your interest in madness, corruption, evil, etc. and you said you didn't...but learning about a mass murder in your own family at age 20 sure doesn't sound irrelevant. So my new question to you is: Do you think that discovering this family story at a fairly tender age influenced your interest in social psychology? If so, how so? If not, why not?
Third: Your work comes to mind often because of my own work related to inner science and inner engineering - a practice I call Deep Self Design - because, through my own life experiences, I learned the hard way that anyone can go dark / become malevolent / turn dangerous and destructive, etc. depending on the circumstances. People prefer to think of ourselves as somehow statically "good" or "virtuous," but this idea is totally divorced from reality and is, in itself, dangerous in the sense that being ethical is both a practice and a choice. You can't count on its solidity and it must, therefore, be tended and cultivated, preferably with a community of practice. Which leads to my fourth comment:
What drives me up the wall in so many Western-based paradigms is our inclination to constantly try and make reality binary. We pose silly questions at the beginning of an exploration - is this phenomenon due to this OR that? - and then we spend an exorbitant amount of time grappling with the hyper-simplicity of our own question. Sunday Schools (just as an example of an institution that you mentioned) should never teach totalizing, ultimately stupid shit, like "people are good or bad" and "X linearly causes Y" and "if you do these 10 things, you will go this place." It completely misses the reality of complex, multivariate systems which can and do hold seemingly paradoxical realities all the time. For me, one of the biggest indicators of a courageous intellect is one that doesn't NEED to make the world binary or fit it into a box so that WE feel more comfortable. I get it: Life is uncertain and it's very, very comforting to think we can predict and control it. But that kind of thinking leads to bad outcomes over and over again. That list is endless.
Anyway, my morning rant. I'm excited for your book and I really appreciate what you focus on and share. Big ups to you, always.
Thank you, Sunni! I agree about the binary condensing of reality being a silly thing. I write a lot about complexity in Fluke. As for the question about my family...I know it sounds weird...but I don’t think it had anything to do with my interest in evil because I don’t think she was evil. I think she likely had a mental health breakdown, one that would have gone undiagnosed in 1905...so I think for a while the story was just like this weird thing about our family history nobody really knew about.
It made a lot more sense to write about it in the context of the contingency of existence because that hits you over the head when you’re descended from something like that.
Anyway, thanks for reading and for the great questions and comments - this is all very good preparation for what I’ll get asked about when the book sees the light of day in a few months!
The contingency of existence...that's a beautiful phrase. I'm a Zen practitioner and we would think of this as 'dependent origination.' I'm not sure how it's similar or different in your world but it's an incredibly deep teaching, one apparently you're writing about in Fluke!
On the topic of (non)evil in your recent family history - since no one with the discernment of evil seems to be available to comment one way or the other on that particular family member, the safest bet is to assume she was not, in fact, evil and was plausibly suffering from a combination of circumstances - social, mental, hormonal, developmental, etc. - that resulted in a very tragic outcome. That said, I wonder if you've heard of any of the following: Unattached burdens. Porous mind. Wetiko. I have a well-developed, personally intimate, but decidedly armchair hypothesis of evil and I ran across these concepts in my research, among many other that are more well-known. Do they ring bells for you?
On being asked questions after your book comes out, I HEAR YOU. I myself am about to submit a fourth book proposal in December and am already anticipating the random reactions and questions that inevitably arise once you've expressed something evocative or interesting. (This when there's no guarantee of the book ever even coming into existence. Ha haha!) So I can keep the questions coming, since it may be valuable on your end, too.
Thank you for responding. You and I are intrigued by many of the same topics. It's a relief to subgroup in any way.
I'm only guessing where this all leads or rather I guess I should say I don't know. This 'not knowing" feels more intimate with how life unfolds and I look forward to your explorations in the book.
Hi Brian. Well I waited and wasn’t disappointed. I feel more significant than I did, given my large load of “junk” DNA (which was a misnomer coined a while back, but is catchy), as I can now contemplate on the random mating preferences of chimpanzees. I’m guessing that you also touch further on complexity in your book. All the best, John.
Brian, now I understand why I have been drawn to you work and view of the world. I feel a kindred spirit albeit 20 years or so apart in age. The world is not entirely chaos, and if we all believed as such, nihilism would prevail. But also random events that seemingly have no relation to subsequent events do matter. As I like to phrase it, it is the search for seemingly disparate pieces of information and seeing how they fit together, no matter how unlikely, is what matters. In that sense chaos and flukes do matter immensely!
I too an a frustrated social scientist (PhD economist by second training, historian by first training) but today work in power and gas industries touching everything from system operations to planning to market design to regulatory and environmental policy. I have made my mark by bringing together disparate pieces of knowledge using all my trainings experiences.
What I find is that any academic area suffers from “cylinders of excellence” aka silos where such creative thinking and acknowledgement of other factors is discouraged in large measure because this in the silo do not understand knowledge from other fields.
Your work is the example of how better to appreciate and understand the world by braking down those silos and sifting through the ruble to find the other underlying patterns and linkages!
Thanks, Paul! I suspected as much from many of your comments and I was just thinking to myself “just wait, Paul, you’re going to see how much I agree with you soon...”
One area I disagree: if the world is chaos, I don’t think that necessarily needs to lead to nihilism. But I explain why a little in the last two chapters of Fluke which are very philosophical (and were probably the most fulfilling bits of writing I’ve done).
I’m such a nerd because I absolutely love thinking about this stuff - and engaging with smart people about it. Thanks to you for also highlighting the silo effect which is an absurd artefact of some very outdated thinking - and kudos to you for overcoming it.
Brian, I guess I am transparent if nothing else! On the chaos issue, I think the there is a subtle, yet critical distinction you may have missed in what I said...if we as people all believes it is only chaos, not if it is, then why have any norms at all, hence a nihilistic tendency. And in truth, there is a sense of order in our lives, otherwise why would we have “rule of law” or norms of courtesy, or some kind of daily routine?
Clearly I enjoy and relish the nerdy, intellectual back and forth! So I do expect some good pushback on that distinction. But the overall sense is that rather than using the word “chaos” perhaps a more descriptive word is “entropy” or randomness. In that sense Stimson’s visit is a random event around an overall trend of worsening Japanese-US relations and Japanese empire building.
So, would be an interesting exercise to think about entropy or “order/trends” at a macro level and the same things at a very micro level. Or in another way, to think about all the “forks” in the road as those not taken as a “branch cutting” algorithm in combinatorial optimization problems to make the problem more tractable to solve in a reasonable amount of clock time. Of course, life is hardly an optimization problem! Yet, provides an interesting analogy.
Such a flow to your writing -- engaging, intriguing, evocative. If it proves to be a fluke I read these first two chapters, I'm delighted. Fluke will be a Christmas present to a few on my list. Who knows what changes that may bring. Cannot wait to read the rest of the book.
Agreed! The narrative prose Brian writes is something to be appreciated for the art form of communication that it is!
Thank you so much! I’m afraid it’s not out until January, though, so it’ll have to be a delayed present...I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed reading it.
I'll just have to send them these first two chapters and let them know they have something to look forward to in the dark days of January.
Brian, first:
Congratulations on getting another surely-excellent book into the world. I think of your work often and deeply admire what you teach.
Second: I asked you a few weeks ago if you had an origin story that may have contributed to your interest in madness, corruption, evil, etc. and you said you didn't...but learning about a mass murder in your own family at age 20 sure doesn't sound irrelevant. So my new question to you is: Do you think that discovering this family story at a fairly tender age influenced your interest in social psychology? If so, how so? If not, why not?
Third: Your work comes to mind often because of my own work related to inner science and inner engineering - a practice I call Deep Self Design - because, through my own life experiences, I learned the hard way that anyone can go dark / become malevolent / turn dangerous and destructive, etc. depending on the circumstances. People prefer to think of ourselves as somehow statically "good" or "virtuous," but this idea is totally divorced from reality and is, in itself, dangerous in the sense that being ethical is both a practice and a choice. You can't count on its solidity and it must, therefore, be tended and cultivated, preferably with a community of practice. Which leads to my fourth comment:
What drives me up the wall in so many Western-based paradigms is our inclination to constantly try and make reality binary. We pose silly questions at the beginning of an exploration - is this phenomenon due to this OR that? - and then we spend an exorbitant amount of time grappling with the hyper-simplicity of our own question. Sunday Schools (just as an example of an institution that you mentioned) should never teach totalizing, ultimately stupid shit, like "people are good or bad" and "X linearly causes Y" and "if you do these 10 things, you will go this place." It completely misses the reality of complex, multivariate systems which can and do hold seemingly paradoxical realities all the time. For me, one of the biggest indicators of a courageous intellect is one that doesn't NEED to make the world binary or fit it into a box so that WE feel more comfortable. I get it: Life is uncertain and it's very, very comforting to think we can predict and control it. But that kind of thinking leads to bad outcomes over and over again. That list is endless.
Anyway, my morning rant. I'm excited for your book and I really appreciate what you focus on and share. Big ups to you, always.
Thank you, Sunni! I agree about the binary condensing of reality being a silly thing. I write a lot about complexity in Fluke. As for the question about my family...I know it sounds weird...but I don’t think it had anything to do with my interest in evil because I don’t think she was evil. I think she likely had a mental health breakdown, one that would have gone undiagnosed in 1905...so I think for a while the story was just like this weird thing about our family history nobody really knew about.
It made a lot more sense to write about it in the context of the contingency of existence because that hits you over the head when you’re descended from something like that.
Anyway, thanks for reading and for the great questions and comments - this is all very good preparation for what I’ll get asked about when the book sees the light of day in a few months!
The contingency of existence...that's a beautiful phrase. I'm a Zen practitioner and we would think of this as 'dependent origination.' I'm not sure how it's similar or different in your world but it's an incredibly deep teaching, one apparently you're writing about in Fluke!
On the topic of (non)evil in your recent family history - since no one with the discernment of evil seems to be available to comment one way or the other on that particular family member, the safest bet is to assume she was not, in fact, evil and was plausibly suffering from a combination of circumstances - social, mental, hormonal, developmental, etc. - that resulted in a very tragic outcome. That said, I wonder if you've heard of any of the following: Unattached burdens. Porous mind. Wetiko. I have a well-developed, personally intimate, but decidedly armchair hypothesis of evil and I ran across these concepts in my research, among many other that are more well-known. Do they ring bells for you?
On being asked questions after your book comes out, I HEAR YOU. I myself am about to submit a fourth book proposal in December and am already anticipating the random reactions and questions that inevitably arise once you've expressed something evocative or interesting. (This when there's no guarantee of the book ever even coming into existence. Ha haha!) So I can keep the questions coming, since it may be valuable on your end, too.
Thank you for responding. You and I are intrigued by many of the same topics. It's a relief to subgroup in any way.
I'm only guessing where this all leads or rather I guess I should say I don't know. This 'not knowing" feels more intimate with how life unfolds and I look forward to your explorations in the book.
A gift worth the wait!
Hi Brian. Well I waited and wasn’t disappointed. I feel more significant than I did, given my large load of “junk” DNA (which was a misnomer coined a while back, but is catchy), as I can now contemplate on the random mating preferences of chimpanzees. I’m guessing that you also touch further on complexity in your book. All the best, John.
There is a whole chapter on complexity!
Brian, now I understand why I have been drawn to you work and view of the world. I feel a kindred spirit albeit 20 years or so apart in age. The world is not entirely chaos, and if we all believed as such, nihilism would prevail. But also random events that seemingly have no relation to subsequent events do matter. As I like to phrase it, it is the search for seemingly disparate pieces of information and seeing how they fit together, no matter how unlikely, is what matters. In that sense chaos and flukes do matter immensely!
I too an a frustrated social scientist (PhD economist by second training, historian by first training) but today work in power and gas industries touching everything from system operations to planning to market design to regulatory and environmental policy. I have made my mark by bringing together disparate pieces of knowledge using all my trainings experiences.
What I find is that any academic area suffers from “cylinders of excellence” aka silos where such creative thinking and acknowledgement of other factors is discouraged in large measure because this in the silo do not understand knowledge from other fields.
Your work is the example of how better to appreciate and understand the world by braking down those silos and sifting through the ruble to find the other underlying patterns and linkages!
Thanks, Paul! I suspected as much from many of your comments and I was just thinking to myself “just wait, Paul, you’re going to see how much I agree with you soon...”
One area I disagree: if the world is chaos, I don’t think that necessarily needs to lead to nihilism. But I explain why a little in the last two chapters of Fluke which are very philosophical (and were probably the most fulfilling bits of writing I’ve done).
I’m such a nerd because I absolutely love thinking about this stuff - and engaging with smart people about it. Thanks to you for also highlighting the silo effect which is an absurd artefact of some very outdated thinking - and kudos to you for overcoming it.
Brian, I guess I am transparent if nothing else! On the chaos issue, I think the there is a subtle, yet critical distinction you may have missed in what I said...if we as people all believes it is only chaos, not if it is, then why have any norms at all, hence a nihilistic tendency. And in truth, there is a sense of order in our lives, otherwise why would we have “rule of law” or norms of courtesy, or some kind of daily routine?
Clearly I enjoy and relish the nerdy, intellectual back and forth! So I do expect some good pushback on that distinction. But the overall sense is that rather than using the word “chaos” perhaps a more descriptive word is “entropy” or randomness. In that sense Stimson’s visit is a random event around an overall trend of worsening Japanese-US relations and Japanese empire building.
So, would be an interesting exercise to think about entropy or “order/trends” at a macro level and the same things at a very micro level. Or in another way, to think about all the “forks” in the road as those not taken as a “branch cutting” algorithm in combinatorial optimization problems to make the problem more tractable to solve in a reasonable amount of clock time. Of course, life is hardly an optimization problem! Yet, provides an interesting analogy.