What’s wrong with today’s world order. What motivates the messianic self-deprivation of tech CEOs. Why the economy is giving off strange, hard to interpret, vibes. The mathematical mystery of zero. Why falling back in love with reading is one of the most cognitively beneficial things we can do.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Shivshankar Menon, Nobody Wants the Current World Order
(Foreign Affairs, 3 August 2022)
The Indian former diplomat laments that the last coherent response by the international system to a transnational challenge came at the London summit of the G-20 in April 2009. In his words, the subsequent international response to global challenges “can only be described as pathetic.” This is because major powers exhibit what he calls “revisionist” behaviour: the pursuing of their own ends to the detriment of the international order and the willingness to change the order itself. Such a world “will be meaner, more contentious, and poorer”, and coping with it “could be the defining challenge of the years ahead” (metered paywall that may require registration – reads in 8-10 min).
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Kyla Scanlon, The Vibes in the Economy Are … Weird. Really Weird.
(The New York Times, 4 August 2022)
“Economic indicators are a Jackson Pollock painting of data points and trends. If you think hard enough about all of them, they begin to make a bit of sense, but there’s a lot to interpret.” Why is it so difficult to discern what’s happening in the economy? Because it reflects the complex story of what we do (how we spend money and time, the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of our existence). It is driven by sentiments and sometimes becomes just too noisy to interpret. Furthermore, we can be victims of self-fulfilling prophecies: what we expect to happen can soon end up doing so, like a recession (behind a paywall but gifted article – reads in 6-7 min).
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Manvir Singh, The ‘Shamanification’ of the Tech CEO
(Wired, 14 July 2022)
Why does success in tech require deprivation? This is what the anthropologist who wrote this article explores. From fruit-only diets to dopamine fasting, Silicon Valley founders flaunt self-deprivation like a misguided pursuit of wellness. But there’s more to it. These self-denial fads are often touted as biohacking innovations, but they are part of a larger pattern: “the self-shamanification of tech CEOs.” Like shamans, modern tech executives promise control over the uncertain (metered paywall – reads in 7-9 min).
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Shaharir bin Mohamad Zain and Frank Swetz, The Elusive Origin of Zero
(Scientific American, 28 July 2022)
We are no longer sure about who decided that nothing (0) should be something. The tracing of zero’s heritage has been elusive, with historians and journalists variously ascribing the symbol’s birthplace to the Andes of South America, the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the surface of a calculating board in the Tang dynasty of China, a cast iron column and temple inscriptions in India, and most recently, a stone epigraphic inscription found in Cambodia. The history of nothingness is one last mystery in the history of mathematics (metered paywall – reads in 5-6 min).
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Alissa Wilkinson, How to fall back in love with reading
(VOX, 21 July 2022)
Books require sustained attention, something few of us have, which is the reason why we read less and less. Yet, the psychological and cognitive benefits of reading, are huge, and just doing it might matter as much or more than the content. Reading fiction, though, tends to retrain the brain to stay open, comfortable with ambiguity, and able to sort through information more carefully (metered paywall – reads in 5-6 min).
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