spoonierbard asked:
if you could recommend one book to Donald Trump and Theresa May, what would it be and why?
I’d pick a few choice articles from Slate Star Codex and a few other sites have them bound as a book. Something short enough that it wouldn’t lose Trump’s attention.
You’re assuming, I think, that I am virtuous like these other ratsphere members and read lots of books. I’m not virtuous in that way (which brings me a long-running sense of shame). I have some formal education in Political Science, Economics, etc, but what you’re seeing on this blog is leaning more on intuitive synthesis from articles on the internet, observations, and so on.
So, when I suggest replacing the legislature with think-tank-parties or reorganizing school around spaced repetition using computers, which are both outside the envelope of what people are thinking about right now in terms of reforms, it isn’t because I’m some deep, learned expert at organizational engineering (which is a field that doesn’t even exist yet), but because I’m extrapolating various limited information and experience in novel ways to reach out farther into the policy space.
The awkward issue is that if I were the kind of deep-reader person and not the novelty-craver person I am, I would not have gained the necessary experiences / ways of thinking / depth of search in order to escape the existing envelope with proposals anyway, probably. I wouldn’t be writing a blog of half politics and half futurist shitposting designed to make readers think about possible futures. Said blog wouldn’t have the Union Girl branding associated with it. There would be no video game potentially in the works because I would either lack coding or 3d artist ability or both.
What reading I have done gets pruned of its, for lack of a better word, citations, and instead updates an intuitive base. There are probably books I would want them to read, but instead of remembering what they are, I changed and moved on.
