where are all the people trying to understand how the world works? (in a broad sense that is useful for understanding the trajectory of the world: e.g things like why is society the way it is, why do people behave the way they do; why has technology developed the way it has, etc.; as opposed to zooming in and specializing, e.g fundamental physics research or biomed or whatever) there are a bunch of people like this in the rationalist sphere but i’m curious where all the non-rationalist-adjacent such people are. it seems many people in the broader world are either uncurious or mindkilled on such questions.
Seeing Like a State by James C Scott (I’ve read most of it, I liked it)
Bullshit Jobs, The Dawn of Everything, most books by David Graeber (I’ve read and liked long extracts of his work)
The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944–45 by Sir Ian Kershaw (I’ve read all of it and found it very valuable as a complete picture of a society melting down)
Open Letters by Vaclav Havel (I’ve read a lot of it, I like it a lot. He was the first president of Czechoslovakia and a famous communist dissident and his writing sketches out both what he finds soul-destroying about that system and what he thinks are the principles of good societies)
System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life by Robert Jervis (I’m reading this now, very good case studies about non-obvious phenomena in international relations)
Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets by Jeff Horwitz (Very good book about how social media platforms like Facebook shape and are shaped by modern civilisation, I read all of it)
All of these books to various degrees tackle the things you are describing from a holistic perspective. Hope this helps.
thanks for the recommendations, I’ll add these to my reading list!
I’m also curious if there is a location or social cluster or something where there are a lot of people who read stuff like this and talk about it productively and come up with new ideas. (again, other than the rationalist/ratadj/bay area community—I’m stipulating this because I think the ratsphere and bay area as a whole are a bubble with a lot of other correlated beliefs)
I suppose that sociologists, historians, philosophers, and (especially) futurologists do tackle the questions you describe, though maybe there is a sense in which they aren’t doing so in a zoomed-out enough way.
Vaclav Smil is great on this, I really liked his book Growth. He takes a very numerate but still very different view on history (e.g., ah, fitting a sigmoid to GDP numbers in the book).
(I don’t know if the book is good but my knee jerk reaction to fitting sigmoids to things is it’s a bit spooky—see https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08065)
Fwiw, I read a number of Smil’s books, and it was my impression that he strongly expressed that same opinion about sigmoids, and the mentioned example might have been precisely an attempt to illustrate how you can show everything with fitting the right sigmoid. (But it’s been awhile since I read his books)
where are all the people trying to understand how the world works? (in a broad sense that is useful for understanding the trajectory of the world: e.g things like why is society the way it is, why do people behave the way they do; why has technology developed the way it has, etc.; as opposed to zooming in and specializing, e.g fundamental physics research or biomed or whatever) there are a bunch of people like this in the rationalist sphere but i’m curious where all the non-rationalist-adjacent such people are. it seems many people in the broader world are either uncurious or mindkilled on such questions.
Some books you might like to read:
Seeing Like a State by James C Scott (I’ve read most of it, I liked it)
Bullshit Jobs, The Dawn of Everything, most books by David Graeber (I’ve read and liked long extracts of his work)
The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944–45 by Sir Ian Kershaw (I’ve read all of it and found it very valuable as a complete picture of a society melting down)
Open Letters by Vaclav Havel (I’ve read a lot of it, I like it a lot. He was the first president of Czechoslovakia and a famous communist dissident and his writing sketches out both what he finds soul-destroying about that system and what he thinks are the principles of good societies)
System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life by Robert Jervis (I’m reading this now, very good case studies about non-obvious phenomena in international relations)
Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the fight to expose its toxic secrets by Jeff Horwitz (Very good book about how social media platforms like Facebook shape and are shaped by modern civilisation, I read all of it)
All of these books to various degrees tackle the things you are describing from a holistic perspective. Hope this helps.
thanks for the recommendations, I’ll add these to my reading list!
I’m also curious if there is a location or social cluster or something where there are a lot of people who read stuff like this and talk about it productively and come up with new ideas. (again, other than the rationalist/ratadj/bay area community—I’m stipulating this because I think the ratsphere and bay area as a whole are a bubble with a lot of other correlated beliefs)
I suppose that sociologists, historians, philosophers, and (especially) futurologists do tackle the questions you describe, though maybe there is a sense in which they aren’t doing so in a zoomed-out enough way.
https://sites.santafe.edu/~wbarthur/thenatureoftechnology.htm
And many Santa Fe people more generally, e.g., https://www.sfipress.org/books/history-big-history-metahistory or https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582 or https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Chaos-Better-Economics/dp/0300273770
My understanding is that Bridgewater has a bunch of people like this, but they are unlikely to share their answers with the broader world.
Vaclav Smil is great on this, I really liked his book Growth. He takes a very numerate but still very different view on history (e.g., ah, fitting a sigmoid to GDP numbers in the book).
(I don’t know if the book is good but my knee jerk reaction to fitting sigmoids to things is it’s a bit spooky—see https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08065)
It is, and it’s the thing I’d most like Smil to read if I could recommend something to him.
Fwiw, I read a number of Smil’s books, and it was my impression that he strongly expressed that same opinion about sigmoids, and the mentioned example might have been precisely an attempt to illustrate how you can show everything with fitting the right sigmoid. (But it’s been awhile since I read his books)