Friday Finds (Gin, Imitation, Scruton, Internet, Science)

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

This week, I published a new essay called Imitate, then Innovate, which has been months in the making.

The premise is simple but counterintuitive: Imitating others is the fastest way to discover your unique style. Modern creators do the opposite, though. They stubbornly insist on originality, which they hold as their highest virtue — even when it comes at the expense of quality.

Here's what else I want to share this week:

1. The Future of Education: My Twitter thread about what the future of education looks like. Though you can read the whole thing in a neat layout here, I recommend reading it directly because the comments are very illuminating, both as a worthy critique and to see how pessimistic people are about education reform. ​
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2. ​What You Can Learn from Picasso: My video about the Imitate, then Innovate philosophy. In addition to Picasso, I focus on creators like Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Benny, and Quentin Tarantino.​
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3. ​What is Write of Passage Workshop: At Write of Passage, we're exploring the cutting-edge of education. This workshop will give you a sense for what we're doing. Specifically, we talked about:

• Multi-level learning: Studio-quality production with hundreds of students, close-knit Mentor Groups of 20-30 peers, and 1:1 live exercise sprints with partners.
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• Social, Internet-native learning: Students refine their ideas through conversations from peers and feedback from our team of trained editors.
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• 300 students from 30+ countries connected by deep curiosity and a belief in the power of ideas.

Friday Finds

​​Shop Class as Soulcraft: One of the best ways to find good things to read is to look for the essays that were so good that they eventually became books. For a series of essays that eventually became books, I recommend this compilation from Joe Wells. This essay reveals the downsides in the transition from physical labor to knowledge work. Manual trades have lost their honor and the material world has lost its mystique. So has craftsmanship, where people pursue excellence for its own sake. Part of the challenge is that the media narrative is shaped by urbanites who prioritize knowledge work and vaguely scoff at manual laborers. But in praise of craftsmanship, the author writes: "The tangible elements of craft were appealing as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the professional classes."

​Where Ideologies Come From: Why are so many old ideologies coming back into the public sphere? This essay offers an answer through the prism of a social science article called Ideologies of Delayed Industrialization. It describes the persistent cultural patterns that follow the same kinds of rapid and transformative societal changes that the Internet is now bringing to society. When the tectonic plates shift, leaders jostle for power by integrating old ideologies with the fashions of the present. From Gandhi to Confucius to The New York Times, this essay describes the persistence of this cultural pattern.

Roger Scruton: When one of the leading conservative thinkers died, and I knew almost nothing about him. I wanted to change that. As Nassim Taleb wrote: “Rest in Peace, Roger Scruton. Your memory and your work will be remembered. Ad vitam aeternam. Fiercely independent, he was one of the last thinkers who used their own head.” Of everything he's published, I think he's best while talking about beauty, and I recommend his documentary on the subject. BBC took it down because it didn’t stand with their values, so the only available version is pirated and has Portuguese subtitles. Of course, this is how you know it’s a great documentary. He also has a short book called Beauty. For an introduction, I also recommend this 11-minute video on why modern culture is degenerating and this essay on the cultural significance of pop music.

​Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus: Reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody was one of those moments where I realized how transformative the Internet could become. This speech is a good place to start. He compares modern sitcoms to gin during the Industrial Revolution. People didn’t know what to do with their lives, so they drank and drank and drank. Now, they watch and watch and watch. Only later did society wake up to new ways of living, made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Shirky argues that something similar has happened since World War II. But this time, the social lubricant wasn’t liquor but sitcoms. We spent most of our free time watching TV. Now, with the Internet, we have a giant cognitive surplus. Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year. Meanwhile, the whole Wikipedia project — every page, every edit, every line of code, and every translation — represents the result of roughly 100 million hours of human thought. Every year, we therefore devote ~2,000 Wikipedia projects to watching television. What if we could transfer some of that energy into something more generative?

​Slowed Progress in Science: Here’s a theory I’ve never considered: What if scientific progress is slowing because there are too many papers being published? What if, out of a desire to increase the rate of scientific progress, we’ve actually made it hard for scientists to grapple with transformative ideas? That’s the thesis of this paper. Basically, the authors argue that past a certain point, the more papers that are published in a given field, the more citations flow to already well-cited papers — which ossifies the canon.