The Sixth Extinction: Elizabeth Kolbert

[rrneck]

7. Collapse is very good. I recommend it.

I tried to listen to one of Diamond's TED talks. He's a much better writer than lecturer. While Haidt and Pinker are doing some pretty interesting stuff, one of the most important books I've seen lately is The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. It could be because it's very readable and even a mathametical dunce like me can almost keep up with what he's talking about. But it seems that the basic thrust of the book is that humans are constantly tripped up by our inability to understand random events and a large part of that reason is our inability to select proper datasets.

The world is just so fucking big. As I recall, as late as the mid twentieth century most agriculture was still being done with horses and mules. A large part of Germany's blitzkrieg was supported with horses. It just hasn't been that long since human muscle was still the predominate way we got things done around here. That's part of the point of Kolberg's book. It's not just climate change, it's the rate of change. We've spent the last seven thousand years working on the world around us, maybe we should spend the next seven thousand working on the world within.