Each Sunday I compose a list of the most thought-provoking and interesting content I’ve consumed during the past week. Primarily as a way to keep inventory of material that influenced me and my way of thinking.
Papers/Notes
Civilian Morale During the Second World War – Responses to Air Raids Re-examined (2004) by Edgar Jones et al.
”We sought to re-examine this interpretation. Were people as resilient, adaptable, and impervious to the stress of air raids as official histories have claimed? If people did break down, what had caused this to happen and, for those who survived apparently unscathed, what were the preventive factors?”
”In 1942, in the aftermath of the Blitz, R. D. Gillespie wrote: ‘one of the most striking things about the effects of the war on the civilian population has been the relative rarity of pathological mental disturbances among the civilians exposed to air-raids’. Indeed, in 1941, the clinic set up in London by Edward Glover and other psychoanalysts to treat those traumatized by air raids was forced to close because they had no patients. Responsible for a nationwide survey of the incidence of neuroses among the general population, C. P. Blacker wrote that ‘it was a source of almost universal surprise that, throughout the aerial bombardments of the civilian population in 1940 and 1941, very few of these conditions material- ised’.”
”Contemporaries struggled to explain why the predicted epidemic of air-raid neurosis failed to appear. If so many soldiers had succumbed to shell shock during the First World War why, then, did civilians behave so differently when exposed to the dangers of bombing? . . . As Vernon observed, the civilian was not: tempted to think that it would be an advantage to be sick or wounded, and he is usually already in, or close to, his own home. The importance of sentiments centred around the home in preserving mental stability is further indicated by the tendency towards deterioration . . . among those whose homes are destroyed.”
”In the event, it seems that civilians proved to be far more resilient in the face of war’s technological advances than planners had predicted. It may well be that this was because they underestimated their adaptability and resourcefulness, but also because the length and scale of the conflict had involved so many in constructive participant roles.”
Writings/Essays
The Poison We Pick by Andrew Sullivan.
”When we see the addicted stumbling around like drunk ghosts, or collapsed on sidewalks or in restrooms, their faces pale, their skin riddled with infection, their eyes dead to the world, we often see only misery. What we do not see is what they see: In those moments, they feel beyond gravity, entranced away from pain and sadness. In the addict’s eyes, it is those who are sober who are asleep. That is why the police and EMS workers who rescue those slipping toward death by administering blasts of naloxone — a powerful antidote, without which death rates would be even higher — are almost never thanked. They are hated. They ruined the high. And some part of being free from all pain makes you indifferent to death itself. Death is, after all, the greatest of existential pains. “Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death,” Cocteau observed. “To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”‘
New Details Shed Light on Lukashenko’s Human Trafficking Network by Jürgen Dahlkamp, Christina Hebel, Muriel Kalisch, Steffen Lüdke & Maximilian Popp.
Choosing Civilization by Rob Henderson.
Podcasts/Conversations
Simon DeDeo on Good Explanations & Diseases of Epistemology, Complexity by the Santa Fe Institute.
Plato’s Gorgias, In Our Time.
Max Tegmark on Why Treating Humanity Like a Child Will Save Us All (Part 1), People I (Mostly) Admire.
Max Tegmark on Why Superhuman Artificial Intelligence Won’t be Our Slave (Part 2), People I (Mostly) Admire.
Long vol, short prediction models 