Let’s begin this post with a comment by Chris Schuck on my recent video about The Data Detective by Tim Harford. Chris wrote: Some of the books in this genre look really great, but I was also thinking about how these statistical/quant critical thinking analyses are often at their most effective when placed in the context of a specific debate or social problem, often by attentive journalists. Zeynep Tufekci’s writing on the pandemic these past…
Tim Harford’s (2021) book, Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, isn’t really about statistical methods. It has a much broader scope, and it is less technical than book on methods. It deals with knowledge in general, our relationship with knowledge, and the factors that determine that relationship for individuals and collectives. The book is very well-written. You get the sense that Harford has written the text slowly and patiently, based on…
Over a period of five months, we read this collection of “occasional writings” by Umberto Eco (translated to English by Richard Dixon). Today was the final session, where we discussed Eco’s short essay on Wikileaks. Discussing this collection together with our small group has been the longest and best-sustained group project, thus far, associated with my YouTube Channel and Patreon. I am very grateful to everyone who attended the sessions, hoping you all know how…
… it is utterly useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy. Chesterton’s book Saint Francis of Assisi was published in 1923, about two decades after the publication of Heretics (1905) and a decade before the publication of Saint Thomas Aquinas: The…
Sometimes it is difficult to write because there is something else that needs to be written, something more urgent, more pressing, more alive, and more real. A desire for being expressed, a desire for being written, is a quality of some experiences. Perhaps by giving expression to something that isn’t charged with that desire, we are reminded of the desire and its possible aims. Perhaps this is why writing can be discomforting, because it could…