reading list May 2025

  • Play Anything
  • The Gift
  • The End of certainty
  • Beginning of Infinity
  • Fabric of Reality
  • How Information Grows
  • Debt: The First 1,000 Years
  • The History of Everything (Graeber)
  • The Brothers Karamzov
    • is Alyosha outside the economy? A good exemplar of gift giving?
      • yes, he “has access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty”

Non-equilibrium (Prigogine) is also what a gift is. (no expectation of accounting for value such that there can be an equilibrium of exchange)

A growing spiral. The whole idea of economy; does it imply scarce resources? If knowledge is truly infinite, it’s not really an economy at all. So when knowledge grows and is considered Wealth, none of that is “economical” because it is NOT scarce. It is universal. The Gift may also be universal. The gift we cannot eat.

Science, knowledge are gifts growing forever, never consumed. Maybe even a burning bush.

And society comes into the picture: Hyde points out some social fabric is destroyed when exchange happens. “Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe’s gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.” - The Gift p 5

“When you give a gift there is momentum”

makes me think of open source perhaps contributing to real wealth creation and progress.

“scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow.” “If money goes, money comes. If money stays, death comes”

“Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases.” p 23

what is the question?

  • what progress has humanity made?
    • is the only real kind knowledge? order as in Hidalgo’s book? How Information Grows
  • spontaneous order: what is it? why does talking about it matter at all?
  • should we ask how children can be adults rather than how man differs from woman?
    • how does becoming a woman differ from becoming a man? does this difference matter? or do we give the child the same goal and path regardless of gender? Im leaning toward the latter
  • what is the role of our economy? is there a better question than “is capitalism the best system”? what system can we choose?
    • share over the communication networks we have (internet)
  • does market exchange retard actual progress?
    • pro: how instrumental was exchange to indsutrial revolution
      • was it market exchange or gift “exchange”? do we usually miss the distinction?
    • con: it was sharing that enabled the industrial revolution IN SPITE of economic wealth.
      • could it have been better without market exchange? how would sharing persist without the market component?
    • how does violence and mimesis come in to this? what even IS the social fabric?
      • do we need to be against an out group?
        • pro: pluralism and competiton between cultural groups is necessary for humanity “learning” which solution works where and when
  • how are the words “motion” and “emotion” related?
  • Are there any blockchain applications which can be based on these old ideas of gift, ownership? what IS digital wampum? I hold it now, on its journey through different social groups. provenance IS the value of the gift, knowing who had it in the chain of giving. IS this like works of art? Always moving between museums.
    • like Kula necklaces, “‘ceremonial gifts’… social use far exceeds their practical use”
  • how real is ownership? We don’t even own anything really anyway. SO back to one of the above questions: did or does any of the violently enforced ownership laws help or hurt the progress of humanity? Even among the Kula, what happened when too many men became “slow” in moving their gifts forward? WHat about the things that DID have “practical use”? Steward something as capital; is that possible? What would Hyde say? What if you treated the gift as capital so that you could then give MORE goats than you received?
  • “To possess is to give” among the Kula. Like the aplha male being the one who gives away the most resources. But why is he receiving more resources (even as gifts) than others? Does giving CAUSE receiving as well? It might very well do. (Matthew effect)
    • Malinowski says “here the natives differ from us notably. A man who owns a thing is naturally expected to share it distribute it, to be its trustee and dispenser”. But do they differ from “us” in this way at all??? I dont think so. “We” too say to give is to possess; start by helping others, by “deserving” success in Munger’s words.
  • The trinity emerges from the need of the minimal number of participants in a gift circle being three. Each then has a giver and givee. this minimum is requried to structurally enforce the prohibition on discussing the relative values of the gifts.
    • the blindness of not knowing what happened along the chain (is this the needed privacy?) seems to be necessary to keep from becoming economic. does blindness keep it from becoming scarce?
    • there is a danger of the gift to stop if there were any less than three members
  • do we need to send our gifts to not just a binary exchange to realize the …. growth spiral? to keep the gift in motion… to keep everything in motion. the gift is everything
  • “with the priests involved, the gift must leave the hunters’ sight before it returns to the woods. The riests take on or incarnate the position of the third thing to avoid binary relation of the hunters and forest which by itself would not be abundant.”
    • what about if the priests and hunters forgot the forest?
      • is this the church forgetting God? or the Bible as in Catholic church not publishing the Bible
  • “We stand before a bonfire or even a burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf” Gift p 20
    • This is why Palahniuk mentions this booK! FIght Club is all about this kinda. The odd release of the Narrator’s bombed out apartment. Fight CLub meditates on where we stand in the gift circle
  • Whitman mentions lacy jags. Like the Human instrumentality project in evangelion. An enlargement of our sense of self (ego) and thereby a “pleasing odor to the Lord”
  • I railed jokingly against the Kazaa user for taking my song. as if it were eaten up by him taking it. The easy duplication of “information” means the song can be given and given and never used up.
    • “Am I a machine? I shall be told I can use up my emotions by using them, next?” gift p 21
  • is our “capitalism” actually just generous stewardship where it succeeds in growing wealth? so where does it go wrong? anywhere?

250527 thoughts

  • what progress has anyone made?

    • live virtuously within your own lifetime (self-development)
      • ben franklin
      • socrates
      • marcus aurelius
    • end of slavery
      • maybe we still have wage slaves (sometimes this is voluntary?)
    • knowledge
      • measured by.., material abundance?
      • better than GDP: beggar’s bowl
        • flow rate through the beggar’s bowl
          • the bowl would ideally be growing by more and more people adopting an attitude of reception and giving (participation in gift cycle)

  • how is our speech the same as our fear? ( I wrote this in a journal once)

    • well we have to pay attention to speak right? so if fear is attention, we “fear” every word we speak by necessity