The Evolving Library Problem

Mary Beard’s short musing on how to tidy up and organise a sprawling library, ends with the fear that physical print libraries may be a thing of the past anyway. I think she’s wrong there.

Libraries are an infrequent but recurring theme of mine, and my own library is at that sad state of being so disorganised, following a couple of years of not-quite-complete house “remodelling”, that I actually have the same problem. I need to do something.

ISBN ordering seems arcane but, as with all good information management, meaningless index numbers are better than any other coding of what is meaningful or significant about the objects. Books that fall outside ISBN numbering can add a dummy “My-ISBN” prefix and follow the same conventions.

Extensible tagging can be used to add your own significance to the indexed database. After all, as well as having enough space to organise and evolve, such significance will evolve as our agendas develop over time,. And, there will be physical constraints like “oversize” shelves for individual books that disrupt efficient average shelf sizes. Having an indexed database ensure these kind of exceptions can also be handled with additional tags. The bonus is that using ISBN’s can also link you to other global library meta-data about the books you own. ISBN is the right way.

I’m not quite at Karl Lagerfeld’s “sideways library” state, but a good 40% of my books are currently in random stacks for assorted long-forgotten temporary reasons, and mostly not on or anywhere near the actually library shelves..

Two “Mind” Conferences Storified

Last week & weekend I followed two conferences via Twitter. HumanMind2017 and BreakingConvention.

#HumanMind2017 I had originally intended to attend in Cambridge (partly because I have a nostalgic soft-spot for The Møller Centre where it was held), but diary log-jam meant I overlooked doing anything about it until they started Tweeting. I ended up following them very closely and interacting via Twitter. Excellent multi-discipline event bringing international neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers together around two existing Cambridge and London based research projects. Felt very constructive and important. I shall be looking out for their next get-together, and for any published proceedings or other outputs.

Active Handles: Chris Meyns – Human Mind Project – New Directions Project – And my own in responses mainly to these.
HashTags: #HumanMind2017 – #GC17 – June 27 to 29 +/- days.
Fixed Sources: Tim Crane’s “New Directions” Cambridge Uni project –  Colin Blakemore’s  “Human Mind“, London Uni School of Advance Study project – The Human Mind Conference 2017

#BreakingConvention (#4) I had not even noticed until it was happening and I simply watched out if the corner of my eye, but its focus was alternative (non-mainstream science) views of consciousness and altered-states thereof. Always fascinating. Noticed one contributor was Rupert Sheldrake of Morphic Resonance infamy, but many on Psychedelics too. Didn’t notice Steven Reid? (Ha, he was there, ironically he is the conference press-officer.)  Will share with others.

Active Handles: @BreakingCon – Jules Evans
HashTags: – #BreakingConvention – #BC4 – #BC17 – June 30 to July 2 +/- days
Fixed Sources: Breaking Convention

[Ha, and coinciding with 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”, which I mentioned a week or so ago. Not sure what the ’09 means on the poster?]

[Storify – tried out but couldn’t secure more than 50 items per story, so left very disjointed still. Will have to hope Twitter and other links do not rot in the meantime. Help anyone?]

MMT – Magic (Modern Money) Tree “Theory”

This is just a quick (unedited) reaction post. “Modern Money Theory” deserves more, but I have too many topics on the go right now, and I can’t claim to be expert enough anyway.

Big fan of @PaulMasonNews economic proposals in PostCapitalism, but can’t stand his partisan politics. (See Labour Populism). Long time correspondent David Morey has a banking background as well as deep philosophical interests, and has been posting on Modern Money regularly over the years. Chris @contronline posted “The Magic Money Tree is Real” in response to the recent political chatterings over government spending priorities. The popular reaction to the whole meme is the degeneration of partisan politics into tyrannical populism. However, as Chris says, Magic Money Tree (Modern Money) Theory is not partisan, it’s neutral theory. Same as the explicitly Marxist ideas in PostCapitalism, the mechanisms of how things could work can still be managed by our social priorities.

Things I get:

Debt or a promise to pay being a Government promise, the same monetary value linked to tax repaid in return. (But it’s also linked to bonds used to raise debt finance within the economy.)

Traditional relative competitiveness: with two sides of a trade one is always better off than the other, BUT the other is still better off than it would be in the absence of the trade. Implies not just between individuals, but between states or fiscal constituencies, there need to be trade boundaries with exchange value in the currency itself. The point of MMT is that even without this inter-state trade, the value in the money can still be maintained by the government promise in the state economy, and an isolated or even a single global economy is still possible. However big the state “debt”, the two-way trust is that ongoing liabilities will always be paid.

My remaining doubts and differences (on both MMT and PostCapitalism) are entirely about how things might actually work in practice:

These are still “just theory” and IMHO, the biggest problem with economics in general is that it is “autistic” to believe the economy runs predictively on any objective theory, capitalist / traditional money or otherwise. Goods and services as objects. Value as numbers. Decisions as arithmetic. (This is the root of my main agenda.)

In fact real economics is almost entirely about trust and psychology and gaming of these, and experience and wisdom and fault-tolerance and irreversibility and much more. There will always be unintended incentives to game the system and hence unintended consequences.

If there is only one economy (or each economy is monetarily independent) everything depends on trust in that money supplier.

Trust is the one thing the world is really short of right now. Apparently every statement must be backed by objective evidence. The default position is that everyone who makes a mistake, or makes a statement we disagree with, must be part of some evil conspiracy. Our job is to label them as evil or ridicule them as idiots apparently. Opposition politics has been replaced with populist tyranny – the free-democratic opposition concepts of criticism and holding to account have been totally lost.

And the real question – even if we “trust” in the new model for a brave new world – is the Irish question. How do we get there from here? We can’t start anywhere but where we are now. So, revolution or evolution? And whilst we don’t need to predict all the what-ifs, we have to know how we would handle classes of problem, plan B’s, escape-routes and off-ramps. There are the billions of people’s lives at stake.

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[Post Note : Book review link from David.]