Reading Notes 2018.11.14

# Rob Reich on "Is philanthropy bad for democracy?", from Rationally Speaking
--Many philanthropists donate to fancy schools that really don't need extra money. Maybe public policy should be: tax-deductible donations to support public schools should be conditioned on whether or not the school that you're supporting with your donation has a certain percentage of kids who are on free or induced lunch.
--It's true that the philanthropists could have had put the money into business or politics rather than philanthropy. But when an individual creates a company, as you were describing, or say gets elected to government and then has an opportunity to direct public resources, there are forms of accountability that are kind of internal to the marketplace and internal to the operation of government, that hold that power in check in a certain way. Philanthropic power by contrast is almost wholly unaccountable. >>這一點也是台灣的財團喜歡用財團法人控制企業的原因吧。台灣就連企業都沒有完整的監督與制衡，更別提慈善或公益事業的權力問題了。

# Christopher Chabris on "Collective intelligence & the ethics of A/B tests", from Rationally Speaking
--People who have good social and emotional skills enhance group intelligence more than experts of specific, technical fields.
--Women enhance group intelligence, but there may be a selection bias that the women got selected into the sample tend to be more intelligent than average women.

Reading Notes 2018.10.20

Claude Lévi-Strauss today, by Dan Sperber

[p.72] Faithful to the terminology of Saussure, he [Levi-Strauss] tends to refer to symbolic phenomena as "signifiers," and one might assume that the investigation is into an underlying code which pairs these signifiers with their "signified." Yet, if readers begin looking for the signifieds, they soon realize that the underlying code relates signifiers to other signifiers: there are no signifieds. Everything is meaningful, nothing is meant.

[p.74] If the question asked were: "Why should a given social group consider itself to stand in a special relationship to, say, eagles?," only unsatisfactory answers could be given: "Because they are mistaken about ancestry," or "because they think they resemble eagles and assume this implies a relationship." Explaining strange behavior by even stranger intellectual errors is no explanation at all.

Levi-Strauss points out that the human-animal relationship can be understood in a third, even more systemic way: neither as a set of dyadic relationships between individual items, nor as a dyadic relationship between sets of individual items, but as a second-degree dyadic relationship between two sets of first-degree relationship:

On the one hand there are animals which differ from each other (in that they belong to distinct species, each of which has its own physical appearance and mode of life), and on the other hand there are men...who also differ from each other (in that they are distributed among different segments of the society, each occupying a particular position in the social structure.). The resemblance presupposed by so-called totemic representations is between these two systems of differences (Levi-Strauss 1963b: 77).

Seen in this light, the resource to animal species provides a unique system of differences. Species do not overlap, they look different, they live differently, they offer an endless choice of opposed features that can be used to contrast human groups......If, for instance, a tribe were divided into three clans named after the eagle, the bear, and the turtle, this might suggest that we concentrate on the natural element of each of these species, and further contrast the three clans as associated with sky, earth, and water.

# Christopher Chabris on "Collective intelligence & the ethics of A/B tests", from Rationally Speaking
--People who have good social and emotional skills enhance group intelligence more than experts of specific, technical fields.
--Women enhance group intelligence, but there may be a selection bias that the women got selected into the sample tend to be more intelligent than average women.

約瑟和他的兄弟們 by 曾慶豹

比起其他高遠的神學研究，此書讀來異常親切，讓我重新理解一些人與事。由此回望，我經驗中的那些「好」顯得無比卑微、天真與脆弱，而那些「壞」原來還有千百個理由可以更壞。我該慶幸自己不曾真正經驗過那核心裡的惡嗎？

[p.2] 有一次在一位老牧師的書架上翻看到一本書《共黨能和宗教和平共存嗎》......令我感到興趣的莫過於是牧師在扉頁註記了一段話：

反共不是政治

「反共不是政治」絕不是一句簡單的話，他基本上反應了兩種情況：一方面是暗示著基督教最好不要涉入政治，堅持政教分離的原則，另一方面則是把反共產黨、反無神論提高到比政治更高的層次，即它的宗教性或基督徒口中所說的「屬靈戰爭」。