Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2019–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Small is Beautiful" is sort of a difficult read. I picked up a copy of "Small Is Beautiful in the 21st Century: The legacy of E.F. Schumacher" by his daughter Diana Schumacher. It hits all the main points while being a little better organized.
I went a little nuts with modern anthropology and absolutely adore Giddens. He was actually the person I was visiting in London when I bumped into Graber. "The Consequences of Modernity" is a bit dense and filled with jargon, but I love it.
There was another post I commented on and mentioned "Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More," and while it's not a general-purpose discussion of how we model social systems, it is a great read. It's where the word "HyperNormalization" comes from and tells the story of the last generation of soviet citizens who noticed things weren't working too well, but grew up in a world where there were no alternatives to state bureaucracy and politics.
I also read a fair amount about pedagogy since I'm interested in structured systems of developing denotational systems for modeling human knowledge with the objective of communicating said knowledge. I love Sylvia Ashton-Warner. She wrote an autobiography called "Teacher" that's worth a read. I hung out with Seymour Papert and Cindi Solomon when I was a kid, so I have to mention Mindstorms. And Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" has some interesting bits if you can handle the 70s communista jargon. It's not full-on marxist, but if you're sensitive to such things, it can be distracting. But... what they all have in common is a framework for how to communicate (potentially) complex models and knowledge maps.
Read everything you can find by Jung, McLuhan and Claude Levi-Strauss.
"Eros and Magic in the Reniassance" by Ioan Cuilianu. Then read it again because it's hard to figure out what you just read when you only read it once.
For fun I've read some of the articles and books by Rory Sutherland.
- It was very weird to go the other way around and have read Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More before HyperNormalisation came out.
I love Bitter Lake and The Power of Nightmares, but cannot stand HyperNormalisation for having almost nothing to do with the book's concepts, regardless of whether it stands on its own.
- HyperNormalisation (2016) is a documentary film by Adam Curtis; the word/concept is from a book, so maybe that's what you're referring to? I have only seen the film myself.
As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...
In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)
> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.
> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...
- meh. I would be happier with this article if it demonstrated familiarity with the source material. "Del Rigor en la Ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science) was Borges (hilarious) investigation into Korzybski's General Semantics, a fact that was surprisingly absent from the text. Borges implied "the map is not the territory," but Korzybski actually came out in said it a decade or so before Borges wrote the story in question. Understanding the themes of Borges story is greatly informed by a passing familiarity with Korzybski's work. WorldCat tells me the 4th edition of "Science and Sanity" is widely held by libraries, and if you're interested in the assertions made in this article, you might enjoy reading (at least parts of) it.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/369632
The author completely missed the point Borges (and Korzybski) made about the utility of maps. Maps (according to both) are abstractions which allow the user to ignore irrelevant aspects of reality so other, more interesting facets come into sharper resolve. This might be why Beck's London Tube map is so well regarded. It allows the user to easily ignore aspects that are not germane to the task of deciding where and when to get on and off the tube.
But is a scientific paradigm like a map? Certainly it is an abstraction, if we take Kuhn's definition. If you're interested, I can recommend both "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and "The Essential Tension : Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change" by Kuhn.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/4660423077
https://search.worldcat.org/title/3034084
Calling scientific paradigms maps isn't wrong, per se, but it does create more of a meta-metaphor, and a weak one at that.
Also. No. Maxwell did not replace a patchwork of equations with four short ones. That was Heaviside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside
Something we don't mention in polite society these days is that Maxwell proposed electromagnetic waves as propagating through an aether:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Electricity_and...
If you're going to talk about new paradigms, Maxwell is a great example, but his story is not complete without mentioning Heaviside, Michelson and Morley.
Also... I bristle at the phrase "Hypernormal Science." It's also introduced without definition or reference. Collins, et al describe it as distinct from (though seemingly related to) the word "Hypernormal" as coined by Yurchak in "Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More."
https://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-abstract/31/2/262/112751...
https://search.worldcat.org/title/1572419463
Or if you're short on time, you can get an entertaining (though not as enlightening) description from Adam Curtis' 2016 documentary HyperNormalization. You won't come away from it with a better understanding of AI, General Semantics or Popperian falsifiability, but it has a striking visual style and a very good soundtrack. And may lead to a better understanding of "hypernormal science."
And getting back to the Michelson-Morley experiment. The author talks about how their results did not cause the scientific establishment to abandon the concept of luminiferous aether. Certainly there is conservatism in science. Gigging science-monkeys tend to want to see interesting results replicated.
And this was one of the issues with the MM experiment. It took a while to replicate. We're MUCH better at replicating it these days and I would guess that thousands (maybe hundreds) of physics undergrads did this very task last year. But we've had over a century of pedagogical experience w/ this experiment. We know how to structure it to get the results we want. This was not the case in the late 1800s and in fact, several early attempts to replicate the experiment suggested the existence of an aether which was drifting slowly towards Cleveland.
And what does it say that heat flow, fluid flow, diffusion and electrostatics share equations? Does it say there's something fundamental in reality? Or does it say there's something fundamental in the way we model reality?
That being said... I think the author has hit upon something here... people are often wary of evidence which contradicts experience, even when that evidence (and not experience) is more correct.
But each of the examples he provides glosses over the process by which new paradigms overrode the old.
I deeply appreciate the author avoiding slavish fealty to fashionable AI trends. He probably could have gone further to describe more representational weakness of ESM3 and GNoME.
I fear, however, he has missed the point. It's less interesting to describe the messy ways in which AI fails than to describe the messy ways in which humans succeed. The process by which paradigms shift is messy, social and fundamentally human. It often has more to do with qualitative explanations than quantitative science. Science, as a human endeavor, is very much a story-telling exercise.
- > I’m more and more desensitised. If anything, I found it demoralising.
Reminds of this explanation of the soviet era 'hypernormalization':
"The word hypernormalization was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation."[0]
- I believe what he's referring to is this:
> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.[6]
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