Spaciousness and Crowding

These are the best sentences from Chapter 5 of Space and Place.

Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom...A healthy being welcomes constraint and freedom, the boundedness of place and the exposure of space.

Solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity.

Etiquette and rudeness are opposite means to the same end: helping people to avoid contact when such contact threatens to be too intense.

Living constantly in a small, close-knit group tends to curtail the enlargement of human sympathy in two antipodal directions: toward one pole, an intimacy between unique individuals that transcends camaraderie and kinship ties; and toward the other, a generalized concern for human welfare everywhere.

The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires, and cramped when it frustrates them.

I've got to say this is the best chapter of the book, so far.

宇宙人

From Yi-Fu Tuan：

一起歌唱，一起面对眼前的困境，我们不知不觉地融化成为一个整体，感受到我们是大家庭的一员。相反的，沉思，特别是带有反省，讽刺，或是质疑的思考 -- 作为物质文明丰富的现代人特有现象 -- 却带有把我们从社会团体和家庭中孤立出来的危险性.

对于我们这些容易受伤，时常渴望沉浸于和我们同类的人一起闭眼歌唱的感觉的现代人来说，这种思考所带来的孤立常常使我们感到深深的失落。

但是思考也给我们带来两层收获：它让我们感到一种与陌生人，异地他乡以及这个宇宙世界的息息相关，这种关联可能是深层和严肃的，也可能是轻松愉快的；它同时让我们接受一个我们作为人类必须接受的现实：我们最终都是无家可归的流浪人，无论我们在那里，那都不是我们永远的归宿， 不管我们多么害怕和逃避这个现实。

那作为一个宇宙人意味着什么了？宇宙人认为思考带来的收获大于它带来的失落。在经历和体验过绚丽的世界后，他（她）再也不愿意回到和驻留在那种家所带来的莫另两可的安全感。

Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place. By contrast, thinking--especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies--threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home. As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation--of being a unique individual--can be felt as a deep loss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from ourimmediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos--to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.

Postmodernism

I did not realize that I've been a subscriber to Postmodernism until I read this. I think a lot of my postmodernism views come from Karl Weick, I wonder if he would call himself a postmodernist.

In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality.

This is very close to Weick's retrospective sensemaking.

Yi-Fu Tuan

This is what I wan to read more. I think I will pick up a few books from Yi-Fu Tuan this summer. My sense is that he has really reached a point where he can truly appreciate both Western and Oriental cultures. I am so eager to explore this.

Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place. By contrast, thinking--especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies--threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home. As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation--of being a unique individual--can be felt as a deep loss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our
immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos--to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she (like Mole [in The Wind in the Willows]) will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth.

What it means to be a liberal?

From Chicago Tribute a law professor tries to clear the name for liberals. Of his 10 propositions of what liberals stand for, the top one rings very much true to me:

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism. Liberals understand, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed, that "time has upset any fighting faiths." Liberals are skeptical of censorship and celebrate free and open debate.

There have been many times I reflected and took a turn in a my life when I discovered my own ignorance. I used to think Bill O'Reilly was honest and independent.

When I look at the people that have shaped my way of thinking in some way or other, Bill Maher, Karl Weick, Carl Jung, and Tyler Cowen recently, they tend to have one thing in common that they admit that they are not sure about their own truths, and they question how others can be so sure. In a world of vast uncertainties, having concrete rules is one way of wading through the jungles, but you run the risks of dogmatizing your thinking and missing the richness and nuances of life. Trial-and-error, on the other hand, could be untidy and sometime painful, but it's likely to more fruitful in the end.

On Bias and Values

Interesting discussion on on bias and values on MR:

I understand procedural bias, which happens when a person throws out valuable information because he doesn't like the conclusion. And I understand ideological rigidity, which suggests that a person's view on one issue predicts his view on most other issues far too readily. I also understand that a curious and open-minded person should be absorbing enough
information to change (how much?) percent of his views every (how many?) years or so. (Is it worse if I am changing my views in predictable fashion, or should the change be a random walk?) But is it so bad for the prolific to be predictable? Am I not allowed to have a shelf life?

Janet takes a bit further:

...[V]alue judgements are hard to argue with--is green a better colour than blue? Should we have justice or peace? Thus, we all seek to make our value preferences into facts, rather than opinions.

I think one of the biggest problems facing economists, and to some degree other social scientists, is the feeling that if you're just a little bit willing to fudge facts, you could do a great deal of good. If you'd torture the numbers just a little--not even torture, really, just waterboarding and a few stress positions--you could convince people to do what you know, deep in your heart, is
the right thing. If you produce numbers showing that tax cuts increase tax revenue, or the minimum wage increases jobs, or GDP doubles for every 10% increase in the salaries of economists--why, you could do a whole world of good.

Some good remarks in the comments:

...in the physical sciences (most of them) you can take a thousand cases that are identical except for one variable, and see what laws are true. That'll quash the debate pretty nicely. Social sciences can't hope to have anywhere near that kind of experimental precision.

...You should read "On Certainty" by Ludwig Wittgenstein. You are getting into some deep water about how people "know" things and when they are willing to discard one belief for another. Do you revise your political beliefs based on
what you read & study? Or do you test what you read and study AGAINST your political views? For most people, there's a bit of both going on all the time. You have to hold some beliefs as certain, beyond a doubt, in order to process the truth value of a new piece of information. But it's tricky, and far from logical, even for the best of us.

...Just because value judgments are hard to argue with, doesn't mean they are impossible to argue with. People who work on ethical and political theory, both inside and outside academia, think very hard about these questions and, even when they disagree, they have a great deal to say on the question...... it is also important to note that their is a distinction between *value judgments* and matters of taste. If I like corn bisque and you like clam chowder, arguments about which is better are trivial (although not useless!); it could simply be that one of us likes corn bisque, and the other likes clam chowder. But value judgments are not matters of taste.

...[s]tatistical results are best used to find if something is important, not if it is true.

Here is one thing I thought of after reading this: who is better suited to be a good social scientist? A passionate hot-head or a cold-hearted rational person? I would strongly argue for the latter. As a social scientist, economist included, you will need a lot more discipline to guard against your emotions seeping into your rational judgements. So if you know you are a emotional person by nature, go pursue a career in the fields of natural science or engineering, trust me, you will be better off this way.