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The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe

References to Weber in the literature on preindustrial Europe published by economists during the last fifty years show that the more economists have rehabilitated culture as an autonomous force of economic change, the more they have heralded Weber as a precursor of their endeavors. The casting of Weber in such terms, moreover, has gone hand in hand with a decline, rather than an increase, in conversations between economists, sociologists, historians, and other humanists and social scientists interested in the role of culture in the formation of modern economic life.

Trivellato, Francesca. “The Ghosts of Max Weber in the Economic History of Preindustrial Europe.” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 4, no. 2 (2023): 332-376. doi.org/10.1353/cap.2023.a9176.

@econhist @economics

attribution: Ernst Gottmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

How much of national income goes to the richest 1%?

You might expect these numbers to be strongly correlated to a country’s level of economic development. But this isn’t always the case. In the United States, for example, 1% of its population takes home 21% of national income. This is relatively high globally.

ourworldindata.org/data-insigh

@economics

Should social media come with a health warning?

Reports have variously cited cyberbullying, exposure to violent or harmful content, and the promotion of unrealistic body standards, for example, as potential key triggers of low mood and disorders like anxiety and depression.

technologyreview.com/2024/06/2

@socialmedia

Identifying Bible Interpolations The False Pen of the Scribes!

…we work on learning how to spot and identify texts of the Bible, whether Hebrew Bible/O.T. or New Testament, that have been overlaid with what appear to be disjunctive interpolations inserted for polemical reasons.

length: twenty minutes and one second.

youtube.com/watch?v=te5JhmPHX5

@religion

Wittgenstein and the liar

In what follows, a reading of Wittgenstein’s remarks will be offered according to which Wittgenstein subscribes to a form of dialetheism (that is, the view that there are sentences that are both true and false). In contrast to modern dialetheist approaches to the Liar, however, some of Wittgenstein’s remarks suggest combining a dialetheist position with what is called ‘logical nihilism’ (that is, the view that there are no universally valid inference rules).

Bromand, J. Wittgenstein and the liar. Synthese 204, 8 (2024). doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-046 @philosophy

Secondary Schools: Iberian Scholasticism

The “School of Salamanca,” founded by Francisco Vitoria, and the commentators of Coimbra are at the center of a movement sometimes called the “Second Scholastic.”

historyofphilosophy.net/iberia

@philosophy

attribution: Claus Grünstäudl w18, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Long-lost Assyrian military camp devastated by ‘the angel of the Lord’ finally found, scientist claims

At the British Museum in London, there is a relief depicting the siege of Lachish, and it shows the Assyrian camp. Stephen Compton, an independent scholar who specializes in Near Eastern Archaeology, compared this relief to photos from the early to mid-20th century which show Lachish. He identified a site north of Lachish with an oval shaped structure with walls that he thinks may have been the Assyrians’ camp.

livescience.com/archaeology/lo

@archaeodons @histodon @histodons

@bibliolater @bookstodon

Love the quote you’ve pulled from this article!

(Though there are moments these days when I long for something comforting to read.)

Irvine Welsh: ‘If reading gives you comfort, you’re not doing it right’

The Scottish author on having his mind changed by Orwell, how Trainspotting was influenced by Ulysses, and his wariness of novels created with AI

theguardian.com/books/article/

@bookstodon

Are you 80% angry and 2% sad? Why ‘emotional AI’ is fraught with problems

Emotional AI’s essential problem is that we can’t definitively say what emotions are. “Put a room of psychologists together and you will have fundamental disagreements,” says McStay. “There is no baseline, agreed definition of what emotion is.”

Nor is there agreement on how emotions are expressed. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2019 she and four other scientists came together with a simple question: can we accurately infer emotions from facial movements alone? “We read and summarised more than 1,000 papers,” Barrett says. “And we did something that nobody else to date had done: we came to a consensus over what the data says.”

The consensus? We can’t.

theguardian.com/technology/art

@ai @psychology

Population implosion collapse chaos, pronatalist billionaire discourse edition

There are some alarming statistics in the world today, and I take it as my job in these situations to urge the audience to keep their eye on the ball of real world problems — inequality, climate change, reproductive rights, war — and not blow our minds on world population in the year 2300.

familyinequality.wordpress.com

@sociology

How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number

Useful mathematical concepts, like the number line, can linger for millennia before they are rigorously defined.

quantamagazine.org/how-the-squ

@science

Okinawa - 1945 | Movietone Moment

On this day in 1945, US troops took the island of Okinawa. Here is a British Movietone report showing the Allies invading the island.

length: two minutes and thirty seven seconds.

youtube.com/watch?v=ldbaHIK7OM

@histodon @histodons

Does a cave beneath Pembroke Castle hold key to fate of early Britons?

One of the issues that scientists are seeking to resolve is the question of whether or not Neanderthals interbred with Homo sapiens in Britain, as they did in other parts of the world. For good measure, they also want to know if the two species lived alongside each other or whether they replaced each other in successive waves.

theguardian.com/science/articl

@archaeodons @anthropology

Five of the best books about maths

Since the Egyptian scribe Ahmes put pen to papyrus some time around 1550BC to explain how to calculate the slope of a pyramid, we’ve had over three millennia of maths literature. So within some level of statistical confidence: here are a subset of the best ever maths books.

theguardian.com/books/article/

@bookstodon

Discovery of ancient Greek shepherd’s graffiti rewrites Athens history

Now, researchers have found graffiti drawn by a shepherd named“Mikon” who lived in the 6th century BC, which depicts a temple on the Acropolis predating the Parthenon.

By signing his drawing using particular alphabets, Mikon has allowed the graffiti to be dated.

independent.co.uk/news/science

@histodon @histodons @archaeodons

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