智识分子

by 万维钢

《智识分子(做个复杂的现代人)》是一本关于现代世界的书，作者万维钢想在这本书中讲些一个现代人应该有，而且只有现代人才可能有的“智识”——智慧和见识。想要理解这个现代世界，乃至做些决策，就得有这种智识。这本书会纠正你想当然的判断，告诉你一些靠谱的认知科学的研究结果。“学而时嘻之”精粹，大量深度好文首次发布！

275 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[LaanSiBB]

0-star

Mindsets, social science, national pedagogies, cognitive bias, statistics, legal history, epistemology, knowledge systems and complexity...

This is the lowest rank of popular science, where Wan broadly defines different concepts without congregating them into one topic. Intellectual can not be isolated from its historical writing, and modernity has its own struggles. The author emphasizes on not relying on theories, but seemingly uses theories to support his own arguments. Probably not the most well-structured book on successful theory, but you can read it if time is spared.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting book, cover a wide range of topics, which are critical to modern life.

One topic is that when AI can take over majority of jobs, what can we do to the people who lose their jobs. The answer is to give free money, so that they can spend on the products and services AI produces and provides. Otherwise, the economy will be halted.

And even for now, to boost economy, spending becomes a virtue. However, I guess wise people would wait for other people to spend, so that they can save :)

[Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

- 万维钢这真的喜欢出书，但是他的思想，或者说他看到的思想只有那么多，不可避免地要重复自己。部分内容是在万万没想到上出现的，所以如果看他的书，推荐万万没想到大概就够了。后面出的基本都可以看作是增订版本。
- 请万老师读书没有问题，却不可尽信。全文充满着理工科学生洞察一切的洋洋自得。
- 还有一个问题，就是大杂烩。万老师读了这么多书，什么时候能有一个自己的体系？或者将其整合在一起，更加合理的体系呢？

[Q · Rating 5 out of 5]

醍醐灌顶

[Lula · Rating 3 out of 5]

博文的文章合集，挑了感兴趣的几篇读了，几年前的文章现在看还挺有意思

[toni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 'book' of book summaries thrown together. Below are some of the concepts discussed at the beginning...

• Broken windows theory/copycat effect - media's tendency to over dramatise crime/events -維穩
• Pluralism vs monism
• The unpredictability of information (or any) cascading
• Democracy fails precisely because it gives voters what they want, whereas all those dim-wits want are 'narratives'
• Author believes that the Free Market will solve all issues (?!)

New to me:
Claude Shannon's definition of self-information: (1) an event with probability 100% is perfectly unsurprising and yields no information. (2) The less probable an event is, the more surprising it is and the more information it yields.

Topic modelling: a type of statistical modelling that uses unsupervised Machine Learning to identify clusters or groups of similar words within a body of text.

Rhodopsin and the convergence of evolution.

[Joseph Tang · Rating 4 out of 5]

常识这东西，着实很影响一个人对这世界的认知和评判。所以不“正确”的常识，于个人是遗祸终身的。对于教育，精英教育，培养还在分析问题解决问题做主人翁的意识，而且精英教育在国内鲜有听闻。而据实辩论，有理有据的争论，也是一个知识分子必备的技能。在未来也要考虑自己工种的不可替代性，独特性，如此才有竞争力不会被机器人替代。