The Idea Machine - How Books Built Our World and Shape Our Future - Joel Miller
Summary
- A history of the writing and the book, and how it changed human history
How the book changed me
- I have a newfound appreciation for the amazing thing which is a book, the ability to read and converse with people long dead, to pass on ideas and thoughts and stories. Writing is human's superpower
Details
- Writing allows for iterative thinking
- A book is a machine to think with - I A RIchards
- The 11th Century Muslim World had the Best Libraries
- Hernando Colón, who wrote the first index
- Learned about Euclid, teh father of geometry
- Technologies have biases
Quotes
- A book is a machine to think with - I A RIchards
- No book was so bad but some good might be got out of it - Pliny
- We also, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate - Seneca
- Information technologies … modify how we act in the world; they also profoundly affect how we understand the world - Luciano Floridi
- All machines have their friction - Henry David Thoreau
- Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point - Steven Pinker