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Over de Auteur

Howard Bloom was a legendary publicist in the 1970s and 1980s for singers and bands such as Prince, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, and Styx. Since then, he has published six books on human evolution and group behavior, including The Genius of the Beast, Global Brain, and The Lucifer Principle. In his toon meer Zelig-like career, Bloom has been cited, thanked, anthologized, and quoted in books on quantum physics, genetics, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and much more. How I Accidentally Started The Sixties may be his strangest book yet. toon minder

Bevat de namen: Howard Bloom, Howard Bloom

Fotografie: Psychology Today

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A sprawling, playful, sometimes quixotic exploration of how our DNA has manifested -- necessarily, Bloom argues -- capitalism. Rather than arguing the relative merits and pitfalls in the system or pitting it against socialism -- a tired matchup these days -- he shows the psychological, sociological, even genetic and physical origins of the economic system that arguably dominates the globe. The book closes with an impassioned plea for those who have benefited most from the capitalist system to use their bounty to help those who are the least among us. Setting aside my personal bias against capitalism gone wild and my prejudice against libertarianism, the book is a rollicking read and makes its points with a great deal of joy.… (meer)
 
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vverse23 | Jan 9, 2024 |
Bad writing, outdated. The bibliography is large but generally obsolete by 2023.
½
 
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johnclaydon | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 31, 2023 |
In between ravings about homoeopathy and inaccurate descriptions of what a neural net is and what it can do the book is just a random hotchpotch of musings with no clear aim. Not sure what the message is but the author sure tries to hammer it home by repeating himself ad nauseam. It's like listening in to a pub conversation. You are drunk Mr Bloom, go home.

Lucifer Principle Drinking Game:
Drink every time you read "pecking order" or "superorganism".
If you see "superorganismic pecking order" down your drink.… (meer)
 
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Paul_S | 12 andere besprekingen | Dec 23, 2020 |
This book was interesting, but it really didn't explain away all of my questions in the overall narrative. Early on in the book, Bloom tells us that "we" either some character or himself was born in 1943, disbelieved in God and all of this various stuff. Maybe I am stupid, but I wanted to know who he was talking about. I did like the book, but many times it jumps around and I felt like I was reading Gravity's Rainbow.

The overall thesis of the book seemed to be that human beings as a group undergo paradigm shifts of thought spurred on by certain individuals. These paradigm shifts establish new patterns and modes of thought that people train themselves to see. As a side note, Bloom is a good story teller. He takes threads of ideas and weaves them together into a whole narrative.

What does Bloom even talk about? Well first off, take the Babylonians. They split the circle into 360 degrees right? Wrong. Apparently, the Babylonians didn't have a concept for the idea of an angle as we know it now. They had remarkable skills in arithmetic, and used tables to shorten the time it took to collect taxes; multiplication tables, but that was all they did. Sure, they had a name for a load of grain, and could imagine a representation of some land as a drawing on a clay tablet. They thought that the sky was flat, though, represented in their thought processes as a ceiling to a room. This limited their thinking to a certain set of symbols. The reason was this; their mythology had declared that Marduk took this giant she-beast monstrosity, Tiamut(his spelling not mine), and ripped her in half, using one half to make the Earth and the other half for the Sky. This image representation lasted for the culture of the Babylonians and was quite pervasive. Thus, they did not think of the sky as being a wheel or a great sphere or whatever.

As it just so happened, most of the people that established the current paradigm were people like Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Einstein. Aristotle established a mode of thinking that lasted for centuries, the syllogism and deductive logic. From this came the basis of all of the science we use today. Euclid set up the Elements. The most famous printed material after the Bible for centuries. And it pervaded the thoughts of men. Now he did not invent these axioms, but he set it up in such a manner that it was preferable to use his book over those of his rivals. That is another theme.

Take Einstein for instance. He didn't invent any of the stuff that he formulated. It was there in the open, waiting for someone to weave the threads together. Einstein was just the kind of guy that looked outside the box and set axioms on their heads.

The last thing is that complex things can arise from simple rules. Bloom repeats this a lot too, but it does hold true. Repetition and iteration are pretty powerful things when they are done many times. The examples that stick out to me are Conway's Game of Life and the Mandelbrot Set. Although they are established by simple rules, you can get some really fascinating and unpredictable behavior from it.

So we don't really get to the answer of "The God Problem," but it was really interesting and enjoyable nonetheless.
… (meer)
 
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Floyd3345 | 3 andere besprekingen | Jun 15, 2019 |

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9
Ook door
4
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1,457
Populariteit
#17,640
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½ 3.6
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21
ISBNs
37
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2
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4

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