Book Draft: “Making Good Decisions” – Volume 2 – Part II: Author Profile: C.K. Ogden
Readers can scan the following summary if they do not have time to read the pdf linked below.
Book Draft: “Making Good Decisions” – Volume 2 – Part II: Author Profile: C.K. Ogden – To complete this week’s posts, and before we start next week’s posts with the Template for Reading Research Papers, see below an Author Profile about C.K. Ogden. This profile highlights why understanding the meaning of books and papers requires careful examination of the kind provided by the Template.
Ogden’s foundational work on the meaning of communications starts a lineage with other ground-breaking authors in the field that include: Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan, and Edward Bernays.
This lineage - from Ogden’s recognition of foundational “Word Magic” in our use of language, to the development of pragmatic skepticism with Korzybski’s General Semantics, to McLuhan’s unveiling of structural bias in “Media” filters, and finally the recognition of the deliberate misdirection and false reconstructions from the followers of Bernays - shows the importance of finding the meaning of things for ourselves, thus becoming owners of knowledge from learning, instead of taking directions from influencers that make us renters of cheap tricks.
Finding the meaning of things in books and research papers means working like tradesmen, showing up to the worksite with our own toolbox. One could hope that chatbots based on large language models such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformers (ChatGPT) might help, but the opacity of the code brings to mind Ken Thompson’s warning - in his 1984 lecture “Reflections on Trusting Trust” - that we cannot trust code that we did not write ourselves. Using the likes of ChatGPT as a conceptual GPS keeps the reader in the vulnerable position of a renter of knowledge instead of an independent owner of knowledge, thus leading the reader to thoughts and places that may not be what they thought or sought.
The Template for Reading Research Papers provides tools, checklists, and processes that readers can use to start their own toolbox, read their own papers, and see things for themselves.
To build up and quote from Ogden’s Preface to the first edition (1923) of his foundational book on Semantics, “The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism”: We have reached yet another time in History when “New millions of participants in the control of general affairs must now attempt to form personal opinions upon matters which were once left to a few.”
”CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a business book in three volumes, published serially on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, and continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, and Statistics research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.