“Constructive Skepticism” Volume 2 – Notebook #IV: The Template for Reading Research Papers – Reading List (1 of 10): Hannah Arendt
For new readers: Please read the “Pinned Post” at the top of this Substack’s Home Page, and titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers & subscribers: This post connects the dots with last week’s post as a way to understand its audiences, as the third for three posts that will examine what readers do, say, and read. This post focuses on the reasons for the readings presented in the prior post.
Four Posts to Understand what Readers Do, Say, and Read
The first post in this series documented the size the iceberg of bad research papers over the last 50+ years, and how it sank meaningful innovation since then, and what we can do about it.
https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/constructive-skepticism-volume-2-aa0
The second post showed how we can move from “Trust Them” to “Show Me”, and to “See for Yourself” by asking good questions. It also showed how to see the differences between “Tools, Checklists & Processes” by seeing the question that they answer, and what we can say about it.
https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/constructive-skepticism-volume-2-37e
The third post offered that what we read reveals the nature of our questions. What we read points to the questions that we ask implicitly, or explicitly. This post started the process of sharing reading lists with a selection from CTRI library of books and papers.
https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/constructive-skepticism-volume-2-c53
While the plan for this series of posts on understanding readers only considered these three posts, the experience of writing them showed a need for additional posts. This fourth post starts a series of ten posts that connect the selections from CTRI library of books and papers with its research programs in order to explain the reasons for their inclusion. First let’s summarize CTRI’s research programs.
Reading Research Papers in the Context of CTRI’s Research Programs
CTRI is a 501(c)(6) association that reads research papers about “Health, Wealth, & Statistics”, and translates them into plain English and clear mathematics. CTRI’s three programs of inquiry include:
1- The Trust & Verification Program:
A body of work in three volumes, called “Constructive Skepticism”, and the foundation for a professional curriculum as well as institutional training programs for individuals involved in the reading and peer-review of journal articles, and research papers. Publicly available material includes Substack posts started in January 2022
and the April 2024 print publication of the Template for Reading Research Papers on Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/CTRIs-Template-Reading-Research-Papers/dp/B0D2WBP7L1/ref=sr_1_3?sr=8-3]. This means that the Trust & Verification Program, and the "Constructive Skepticism" curriculum apply to any client-facing business or brand: How do you develop, and protect the trust that you receive from individual, and institutional clients? The short answer: Create "Tools, Checklist & Processes" that help them "See for Yourself".
The Trust & Verification Program, and the Template for Reading Research Papers provide value for institutions with publications that seek to protect and enhance their brand with visible “Tools, Checklists & Processes” for peer-review.
Additionally, these provide value to start-ups seeking to apply automation to the development of datasets based on the reading of research papers in order to sort out the good papers from the bad papers.
2- The Client-Centric Planning and Communications Program:
A collection of "Tools, Checklist & Processes", including a developing software platform that combines Large Language Models with Expert Systems to extend, and to leverage the use of the household balance sheet in retirement planning. Publicly available material includes a number of conference presentations, Substack posts, “Constructive Skepticism” Workbook sections, Notebooks, and quantitative models that include a review of Ole Peters’s Ergodicity Economics, as well as an author-by-author history of Expected Value Optimization, Growth Optimal Solutions, and Client-Centric Planning.
The Client-Centric Planning and Communications Program provides value for established institutions, and start-ups that seek to improve, as well as automate their investment and/or retirement advice processes.
3- The Program of Terrain Theories for the Management of Ecosystems:
A collection of "Tools, Checklist & Processes" focused on helping start-ups in general, and Fintech Start-ups, in particular. Publicly available material includes Substack posts on Boston Fintech Week, CTRI's Business Ecosystem Template, Gerd Gigerenzer’s “Fast & Frugal” Heuristics Program, and the study of individual longevity. Terrain Theories of Ecosystems expand the holistic view of individual clients (such as retirement planning), to a holistic view of the ecosystem that they live in. Terrain Theories observe that ecosystems harbor the means of their own disassembly. These means of disassembly grow to destroy the ecosystem when the health of terrain components falls below specific thresholds. Managing an ecosystem from the perspective of Terrain Theories feels like “Flying a Foil in the Flow”: Orienting foils in the flows of time and energy in order to keep terrain components above their thresholds of disassembly.
The Program of Terrain Theories for the Management of Ecosystems provides value for institutional business strategy, ranging from established companies to start-ups.
Connecting CTRI’s Reading List to CTRI’s Research Programs
While most of the books and papers in his list touch all three research programs, their center of gravity tends to rest in one program rather than the others. This post will focus on the first author on the list.
Arendt, Hannah (1971), Thinking and Moral Considerations, Social Research, 38:3 (1971: Autumn). P417
- Mentions of this first author on the list center on the Trust & Verification Program, with references in several sections at the beginning of Volume 1 – Workbook #I: Our Shared Humanity of the “Constructive Skepticism” Curriculum. She brings the idea of “Two-in-One-Mind” thinking to the curriculum. See a recent draft of a relevant section on Substack:
o https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/workbook-edits-for-making-good-decisions-ad5
- Readers will find additional references to Hannah Arendt in Volume 2 - Handbook #1: Authors Profiles of the “Constructive Skepticism” Curriculum. See a recent draft of her author profile on Substack:
o https://francoisgadenne.substack.com/p/workbook-edits-for-making-good-decisions-dd8
Arendt finished, and published this essay in 1971, just a few years before her death in 1975. This essay benefits from the positive and negative feedback she received from the publication of her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” in 1963. That book put her “in the possession of a concept” (the banality of evil), and thus gave her the responsibility to ask and to answer the questions: “What is thinking?”, and “What is evil?”
Maps, models, and even “Clichés” help us make “Predictions” to decide, and to manage our “Motions” in the territory of our reality (See #2 on the list, John Boyd, and #7 Rodolfo Llinás). Seeking to understand the rise of Totalitarianism during her own lifetime, Arendt noticed the prevalence, and the banality of people that conflate the map with the territory, even though “The map is not the territory” (See Alfred Korzybski). She concluded that one does not need to be psychopath to do evil deeds, and that normal people that fail to think for themselves, to “See for Yourself”, and choose to follow orders can also do evil deeds.
Choosing to think, to make better “Predictions”, and better “Motions” means going “beyond the limitations of knowledge”. She references Kant’s distinction of thinking vs. knowledge despite his restriction of the subject to “the old metaphysical questions of God, freedom, and immortality”. Thus, she concludes that thinking applies to all of us, to everything around us, and that it stops our concrete interactions with the real-world, sense-world, and people-world, as we focus on the invisible maps, concepts, and models that it shapes, morphs, and evaluates abstractly.
Arendt observes that “thinking deals with invisibles”, and blinds us to the visible world, up to the point where the ultimate form of invisibility comes in the form of death. Over-focusing on thinking has the stench of death. Maps remain maps, models remain models, “Clichés” remain “Clichés”, and do amount to a complete description of lived reality. She then asks the questions: What’s the point of asking the Many to think, when they “wish to see results and don’t care to draw distinctions between knowing and thinking, between truth and meaning”?
She develops the answer - “Two-in-One-Mind” thinking - by using Socrates as a model, an “ideal type” of “a man who counted himself neither among the many nor among the few”, a thinker as a citizen among citizens that did not write knowledge, or formulate “a doctrine that could be taught and learned”.
Socrates’ style of questioning revealed the circularity of discussing “ideas perceivable only by the eyes of the mind”, words without physical evidence defining words without physical evidence, where definitions become slippery, arguments lead nowhere, and everything moves around in circle. Perceiving this circularity blows like the “wind of thought”, and sharing it, thus sharing “how to think without being taught a doctrine” has a destructive effect on the unexamined beliefs, and “frozen thoughts” of people that would rather stay in their sleep, thus dream-like state of mind. Thinking about the “Meaning” of things becomes a dangerous activity because it brings about “dangerous thoughts”.
However, Eichmann’s style of non-thinking, or thinking to stop thinking and thus to flip from one steadfast attachment to “prescribed rules of conduct” to another such as its opposite, becomes even more dangerous because it prevents adaptation to changing circumstances. Non-thinking based on having rules means complying and obeying, thus getting “used to never making up their minds”. The non-thinkers that hold to an old code assimilate themselves to a new code with ease, explaining the rise of 20th Century Totalitarianisms as illustrated by those that reversed “the basic commandments of Western morality” in Germany as well as Russia. Arendt sees the greater evil as “done by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good”.
After this long introduction based on a review of foundational Greek-speakers including Homer, Democritus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Xenophon, Thucydides, and German-speakers including Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, as well as Latin-speakers including Solon, Augustine, Spinoza, and an Italian-speaker, Dante, Arendt arrives at the crux of the matter: The importance of “two-in-one” mind as a prerequisite for thinking. Finally, quoting an English-speaker Shakespeare’s Richart III, she connects “two-in-one” mind with conscience”.
This makes Arendt relevant to “Constructive Skepticism” because “Two-in-One-Mind” means that obstacles to consistency, and coherence in the “Methodology”, “Methods”, and “Models” of research papers start with the author(s). To quote two of Arendt’s closing points:
- the inability to think is “the everpresent possibility for everybody – scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded – to shun that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered”, and
- “The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.”
Arendt’s essay shows that building a Template for Reading Research Papers to find their “Statistical Meaning” as well as the “Practical Meaning” should start with an understanding of the author’s personal and ecosystem “Perspective”, “Domain of Knowledge”, “Historical Lineage”, and “Purpose”, and that thinking to move from “Trust Them”, to “Show Me”, to “See for Yourself” applies to all, the Many as well as the Learned. Arendt proved to be a very good way to continue Volume 1 – Workbook #I: Our Shared Humanity after the opening salvo of Rodolfo Llinás’ “Tale of the Sea Squirt”.
The rest of the list includes:
[Boyd, John] Osinga, Frans P.B. (2007), Science, Strategy and War, The strategic theory of John Boyd, Routeledge
Carse, James P. (1980), Death and Existence, A Conceptual History of Mortality, John Wiley & Sons
Cipolla, Carlo M. (2019) with a foreword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Doubleday
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997), Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, Basic Books
Gigerenzer, Gerd (2023) The Intelligence of Intuition, Cambridge University Press
Llinás, Rodolfo R. (2001), “I of the Vortex: From Neuron to Self”, MIT Press
Mastrolia, Stacy, Zielonka, Piotr & McGoun, Elton (2014), Conjuring Reality: The Magic of the Practice of Accounting”, MBA-CE, Volume 22, Number 3, pages 3-17
Peters, Ole (2018), Course Notes, London Mathematical Laboratory
Zwecher, Michael J. (2010), Retirement Portfolios, Theory, Construction, and Management, Wiley
Looking forward to reading your comments.
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a series of Workbooks, Handbooks & Notebooks about “Constructive Skepticism” with a process of public peer review on Substack. These books connect 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, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.