News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
A lot has been happening behind the scenes of the FPR website. Sometime in the next few days, you should see our new site. Please be patient with any glitches during the transition, and once it's up and running, let us know what you think.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about land, cheating, and work.
- Nadya Williams reflects on the motherly joys of cutting her family's hair: "for me, cutting hair is an act of love—for this squirmy boy who makes this activity so incredibly stressful for me at times with his sudden moves; for my older son, now out of the house and whose extraordinarily thick wiry hair I no longer cut, but whose uneven hairline I remember, as it made the task infinitely trickier for the haircutter; for my husband, whose hair has somehow gotten curlier over the years, especially in the back, now making it harder to cut evenly."
- Natalie Symons thanks her homeschooling mother for her years of loving educational labors: "My mom knew that she could not transfer the entire corpus of Western thought to us because she didn’t have it. But she did have love."
- Patrick J. Casey urges us to take up heroic efforts in an age that tempts us to sloth: "It's entirely possible that many will give up human relationships, turning instead to the safety and predictability of technology, like an AI companion."
- Christine Norvell reviews Mandi Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom: "As teachers we must ask what is worth contemplating, what is worth our affections, and then teach our students the same practice. Like Augustine, we must teach our students how to order their loves by teaching them how to judge something according to how it adheres to reality—how true it really is."
- Amir Zaki describes how he lost all interest in podcasts: "Over the decades, I suppose I learned a lot from podcasts; plenty of facts and all the 'sides' to stories. Very little of those things seem to matter to me now."
- Zachary Michael Jack praises the pleasures of heating with wood: "I’ve heated with wood for a winter, and I am pleased to do so, but it’s backbreaking labor to warm this way for a lifetime."
After I gave a talk somewhere this past year, someone recommended Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. It is indeed a fascinating book. Paul indulges in some social-sciency just-so stories at times, but her argument for the embodied, social, placed nature of human intelligence is quite helpful. In particular, Paul demonstrates that the common cultural perception of human thinking as “individual, inherent, and readily ranked according to quality” is not only misguided but also pernicious:
Since [the] early days at the dawn of the digital age, the brain-computer analogy has become only more pervasive and more powerful, engaged not just by researchers and academics but by the rest of us, the public at large. The metaphor provides us with a model, sometimes conscious but often implicit, of how thinking works. The brain, according to this analogy, is a self-contained information-processing machine, sealed inside the skull as the ENIAC was sequestered in its locked room. From this inference emerges a second: the human brain has attributes, akin to gigabytes of RAM and megahertz of processing speed, that can be easily measured and compared. Following on these is the third and perhaps most significant supposition of all: that some brains, like some computes, are just better; they possess the biological equivalent of more memory storage, greater processing power, higher-resolution screens.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro