Steps to an Ecology of Mind
by Gregory BatesonIf you need your logical toolkit expanded and your critical thinking skills honed, I can recommend no book more highly than this one. Logical toolkit expanded, because the text introduces a useful methodology of thought; critical thinking skills honed, because Bateson makes fully as many unsupported, ridiculous or logically plausible but long-since-disproved assertions as he does brilliant ones.
The book, actually a collection of "Metalogues" and papers published and/or presented by Bateson prior to the book's original publication date of 1972, touches on a variety of topics while maintaining a consistent underlying theme; included are papers on cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and so on. As a result the text is dense and the vocabulary used sometimes gratuitously technical, which makes for a slow read. If the idea of picking up and reading a random trade publication at the library makes you nervous, this book is probably not for you.
If, on the other hand, you can read between the lines of well-written academic texts for method applied and you're interested in expanding the scope and clarity of your ability to analyze the world around you, this is a good book to read. Additionally, many of the papers collected in the book are simply interesting to the reader with interdisciplinary interests; even where the ideas they contain are obsolete, great value can in many cases be gleaned from the contents. For example: Bateson's theory of the Double Bind, disproved as a possible cause for schizophrenia, is nevertheless central to a great deal of work in the field of family therapy.
In the overall, Steps to an Ecology of Mind earns:
4 stars for interest
5 stars for usefulness
2 stars for readability
2 stars for style
And that's all she wrote.
4 comments:
Hitori,
I like your writings.
It seems you are interested in critical thinking and epistemology.
Do you know these pages?
http://www.overcomingbias.com/
I am, at this moment, very interested in bayesian reasoning:
http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
I though you could find it interesting.
Regards!
Mystery Individual:
Thanks for the compliment, and the links. You're absolutely right about my interest in epistemology and critical thinking, and I'll check these out.
please show me some research where environmental factors, including distortions in communications in families, such as double-binds, have been "disproved" as one of the possible factors in the etiology of the still mysterious condition we call schizophenia...
Hi Hitori!
It's Wulfen from ASF here. Just found out you had a blog. I've been reading some Evo psychology as of lately and I find very interesting these topics.
*Specially* the fact that many seducers bring into the equation some evolutionary mumbo-jumbo to try and justify some apparent irrational behaviors. There's usually a simpler explanation around the corner.
Hitori, I would like to ask you a question, but I haven't found your email anyhere. Would you mind sending me a mail at loboferoz.exitosocial@gmail.com?
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