Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Meat was the food most emigrants had longed for in Britain...it was 'the ambition and glory of every loving father...to sit at his own table...with a good joint of meat'." - hence the Anglosphere's obsession with meat, but other cultures?

"However, as America also industrialised after the civil war...English immigrants were no longer able to recapture the old ways" - plus ca change...

"Emigration had allowed them to move back in time to the rural world destroyed by enclosure in England" - were the land use aspirations of New England settlers actually in conflict with the later New Zealand settlers? Were the waves of emigration from actually England driven by this conflict?

"Having discovered in India how expensive territorial acquistions could be, they sought to create an 'informal empire' of econonic hegemony." - a system the Americans later perfected.

"The company delegated the illegal section of the trade to private merchants" - Philip Morris breaking the Italian cigatette monopoly.

"But rather than creating a body of English-style improving landlords, the company brought into being a rapacious rentier class..." - the danger of invasive memes.

"The importance of maize in the food world of the British Empire is easily overlooked because it never made any inroads into the British diet." - I made a similar mistake in picking this book. I thought it would about feeding Britain, not the British Empire. The subtitle is not particularly helpful in this respect.

"The main point is this: while probabilities encode our beliefs about a static world, causality tells whether and how probabilities change when the world changes, be it by intervention or by act of imagination" - probabilities encode our beliefs about an unknown states in the world, there is an epistemic element here as well. Intuitive causes are known, at least for Kant.

"I have not attempted to define causation...Instead, I have pursued the ultimately more constructive program of explaining how to answer causal queries and what information is needed to answer them"...might result in the same thing, he assumes that because 'cause' is intuitive, it is simple. Philosophy suggests otherwise.

"At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was still an integral part of the European economy [which accounted for 85% of its exports, and 68% of its imports], Yet by 1800..." - Brexit, Brexit, Brexit?

"It was probably a food processing factory rather than a textile mill that inspired William Blake's phrase 'dark satanic mills' in his poem 'Jerusalem'" - I don't mind, I have connections to both.

"The rocking motion of the ship combined with the gradual application of heat as it sailed first to the Atlantic wine islands and then on to Rio de Janeiro...resulted in a beer with a depth of flavour that could only be acheived in England only after years in the cellar." - you have to wonder if the makers of the current spate of IPAs go to so much trouble.

"I conjecture, that human intuition is organized around causal, not statistical, relations." - Kant treated it as a category not a conjecture, what went wrong?

"To handle uncertainty we need information about the likelihood such abnormalities will occur" - my hunch here it that "abnormal" is something more than "unlikely", that there's a value judgement involved.

"As a manifestation of our newfound ability to imagine things that have never existed, the Lion Man is the precursor of every philosophical theory, scientific discovery, and technological innovation" .... and work of art?

"Note that there are multiple causes and that none of them are deterministic" - can you have a coherent concept of cause that is non-deterministic?

"Drug D increases Lifespan L of diabetic Patients Z by 30 percent plus or minus 20 percent" - is this a causal relationship? I want causality to yield binary results, not a range of possible results.

"This confusion between seeing and doing has resulted in a fountain of paradoxes" - in quantum physics, does this distinction still exist, if not is that why causation has disappeared in quantum physics?

"None of the letters k, B, or P is in any mathematical way priviledged over any of the others. How then can we express our strong conviction that it is the pressure that causes the baromter to change and not the other way round" - one of my problems with causation is that it does priviledge one variable, whereas objectively none is priviledged: i.e. causation is a consequence of our convictions rather than physics.

"While the West African mangrove rice fields fell into disrepair, erstwhile African rice farmers rebuilt rice farmers rebuilt them on North America's eastern seaboard." - Uncle Ben should been seen as a messenger from history, and as rice farming was primarily the work of men, this story makes more sense of the switch from millet to maize. What have I been wrong about, rice farming or West Africa?

"The bulk of the crop, however, went to London in order to satisfy the rules of the Navigation Acts, that stipulated that colonial goods had to be transported to Britain, where duties were charged. The rice was then re-exported to the Netherlands and the German states..." - no surprise then that the EU is so suspicious of British ambitions for a post-Brexit trade deal.

"Tea-drinking is not the cause, but the consequence of the distresses of the poor" - but interestingly never lost it's gentility

"The consumption of colonial goods became linked to pride in Britain's imperial greatness, and both became an integral part of what it meant to be British" - you are what you eat

"But the real key to prosperity of eighteenth-countryside was the increase in women's earning capacity" - and spinning made children economically productive from the age of seven.

"But the exchange of men for maize had tragic consequences" - most interesting chapter so far, but not convinced it adds up.

"Thus the Africa the Europeans encountered was not a backward continent where they could simply impose their will" - cf North America

"The Atlantic trading system that developed out of England's American empire underpinned the structural changes and economic development that eventually culminated in Britain's Industrial Revolution" - and did Britain's ultimate exclusion of the other Atlantic powers from North America delay their industrialisation? Or was the scale of population growth in North American colonies key?

" contemporaries calculated that a planter needed at least 200 acres of sugar cane to clear a profit after the expensive investment necessary to set up a mill and a boiling house." - how many yeoman families could the same 200 acres support?

"When you think about childhood you think about your parents. Blame it on the relationship department of your mind, which has usurped more than its rightful share of your thoughts and memories" - which is why we should not be relying on questionnaires to produce psychological 'evidence'.

"Group socialization theory makes this prediction: that children would develop into the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged - left them in their schools and their neighbourhoods - but switched all the parents around." - which is commenably clearsighted, but also ridiculously unlikely.