Thinking about knowledge, wisdom, values
I referred to Ted Gioia’s newsletter The Honest Broker in a prior post, when he referenced the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s tenet that “multitasking is what wild animals do to survive.”
The Honest Broker is really a fantastic read, covering jazz music and many many other topics. It’s like a one-person version of The New Yorker or Harper’s. It’s that ambitious.
This week was perhaps my favorite post. “I Presided at the Birth of Google,” which like many great New Yorker headlines, is accurate but in no way encompasses everything this essay covers. Gioia discusses a certain bookstore in Palo Alto in the ‘90s which occupied the ground floor of a building where a nascent Google grew starting in 1999. Google, soon to be the world’s largest source of information, and a small enterprise that hand-selected texts for sale. How they differ really made me think about what I am searching for in the world, and where my values really are. Not bad for a free newsletter (there’s a paid option which I may need to invest in).
Read it all, but here’s a taste to tempt you if you’re not hooked yet.
I can’t help comparing the two different approaches to knowledge that coexisted at 165 University Avenue for a short spell back in 1999. By any quantifiable measure, Google wins the comparisons. It now has 135,000 employees and a market capitalization of $2.5 trillion. The bookstore is just a memory. But not everything can be quantified in dollars and headcount. In fact, the most important things in life—love, friendship, trust, wisdom, beauty, integrity, to name a few—resist any reduction into a mere number.