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Name: Applied Big History: A Guide for Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Other Living Things: Grassie, William: 9781719853071: Amazon.com: Books
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William Grassie

Applied Big History: A Guide for Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Other Living Things Paperback – September 27, 2018

by William Grassie (Author)

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Applied Big History is a guidebook to doing good and well in a fast-changing world. With the help of numerous experts, author William Grassie builds a latticework of diverse disciplines—physics, chemistry, geology, cell biology, energetics, informatics, evolution, anthropology, psychology, economics, and more. Grassie explores the significance of chaos and complexity, as well as the dynamics of discovery and innovation, in evolution and economics. He does so with a practical eye as to how these new sciences can help to better understand and practice economics, business, and finance in the face of uncertainties. Applied Big History weaves many specializations together in a useful framework for application in work and life contexts alike. The book includes a foreword by Mitch Julis, co-founder of Canyon Partners, a hedge fund with $25 billion under management. Julis writes: “Applied Big History does macro and micro. It zooms elegantly in and out, between the two throughout this engaging book by applying the general principles of acquired scientific and historical knowledge available to us today. As a result, we learn that value and wealth represent not just the flow and accumulation of money, but also stand for the fundamentals of energy, matter, and ingenuity that flow in and out of the economy and the financial system…. Grassie’s exposition is careful, concise, informative, and engaging in telling and applying this origin story to the investment world.”Table of ContentsForeword by Mitch Julis, Canyon Partners1.Thriving in a Complex WorldOut Performing the Market/ Caveat Emptor /Applied Big History/ Wikipedia2.The Great MatrixSize/ Time/ Matter/ Energetics/ Electromagnetism/ Sound/ Information-Ingenuity/ Sentience-Intelligence/ Evolved Cultural Hierarchies/ Emergent Complexity/ A Multi-Dimensional Matrix3.The Economy of a Single CellThe Central Bank of Chemistry/ The Currency of Life/ New Business models/ The First Agricultural Revolution/ The First Industrial Revolution/ The Whole Economy of Nature4.Complexity Economics ‘All Hell Breaks Loose’/ Big Money/ Short and Long-Term Oscillations/ Scaling Effects/ Complex Adaptive Systems/ Complicated versus Complex/ The Fluid Dynamics of Markets/ Natural and Economic Selection5.Death and TaxesEnergy Density Flow/ Goldilocks Gradients/ Energy Regimes/ Instability and Resilience6.Your Hunter-Gatherer BrainA Really Great Ape/ The Great Cooperators/ What We Don’t Know/ Survival/ Reproduction/ Gendered Differences/ The Cognitive Revolution/ Stone Age Brains/ Divided Self/ System 1 and System 2/ Luck of the Genes/ Our Inner Demons/ Our Better Angels/ Elephant Morality/ Caveats and Cautions7.The Big Lollapaloozas Welcome to the Anthropocene/ The Secret of Our Success/ Collective Learning/ Network Effects/ Imaginary Worlds and Artificial Instincts/ Energy Capture/ Information-Ingenuity Capture/ Gene-Culture Coevolution of Collective Brains8.Existential ChallengesAnthropogenic Existential Risks/ Natural Existential Risks/ Case Study: Peak Humanity/ Case Study: Climates Change/ Useless Arithmetic/ Next Great Leap9.The Bottom LineCreating and Capturing Value/ Parasites or Symbionts/ Species of Specialization/ Little Bets and Big Wins/ Picking Winners/ Diversification/ The Alphas and the Rest of Us/ Teams work/ Inventing the Future/ Bad Things Happen to Good Investors/ Disaster Preparedness/ Investing in Values/ Universal Values/ Impact Investing/ Our Big Future/ Bottom LineAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorBibliographyISBN-10: 171985307XISBN-13: 978-1719853071229 pages

Print length

231 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 27, 2018
Dimensions

6 x 0.53 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

171985307X
ISBN-13

978-1719853071
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published (September 27, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 231 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 171985307X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1719853071
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.53 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,275,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,042 in Business Decision Making
- #6,560 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #235,280 in Science & Math (Books)

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William Grassie

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William Grassie is an interdisciplinary scholar, academic entrepreneur, social activist, and author. He received his bachelor degree in political science from Middlebury College and then worked for ten years on nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, community organizing, and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, and West Berlin. He studied comparative religion and philosophy of science at Temple University, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Reinventing Nature: Science Narratives as Myths for an Endangered Planet (1994). Grassie continued at Temple for five more years as an assistant professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program. He has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Pendle Hill, and City College of New York.

A recipient of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation, Grassie served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 2007–2008. He was the founding director of the Metanexus Institute, which promotes scientifically rigorous and philosophically open-ended exploration of foundational questions. Metanexus has worked with partners at some 400 universities in 45 countries and publishes an online journal.

His writings include The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (2010) and a collection of essays, Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the 21st Century (2010). Grassie is currently working on a book entitled Applied Big History: A Guide for Investors and Other Living Things (2018).

For more information go to https://www.grassie.net

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Meenakshi Venkat

A creative, multidisciplinary thought experiment

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 6, 2018

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Big History is a new way of looking at the writing of history. First advanced by the Australian historian and Russian history scholar David Christian, it is an approach to writing history that views time across a vast continuum rather than sequentially or chronologically. It views key events in human history as evolutionary and interrelated in nature rather than as occurrences that are connected via a linear chronology or separated by artificially drawn classifications.

How can this understanding of history be applied to offer insights and suggest new directions for more contemporary contexts, such as those of finance, economics, and investing? Why should the concept of Big History be applied to such contexts? And what implications can be drawn from such an exercise?

These are questions that Dr. William Grassie, a contemporary scholar of comparative religion, seeks to explore in Applied Big History. Dr. Grassie is the founder of the New York City–based Metanexus Institute and the author of several books that aim to explore the connections between religion and science, including The New Sciences of Religion (2010).

What is unique about Dr. Grassie’s book is its impressive synthesis of Big History concepts and the application of this synthesis to the fields of business, investing, and finance. It focuses on how an understanding of Big History – “the epic of evolution” -- can help investors and entrepreneurs envision their roles from a broader perspective and “how this new understanding of the universe and its evolution can inform business and investing in particular and life in general.”

The book contains a useful bibliography of works that question the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the various natural and physical sciences, religion, and economics while also engaging with larger questions pertaining to evolution, cosmology, the origins of the universe, climate change, and the world of investors and entrepreneurs.

Applied Big History is a creative, multidisciplinary thought experiment that is packed with fresh insights into how "star formation, cell biology, genomics, ecology, earthquakes, floods, neuroscience, and economic markets turn out to share common patterns." In the process, it also suggests how science and scientific questions can help us to understand the larger meaning of life.

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M. W. Moffett

Grassie thinks in large ways to solve problems big and small

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 8, 2019

Applied Big History roams through physics, biology, anthropology, and human history to make sense of the strategies we should use in business and everyday life. An entertaining and enlightening read.

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V. V. Raman

Energy, Entropy, and Ingenuity: The Human Condition

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 11, 2019

Earth is our small home in a vast universe. Insignificant as it is in the spatio-temporal expanse, it is teeming with variety and activities such as seem to be wildly uncommon in the larger cosmos. William Grassie’s new book, Applied Big History, helps us “grok” this newly discovered reality with new eyes. “We live on a tiny thermodynamic eddy in a universe,” writes Grassie, “where free energy is plentiful and complexity has the possibility of running up hill… for at least a billion years.” Human civilization is less than 10,000 years old, so our descendants have the possibility of a really big future on this “jewel of a planet.”
The author—a highly respected and learned polymath—introduces readers to fundamental physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, anthropology, and economics with an eye to how businesses, entrepreneurs, and investors can better plan, predict, and profit from these insights. As the book’s subtitle implies, most of the content and general principles apply to all living things, but especially humans.
In evolution and economics, complexity is the product of the flow of energy, matter, and information. The latter, Grassie hyphenates as “ingenuity-information,” because it is not the amount of “information” that matters, but the ingenuity that is embedded in the code—whether that code be genetic, digital, linguistic, cultural, or financial.
One of the mysteries that Grassie addresses is how our species recently “cheated the logic of Darwin and Malthus,” as witnessed in the dramatic and accelerating growth in population and consumption in the last century. Citing numerous experts and astounding facts, Grassie argues that exponential leaps in “energy density flows” are part of evolutionary and human history. The next great exponential leap will surely be a move to directly and indirectly harnessing solar energy. “The total fossil fuels on the planet may be as large as 200 zettajoules (1021), an enormous number to be sure, but equivalent to only thirteen days of the Earth’s supply of solar energy.”(89)]
Chaos and complexity theory figures prominently in the narrative. “The inner life of a cell,” writes Grassie, “is a dense and intense collection of millions of molecular machines undergoing trillions of mind-boggling chemical cascades per second.” So too economics, in which networks of producers, consumers, and investors exchange goods and services across the globe based on “symbolic systems of value” (i.e., money). Cells, people, and economies are examples of complex adaptive systems—sometimes resilient and at other times fragile—but always requiring the flow of energy, matter, and ingenuity. Grassie writes:
“Economics and ecology are often pitted against each other as conceptually incompatible—one seeks continued growth and the other sees limits to growth. Both are mistaken in thinking that some kind of equilibrium could and should be achieved. Big History teaches us that there are pockets of temporary stability, predictability, homeostasis, and control in the universe, in life, and in human affairs. The driving forces, however, are instability, disequilibrium, and increasing entropy. In life, equilibrium equals death.”
A billion years future for our species on this “restless planet” is hard to contemplate, given that human civilization began less than 10,000 years ago. And for all our knowledge and knowhow, our prowess and technology, we have inherited many self-destructive tendencies in our “hunter-gatherer brains.” Grassie devotes a chapter to exploring our evolved cognitive biases and how they get us into trouble today. The content and experts cited in this chapter may be the most critical chapter for our species “at this moment in the cultural evolution of our species and the natural history of our planet.”
Humanity has made tremendous progress through specialization and division of labor, but there is a critical need to bridge “the gap between the specialized knowledge of the few and the general knowledge of the many.” This book is the result of such reflections. And while many books have been authored on Big History, this book is unique in applying the general principles to solving the challenges of our time.
The author urges us to build a resilient into our lives, such that individuals, communities, businesses, and our global civilization that can survive catastrophic events. This requires human individuals and their genes reproducing on the other side of future bottlenecks, but critically also the transmission of memory of what we have learned over 10,000 years of human civilization.
“Our greatest vulnerability as a species is also our greatest asset. Humans developed collective learning and thus knowledge and know-how that can grow exponentially with each passing generation. Every child, however, is also born without language and learning. Each generation must be taught anew, if our species is not to forget what we have been so fortunate to recently learn. Collective learning is thus our greatest strength, but always at risk of being forgotten or diminished in future bottlenecks” (193).
An unusual feature of our times is that many aspects of the human condition are now woven into a seamless whole: politics and science, economics and human rights, the environment and immigration, commerce and women’s rights: all these and more have mingled with one another in inextricable ways, not in simple systematic ways but through complex, subtle, and unexpected links. One task of Big History is to track down these interconnections.
Painting all this complexity on a grand canvas requires studies in breadth, analysis and reflection in depth, as well as understanding and insight. The emerging picture brings a refreshing clarity that is the result of careful inquiries into the methods, results, and roles of the many fields that combine to shape the human condition. That picture can be enormously meaningful in what otherwise might strike one as incomprehensible chaos. It can also help the actors, from ordinary citizens to leaders in government, industry, education, religion, commerce, and other fields in playing their various roles constructively and effectively.
With our species’ tremendous successes have also come a number of major challenges—environmental, cultural, political, economic, scientific, and philosophical. These are best understood and addressed with the help of Big History. That is exactly what this book accomplishes.
Grassie’s prose is often poetic and profound. He writes:
“The product of the evolutionary and economic processes, for you and other living things, should be life more abundant, more beautiful, more complex... Each life is an incredible opportunity within the context of our long and fortuitous evolution histories. In the end, economic and evolutionary processes are not merely a flux of energy, matter, and ingenuity, but also an immaterial flux of ever more truth, beauty, and goodness. And while we have partially enumerated truth through this exploration of Big History, beauty and goodness remain precious mysteries.”
There is a lot more in the book, indeed essential reading for anyone who wishes to get a grasp of the current status of societies, cultures and civilizations. Here we find physics and philosophy, biology and finance too, all presented with much clarity. The centrality of energy and energy-exchange is brought out, as also their thermodynamic aspects, reminding us of Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energism-thesis of a century ago. After all, what distinguishes blind nature from organized bio-systems is in the way they grow complexity. Grassie proposes an evolutionary “prime directive” to “minimize entropy, maximize creativity.” And the application of ingenuity is how life in general and humans in particular, minimize, while maximizing.
In short, Applied Big History is very readable, though parts of it may require re-reading and looking into the references. It is written in an engaging style too. I heartily recommend it to everyone who has an interest in the world today.

V. V. Raman

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Tony's kid

An academic discipline made relevant to everyday life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 5, 2018

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Before reading this book, I had no idea that there existed an academic discipline examining how humanity fits into the context of such an expansive area, from the Universe's origins to the economics of the cells in your body. Nevertheless, newcomers need not be intimidated. 'Applied Big History' starts with a refresher course reminding readers of basic scientific concepts. William Grassie's writing style makes the topics covered easy to understand and at times humorous. He helpfully guides you through the complexity of Big History and how this understanding of the Universe applies to your everyday life.

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