Join the Fitzwilliam Reading Group
A new outlet for discussion in Dublin
I apologise that The Fitzwilliam has been quiet recently. I’ve been taking exams, and have also been very sick, although note I’m still publishing regularly on my personal blog. I promise we’ve been cooking up some interesting schemes.
I wish that the world had more reading groups: outlets outside a university context for people to come together to discuss interesting papers, essays, books, and blogs. It’s really more difficult than it should be to find a social group to learn complicated stuff together with.
For this reason, we are starting a monthly reading group in Dublin. The readings will be an eclectic mix at the intersection of economics, science, and history. I also anticipate that we’ll have a regular stream of special guests to answer our questions about what they’ve written.
I ran a group like this for years when I lived in Edinburgh. Some highlights included discussing the history of the steam engine with Anton Howes, and reading The Merchant of Venice with Henry Oliver. My personal favourite meetups were probably from our series about classic papers of computer science, including Alan Turing’s On Computable Numbers and Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication. (If you live in or near Edinburgh and would like to join the group that I used to run, it is now in the capable hands of my friend Sean: sean [dot] brocklebank [at] ed [dot] ac [dot] uk.)
Two commonly reported problems with reading groups are that attendance dwindles over time, and that people don’t actually do the readings. None of my reading groups has ever had either of these problems. I think the key is to convince people that you will show up on time, prepared, even if nobody else does. So that is what I will do.1
The first meetup of The Fitzwilliam Reading Group will be at 2pm on Saturday, June 7th. It will be about the economics of trade and sanctions, and we will be discussing:
(I will note that all of these papers look longer than they really are because of the bibliography. Get reading!)
The meeting will be in Dogpatch Labs in CHQ Dublin, which is a five-minute walk from Connolly Station. In particular, it will be in the ‘Ideation Space’ right across from the main Dogpatch entrance, immediately adjacent to the Starbucks. We will have a sign. It’s a great venue, which is essentially perfect for an event like this, so I give my thanks to Dogpatch for letting us use it. We usually end up chatting for about 2.5 hours, although there’s no problem if you can only make it for part of that.
The July meetup will be on Sunday, July 6th at 2pm. It will also be in the Ideation Space. There will be a special guest in the form of Santi Ruiz, author of the Statecraft newsletter. We will be discussing:
Bonus: 50 Thoughts on DOGE
You can join the mailing list here. The form also has an optional space to include your number for a WhatsApp group for general chit-chat. The normal disclaimers apply about how we expect people to be respectful. Everything official will be announced on both platforms. I encourage people to join even if they have a low probability of being in Dublin in any given month. Indeed, you’re welcome to join the mailing list even if you just want my monthly curated reading list (if that sounds appealing, you might enjoy my monthly links roundups).
If you have further questions, you can email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com, or reply to this email. After the first meeting, we can also discuss the timing and reading for the August meetup. I look forward to seeing many of you there.
This group is also the spiritual successor to an online discussion series I ran during lockdown as part of Patch, which also had some cool guest speakers. Talking to David Deutsch about the origins of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm was one of the more fun things I did during the pandemic. I have written an essay about what I learned from running these groups, which I’ll post on my personal Substack when I find the time.