Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
- William James
- William James
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, is well qualified to examine the impact and origins of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century love affair between many members of the Western intelligentsia and some of the most ruthless, bloody dictators and political systems of the age. As he explains in his preface:
To paraphrase Erasmus by way of Cecil Rhodes: So much folly, so little time. Hollander is a superb cicerone to what amounts to an intellectual freak show, a gallery of great minds entranced by even greater villainy. He has produced a devastating catalogue of the delusional propensities that led so many modern intellectuals to embrace so many dictators of varying degrees of infamy. Perhaps the last word on the subject should go to another wise refugee from communist Hungary who, as the son of Stalinist apparatchiks, knew whereof he wrote—my old friend the late Tibor Szamuely, quoted by Hollander in his book:
- Review of Paul Hollander's book From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship
“This book continues to explore several of my long-standing and converging interests. They include totalitarianism, communist systems, intellectuals and politics, the relationship between the personal and political, between political ideals and practices, the spiritual problems of modernity, and the apparently limitless capacity of idealistic human beings, notably intellectuals, to engage in wishful thinking and substantial political misjudgments.”All this with the proviso, “I should hasten to add that the generalizations and propositions that follow in this book apply only to an undetermined but very visible and vocal portion of Western intellectuals. In the absence of opinion and other surveys addressed to ‘intellectuals’ these proportions cannot be determined or quantified.” Even without such quantification, it is probably safe to characterize that proportion as more than enough.
To paraphrase Erasmus by way of Cecil Rhodes: So much folly, so little time. Hollander is a superb cicerone to what amounts to an intellectual freak show, a gallery of great minds entranced by even greater villainy. He has produced a devastating catalogue of the delusional propensities that led so many modern intellectuals to embrace so many dictators of varying degrees of infamy. Perhaps the last word on the subject should go to another wise refugee from communist Hungary who, as the son of Stalinist apparatchiks, knew whereof he wrote—my old friend the late Tibor Szamuely, quoted by Hollander in his book:
“[A] striking—and paradoxical—aspect of ‘progressive’ intellectuals’ involvement in politics is the fundamentally non-intellectual nature of their commitment . . . it is almost invariably an emotional attitude, owing very little, if anything, to the process of reason and study that one usually associates with the word ‘intellectual.’”
- Review of Paul Hollander's book From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship
Quote of the Day
People talk about getting lucky breaks in their careers. I'm living proof that the 'lucky breaks' theory is simply wrong. You get to make your own luck. ... The world is run by those who show up...not those who wait to be asked.
- Steve Blank
- Steve Blank
Friday, December 29, 2017
Quote of the Day
There's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.
- Elon Musk
- Elon Musk
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Quote of the Day
It’s time to move the argument to a new plane. For the rich and well-fed to deny Africans, Asians or South Americans the benefits of modern technology is not merely anti-scientific. It’s cruel, it’s heartless, it’s inhumane — and it ought to be confronted on moral grounds that ordinary citizens, including those who have been conned into preferring non-GMO Cheerios, can understand.
Travel to Africa with any of Purdue University’s three recent World Food Prize winners, and you won’t find the conversation dominated by anti-GMO protesters. There, where more than half of the coming population increase will occur, consumers and farmers alike are eager to share in the life-saving and life-enhancing advances that modern science alone can bring. Efforts to persuade them otherwise, or simply block their access to the next round of breakthroughs, are worse than anti-scientific. They’re immoral.
- Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral
Travel to Africa with any of Purdue University’s three recent World Food Prize winners, and you won’t find the conversation dominated by anti-GMO protesters. There, where more than half of the coming population increase will occur, consumers and farmers alike are eager to share in the life-saving and life-enhancing advances that modern science alone can bring. Efforts to persuade them otherwise, or simply block their access to the next round of breakthroughs, are worse than anti-scientific. They’re immoral.
- Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Quote of the Day
Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men. Always trust your heart. If the Creator stood before a million men with the light of a million lamps, only a few would truly see him because truth is already alive in their hearts. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have Truth in his heart, will always be blind to her.
- Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
- Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Monday, December 25, 2017
Sunday, December 24, 2017
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
After all those distinguished scientists have weighed in, I think the most relevant contribution to the current discussion is the 2001 paper by Leo Breiman (statistician, 1928–2005), Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures. In this paper Breiman, alluding to C.P. Snow, describes two cultures:
First the data modeling culture (to which, Breiman estimates, 98% of statisticians subscribe) holds that nature can be described as a black box that has a relatively simple underlying model which maps from input variables to output variables (with perhaps some random noise thrown in). It is the job of the statistician to wisely choose an underlying model that reflects the reality of nature, and then use statistical data to estimate the parameters of the model.
Second the algorithmic modeling culture (subscribed to by 2% of statisticians and many researchers in biology, artificial intelligence, and other fields that deal with complex phenomena), which holds that nature's black box cannot necessarily be described by a simple model. Complex algorithmic approaches (such as support vector machines or boosted decision trees or deep belief networks) are used to estimate the function that maps from input to output variables, but we have no expectation that the form of the function that emerges from this complex algorithm reflects the true underlying nature.
It seems that the algorithmic modeling culture is what Chomsky is objecting to most vigorously. It is not just that the models are statistical (or probabilistic), it is that they produce a form that, while accurately modeling reality, is not easily interpretable by humans, and makes no claim to correspond to the generative process used by nature. In other words, algorithmic modeling describes what does happen, but it doesn't answer the question of why.
- Peter Norvig
First the data modeling culture (to which, Breiman estimates, 98% of statisticians subscribe) holds that nature can be described as a black box that has a relatively simple underlying model which maps from input variables to output variables (with perhaps some random noise thrown in). It is the job of the statistician to wisely choose an underlying model that reflects the reality of nature, and then use statistical data to estimate the parameters of the model.
Second the algorithmic modeling culture (subscribed to by 2% of statisticians and many researchers in biology, artificial intelligence, and other fields that deal with complex phenomena), which holds that nature's black box cannot necessarily be described by a simple model. Complex algorithmic approaches (such as support vector machines or boosted decision trees or deep belief networks) are used to estimate the function that maps from input to output variables, but we have no expectation that the form of the function that emerges from this complex algorithm reflects the true underlying nature.
It seems that the algorithmic modeling culture is what Chomsky is objecting to most vigorously. It is not just that the models are statistical (or probabilistic), it is that they produce a form that, while accurately modeling reality, is not easily interpretable by humans, and makes no claim to correspond to the generative process used by nature. In other words, algorithmic modeling describes what does happen, but it doesn't answer the question of why.
- Peter Norvig
Quote of the Day
Let’s pause to note how peculiar this all is. The traditional view of the immune system is full of military metaphors and antagonistic lingo. We see it as a defence force that discriminates self (our own cells) from non-self (microbes and everything else), and eradicates the latter. But now we see that microbes craft and tune our immune system in the first place!
- Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
- Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru
When I almost lost hope in the art of Tamil cinema, this movie came along and changed my mind. Never underestimate the power of a brilliant movie; it can inspire generations to come.
A world without internet, high-tech gadgets , no stupid Marvel comic idiocy - Real world, real cops and a mission to capture a murderous gang.
A world without internet, high-tech gadgets , no stupid Marvel comic idiocy - Real world, real cops and a mission to capture a murderous gang.
Wisdom Of The Week
The question is this: why don’t Americans understand how poor their lives have become? Is it even a fair question to ask?
Of course, one can speak of capitalism and false consciousness and class war, of technology hypnotizing people with outrage. But I think there is a deeper truth here. There is a myth of exceptionalism in America that prevents it from looking outward, and learning from the world. It is made up of littler myths about greed being good, the weak deserving nothing, society being an arena, not a lever, for the survival of the fittest — and America is busy recounting those myths, not learning from the world, in slightly weaker (Democrats) or stronger (Republicans) forms. Still, the myths stay the same — and the debate is only really about whether a lightning bolt or a thunderstorm is the just punishment from the gods for the fallen, and a palace or a kingdom is the just reward for the cunning.
[---]
Still, though, “why don’t Americans get it!” is an unfair question unless we ask it for both sides. So let us look at the picture from the opposite side, to see if our question is worth asking.
Do Europeans “get it” — how good their lives are, relatively speaking? Well, in Europe, regressive forces are at work, too — not as badly as in America, but rising, to be sure, in every single nation. So Europeans, too, at least enough to seat extremist parties in parliaments, take their quality of life for granted a little. Why would that be? Probably because they have now grown up with the gift their grandfathers and grandmothers gave them — constitutions in which healthcare, education, dignity, and so on, are essential rights — which are what underpin Europe’s stunningly high quality of life. Hence, regressive forces in Europe say “these people must not have rights!”, not understanding that those very rights, enshrined in rewritten constitutions, are exactly how Europe rose in a generation from the ruins of war, to the highest living standards ever, period — and to take them away is to begin erasing history.
So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes.
Now. What does that really mean? We are living in a world unable to learn from itself. What would sane societies do, watching each other, watching each other’s fortunes rise and fall? A sane America would look at Europe, see it’s tremendously higher quality of life in every possible regard, and say, “My God! That is what we should reach for, too!”. And a sane Europe would look at America, see it’s falling life expectancy and imploding middle class, and say, “My God! We must never become that!” But you see, the irony is this: both are doing precisely the opposite. Europe is fighting against becoming more American, and America is not fighting to become more European. (Of course, I don’t mean culturally — I mean in terms of constitutions, institutions, economy, polity, and social contracts).
- From ever wonderful Kottke, A world that can’t learn from itself
Of course, one can speak of capitalism and false consciousness and class war, of technology hypnotizing people with outrage. But I think there is a deeper truth here. There is a myth of exceptionalism in America that prevents it from looking outward, and learning from the world. It is made up of littler myths about greed being good, the weak deserving nothing, society being an arena, not a lever, for the survival of the fittest — and America is busy recounting those myths, not learning from the world, in slightly weaker (Democrats) or stronger (Republicans) forms. Still, the myths stay the same — and the debate is only really about whether a lightning bolt or a thunderstorm is the just punishment from the gods for the fallen, and a palace or a kingdom is the just reward for the cunning.
[---]
Still, though, “why don’t Americans get it!” is an unfair question unless we ask it for both sides. So let us look at the picture from the opposite side, to see if our question is worth asking.
Do Europeans “get it” — how good their lives are, relatively speaking? Well, in Europe, regressive forces are at work, too — not as badly as in America, but rising, to be sure, in every single nation. So Europeans, too, at least enough to seat extremist parties in parliaments, take their quality of life for granted a little. Why would that be? Probably because they have now grown up with the gift their grandfathers and grandmothers gave them — constitutions in which healthcare, education, dignity, and so on, are essential rights — which are what underpin Europe’s stunningly high quality of life. Hence, regressive forces in Europe say “these people must not have rights!”, not understanding that those very rights, enshrined in rewritten constitutions, are exactly how Europe rose in a generation from the ruins of war, to the highest living standards ever, period — and to take them away is to begin erasing history.
So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes.
Now. What does that really mean? We are living in a world unable to learn from itself. What would sane societies do, watching each other, watching each other’s fortunes rise and fall? A sane America would look at Europe, see it’s tremendously higher quality of life in every possible regard, and say, “My God! That is what we should reach for, too!”. And a sane Europe would look at America, see it’s falling life expectancy and imploding middle class, and say, “My God! We must never become that!” But you see, the irony is this: both are doing precisely the opposite. Europe is fighting against becoming more American, and America is not fighting to become more European. (Of course, I don’t mean culturally — I mean in terms of constitutions, institutions, economy, polity, and social contracts).
- From ever wonderful Kottke, A world that can’t learn from itself
Quote of the Day
Good scientists, like good innovators of any kind, are entrepreneurial, and they’re the ones that are most likely to get into trouble. And I’ve always enjoyed being in trouble. In science, trouble means progress.
- E. O. Wilson
- E. O. Wilson
Friday, December 22, 2017
Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear
The ethos of startup culture could serve as a blueprint for civilization-destroying AIs. “Move fast and break things” was once Facebook’s motto; they later changed it to “Move fast with stable infrastructure,” but they were talking about preserving what they had built, not what anyone else had. This attitude of treating the rest of the world as eggs to be broken for one’s own omelet could be the prime directive for an AI bringing about the apocalypse. When Uber wanted more drivers with new cars, its solution was to persuade people with bad credit to take out car loans and then deduct payments directly from their earnings. They positioned this as disrupting the auto loan industry, but everyone else recognized it as predatory lending. The whole idea that disruption is something positive instead of negative is a conceit of tech entrepreneurs. If a superintelligent AI were making a funding pitch to an angel investor, converting the surface of the Earth into strawberry fields would be nothing more than a long overdue disruption of global land use policy.
There are industry observers talking about the need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelligent AIs we create be “friendly,” meaning that their goals are aligned with human goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics, that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn’t be surprised; the question of how to create friendly AI is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.
- More Here
There are industry observers talking about the need for AIs to have a sense of ethics, and some have proposed that we ensure that any superintelligent AIs we create be “friendly,” meaning that their goals are aligned with human goals. I find these suggestions ironic given that we as a society have failed to teach corporations a sense of ethics, that we did nothing to ensure that Facebook’s and Amazon’s goals were aligned with the public good. But I shouldn’t be surprised; the question of how to create friendly AI is simply more fun to think about than the problem of industry regulation, just as imagining what you’d do during the zombie apocalypse is more fun than thinking about how to mitigate global warming.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
Mount Taranaki in New Zealand is to be granted the same legal rights as a person, becoming the third geographic feature in the country to be granted a “legal personality”.
Eight local Māori tribes and the government will share guardianship of the sacred mountain on the east coast of the North Island, in a long-awaited acknowledgement of the indigenous people’s relationship to the mountain, who view it as an ancestor and whanau, or family member.
The new status of the mountain means if someone abuses or harms it, it is the same legally as harming the tribe.
- New Zealand gives Mount Taranaki same legal rights as a person
Eight local Māori tribes and the government will share guardianship of the sacred mountain on the east coast of the North Island, in a long-awaited acknowledgement of the indigenous people’s relationship to the mountain, who view it as an ancestor and whanau, or family member.
The new status of the mountain means if someone abuses or harms it, it is the same legally as harming the tribe.
- New Zealand gives Mount Taranaki same legal rights as a person
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Quote of the Day
The bigger problem, according to Shostak, is that the money shunted into the Pentagon program went primarily to a company founded by Robert Bigelow, a billionaire aerospace mogul whose company builds inflatable space modules and who has long believed in alien visitation. Initiated after conversations between Bigelow and then-Nevada senator Harry Reid, the program garnered at least $22 million in funding over five years (it’s not yet clear whether it survives under a different guise after its supposed termination in 2012).
- What We've Learned From 60 Years of U.S.-Funded UFO Probes
- What We've Learned From 60 Years of U.S.-Funded UFO Probes
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Bees Can Solve The Traveling Salesperson Problem
Past research that looked only at the order in which small foragers like birds and bees arrive at each destination, showed that they often find optimal solutions—but it couldn’t explain how the animals decreased flight times. To figure that out, the bee research team set up five artificial flowers, which were not as attractive as real flowers but did offer the bees sweet nectar when they landed. Scientists then tracked the insects over two days as they explored the paths and developed routes.
A bee drawn to an artificial flower keeps figuring out how to get here faster. (Joseph Woodgate)
Like people, bees are creatures of habit. The study’s bees established favorite paths early on and followed them regularly, limiting exploration with time. They also became better navigators with each flight, changing route sequences to improve speed from one feeder to another until they found the best paths, and becoming increasingly adept at their favorite flights. They never became completely set in their ways, however.
The research team believes their work can inform a few very different fields of study. For one, it improves understanding of how bees and other pollinating insects search for food and operate, which can help humans minimize risks posed by habitat loss and increased agriculture. The study also adds to a growing body of knowledge on animal cognition, used to understand both animal and human brains. Lastly, the researchers say, their findings could come in handy for technologists developing machines that navigate. In the future, when your GPS tells you to turn left, you may have a bee to thank for the information.
- More Here
A bee drawn to an artificial flower keeps figuring out how to get here faster. (Joseph Woodgate)
Like people, bees are creatures of habit. The study’s bees established favorite paths early on and followed them regularly, limiting exploration with time. They also became better navigators with each flight, changing route sequences to improve speed from one feeder to another until they found the best paths, and becoming increasingly adept at their favorite flights. They never became completely set in their ways, however.
The research team believes their work can inform a few very different fields of study. For one, it improves understanding of how bees and other pollinating insects search for food and operate, which can help humans minimize risks posed by habitat loss and increased agriculture. The study also adds to a growing body of knowledge on animal cognition, used to understand both animal and human brains. Lastly, the researchers say, their findings could come in handy for technologists developing machines that navigate. In the future, when your GPS tells you to turn left, you may have a bee to thank for the information.
- More Here
Generalization Theory and Deep Nets, An introduction
Why do students get confused and think that such tools of generalization theory gives some powerful technique to guide design of machine learning algorithms?
Answer: Probably because standard presentation in lecture notes and textbooks seems to pretend that we are computationally-omnipotent beings who can compute VC dimension and Rademacher complexity and thus arrive at meaningful bounds on sample sizes needed for training to generalize. While this may have been possible in the old days with simple classifiers, today we have complicated classifiers with millions of variables, which furthermore are products of nonconvex optimization techniques like backpropagation. The only way to actually lowerbound Rademacher complexity of such complicated learning architectures is to try training a classifier, and detect lack of generalization via a held-out set. Every practitioner in the world already does this (without realizing it), and kudos to Zhang et al. for highlighting that theory currently offers nothing better.
- More Here
Answer: Probably because standard presentation in lecture notes and textbooks seems to pretend that we are computationally-omnipotent beings who can compute VC dimension and Rademacher complexity and thus arrive at meaningful bounds on sample sizes needed for training to generalize. While this may have been possible in the old days with simple classifiers, today we have complicated classifiers with millions of variables, which furthermore are products of nonconvex optimization techniques like backpropagation. The only way to actually lowerbound Rademacher complexity of such complicated learning architectures is to try training a classifier, and detect lack of generalization via a held-out set. Every practitioner in the world already does this (without realizing it), and kudos to Zhang et al. for highlighting that theory currently offers nothing better.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw
- George Bernard Shaw
Monday, December 18, 2017
Earliest Evidence For Dog Breeding Found On Remote Siberian Island
The hunter-gatherers of Zhokhov Island were a hardy folk. Nine thousand years ago, they survived frigid year-round temperatures in animal-skin tents some 500 kilometers north of what is now the Russian mainland, and they were the only people ever known to hunt large numbers of polar bears without firearms. Now it appears these ancient Arctic dwellers did something even more remarkable: They may have been among the first humans to breed dogs for a particular purpose. An analysis of canine bones from Zhokhov suggests the dogs there were bred to pull sleds, making this the first evidence—by thousands of years—for dog breeding in the archaeological record.
“It’s pretty convincing and very exciting,” says Melinda Zeder, an archaezoologist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The finding may help explain why people domesticated dogs in the first place: to put them to work. “It fills in a missing piece of the puzzle of early human-dog relationships, and even domestication itself,” adds Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
- More Here
“It’s pretty convincing and very exciting,” says Melinda Zeder, an archaezoologist at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The finding may help explain why people domesticated dogs in the first place: to put them to work. “It fills in a missing piece of the puzzle of early human-dog relationships, and even domestication itself,” adds Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
- More Here
Sunday, December 17, 2017
What I've Been Reading
How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs.
Wow! One of the best books I have read this year. It is one of those books which we have to re-read every year to keep our thinking from straying.
Wow! One of the best books I have read this year. It is one of those books which we have to re-read every year to keep our thinking from straying.
John Stuart Mill's defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components.
The first is that brining analytical power to bear a problem is not enough, especially if one's goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can provide meaningful action.
The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really life. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that language in the way that it deserves; to have your feelings moved in a very different direction by the sight of people living in abject poverty is to respond to that situation in the way it deserves. The latter example is especially relevant to someone like Mill who wishes to be a social reformer: if your analysis leads you to the conclusion that is it unjust that people suffer in poverty in a wealthy country, but your feelings do not match your analysis, then something has gone awry with you. And it may very well happen that if the proper feelings are not present and imaginatively active, then you will not even bother to do the analysis that would reveal unmistakable injustice. If the feelings are not cultivated the analytical faculties might not function at all.
It is, then for John Stuart Mill, looking back from the end of his life on his youthful sufferings, impossible to draw a line that separates analysis on the one side from feelings on the other and to conclude that only the first side is relevant to thinking. The whole person must be engaged, all the faculties present and accounted for, in order to real thinking to take place. Indeed, this is Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is - and to act responsibly toward it.
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
What are some causes of depression across cultures?
Many of the risk factors for depression are similar across cultures. These include gender, unemployment, traumatic events. The themes of depression tend to revolve around loss. But what people make of their losses and how they interpret their distress differs tremendously across cultures. In the West, we have increasingly pathologized depression and attributed it to biomedical factors. We tend to think that distancing people from their distress can be a functional way of helping them. However, teaching people that this very complex social, cultural, and biological phenomenon is entirely biological can backfire. It encourages people to ignore environmental factors, and instead, essentialize depression as a characteristic of themselves and their biology.
How does the meaning of depression vary around the world?
The meaning that people assign to suffering varies richly across cultures. Buddhism approaches suffering as an essential characteristic of life. We are mindful of it, yet, we don't try to chase it away. In Eastern European Orthodox Christianity and traditional Catholic contexts, there are two religious perspectives on suffering. On one hand, excessive suffering that blocks your goals is thought to be a sin. Simultaneously, suffering that allows you to stay engaged in your life is thought to bring you closer to God. It’s almost like broadcasting your suffering highlights you as a more complex and virtuous human being in other people’s eyes. Moreover, in India and Ecuador suffering can be interpreted as a rift in social networks that requires mending.
[---]
Are there genetic vulnerabilities for depression across cultures?
Genetic vulnerability differs substantially from country to country. East Asian contexts, for example, show a high prevalence of genes associated with depression. Yet, despite these vulnerabilities, they develop fewer cases of the disorder. One hypothesis is that genetic vulnerabilities have co-evolved with culture, creating extra protective factors (in this case, extra interdependence). However, when these people leave their cultural contexts, they have a higher risk of developing depression.
[---]
What is the role of emotion regulation?
Emotion regulation is increasingly becoming understood as a core factor in all affective disorders. In western societies, we don't see enough adaptive strategies like reappraisal: learning to tell yourself a different story that would eventually lead to different emotions. There is also not enough social regulation of emotion, which occurs by sharing our emotions with others. Research shows that cultures can facilitate functional regulation strategies. For example, Igor Grossmann’s work shows that Russians make rumination (generally considered a dysfunctional strategy) more functional by encouraging people to ruminate about the self from another person’s perspective, making rumination almost reappraisal-like in its quality.
- How Culture Affects Depression
Many of the risk factors for depression are similar across cultures. These include gender, unemployment, traumatic events. The themes of depression tend to revolve around loss. But what people make of their losses and how they interpret their distress differs tremendously across cultures. In the West, we have increasingly pathologized depression and attributed it to biomedical factors. We tend to think that distancing people from their distress can be a functional way of helping them. However, teaching people that this very complex social, cultural, and biological phenomenon is entirely biological can backfire. It encourages people to ignore environmental factors, and instead, essentialize depression as a characteristic of themselves and their biology.
How does the meaning of depression vary around the world?
The meaning that people assign to suffering varies richly across cultures. Buddhism approaches suffering as an essential characteristic of life. We are mindful of it, yet, we don't try to chase it away. In Eastern European Orthodox Christianity and traditional Catholic contexts, there are two religious perspectives on suffering. On one hand, excessive suffering that blocks your goals is thought to be a sin. Simultaneously, suffering that allows you to stay engaged in your life is thought to bring you closer to God. It’s almost like broadcasting your suffering highlights you as a more complex and virtuous human being in other people’s eyes. Moreover, in India and Ecuador suffering can be interpreted as a rift in social networks that requires mending.
[---]
Are there genetic vulnerabilities for depression across cultures?
Genetic vulnerability differs substantially from country to country. East Asian contexts, for example, show a high prevalence of genes associated with depression. Yet, despite these vulnerabilities, they develop fewer cases of the disorder. One hypothesis is that genetic vulnerabilities have co-evolved with culture, creating extra protective factors (in this case, extra interdependence). However, when these people leave their cultural contexts, they have a higher risk of developing depression.
[---]
What is the role of emotion regulation?
Emotion regulation is increasingly becoming understood as a core factor in all affective disorders. In western societies, we don't see enough adaptive strategies like reappraisal: learning to tell yourself a different story that would eventually lead to different emotions. There is also not enough social regulation of emotion, which occurs by sharing our emotions with others. Research shows that cultures can facilitate functional regulation strategies. For example, Igor Grossmann’s work shows that Russians make rumination (generally considered a dysfunctional strategy) more functional by encouraging people to ruminate about the self from another person’s perspective, making rumination almost reappraisal-like in its quality.
- How Culture Affects Depression
Quote of the Day
In a world where all options and probabilities are known, a heuristic can only be faster but never more accurate. In a world of uncertainty, which is typically the situation we face, where one cannot optimize by definition, heuristics tend to be more robust.
- Review of Enigma of Reason
- Review of Enigma of Reason
Friday, December 15, 2017
Quote of the Day
I was not the only person who was bothered by S’s behavior. He relentlessly pressured my friend, a female graduate student, to have sex with him by saying that because he was married and she was engaged, those two things “cancelled each other out”. Therefore, he argued, they should have sex.
At this same conference, the morning after a particularly debaucherous night, a married professor was overheard imploring other people to smell his fingers following an encounter with a junior colleague. With the benefit of hindsight, I now recognize my experience at that conference as a critical moment in my career, one I looked back on shortly thereafter when I decided that perhaps this version of academia was not for me.
- This is why I don't care about "evil" AI of an imagined future but I am worry every moment about assoles like "S" working in AI. Let us throw this assole of the the field. Btw., you have to call an assole, an assole otherwise what is the point of having that word.
At this same conference, the morning after a particularly debaucherous night, a married professor was overheard imploring other people to smell his fingers following an encounter with a junior colleague. With the benefit of hindsight, I now recognize my experience at that conference as a critical moment in my career, one I looked back on shortly thereafter when I decided that perhaps this version of academia was not for me.
- This is why I don't care about "evil" AI of an imagined future but I am worry every moment about assoles like "S" working in AI. Let us throw this assole of the the field. Btw., you have to call an assole, an assole otherwise what is the point of having that word.
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Quote of the Day
What you think means more than anything else in your life - more than what you earn, more than where you live, more than your social position, and more than what anyone else may think about you.
- George Matthew Adams
- George Matthew Adams
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Quote of the Day
Buried deep alongside the hydroelectric dams, shelters and food stores, the Swiss also have libraries ready to reboot civilization:
“In another [underground bunker], detailed instructions on how to build devices for reading all known data storage formats, even older formats like floppy disks, are kept, so that if that knowledge is otherwise lost, future generations can still decode our data storage devices to access the data within correctly. Essentially, the researchers involved in this particular project have attempted to create a “Rosetta Stone” of data formats and are using a ridiculously secure Swiss bunker as the storage point for that knowledge.”
- Switzerland is Prepared for Civilizational Collapse
“In another [underground bunker], detailed instructions on how to build devices for reading all known data storage formats, even older formats like floppy disks, are kept, so that if that knowledge is otherwise lost, future generations can still decode our data storage devices to access the data within correctly. Essentially, the researchers involved in this particular project have attempted to create a “Rosetta Stone” of data formats and are using a ridiculously secure Swiss bunker as the storage point for that knowledge.”
- Switzerland is Prepared for Civilizational Collapse
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Quote of the Day
The lesson of the war that should never depart from us, is that the American people have no exemption from the ordinary fate of humankind. If we sin, we must suffer for our sins, like the Empires that are tottering and the Nations that have perished.
- The War Claims of South by Murat Halstead
- The War Claims of South by Murat Halstead
Monday, December 11, 2017
Sunday, December 10, 2017
Quote of the Day
Lead author Kitty Xu, formerly a Johns Hopkins graduate student and now a researcher at the social media site Pinterest, explains that when it comes to split-second decisions, the longer a decision has to take hold in the brain, the harder it is to reverse. “Stopping a planned behavior requires extremely fast choreography between several distinct areas of the brain, our research found,” she says. “If we change our mind about pressing the gas pedal even a few milliseconds after the original “go” message has been sent to our muscles, we simply can’t stop.” Xu adds that if we change our minds within roughly 100 milliseconds of making a decision, we can successfully revise our plans. If we wait more than 200 milliseconds, however, we may be unable to make the desired change—in other words we may land a speeding ticket or a tumble down the stairs. As we age, our neural communication slows, and that likely contributes to more of these glitches, Xu says.
- The Neuroscience of Changing Your Mind
- The Neuroscience of Changing Your Mind
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
In particular, there is no such thing as “general” intelligence. On an abstract level, we know this for a fact via the “no free lunch” theorem — stating that no problem-solving algorithm can outperform random chance across all possible problems. If intelligence is a problem-solving algorithm, then it can only be understood with respect to a specific problem. In a more concrete way, we can observe this empirically in that all intelligent systems we know are highly specialized. The intelligence of the AIs we build today is hyper specialized in extremely narrow tasks — like playing Go, or classifying images into 10,000 known categories. The intelligence of an octopus is specialized in the problem of being an octopus. The intelligence of a human is specialized in the problem of being human.
What would happen if we were to put a freshly-created human brain in the body of an octopus, and let in live at the bottom of the ocean? Would it even learn to use its eight-legged body? Would it survive past a few days? We cannot perform this experiment, but we do know that cognitive development in humans and animals is driven by hardcoded, innate dynamics. Human babies are born with an advanced set of reflex behaviors and innate learning templates that drive their early sensorimotor development, and that are fundamentally intertwined with the structure of the human sensorimotor space. The brain has hardcoded conceptions of having a body with hands that can grab, a mouth that can suck, eyes mounted on a moving head that can be used to visually follow objects (the vestibulo-ocular reflex), and these preconceptions are required for human intelligence to start taking control of the human body. It has even been convincingly argued, for instance by Chomsky, that very high-level human cognitive features, such as our ability to develop language, are innate.
Similarly, one can imagine that the octopus has its own set of hardcoded cognitive primitives required in order to learn how to use an octopus body and survive in its octopus environment. The brain of a human is hyper specialized in the human condition — an innate specialization extending possibly as far as social behaviors, language, and common sense — and the brain of an octopus would likewise be hyper specialized in octopus behaviors. A human baby brain properly grafted in an octopus body would most likely fail to adequately take control of its unique sensorimotor space, and would quickly die off. Not so smart now, Mr. Superior Brain.
- The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion
What would happen if we were to put a freshly-created human brain in the body of an octopus, and let in live at the bottom of the ocean? Would it even learn to use its eight-legged body? Would it survive past a few days? We cannot perform this experiment, but we do know that cognitive development in humans and animals is driven by hardcoded, innate dynamics. Human babies are born with an advanced set of reflex behaviors and innate learning templates that drive their early sensorimotor development, and that are fundamentally intertwined with the structure of the human sensorimotor space. The brain has hardcoded conceptions of having a body with hands that can grab, a mouth that can suck, eyes mounted on a moving head that can be used to visually follow objects (the vestibulo-ocular reflex), and these preconceptions are required for human intelligence to start taking control of the human body. It has even been convincingly argued, for instance by Chomsky, that very high-level human cognitive features, such as our ability to develop language, are innate.
Similarly, one can imagine that the octopus has its own set of hardcoded cognitive primitives required in order to learn how to use an octopus body and survive in its octopus environment. The brain of a human is hyper specialized in the human condition — an innate specialization extending possibly as far as social behaviors, language, and common sense — and the brain of an octopus would likewise be hyper specialized in octopus behaviors. A human baby brain properly grafted in an octopus body would most likely fail to adequately take control of its unique sensorimotor space, and would quickly die off. Not so smart now, Mr. Superior Brain.
- The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion
Friday, December 8, 2017
How Planting Trees Changed Lives In a Former Coal Community
John Everitt, the chief executive of the National Forest Company which oversees the project, says the simple act of planting trees has sparked a dizzying list of spin-off benefits, from tourism to a nascent woodland economy; from flood management to thriving wildlife; from improved health and wellbeing to housebuilding and jobs.
“We have embedded trees in and around where people live and made sure they are accessible rather than as a distant thing that they can visit occasionally. And we are seeing the benefits in all sorts of ways – and they are multiplying all the time.”
Everitt, an ecologist by training who has been heading the project for the past three years, fires off an impressive list of figures to back up his claims: the forest attracts 7.8 million visitors a year, it has brought about 5,000 new jobs with hundreds more in the pipeline, woodland industries from firewood to timber businesses are springing up, craft food and beer businesses are flourishing and thousands of people cycle or walk the hundreds of miles of pathways and trails each year.
But he says some of the most important benefits the area has witnessed are more difficult to quantify.
“People now have a sense of pride in this place and a sense of belonging and wellbeing. Children who were maybe nervous of the outdoors are benefitting from being able to walk or cycle or simply play in the woods.”
- More Here
“We have embedded trees in and around where people live and made sure they are accessible rather than as a distant thing that they can visit occasionally. And we are seeing the benefits in all sorts of ways – and they are multiplying all the time.”
Everitt, an ecologist by training who has been heading the project for the past three years, fires off an impressive list of figures to back up his claims: the forest attracts 7.8 million visitors a year, it has brought about 5,000 new jobs with hundreds more in the pipeline, woodland industries from firewood to timber businesses are springing up, craft food and beer businesses are flourishing and thousands of people cycle or walk the hundreds of miles of pathways and trails each year.
But he says some of the most important benefits the area has witnessed are more difficult to quantify.
“People now have a sense of pride in this place and a sense of belonging and wellbeing. Children who were maybe nervous of the outdoors are benefitting from being able to walk or cycle or simply play in the woods.”
- More Here
Quote of the Day
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. The current scientific answer to this pipe dream can be summarised in three simple principles: 1. Organisms are algorithms. Every animal – including Homo sapiens – is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. 2. Algorithmic calculations are not affected by the materials from which you build the calculator. Whether you build an abacus from wood, iron or plastic, two beads plus two beads equals four beads. 3. Hence there is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that non-organic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass. As long as the calculations remain valid, what does it matter whether the algorithms are manifested in carbon or silicon?
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Quote of the Day
I don’t usually ask people to change their behavior. Asking doesn’t work as well for me as action does. Instead of begging people to see things from my perspective, I give them two choices: meat or me.
I tell any friend or family member I plan to see on a monthly basis, “If you have to eat meat, I have to leave.”
- I Don’t Let Friends Eat Meat In My Presence
I tell any friend or family member I plan to see on a monthly basis, “If you have to eat meat, I have to leave.”
- I Don’t Let Friends Eat Meat In My Presence
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Quote of the Day
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
- Charles Darwin
- Charles Darwin
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
The Genetic History of Horses
A new review paper by Pablo Librado and colleagues in the October issue of Genetics tells the story of how the modern horse came to be. They track the genetic changes that led from wild horses living on the Eurasian steppes 5,500 years ago to the many highly specialized breeds of domestic horse that exist today.
Modern horses have been shaped into distinct breeds with different talents and specialties. Compare a racing thoroughbred with a draft horse like a Clydesdale —they’re extremely different animals now, but they both descend from the same ancestral group of wild horses. Comparing the DNA variation of all different kinds of domestic horses and their only living wild relative, Przewalski’s horse, can reveal the genetic changes that occurred during domestication. Librado and colleagues emphasize that another crucial tool used for tracing the horse lineage is ancient DNA, which is extracted from bones of animals that have been dead for thousands of years. The oldest successfully extracted DNA came from the skeleton of a wild horse that lived in the Yukon between 560,000 – 780,000 years ago. Such samples are especially important because there are very few wild horses left alive, and modern horse breeding practices have obscured the genomic signature of early domestication qualities like geography. Thanks to data from ancient DNA, geneticists have learned that a previously unknown group of now-extinct wild horses were also ancestors to modern horses.
Remarkably, the majority of Y-chromosomes carried by modern domestic horses can be traced back to just a few stallions. This could be because only a few males were originally used in domestication, but it could also result from carefully controlled modern breeding practices where a single male sires a huge number of offspring. The ultimate cause of this very low Y-linked diversity is still debated, but strict selective breeding has almost certainly contributed. In contrast, a much larger number of females than males contributed ancestry to domestic horses. According to Librado and colleagues, it seems that wild mares were continuously introduced into human-controlled herds throughout the process of domestication.
- More Here
Modern horses have been shaped into distinct breeds with different talents and specialties. Compare a racing thoroughbred with a draft horse like a Clydesdale —they’re extremely different animals now, but they both descend from the same ancestral group of wild horses. Comparing the DNA variation of all different kinds of domestic horses and their only living wild relative, Przewalski’s horse, can reveal the genetic changes that occurred during domestication. Librado and colleagues emphasize that another crucial tool used for tracing the horse lineage is ancient DNA, which is extracted from bones of animals that have been dead for thousands of years. The oldest successfully extracted DNA came from the skeleton of a wild horse that lived in the Yukon between 560,000 – 780,000 years ago. Such samples are especially important because there are very few wild horses left alive, and modern horse breeding practices have obscured the genomic signature of early domestication qualities like geography. Thanks to data from ancient DNA, geneticists have learned that a previously unknown group of now-extinct wild horses were also ancestors to modern horses.
Remarkably, the majority of Y-chromosomes carried by modern domestic horses can be traced back to just a few stallions. This could be because only a few males were originally used in domestication, but it could also result from carefully controlled modern breeding practices where a single male sires a huge number of offspring. The ultimate cause of this very low Y-linked diversity is still debated, but strict selective breeding has almost certainly contributed. In contrast, a much larger number of females than males contributed ancestry to domestic horses. According to Librado and colleagues, it seems that wild mares were continuously introduced into human-controlled herds throughout the process of domestication.
- More Here
Monday, December 4, 2017
Quote of the Day
But none of Orwell’s silly predictions would really irritate if the canonisation of 1984 was not a net negative for our political debate. This is not to say the novel is not a decent evocation of Stalinism—it is. It’s just that its lodging itself as the English language’s only universally-read dystopia hampers awareness of what really threatens democracy today. It strikes me as rather glib to say that 1984 is relevant because Orwell was worried about surveillance and “newspeak” words losing their meaning. Orwell’s actual warnings—about homogenization, the destruction of information, a world without wealth and only unlimited powers of the state—are now miles away. If anything, the threats to democracy are the opposite of “Orwellian.”
This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.
- Orwell is a terrible role-model for an age that needs more serious people honestly grappling with complexity
This is the problem of bringing everything, always, back to Orwell. He has nothing to say about social fragmentation, financialisation, ethnic splintering, unaccountable corporations, offshore kleptocrats, or echo chambers, to name but a few. Instead, he leaves too many political minds forever chasing, Quixote-like, the totalitarian windmill of untrammeled state power. They ignore the real anemic state before their eyes, which struggles to keep up with corporate algorithms, is unable to fulfil its promises, or tax the super-rich.
- Orwell is a terrible role-model for an age that needs more serious people honestly grappling with complexity
Sunday, December 3, 2017
When Philosophy Lost Its Way
Having adopted the same structural form as the sciences, it’s no wonder philosophy fell prey to physics envy and feelings of inadequacy. Philosophy adopted the scientific modus operandi of knowledge production, but failed to match the sciences in terms of making progress in describing the world. Much has been made of this inability of philosophy to match the cognitive success of the sciences. But what has passed unnoticed is philosophy’s all-too-successful aping of the institutional form of the sciences. We, too, produce research articles. We, too, are judged by the same coin of the realm: peer-reviewed products. We, too, develop sub-specializations far from the comprehension of the person on the street. In all of these ways we are so very “scientific.”
Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.
There is another layer to this story. The act of purification accompanying the creation of the modern research university was not just about differentiating realms of knowledge. It was also about divorcing knowledge from virtue. Though it seems foreign to us now, before purification the philosopher (and natural philosopher) was assumed to be morally superior to other sorts of people. The 18th-century thinker Joseph Priestley wrote “a Philosopher ought to be something greater and better than another man.” Philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, was seen as a vocation, like the priesthood. It required significant moral virtues (foremost among these were integrity and selflessness), and the pursuit of wisdom in turn further inculcated those virtues. The study of philosophy elevated those who pursued it. Knowing and being good were intimately linked. It was widely understood that the point of philosophy was to become good rather than simply to collect or produce knowledge.
Once knowledge and goodness were divorced, scientists could be regarded as experts, but there are no morals or lessons to be drawn from their work. Science derives its authority from impersonal structures and methods, not the superior character of the scientist. The individual scientist is no different from the average Joe; he or she has, as Shapin has written, “no special authority to pronounce on what ought to be done.” For many, science became a paycheck, and the scientist became a “de-moralized” tool enlisted in the service of power, bureaucracy and commerce.
- More Here
Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.
There is another layer to this story. The act of purification accompanying the creation of the modern research university was not just about differentiating realms of knowledge. It was also about divorcing knowledge from virtue. Though it seems foreign to us now, before purification the philosopher (and natural philosopher) was assumed to be morally superior to other sorts of people. The 18th-century thinker Joseph Priestley wrote “a Philosopher ought to be something greater and better than another man.” Philosophy, understood as the love of wisdom, was seen as a vocation, like the priesthood. It required significant moral virtues (foremost among these were integrity and selflessness), and the pursuit of wisdom in turn further inculcated those virtues. The study of philosophy elevated those who pursued it. Knowing and being good were intimately linked. It was widely understood that the point of philosophy was to become good rather than simply to collect or produce knowledge.
Once knowledge and goodness were divorced, scientists could be regarded as experts, but there are no morals or lessons to be drawn from their work. Science derives its authority from impersonal structures and methods, not the superior character of the scientist. The individual scientist is no different from the average Joe; he or she has, as Shapin has written, “no special authority to pronounce on what ought to be done.” For many, science became a paycheck, and the scientist became a “de-moralized” tool enlisted in the service of power, bureaucracy and commerce.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…
- Leo Tolstoy
- Leo Tolstoy
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
If we start in 1775, the land we call the United States of America has had two major violent revolutions against its own government in the span of 242 years, for an annual chance of 0.8% per year. The first one, the American Revolution, was successful. The second one, the Civil War, was not, but for the purposes of this analysis they are both qualifying events.
Now that might be cheating a little bit, since I’m setting the time-span the year before the first one happened, but we could go back to the founding of the colonies at let’s say approximately 1650, and cook up a probability of 0.5% per year for major violent nationwide revolution.
We could also do such an analysis for other countries (defined here as “bits of land”) around the world, and probably get numbers far in excess of 0.5% per year. If we cast a wider net, and included the war, internment, and genocide of native Americans in our mathematics, then the numbers here go way up.
If we simply include traditional war in the numbers for other countries, their numbers go fantastically up. So I would say the probabilities above are likely on the low side.
At an annual chance of 0.8% per year, the USA has a 55% chance of a major violent revolution in any given 100 year span. At an annual chance of 0.5% per year, we have a 39% chance of a major violent revolution in a given 100 year span. On our soil. That’s just math.
These things are much worse than floods, and the people who suffer during them are largely not the elites running the show, they’re the people at the ground level, whether they’re participating in the revolution or not.
Syria is sitting at almost half a million dead and around ten million displaced into Europe and that revolution is still only about half-cooked.
Those people mostly aren’t combatants, those are women, children, families, who got stuck in the middle of something they couldn’t see coming, and for which they were woefully ill-prepared.
Nobody sees these things coming. If they did, they wouldn’t happen. And when they happen to modern countries, which are tremendously dependent on civil infrastructure and supply chains to get the necessities of life such as water and food, the humanitarian impact for the poor and defenseless is staggering.
When people on the modern left question my commitment to keeping firearms in my home, I often ask them whether they think the USA will last “forever and until the end of time,” they don’t know how to answer this question, largely because my left-leaning friends put emotional faith in institutions of authority.
They usually answer, “Well, no, but it’ll certainly last my lifetime.” So I ask them about their kids’ lifetimes, and their grandkids. What would they do if it happened?
Mathematically, something like this is certain to happen over a long enough time-span, and we can use mathematics to project the likelihood of it happening over any given time span, by synthesizing data. All the data I see seems to indicate that having a plan for it is probably much more valuable than having a plan for tornadoes, or floods.
Setting constitutional scholarship aside, which is typically built on retrospective thinking geared towards justifying prior-held opinions, I view gun ownership as a direct hedge against the suffering of the poor and helpless during these violent situations. I don’t think owning guns is a complete solution to protecting your family in a violent revolution or anarchic situation, but I do think it’s an essential piece of the overall puzzle.
You need a safe place to go, a way to protect yourself on your way there, and a way to defend that safe place if necessary from desperate people who didn’t have a plan. And you cannot rely on an authority to provide you that protection when the authority itself is in question.
That, too, is just math.
And with Communists and Nazis openly clashing in our streets, I believe it is math worth thinking about.
- The Mathematics of Violent Revolution, great piece although the Math is simple
Now that might be cheating a little bit, since I’m setting the time-span the year before the first one happened, but we could go back to the founding of the colonies at let’s say approximately 1650, and cook up a probability of 0.5% per year for major violent nationwide revolution.
We could also do such an analysis for other countries (defined here as “bits of land”) around the world, and probably get numbers far in excess of 0.5% per year. If we cast a wider net, and included the war, internment, and genocide of native Americans in our mathematics, then the numbers here go way up.
If we simply include traditional war in the numbers for other countries, their numbers go fantastically up. So I would say the probabilities above are likely on the low side.
At an annual chance of 0.8% per year, the USA has a 55% chance of a major violent revolution in any given 100 year span. At an annual chance of 0.5% per year, we have a 39% chance of a major violent revolution in a given 100 year span. On our soil. That’s just math.
These things are much worse than floods, and the people who suffer during them are largely not the elites running the show, they’re the people at the ground level, whether they’re participating in the revolution or not.
Syria is sitting at almost half a million dead and around ten million displaced into Europe and that revolution is still only about half-cooked.
Those people mostly aren’t combatants, those are women, children, families, who got stuck in the middle of something they couldn’t see coming, and for which they were woefully ill-prepared.
Nobody sees these things coming. If they did, they wouldn’t happen. And when they happen to modern countries, which are tremendously dependent on civil infrastructure and supply chains to get the necessities of life such as water and food, the humanitarian impact for the poor and defenseless is staggering.
When people on the modern left question my commitment to keeping firearms in my home, I often ask them whether they think the USA will last “forever and until the end of time,” they don’t know how to answer this question, largely because my left-leaning friends put emotional faith in institutions of authority.
They usually answer, “Well, no, but it’ll certainly last my lifetime.” So I ask them about their kids’ lifetimes, and their grandkids. What would they do if it happened?
Mathematically, something like this is certain to happen over a long enough time-span, and we can use mathematics to project the likelihood of it happening over any given time span, by synthesizing data. All the data I see seems to indicate that having a plan for it is probably much more valuable than having a plan for tornadoes, or floods.
Setting constitutional scholarship aside, which is typically built on retrospective thinking geared towards justifying prior-held opinions, I view gun ownership as a direct hedge against the suffering of the poor and helpless during these violent situations. I don’t think owning guns is a complete solution to protecting your family in a violent revolution or anarchic situation, but I do think it’s an essential piece of the overall puzzle.
You need a safe place to go, a way to protect yourself on your way there, and a way to defend that safe place if necessary from desperate people who didn’t have a plan. And you cannot rely on an authority to provide you that protection when the authority itself is in question.
That, too, is just math.
And with Communists and Nazis openly clashing in our streets, I believe it is math worth thinking about.
- The Mathematics of Violent Revolution, great piece although the Math is simple
Quote of the Day
The capacity to resist coercion stems partly from the individual’s identification with a group. The people who stood up best in the Nazi concentration camps were those who felt themselves members of compact party (the Communists) or a church (priests and ministers), or of a close-knit national group. The individualists, whatever their nationality, caved in.
- The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
- The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
Friday, December 1, 2017
Do People Commit Evil Out of Ignorance?
Another contemporary philosopher, Glenn Hughes, uses a similar concept, again in the context of Nazi Germany, talking about “intelligent stupidity” (not an oxymoron!):
“Intelligent stupidity is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. [The danger lies] not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, [and] any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings.” Instead, intelligent stupidity is a “spiritual sickness,” and in need of a spiritual cure.What do we gain by curing ourselves of amathia, and moreover by recognizing that people who do bad things are not “evil,” but rather sick? A lot, as it turns out. We get what Epictetus promises his students that they will achieve by practicing and internalizing the precepts of Stoic philosophy, and particularly the dichotomy of control:
“Now the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent and take what belongs to others for your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. … But if you take for your own only that which is your own and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you; you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will; no one will hurt you, you will not have an enemy, nor will you suffer any harm.”- More Here
Quote of the Day
To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.
- How to Think by Alan Jacobs
- How to Think by Alan Jacobs
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Why Lost Ice Means Lost Hope for an Inuit Village
When Dr. Cunsolo first started researching the impact of climate change on mental health, she said there was a misconception that indigenous people — often on the front lines of rising oceans, extreme heat and melting ice — would be the only ones affected.
But studies in Australia showed how farmers struggled with extreme weather, and that in Ghana, withered crops, dried-up wells and the “loss of beauty” made people sad.
“We weren’t around when the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs, but now we have humans in the 21st century who are trying to deal with a change to the world which is unprecedented,” said Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and former professor at Murdoch University in Australia. He said that language needed to evolve to articulate such profound loss.
After witnessing the devastation at Australia’s strip mines, Dr. Albrecht coined the word solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home.” (It comes from the Latin solacium, meaning “comfort” and the ancient Greek root algia meaning “pain.”)
Dr. Albrecht said the anxiety people felt about climate change was perfectly rational. What’s disordered, he said, “is the world that is causing you to feel that way.”
The experience of those on the front lines, Dr. Cunsolo said, was merely an indication of what was coming. “All humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are impacted by the natural environment,” she said.
Mr. Pottle, for his part, is learning, painfully, to adapt.
Blocked by the open water of the bay, he aimed his snowmobile along a path of low willow seedlings and mosses. Miles on, he would reach the tundra, where, in the distance, his red cabin sat against a white backdrop of sky and land.
- More Here
But studies in Australia showed how farmers struggled with extreme weather, and that in Ghana, withered crops, dried-up wells and the “loss of beauty” made people sad.
“We weren’t around when the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs, but now we have humans in the 21st century who are trying to deal with a change to the world which is unprecedented,” said Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and former professor at Murdoch University in Australia. He said that language needed to evolve to articulate such profound loss.
After witnessing the devastation at Australia’s strip mines, Dr. Albrecht coined the word solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home.” (It comes from the Latin solacium, meaning “comfort” and the ancient Greek root algia meaning “pain.”)
Dr. Albrecht said the anxiety people felt about climate change was perfectly rational. What’s disordered, he said, “is the world that is causing you to feel that way.”
The experience of those on the front lines, Dr. Cunsolo said, was merely an indication of what was coming. “All humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are impacted by the natural environment,” she said.
Mr. Pottle, for his part, is learning, painfully, to adapt.
Blocked by the open water of the bay, he aimed his snowmobile along a path of low willow seedlings and mosses. Miles on, he would reach the tundra, where, in the distance, his red cabin sat against a white backdrop of sky and land.
- More Here
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Quote of the Day
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
- I. J. Good
- I. J. Good
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Quote of the Day
For if one shows this, a man will retire from his error of himself; but as long as you do not succeed in showing this, you need not wonder if he persists in his error, for he acts because he has an impression that he is right.
- Epictetus, Discourses, II.26
- Epictetus, Discourses, II.26
Monday, November 27, 2017
Quote of the Day
A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that set in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on ‘solastalgia,’ with it’s evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, 'the homesickness you have when you are still at home.
- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Quote of the Day
Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
- Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever
- Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
Gandhi was more directly influenced on freedom, as on non-violence, by Tolstoy. We saw earlier, in A Letter to a Hindoo, the influence of Tolstoy’s view on non-violence, that Indians would be free from British rule, if they internalised the law of love and stopped cooperating on violent projects. Tolstoy saw freedom in recognition, when he said that Indians are enslaved by violence only because they do not recognise the eternal law of love inherent in humanity. Similarly, in Gandhi’s other favourite work by Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Tolstoy writes that you will be free as soon as you recognise that the role you play in a violent society is not needed for the public good. The reference to love, we saw above, was brought into the Stoic Epictetus’ account of the Cynic’s response to injustice.
Tolstoy was more immediately influenced by the Stoics. He had in his library a book about the Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and other Greek moralists, and had marked a translation of Marcus Aurelius with numerous underlinings. One of Tolstoy’s remarks in The Kingdom of God is Within You is reminiscent of Epictetus on freedom as an inviolability of the rightly directed will, when he says: ‘It is impossible for a man to be placed against his will in a situation repugnant to his conscience.’ Gandhi’s own remark in 1926 seems to echo this when he says: ‘No power on Earth can make a person do a thing against his will.’ In both views, the will cannot be forced, although Epictetus had said this only of the rightly directed will. Gandhi’s comment is presumably not meant to deny that one can act reluctantly, as in his example above, in which non-violence is seen as even worse than violent action.
[---]
I have already given an example to show why I think Gandhi’s philosophy needs to be studied if his politics are to be understood. It is not opportunism that he sometimes allows violence yet often forbids it too. His belief is subtle (and, to my mind, correct) that, although violence is always wrong, it does not give us exceptionless laws of how to act. As already mentioned, he did not think of himself as a philosopher. But neither, for that matter, did he care for politics, which he once called a ‘botheration’, even though he was a great tactician. He put politics below spiritual values, and would give up political objectives if they clashed with spiritual ones.
Nonetheless, his conclusions about non-violence were to have an enormous impact on India, and not only there. It was partly because he had won worldwide admiration that Britain, weakened by the Second World War, had no choice but to leave India. By the count of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, which is dedicated to advancing the study of non-violent action, there have been 23 non-violent resistance movements influenced by Gandhi in the 20th century and beyond, up to 2005; Martin Luther King, Jr’s was only one. Some have used Sharp’s analysis of Gandhi’s techniques as a handbook. Sharp regards about half of these resistance movements as having succeeded. I think one further effect of Gandhi’s non-violent approach was that there was so little bitterness among first-generation Indians towards the British once they had left, although later generations could well be much more upset when they read the history of British occupation.
- Gandhi the philosopher
Tolstoy was more immediately influenced by the Stoics. He had in his library a book about the Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and other Greek moralists, and had marked a translation of Marcus Aurelius with numerous underlinings. One of Tolstoy’s remarks in The Kingdom of God is Within You is reminiscent of Epictetus on freedom as an inviolability of the rightly directed will, when he says: ‘It is impossible for a man to be placed against his will in a situation repugnant to his conscience.’ Gandhi’s own remark in 1926 seems to echo this when he says: ‘No power on Earth can make a person do a thing against his will.’ In both views, the will cannot be forced, although Epictetus had said this only of the rightly directed will. Gandhi’s comment is presumably not meant to deny that one can act reluctantly, as in his example above, in which non-violence is seen as even worse than violent action.
[---]
I have already given an example to show why I think Gandhi’s philosophy needs to be studied if his politics are to be understood. It is not opportunism that he sometimes allows violence yet often forbids it too. His belief is subtle (and, to my mind, correct) that, although violence is always wrong, it does not give us exceptionless laws of how to act. As already mentioned, he did not think of himself as a philosopher. But neither, for that matter, did he care for politics, which he once called a ‘botheration’, even though he was a great tactician. He put politics below spiritual values, and would give up political objectives if they clashed with spiritual ones.
Nonetheless, his conclusions about non-violence were to have an enormous impact on India, and not only there. It was partly because he had won worldwide admiration that Britain, weakened by the Second World War, had no choice but to leave India. By the count of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, which is dedicated to advancing the study of non-violent action, there have been 23 non-violent resistance movements influenced by Gandhi in the 20th century and beyond, up to 2005; Martin Luther King, Jr’s was only one. Some have used Sharp’s analysis of Gandhi’s techniques as a handbook. Sharp regards about half of these resistance movements as having succeeded. I think one further effect of Gandhi’s non-violent approach was that there was so little bitterness among first-generation Indians towards the British once they had left, although later generations could well be much more upset when they read the history of British occupation.
- Gandhi the philosopher
Quote of the Day
An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
- Clayton M. Christensen
- Clayton M. Christensen
Friday, November 24, 2017
Thursday, November 23, 2017
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Quote of the Day
Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
- C.S. Lewis
- C.S. Lewis
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Quote of the Day
When we give our minds and our responsibility away, we give our lives away. If enough of us do it, we give the world away and that is precisely what we have been doing throughout known human history. This is why the few have always controlled the masses. The only difference today is that the few are now manipulating the entire planet because of the globalisation of business, banking and communications. The foundation of that control has always been the same : keep the people in ignorance, fear and at war with themselves,. Divide, rule and conquer while keeping the most important knowledge to yourself.
- David Icke
- David Icke
Monday, November 20, 2017
Quote of the Day
Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.'
"Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.
"Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing on information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.
"Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.
"Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.”
"Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.
"Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing on information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.
"Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.
"Read. Find out what you truly are. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these three I trust.”
- Barry López, About This Life
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Quote of the Day
We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Saturday, November 18, 2017
The Danger of Knowing You’re on the ‘Right Side of History’
I have to say I was deeply moved by the New York Times op-ed yesterday by an evangelical law professor from Alabama. The piece, by the wonderfully named William S. Brewbaker III, moved me because it was the first genuinely Christian thing I’ve heard an evangelical say about the Roy Moore scandal. It did more than renounce the tribalism that has led so many alleged Christians to back Moore; it presented Christianity, properly understood, as the core alternative to tribalism, as one way out of tribalism’s dead end. Brewbaker’s critical and deeply evangelical point:
It is thus wrong to attack one’s critics, as Mr. Moore did recently on Twitter, as “the forces of evil” and attribute their questions about serious allegations to “a spiritual battle.”
This is not just an evangelical truth. It is deeply embedded in all of Christianity. No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on “the right side of history,” or on the right side of a battle between “good and evil,” is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the “good.” These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time. In the Catholic church, the conviction that the institution could do no wrong, that its reputation must endure because it represented the right side in the struggle against evil … led to the mass rape of children and teens.
- Andrew Sullivan
To begin with, sin is a problem from which no one is exempt. If God’s love required the suffering and death of the Son of God in order to redeem us, we should not underestimate the consequences of sin in our own lives. The world is not divided into “good people” and “bad people”; to quote St. Paul, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Or, as the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”
It is thus wrong to attack one’s critics, as Mr. Moore did recently on Twitter, as “the forces of evil” and attribute their questions about serious allegations to “a spiritual battle.”
This is not just an evangelical truth. It is deeply embedded in all of Christianity. No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on “the right side of history,” or on the right side of a battle between “good and evil,” is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the “good.” These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time. In the Catholic church, the conviction that the institution could do no wrong, that its reputation must endure because it represented the right side in the struggle against evil … led to the mass rape of children and teens.
- Andrew Sullivan
Wisdom Of The Week
When every day many of us wake up to read about fresh horrors on our fresh horrors device, we might find ourselves contemplating the question as to whether, as Albert Camus supposedly put it, one should kill oneself or have a cup of coffee. If there is any philosopher who is famous for contemplating suicide, it’s Camus who, in a more serious tone, proposed that, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
The existentialists and Stoics are notorious for being at loggerheads on many issues. Yet Simone de Beauvoir, who was much less famous for her views on suicide than Camus, gives an example that shows the existential answer isn’t so far removed from the Stoic one – a fascinating case of philosophical convergence, two millennia apart.
In 1954, Beauvoir was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize for her book The Mandarins, in which the main character Anne contemplates suicide. When once she saw the world as vast and inexhaustible, she now looks at it with indifference: “The earth is frozen over; nothingness has reclaimed it.” Her great love affair has collapsed, her daughter has grown up and no longer needs her, and she finds her profession unfulfilling. It’s not only that she feels her life no longer counts, but also existing is torturous and her memories are agony. Suicide seems like an escape from the pain. Clutching the brown vial of poison, Anne hears her daughter’s voice outside and it jars her into considering the effect of her death on other people. “My death does not belong to me,” she concludes, because “it’s the others who would live my death.”
[---]
what makes a life worth living is being useful to others, trying to make the world a better place, our relationships with people we love, and our freedom as moral agents. So long as we have those things, even in limited measure, we stay. And the very fact that there is an open door is a guarantee of freedom for the Stoics. It’s the reassuring knowledge that, if things are really unbearable, you can walk out. As Seneca put it, liberty is as close as your wrists.
No one knows when our time is up. But precisely because we don’t know when life is going to end, the Stoics say that we should live every moment to the fullest, engaging our life in the here and now. If we do things that we don’t enjoy, or are not important, we are wasting the only resource for which people cannot possibly pay us back: time. As Seneca puts it: “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, agrees: “A limit of time is fixed for you, which if you do not use for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go, and it will never return.”
So the answer to Camus’ question is the one given by Epictetus: no, you shouldn’t commit suicide so long as you are up to do what Marcus called the job of a human being. Grab a cup of joe, and focus on appreciating and creating meaningful relationships, projects to pursue, useful things to contribute to others, and things to learn for yourself
- Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? The Stoics and Existentialists agree on the answer
The existentialists and Stoics are notorious for being at loggerheads on many issues. Yet Simone de Beauvoir, who was much less famous for her views on suicide than Camus, gives an example that shows the existential answer isn’t so far removed from the Stoic one – a fascinating case of philosophical convergence, two millennia apart.
In 1954, Beauvoir was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize for her book The Mandarins, in which the main character Anne contemplates suicide. When once she saw the world as vast and inexhaustible, she now looks at it with indifference: “The earth is frozen over; nothingness has reclaimed it.” Her great love affair has collapsed, her daughter has grown up and no longer needs her, and she finds her profession unfulfilling. It’s not only that she feels her life no longer counts, but also existing is torturous and her memories are agony. Suicide seems like an escape from the pain. Clutching the brown vial of poison, Anne hears her daughter’s voice outside and it jars her into considering the effect of her death on other people. “My death does not belong to me,” she concludes, because “it’s the others who would live my death.”
[---]
what makes a life worth living is being useful to others, trying to make the world a better place, our relationships with people we love, and our freedom as moral agents. So long as we have those things, even in limited measure, we stay. And the very fact that there is an open door is a guarantee of freedom for the Stoics. It’s the reassuring knowledge that, if things are really unbearable, you can walk out. As Seneca put it, liberty is as close as your wrists.
No one knows when our time is up. But precisely because we don’t know when life is going to end, the Stoics say that we should live every moment to the fullest, engaging our life in the here and now. If we do things that we don’t enjoy, or are not important, we are wasting the only resource for which people cannot possibly pay us back: time. As Seneca puts it: “Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of today’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon tomorrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, agrees: “A limit of time is fixed for you, which if you do not use for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go, and it will never return.”
So the answer to Camus’ question is the one given by Epictetus: no, you shouldn’t commit suicide so long as you are up to do what Marcus called the job of a human being. Grab a cup of joe, and focus on appreciating and creating meaningful relationships, projects to pursue, useful things to contribute to others, and things to learn for yourself
- Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? The Stoics and Existentialists agree on the answer
Friday, November 17, 2017
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Quote of the Day
Our own worst enemy cannot harm us as much as our unwise thoughts. No one can help us as much as our own compassionate thoughts.
- Buddha
- Buddha
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Quote of the Day
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Quote of the Day
It is now becoming clear why, in spite our lip service to the dialectic, we find it so hard to acknowledge that contradictory processes might actually be at work in society. It is not just a question of difficulty of perception, but one of considerable psychological resistance and reluctance: to accept that thedoux-commerce and the self-destruction theses (or the feudal-shackles or feudal-blessings theses) might both be right makes it much more difficult for the social observer, critic, or “scientist” to impress the general public by proclaiming some inevitable outcome of current processes. But after so many failed prophecies, is it not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?
- Albert O. Hirschman
- Albert O. Hirschman
Monday, November 13, 2017
Quote of the Day
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
- Charles Darwin
- Charles Darwin
Sunday, November 12, 2017
Quote of the Day
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
- Edward O. Wilson
- Edward O. Wilson
Saturday, November 11, 2017
Wisdom Of The Week
The conventional story of human development, he shows, is based on faulty chronology. It turns out that cultivating grain—long thought to be the crucial step from roaming to civilization—does not naturally lead people to stay put in large settlements. New archaeological evidence suggests that people planted and harvested grain as part of a mix of food sources for many centuries, perhaps millennia, without settling into cities. And there were, in fact, places where people did settle down and build towns without farming grain: ecologically rich places, often wetlands bordering the migration routes of birds and animals, where foraging, fishing, and hunting made for a good life in all seasons. There is nothing about grain that fastens humanity’s foot to the earth, as President John Quincy Adams put it in one of the innumerable retellings of the standard story.
Grain is special, but for a different reason. It is easy to standardize—to plant in rows or paddies, and store and record in units such as bushels. This makes grain an ideal target for taxation. Unlike underground tubers or legumes, grain grows tall and needs harvesting all at once, so officials can easily estimate annual yields. And unlike fugitive wild foods, grain creates a relatively consistent surplus, allowing a ruling class to skim off peasant laborers’ production through a tax regime of manageable complexity. Grain, in Scott’s lexicon, is the kind of thing a state can see. On this account, the first cities were not so much a great leap forward for humanity as a new mode of exploitation that enabled the world’s first leisured ruling class to live on the sweat of the world’s first peasant-serfs. As for writing, that great gateway to history, Scott reports that its earliest uses suggest it was basically a grain-counting technology. Literary culture and shared memory existed in abundance both before and after the first pictographs and alphabets—consider Homer’s epics, the products of a nonliterate Greek “dark age” before the Classical period. Writing contributed a ledger of exploitation.
Scott’s retelling, however, goes deeper than scrambling the chronology and emphasizing the dark side of early institutions. Life in cities, he argues, was probably worse than foraging or herding. City dwellers were vulnerable to epidemics. Their diets were less varied than those of people on the outside. Unless they were in the small ruling class, they had less leisure, because they had to produce food not just for their own survival, but also to support their rulers. Their labor might be called on to build fortresses, monuments, and those ever-looming walls. Outside the walls, by contrast, a fortunate savage or barbarian might be a hunter in the morning, a herder or fisherman in the afternoon, and a bard singing tales around the fire in the evening. To enter the city meant joining the world’s first proletariat.
- What made prehistoric hunter-gatherers give up freedom for civilization?
Grain is special, but for a different reason. It is easy to standardize—to plant in rows or paddies, and store and record in units such as bushels. This makes grain an ideal target for taxation. Unlike underground tubers or legumes, grain grows tall and needs harvesting all at once, so officials can easily estimate annual yields. And unlike fugitive wild foods, grain creates a relatively consistent surplus, allowing a ruling class to skim off peasant laborers’ production through a tax regime of manageable complexity. Grain, in Scott’s lexicon, is the kind of thing a state can see. On this account, the first cities were not so much a great leap forward for humanity as a new mode of exploitation that enabled the world’s first leisured ruling class to live on the sweat of the world’s first peasant-serfs. As for writing, that great gateway to history, Scott reports that its earliest uses suggest it was basically a grain-counting technology. Literary culture and shared memory existed in abundance both before and after the first pictographs and alphabets—consider Homer’s epics, the products of a nonliterate Greek “dark age” before the Classical period. Writing contributed a ledger of exploitation.
Scott’s retelling, however, goes deeper than scrambling the chronology and emphasizing the dark side of early institutions. Life in cities, he argues, was probably worse than foraging or herding. City dwellers were vulnerable to epidemics. Their diets were less varied than those of people on the outside. Unless they were in the small ruling class, they had less leisure, because they had to produce food not just for their own survival, but also to support their rulers. Their labor might be called on to build fortresses, monuments, and those ever-looming walls. Outside the walls, by contrast, a fortunate savage or barbarian might be a hunter in the morning, a herder or fisherman in the afternoon, and a bard singing tales around the fire in the evening. To enter the city meant joining the world’s first proletariat.
- What made prehistoric hunter-gatherers give up freedom for civilization?
Quote of the Day
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
Friday, November 10, 2017
Quote of the Day
It's also the principle that lies behind all of Oriental martial arts. You don't try to stop your opponent, you let him come at you-and then give him a tap in just the right direction as he rushes by. The idea is to observe, to act courageously, and to pick your timing extremely well.
- M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
Thursday, November 9, 2017
Quote of the Day
You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.
- Charlie Munger
- Charlie Munger
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Monday, November 6, 2017
Quote of the Day
Bitcoin is a system with many strict rules but without any rulers. This is made possible because the rules are enforced by each and every user of the system. Changing the existing rules is nearly impossible, but new rules can be added if consensus is achieved.
- Rules without Rulers
- Rules without Rulers
Sunday, November 5, 2017
Quote of the Day
Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.
- Paulo Coelho
- Paulo Coelho
Saturday, November 4, 2017
So Far, the Best Insight of the Century
Having met the DeepMind people in my role with the MIT Media Lab, I know that their definition of “intelligence” is so impoverished that it doesn’t extend beyond the abstract calculations that an algorithm can achieve, and completely fails to understand that human intelligence is embodied and distributed throughout our physical selves – and indeed between them, in the mirror neurons that fire in sympathy when we watch a dancer or help an injured friend. In short, it’s not just depressing, it’s bad science.
Artificial intelligence of the kind Google promotes can play Go and even – at a pinch – recognise Bach or Picasso. It can never produce Bach or Picasso, still less understand the complexity of social forms and culture that made their lives possible.
If we entrust the education of those who will determine the future relationship of people and machines to a company whose core belief is that all human experience can be replicated by algorithms, all we can hope is that global warming wipes us out before the machines do.
- Google DeepMind is Making Artificial Intelligence a Slave to the Algorithm
Artificial intelligence of the kind Google promotes can play Go and even – at a pinch – recognise Bach or Picasso. It can never produce Bach or Picasso, still less understand the complexity of social forms and culture that made their lives possible.
If we entrust the education of those who will determine the future relationship of people and machines to a company whose core belief is that all human experience can be replicated by algorithms, all we can hope is that global warming wipes us out before the machines do.
- Google DeepMind is Making Artificial Intelligence a Slave to the Algorithm
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