Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Quote of the Day

It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.

- Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

What I've Been Reading

How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen.

Brilliant - Gift this book to a teenager and change the course of his/her life.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.

[---]

Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Quote of the Day

We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.

- Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Monday, January 29, 2018

Quote of the Day

The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.

The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense!


- Brian Cox

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Quote of the Day

Those who do not know the plans of competitors cannot prepare alliances. Those who do not know the lay of the land cannot maneuver their forces. Those who do not use local guides cannot take advantage of the ground.

-  Sun Tzu, The Art of War


Saturday, January 27, 2018

Wisdom Of The Week

Somehow, under scale transformation, emerges a miraculous effect: rational markets do not require any individual trader to be rational. In fact they work well under zero-intelligence –a zero intelligence crowd, under the right design, works better than a Soviet-style management composed to maximally intelligent humans.

Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it has now a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.

For other cryptocurrencies to compete, they need to have such a Hayekian property.

Bitcoin is a currency without a government. But, one may ask, didn’t we have gold, silver and other metals, another class of currencies without a government? Not quite. When you trade gold, you trade “loco” Hong Kong and end up receiving a claim on a stock there, which you might need to move to New Jersey. Banks control the custodian game and governments control banks (or, rather, bankers and government officials are, to be polite, tight together). So Bitcoin has a huge advantage over gold in transactions: clearance does not require a specific custodian. No government can control what code you have in your head.

Finally, Bitcoin will go through hick-ups (hiccups). It may fail; but then it will be easily reinvented as we now know how it works. In its present state, it may not be convenient for transactions, not good enough to buy your decaffeinated expresso macchiato at your local virtue-signaling coffee chain. It may be too volatile to be a currency, for now. But it is the first organic currency.

But its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.


- Nassim Taleb


Quote of the Day

Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

- Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Friday, January 26, 2018

Quote of the Day

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men’s blood. I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar


Thursday, January 25, 2018

Quote of the Day

I think the final (and most overlooked) lesson from Montaigne is that self-study is important, but utterly worthless without tangible results to show for it. Out of Montaigne’s retirement from public life came not only a better understanding of himself, but nearly a thousand pages of it in writing that he could refer back to whenever he needed it. This is why I made keeping a commonplace book a main point of the article. Taking a long walk every now and then might be calming, but cumulatively, what is it building towards? Ourselves is an occupation, not a casual commitment. We must work at it, create insight and wisdom from it and then in turn plow that capital back into more to work at. In other words, philosophy is not just spending a lot of time inside your own head but articulating what you find there, fleshing it out and turning it into something. This is what Montaigne was and continues to be peerless at.

- Ryan Holiday, An Introduction to Montaigne

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Quote of the Day

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it...

-
William James

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Quote of the Day

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Monday, January 22, 2018

Quote of the Day

The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ - this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to “Do you like me? Please like me,” which you know quite well that 99% of all interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obsene. In fact one of the very last few interperonal taboos we have is kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. That’s how it’ll look to the reader. And it will have to. There’s no way around it.

- David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Quote of the Day

Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.

- Thomas Carlyle

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Wisdom Of The Week

The act of anonymously disseminating serious allegations about people’s sex lives as a means to destroy their careers and livelihoods has long gone by a simple name. It’s called McCarthyism, and the people behind the list engaged in it. Sure, they believed they were doing good — but the McCarthyites, in a similar panic about communism, did as well. They believe they are fighting an insidious, ubiquitous evil — the patriarchy — just as the extreme anti-Communists in the 1950s believed that commies were everywhere and so foul they didn’t deserve a presumption of innocence, or simple human decency. They demand public confessions of the guilty and public support for their cause … or they will cast suspicion on you as well. Sophie Gilbert just berated the men at the Golden Globes for not saying what they were supposed to say. It’s no wonder that today’s McCarthyites also engage in demonizing other writers, like Katie Roiphe, and threatening their livelihoods. And just as McCarthyites believed they had no other option, given the complicity of the entire federal government with communism, so today’s McCarthyites claim that appeals to the police, or the HR department, or to the usual channels, are “fruitless” — because they’re part of the patriarchal system too! These mechanisms, Donegan writes, have “an obligation to presume innocence,” and we can’t have that, can we?

[---]

And maybe she is by finally going public. Getting doxxed by alt-right loons is a horrifying experience no one should have to endure. I’d defend her right to basic respect and decency, as I would anyone’s. But I’ll tell you what’s also brave at the moment: to resist this McCarthyism, to admit complexity, to make distinctions between offenses, to mark a clear boundary between people’s sexual conduct in a workplace and outside of it, to defend due process, to defend sex itself, and privacy, and to rely on careful reporting to expose professional malfeasance. In this nihilist moment when Bannonites and left-feminists want simply to burn it all down, it’s especially vital to keep a fire brigade in good order.


- Andrew Sullivan, It’s Time to Resist the Excesses of #MeToo


Quote of the Day

No matter what his rank or position may be, the lover of books is the richest and the happiest of the children of men.

- J.A. Langford

Friday, January 19, 2018

Quote of the Day

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. 

- Ernest Hemingway

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Quote of the Day

When you consistently make better choices you create better habits. These better habits produce better character. When you have better character, you add more value to the world. When you become more valuable, you attract bigger and better opportunities. This allows you to make more of a contribution in your life. This in turn leads to bigger and better results.

- Jack Canfield, The Power Of Focus

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Quote of the Day

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

- Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Quote of the Day

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.

- Mark R. Leary

Monday, January 15, 2018

Quote of the Day

[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy, isn’t this what they’re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.

- Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Quote of the Day

Yet there was, and remains, a maddening quality to their coöperation, the official said. Pakistan’s intelligence service went “all-in” against certain terrorists, like Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, while continuing to support the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqanis, and anti-India jihadis. On at least two occasions, the former acting C.I.A. director Michael Morell flew to Pakistan with a list of militants the United States hoped Pakistan would apprehend or confront. Just last month, Defense Secretary James Mattis went there on a similar mission. “It’s frustrating. Our talking points have been identical for the last fifteen years: ‘You need to get tough on terrorism, and you need to close the sanctuaries,’ ” one former intelligence official told me.

The C.I.A.’s Maddening Relationship with Pakistan

Saturday, January 13, 2018

The Arc Gene - Brain Cells Share Information With Virus-Like Capsules

When Jason Shepherd first saw the structures under a microscope, he thought they looked like viruses. The problem was: he wasn’t studying viruses.

Shepherd studies a gene called Arc which is active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Shepherd, who works at the University of Utah, and has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.”

Despite its importance, Arc has been a very difficult gene to study. Scientists often work out what unusual genes do by comparing them to familiar ones with similar features—but Arc is one-of-a-kind. Other mammals have their own versions of Arc, as do birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But in each animal, Arc seems utterly unique—there’s no other gene quite like it. And Shepherd learned why when his team isolated the proteins that are made by Arc, and looked at them under a powerful microscope.


- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

Lastly, many ‘arguments’ seem to occur where one person makes a true claim with a certain mood. A commenter disagrees with that mood, and makes a different true claim. A second commenter disagrees with THAT mood and makes a third true claim. This pattern of discussion is not always healthy. We should hold ourselves to a standard higher than saying things that true. We should say things that build useful generalizeable mental models. If we only say the counterintuitive hipster ‘facts’ we can in fact paint a misleading picture even though we share only facts that rigorously true. (Tyler, I love you and your work, but this is one of the ways that I think your writing can improve. Contrarian statements, even when true, can sometimes be less good than other true statements. I understand this is vague, but I hope you understand.)

- Comments on Marginal Revolution

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

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Why Humans Need To Rethink Their Place In The Animal Kingdom

Most of our science, philosophy and religion starts from the assumption that there are humans and there are  animals – and there could never at any point be any common ground between them. To call someone an animal is as bad an insult as you can offer, and yet we’re all mammals. For centuries, the notion of human uniqueness was the most fundamental orthodoxy. Now it is being challenged. Book after book ventures into the no-man’s-land – the no-animal’s-land – that lies between our species and the other ten million or so in the animal kingdom. As often as not, they reveal more of ourselves than of our fellow animals.

[---]

Not inferior: different. But that’s a concept that humans have struggled with across the centuries, probably since before language began. “One scientific survey from the 1970s found that sloths ‘are the most numerically abundant large mammal’, accounting for almost a quarter of the mammalian biomass,” writes Cooke, “which is a sophisticated biological way of saying you can take your patronising looks and direct them at some other animal.”

For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism.

[---]

All the barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals turn out to be frail and porous: emotion, thought, problem-solving, tool use, culture, an understanding of death, an awareness of the self, consciousness, language, syntax, sport, mercy, magnanimity, individuality, names, personality, reason, planning, insight, foresight, imagination, moral choice… even art, religion and jokes.

It’s all in Darwin, but we have spent getting on for two centuries ignoring or distorting the stuff he taught us. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” If you accept evolution by means of natural selection, that must be true.

Why, then, are humans so resistant to the idea? We can find the answer in human history. For many years it was important to uphold the notion of the moral and mental inferiority of non-white people, because without such a certainty colonialism and slavery would be immoral. And that would never do: they were so convenient.

To change our views on the uniqueness of human beings would require recalibrating 5,000 years or so of human thought, which would in turn require revolutionary changes in the way we live our lives and manage the planet we all live on.

And that would be highly inconvenient.


- More Here

Quote of the Day

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

- Richard Feynman

Monday, January 8, 2018

Quote of the Day

In ML, where algorithms get published quickly and state-of-the-art frameworks are open-source, there isn't any first-mover advantage.

- François Chollet

Sunday, January 7, 2018

What I've Been Reading

Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist by Robert Trivers.

Robert Trivers is one of those few humans whom I respect immensely. I have learned so much from his work and most importantly, he changed my perspective on many things.

"On another occasion, Bill and I were discussing racial prejudice and the possible biological components thereof, and he said to me, "Bob, once you've learned to think of a herring gull as an equal, the rest is easy." What a welcome approach to the problem, especially from within biology. Bill was down to the level he taught me to be at. We are all living organisms - make discriminatory comments about others at your own risk. In Bill's view, it was always better to try to see the world from the view of the other creature.
One of the Bill's deepest lessons was in how to view other organisms in a way that took into account that very act of viewing has its own effects. This was Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to biology. 
[---]
No one has bothered, after all these years, to come up with a coherent account of the various conditions under which species prosper and generate new species, or fail and go extinct. This in part because Stephen Gould expropriated the subject for his own uses and set back the development of a science by some twenty years. I am trying to help develop the underlying logic he failed to. 


Quote of the Day

So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

- Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Saturday, January 6, 2018

Wisdom Of The Week

My favorite medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.”

Not because patients are failing to thrive — that part makes me sad. But because of the diagnosis’s bold proposition: Humans, in their natural state, are meant to thrive.

My patient, however, was not in his natural state. Cancer had claimed nearly every organ in his body. He’d lost a quarter of his body mass. I worried his ribs would crack under the weight of my stethoscope.

“You know,” he told me the evening I admitted him. “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have cared if I made it. ‘Take me God,’ I would’ve said. ‘What good am I doing here anyway?’ But now you have to save me. Sadie needs me.”

He’d struggled with depression most of his life, he said. Strangely enough, it seemed to him, he was most at peace while caring for his mother when she had Parkinson’s, but she died years ago. Since then, he had felt aimless, without a sense of purpose, until Sadie wandered into his life.

Sadie was his cat.

Only about a quarter of Americans strongly endorse having a clear sense of purpose and of what makes their lives meaningful, while nearly 40 percent either feel neutral or say they don’t. This is both a social and a public health problem: Research increasingly suggests that purpose is important for a meaningful life — but also for a healthy life.

[---]

This work hints at an underlying truth: Finding purpose is rarely an epiphany, nor is it something you pick up at the mall or download from the app store. It can be a long, arduous process that requires introspection and conversation, then a commitment to act.

The key to a deeper, healthier life, it seems, isn't knowing the meaning of life — it's building meaning into your life. Even if meaning is a four-legged friend named Sadie.


Finding Purpose for a Good Life. But Also a Healthy One


Quote of the Day

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Quote of the Day

If you’re a lazy and not-too-bright computer scientist, machine learning is the ideal occupation, because learning algorithms do all the work but let you take all the credit.

- Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Putin's Revenge... There were pictures of naked Trump

On April 10, 2017, an assistant to Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Donald Trump’s campaign for possible collusion with the Kremlin, patched in a long-planned call from Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. Parubiy said he had some potentially explosive information about Trump’s visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

“I would just caution that our Russian friends may be listening to the conversation, so I wouldn’t share anything over the phone that you don’t want them to hear,” Schiff warned.

But Parubiy persisted. “In November 2013, Mr. Trump visited Moscow, he visited competition Miss Universe, and there he met with Russian journalist and celebrity Ksenia Sobchak,” he said in his heavily accented, awkward English. He explained that in addition to having ties to Putin, Sobchak is “also known as a person who provides girls for escort for oligarchs. And she met with Trump and she brought him one Russian girl, celebrity Olga Buzova.” Schiff soberly asked for clarification, and Parubiy answered directly: Sobchak, he said, is a “special agent of Russian secret service.”

Buzova “got compromising materials on Trump after their short relations,” Parubiy said. “There were pictures of naked Trump.”


Schiff betrayed no emotion. “And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the compromising material?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” Parubiy said. Putin wanted it communicated to Trump that “all those compromising materials will never be released if Trump will cancel all Russian sanctions.” The biggest bombshell: He had obtained a recording of Buzova and Sobchak talking about the kompromat while the two were visiting Ukraine. He told Schiff, “We are ready to provide [those materials] to FBI.”

Parubiy had more to say. He told Schiff about meetings that Trump’s former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had had with a Russian pop singer who served as an intermediary for the Kremlin. They’d met at a café in Brighton Beach, a Russian-immigrant enclave in Brooklyn, where, Parubiy said, “they used a special password before their meetings.” One would say, “Weather is good on Deribasovskaya.” The right response was “It rains again on Brighton Beach.”

“All righty. Good, this is very helpful. I appreciate it,” Schiff said. He told Parubiy that the U.S. would welcome the chance to review the evidence he had described. “We will try to work with the FBI to figure out, along with your staff, how we can obtain copies.”

Schiff was right to be concerned about “our Russian friends” listening in, though not in the way he imagined. It wasn’t Parubiy who’d called. It was Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, two Russian pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus. There was no kompromat, no meetings between Flynn and a Russian pop star in Brighton Beach. The call made the Americans look gullible, which suited the callers. Kuznetsov and Stolyarov immediately sent the recording to Kremlin-friendly media, which gleefully made hay of it: another dumb American, ready to believe the most-ludicrous stories about a Russia run by sneaky, evil spies. Any Russian listening to the tape would have instantly recognized how silly the conversation was. There were the B-list Russian celebrities, plus other cultural signals, like the code phrase Flynn allegedly used, which is actually the title of a classic Russian comedy.


- More Here

Quote of the Day

Forget economic growth, social reforms, and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry. .. A growing percentage of the population is taking psychiatric medicines on a regular basis. .. As the biochemical pursuit of happiness accelerates, so it will reshape politics, society, and economics, and it will become ever harder to bring it under control.

Many people will be happy to transfer much of their decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever they face important choices. Google will advise us which movie to see, where to go on holiday, what to study in college, which job to accept, and even whom to date and marry. .. Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns. .. Eventually we may reach point where it will become impossible to disconnect form this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death.

The same technologies that can upgrade humans into gods might also make humans irrelevant. Computers powerful enough to understand and overcome the mechanisms of aging and death will probably also be powerful enough to replace humans in any and all tasks.


- Yuval Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Quote of the Day

Some time ago I went with my six-year-old nephew Matan to hunt for Pokémon. As we walked down the street, Matan kept looking at his smartphone, which enabled him to spot Pokémon all around us. I didn’t see any Pokémon at all, because I didn’t carry a smartphone. Then we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

The idea of finding meaning in life by playing virtual reality games is of course common not just to religions, but also to secular ideologies and lifestyles. Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game.


- Yuval Noah Harari

Monday, January 1, 2018

What I've Been Reading

The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier  and Dan Sperber.

It's wacky how the brain works; one of my all time favorite papers is Why Do Humans Reason but I forgot the name of the authors. Weird enough when I saw the title of this book, I immediately bought it. Only after reading the first few pages, I realized it was by the same authors.This is one of the most important books of this century. I see this as a follow-up of Damasio's Descartes' Error from the psychological perspective.

The premise of the books is simple:

Reason evolved to help us justify ourselves and to convince others, which is essential for co-operation and communication.
The British abolitionists didn't invent most of the arguments against slavery. But they refined them, backed them with masses of evidence, increased their creditability by relying on trustworthy witnesses, and made them more accessible by allowing people to see life through a slave's eyes. Debates, public meetings, and newspapers brought these strengthened arguments to a booming urban population. And it worked. People were convinced not only of the evils of slavery but also of the necessity of doing something about it. They petitioned, gave money, and - with the help of other factors, from economy to international politics - had first the slave trade and then slavery itself banned.

[---]

Yet we do not quite share the pessimism regarding the ability of reason to change people's minds. People do not just provide their own justification and arguments; they also evaluate those of others. As evaluators, people should be able to recognize strong arguments and be swayed by them in all domains, including the moral realm. Clearly, arguments that challenge the moral values of one's community can be met with disbelief, distrust of motives, even down right hostility. Still, on many moral issues, people have been influenced by good arguments, from local politics - for example, how to organize the local school curriculums - to major societal issues - such as abolition of the slave trade. 


Quote of the Day

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.


- Bertrand Russell