Quote of the Day

It does not make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people to tell us what to do.

- Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.

- F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism

Quote of the Day

Three-quarters of today’s youth between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four are unfit to serve for one reason or another.

- Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

The 1-Hour Workday

First thing in the morning is when I'm at my mental best, and when I'm still most in control of my time, so I now use the first hour of my day to write. For me, it's best done from home. I've developed something of a ritual: I wake up early, make an espresso, and write until I'm spent—or until distractions like email or the day's deadlines and meetings start to intrude. This is usually about an hour, some days a little less and some days more. I've found that, like hitting a ball in golf, regular writing is easier if I tee it up. I plan my early morning writing the night before. It is in my calendar and on my to-do list, with details about which paper and section I will be working on.

This routine has transformed my work life. Instead of the frustration that frequently plagued me early in my career, now—no matter how work proceeds after I've completed my writing time—I go home at the end of the day with the satisfaction of having accomplished something.

I have in no way mastered the writing game, but my 1-hour workday has certainly increased my academic output. And by keeping me focused and in practice, it has improved the quality of my writing and made the process much more enjoyable. It also offers an opportunity for deep thinking. I remember rarely having any such thinking time when I started out as a professor, but now I find that my daily keystrokes can lead to new ideas. When I string together days of successful writing, ideas flow and new connections present themselves even when I'm away from my keyboard, particularly on my bike ride to work or when I'm reading for pleasure.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

What I’ve Been Reading

The art of rethinking and rediscovery, lies in questioning our ideas of authority, knowledge, judgement, right and wrong, and the process of rethinking itself. Ideas cannot be pinned down like butterflies: they come from people living and thinking though time, and are passed among us down the centuries. The same idea can be bad at one time and good at another. An idea can be bad in the sense of incorrect, but nonetheless good because it is the necessary stepping-stone to something better. More, generally, rethinking suggests than an idea can be good in the sense of useful, even if it is bad in the sense of wrong. It can be a placebo idea. Outrageously, it sometimes might not matter whether an idea is true or false. 

Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas by Steven Poole. Message of the book is don’t ignore old ideas; lots of new ideas are refurbished from old discarded ideas.

Wow ! I learned so many “old-new” things from this small book. A must read for everyone; I promise you it will make you humble.  I mean, the book covers Presentism, Truthifiable, Falsifiablity, Panpsychism, Teleological, Free Will vs. Free Won’t etc.,  do you need more?

Great quote by Enno Schmidt:

I’m proud of this because to do something good, you have to a bit stupid in that moment. Being a bit stupid allows you to see more. Don’t be too intelligent - because then you can think of every possible objection. This might be summed up as “Don’t overthink,; rethink”. 

Why is it a taboo to talk about population? Is it because most people want kids? its ridiculous ! 

In response to a 2015 article about global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, for example, one reader wrote, “The world’s most difficult problems would be greatly ameliorated if we are able to reduce population, and this notion should be discussed.” By what means he thought that population ought to be “reduced” was, tellingly, left unsaid. Yet what Malthus actually wrote is far from the pessimistic misanthropy that is even today, usually unthinkingly, ascribed to him. 

Summary: 

Take an idea and see if it might be a black box (Lamarckism). Forget about whether an idea is true or false and consider its possible placebo effect (William James’s theory of emotion), or weather it is a necessary stepping-stone even if it might be wrong (dark energy). Ask whether an idea has been rejected not because it is stupid but because it would be a power-up (multilingual computer programming). Pay serious attention to the lease ridiculous option(panpsychism). Identify what we know we don’t know, to stimulate curiosity. Abandon common sense and bet against the market. Take another look at what seems too simple to work. Adopt the view from Tomorrow for an enlightening perspective on current thinking. The suspension of belief is a powerful engine of discovery, and of rediscovery. 

Quote of the Day

The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

- William Gibson

What I’ve Been Reading

As we get older, however, we have to present to the world a consistent identity. We have to play certain roles and live up to certain expectations. We have to trim and lop off natural qualities. Boys lose their rich range of emotions and in the struggle to get ahead, repress their natural empathy. Girls have to sacrifice their assertive sides. They are supposed to be nice, smiling, deferential, always considering other people’s feelings before their own. A woman can be a boss, but she must be tender and pliant, never too aggressive.

In this process, we become less and less dimensional; we conform to the expected roles of our culture and time period. We lose valuable and rich parts to our character. 

Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene.

I was expecting lots of repetition from his older books but I was wrong. This is treasure trove to be savored life long. I cannot even being to quote from this brilliant work.

Thank you Mr. Greene; only you can research extensively and write chapters like “Know Your Limits” and “Reconnect to the Masculine or Feminine Within You”.

Confront Your Dark Side:
We can never alter human nature through enforced niceness. The pitchfork doesn’t work. Nor is the solution to seek release for our Shadow in the group, which is volatile and dangerous. Instead the answer is to see our Shadow in action and become more self-aware. It is hard to project onto others our own secret impulses or over idealize some cause, once we are made aware of the mechanism operating within us. Through such self-knowledge we can find a way to integrate the dark side into our consciousness productively and creatively. In doing so we become more authentic and complete, exploiting to the maximum the energies we naturally process. 

See Through People’s Masks:
You must understand and accept the theatrical quality of life. You do not moralize and rail against the role-playing and the wearing masks so essential to smooth social functioning. In fact, your goal is to play your part on the stage of life with consummate skill attracting attention, dominating the limelight and making yourself into a sympathetic hero or heroine. Second, you must not be naive and mistake people’s appearances for reality. You are not blinded by people’s acting skills. You transform yourself into a master decoder for their true feelings, working on your observation skills and practicing them as much as you can in daily life. 

Know Your Limits: 
The greatest protection you have against grandiosity is to maintain a realistic attitude. You know what subjects and activities you are naturally attracted to. You cannot be skilled at everything. You need to play to your strengths and not imagine you can be great at whatever you put your mind to. You must have a solid grasp of your social position - your allies, the people with whom you have the greatest rapport, the natural audience for your work. You cannot please everyone. 

Beware The Fragile Ego:
Finally, it is worth cultivating moments in life in which we feel immense satisfaction and happiness divorced from our success or achievements. This happens commonly when we find ourselves in a beautiful landscape - the mountains, the sea, a forest. We do not feel the prying, comparing eyes to others, the need to have move attention or to assert ourselves. We simply in awe of what we see, and it is intensely therapeutic. This can also occur when we contemplate the immensity of the universe, the uncanny set of circumstances that had come together for us to be born, the vast reaches of time before us and after us. These are sublime moments, and as far removed from the pettiness and poisons of envy as possible

The Truth About Algorithms - Cathy O’Neil

The Truth About Algorithms | Cathy O’Neil from Nice Shit Studio on Vimeo.

Quote of the Day

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything. It is the pith of civilization and of man’s human existence.

[…]

There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a self-appointed elite of supermen.

- The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

Fourth National Climate Assessment (Detail and Summary)

Climate change presents added risks to interconnected systems that are already exposed to a range of stressors such as aging and deteriorating infrastructure, land-use changes, and population growth. Extreme weather and climate-related impacts on one system can result in increased
risks or failures in other critical systems, including water resources, food production and distribution, energy and transportation, public health, international trade, and national security. The full extent of climate change risks to interconnected systems, many of which span regional and national boundaries, is often greater than the sum of risks to individual sectors. Failure to anticipate interconnected impacts can lead to missed opportunities for effectively managing the risks of climate change and can also lead to management responses that increase risks to other sectors and regions. Joint planning with stakeholders across sectors, regions, and jurisdictions can help identify critical risks arising from interaction among systems ahead of time.

- Read the full report here or the summary here

Wisdom Of The Week

The defining characteristic of economics in the 1950s is that the country got rich by making the poor less poor.

Average wages doubled from 1940 to 1948, then doubled again by 1963.

And those gains focused on those who had been left behind for decades before. The gap between rich and poor narrowed by an extraordinary amount.

[---]

The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely. The differences between his automobile and the poor man’s are minor. Essentially they have similar engines, similar fittings. In the early years of the century there was a hierarchy of automobiles.

Paul Graham wrote in 2016 about what something as simple as there only being three TV stations did to equalize culture:

It’s difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.

This was important. People measure their well being against their peers. And for most of the 1945-1980 period, people had a lot of what looked like peers to compare themselves to. Many people – most people – lived lives that were either equal or at least fathomable to those around them. The idea that people’s lives equalized as much as their incomes is an important point of this story we’ll come back to.

- How This All Happened

Quote of the Day

What I’ve Been Reading

The thing that makes the tragedy of commonsense morality so tragic is the intensity with which you just know that They are deeply wrong. 

[---] 

“It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than... to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.”

- Donald Hebb 

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky.

No kidding ! This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read in decades.

• It’s great if your frontal cortex lets you avoid temptation, allowing you to do harder, better thing. But it’s usually more effective if doing that better thing has become so automatic that it isn’t hard. 
• Many of our best moments or morality and compassion have roots far deeper and older than being mere products of human civilization. 
• Individual no more exceptional than rest of us provide stunning examples of our finest moments as humans. 

It’s impossible to summarize this book so here is simple yet profound last two thoughts from Sapolsky:

• If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “it’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates into something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but we realize that ...” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent concludes the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably have also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasite disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, wardlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try.   

• Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. 

Quote of the Day

Education can help us only if it produces "whole men." The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the "whole man," in fact, may have very little detailed knowledge of facts & theories...but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity.

- E.F. Schumacher

A Thanksgiving Story About The Limits Of Human Empathy: Tossing a Bird That Does Not Fly Out of a Plane

The town of Yellville in Arkansas has come to feel a touch bashful about its annual “Turkey Trot” weekend, when a dozen or so turkeys, which do not fly, are thrown from planes, which do, to the delight of many Yellville residents. “When you drop a turkey from hundreds of feet in the air, the panicked animals try to right themselves. Some catch a gust. Others do not. Some die when they hit the ground. Others survive with broken bones. Yet others are grievously injured when they are fought over by local kids. Some perish of apparent shock. A few, it is fair to note, are rattled, but physically unharmed.

- More Here

What I’ve Been Reading

We should be more concerned with the fragility of our civilization. 

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals  by Tyler Cowen.

The message - Economic growth is good but conscience is more important than that. Unlike his other books where he was very blunt; Tyler changed his tone to be more mellow. A thousand books have been written on this topic and not much changed. A change at a conscience level has to come at a fundamental level. This book doesn’t answer that and to be fair there is no straight forward answer either.

Economic growth does helps us focus on reducing suffering but history and current events has taught us human nature has much more deeper roots with infinitesimal and insatiable needs. But economic growth has been only path so far which has improved human and animal welfare albeit extremely slowly.

Tyler in his own style comes up with timeless one-liners:

• When it comes to most “small” policies affecting the present and the near-present only, we should be agnostic. 
• Policy should more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future. 

Tyler explains (in the appendix) why the ideas in the book cannot resolve animal welfare issues.

Quote of the Day

Prevalent in our society are some deep misconceptions about turkeys: that they lack intelligence, that they don’t have personalities, that there can be no kinship between humans and these animals who appear so very different from us. For eight years, Hildy walked up to people bearing such assumptions and completely disarmed them. No one who met this bright, charismatic bird could doubt that turkeys are individuals with minds, feelings, and unique characters – individuals with whom we can have connections, individuals with whom we can share friendship.

Hildy loved people. Partial to having her feathers stroked, she would sit with visitors for hours soaking up attention…Her best friends were fellow turkeys Kima, Rhonda, and Feather. They all adored spending time together and, when they weren’t at each other’s sides, would call out to one another to stay in touch. The companions loved to wander beneath the willow tree in the yard by their barn.

- 12 Reasons You May Never Want To Eat Turkey Again

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.

- Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

Quote of the Day

Humans Are So Immersed In Immorality That We Can Be Entirely Unaware Of It

Most of us are not like McMahan. We do not follow moral arguments if they lead to uncomfortable conclusions. We prefer to make ethical decisions based on instinct, popular wisdom, and whatever feels like the right response to a particular situation. It’s a mushy process—one that moral philosophers attempt to de-mush by laying out the myriad assumption and implications that are weaved into almost every human action, from how we spend our money to our relationships with family.

Why bother with moral philosophy when common sense serves most of us perfectly well? The simple answer is that, as history shows, commonsensical beliefs are very often wrong. Slavery, marital rape, and bans on interracial marriage were all widely accepted in the relatively recent past. Much like fish who, as the proverb goes, are the last to discover water, humans are so immersed in immorality that we can be entirely unaware of it.

Part of a moral philosopher’s work, then, is to question common sense and reveal our ethical blind spots. “I do think we make moral progress in part by challenging our intuitions,” McMahan said.

[---]

Though McMahan’s philosophical studies focus on clear-cut arguments, it’s impossible to shed personal preferences. Lurking behind this formal discussion of killing humanely-reared animals lies McMahan’s decision to go from being a hunter in South Carolina to a committed vegetarian. He made the choice as a teenager, after he saw a man wound a bird on a dove shoot.

“I remember this man walking in such a leisurely way towards this bird that was flapping across the ground trying to evade him,” he recalled. And so McMahan sold his gun and stopped hunting. A little later, his “first philosophical thought” turned him vegetarian: “I thought that if I wasn’t willing to kill these animals in order to eat them, I shouldn’t pay other people to kill them for me,” he added.

[---]

Our instincts can lead us astray. But nothing would truly matter were it not for our deeply-felt, potentially irrational, emotional responses. The problem that McMahan and moral philosophy must face is how to integrate such intuitions into a solid theory. And for those of us facing ethical decisions in everyday life, we must tackle the same potentially unanswerable questions as McMahan, testing both our intuitions and our logic.

No great ethical conundrum can be answered in a way that appeases all moral philosophers—or all people—easily. But by carefully thinking through the self-doubt, logic, and instinct bound up in morality, it’s certain that, at the very least, the decisions we reach won’t be shallow.

It’s difficult work, and slow. McMahan plans to spend several days working solidly for 12 hours at a time on the question of meat-eating, reading others’ work and writing constantly. That’s just the beginning. “And then,” he said, “you just have to sit and think about it for a terribly long time as hard as you can.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

In a 2015 paper Mr. Borio and colleagues examined 140 years of data from 38 countries and concluded that consumer-price deflation frequently coincides with healthy economic growth. If he’s right, central banks have spent years fighting disinflation or deflation when they shouldn’t have, and in the process they’ve endangered the economy more than they realize.

“By keeping interest rates very, very, very low,” he warns, “you are contributing to the buildup of risks in the financial system through excessive credit growth, through excessive increases in asset prices, that at some point have to correct themselves. So what you have is a financial boom that necessarily at some point will turn into a bust because things have to adjust.”

He describes this as a “pincer movement” in a working paper he wrote with several colleagues this year. On one hand, globalization and other (often benign) factors make it harder for central banks to gin up inflation by cutting interest rates. On the other hand, by slashing rates in pursuit of that hard-to-attain inflation target, they create imbalances in the financial system that lead to crises like the one in 2008.

It’s not that other economists are blind to financial instability. They’re just strangely unconcerned about it. “There are a number of proponents of secular stagnation who acknowledge, very explicitly, that low interest rates create problems for the future because they’re generating all these financial booms and busts,” Mr. Borio says. Yet they still believe central banks must set ultralow short-term rates to support economic growth—and if that destabilizes the financial system, it’s the will of the economic gods.

[---]

The financial panic caught experts by surprise because they had assumed that the financial system (and the economy as a whole) would, through the inscrutable workings of the invisible hand, find a sustainable balance of saving, investment, consumption and other variables independent of central-bank policies.

Mr. Borio, in contrast, can explain exactly where dangerous financial imbalances come from: the incentives policy makers accidentally create for bad decisions on Main Street about borrowing and investment. The misallocation of resources during the booms requires a prolonged and miserable process of reallocation during and after a recession.

We should expect any serious monetary theory to explain a financial crisis, Mr. Borio insists. The only time he sounds genuinely dismissive of conventional wisdom during our conversation is on this point: “You know, in many of these models, how do they explain the Great Financial Crisis? They explain it as a meteorite coming from nowhere—it’s an exogenous shock, it’s productivity that all of a sudden for some unexplained reason collapsed, or people all of a sudden decided to save more, but without an explanation. In my most cynical moments, I say ‘shocks’ are a measure of our ignorance, not a measure of our knowledge.”

[---]

Above all, “it’s important to be thinking of these things all the time.” Policy makers should keep a constantly watchful eye on financial conditions, not only in the depth of a crisis or the height of a worrisome bubble. The problem comes when “95% of the time you carry out your policy as if these factors didn’t matter, and then when you see that the economy is running red hot and you see obvious signs of financial imbalances, you start moving.”

- Why Central Bankers Missed the Crisis

Wisdom Of The Week

1. Ignoring small or imperceptible effects

Parfit produces an apparently plausible view: When benefits are considered as gained pleasures or avoided pains, "to be benefits at all, they must be perceptible." A pleasure must be noticable or it is no pleasure at all. In practice, this belief exists as a "threshold" - a point on the scale of magnitude below which all effects are ignored. Parfit quotes Glover:

"Suppose a village contains 100 unarmed tribesmen eating their lunch. 100 hungry armed bandits descend on the village and each bandit at gun-point takes one tribesman's lunch and eats it. The bandits then go off, each one having done a descriminable amount of harm to a single tribesman. Next week, the bandits are tempted to do the same again, but are troubled by new-found doubts about the morality of such a raid. Their doubts are put to rest by one of their number who does not believe in the principle of divisibility. They then raid the village, tie up the tribesmen, and look at their lunch. As expected, each bowl of food contains 100 baked beans. The pleasure derived from one baked bean is below the descrimination threshold. Instead of each bandit eating a single plateful as last week, each takes one bean from each plate. They leave after eating all the beans, pleased to have done no harm, as each has done no more than sub-threshold harm to each person."

Parfit goes on to explain his view that benefits and harms can be real and valuable, even when imperceptibly small. The view that a benefit is no benefit if it is too small to be noticed is often produced in defence of egoistic actions: overfishing (when considering the effects only on other humans) leading to a collapse in numbers, and pollution can both be justified if we assume that there is some threshold below which a harm does not count. An imperceptible effect, with sufficient extent or repetition, can be very terrible indeed.

2. Ignoring small chances

"It is sometimes claimed that, below some threshold, small chances have no rational or moral significance."
This view is used to support the idea (amongst others) that it is not worth voting in elections: the likelihood of making a difference is too small. But consider, if a difference is made, it is likely to be a very valuable one - for the election of government can affect every member of the population for some years. If we assume that one-in-a-million chances can be reasonably ignored, what would we say to the builder of a nuclear power station who uses 1000 components, each with a one-in-a-million chance of catastrophic failure per day? If the consequences have a large potential value (perhaps due to a large extent) or there are many chances for the action to occur, sometimes a consideration is significant, despite its almost-impossible odds.

3. Ignoring the effects of sets of acts

"It is natural to assume ... If some act is right or wrong because of its effects, the only relevant effects are the effects of this particular act."
This assumption is mistaken in cases of overdetermination and coordination problems. "X and Y simultaneously shoot and kill me. Either shot, by itself, would have killed. Neither X nor Y acts in a way whose consequences is that an extra person dies. Given what the other does, it is true of each that, if he had not shot me, this would have made no difference." If we make this mistake, we reach the conclusion that neither X nor Y have acted wrongly.

4. The "Share-of-the-Total" view

Parfit also describes another mistake, which he calls the "Share-of-the-Total" view. "Suppose that I could save either J's life or K's arm. I know that, if I do not save J's life, someone else certainly will; but no one else can save K's arm." Should I save someone's life or save someone's arm? We must be careful to choose the best outcome, which may not coincide with our impression of producing the most benefit, or else K's arm will be lost unnecessarily.

- Five Mistakes in Moral Mathematics, Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit

Quote of the Day

No kidding !

A Eulogy for a Cow: How Commodified Animals Die

We were seated in the front row by the door through which the animals exited, so as each cow left the ring, we were able to look into her face. As I sat there and met the gaze of cow after cow, I felt deeply ashamed to be human. To be a member of a species that so systematically breeds, raises, uses up, sells, kills, and consumes not just cows but many other species felt sickening and unforgivable.
This feeling only intensified when a Holstein cow with ear tag #1389 limped through the door into the ring. She was small for her breed, and the impacts of her life as a commodity producer were easily legible on her body. Her tail was docked, her hide was covered in scrapes and abrasions, and she had an auction sticker with a barcode stuck to her side. Her frame was slight, and her ribs and hip bones protruded visibly beneath her skin. One of her back legs was not bearing weight (the source of her limp). Her udders hung to the ground and were red with mastitis. Compromised mobility and mastitis are common in cows used for dairy, especially those at the cull market auction, since both of these ailments frequently signal a cow’s declining productivity.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.

- Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day

Let us meet with bravery whatever may befall us. Let us never feel a shudder at the thought of being wounded or of being made a prisoner, or of poverty or persecution.

- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Quote of the Day

No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.

- Derek Parfit

Quote of the Day

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

- Andrew Sullivan

Wisdom Of The Week

Ai Weiwei: I grew up in the most restrictive society. We paid so much for any gesture or show of attitude. Then I came to the West, I went to the Lesbos beach where people are dying daily, and I posed as a single child. I was confused and surprised by so many people being against this act. I want to understand why they were against it. Humans are so fixed in their ways: when to sleep, when to eat, our educational systems that teach us what we can or can’t do, all these religious reasons and fake moral structures. I don’t understand why you would set yourself up to be afraid.

On the Lesbos beach people are dying daily, not just Alan Kurdi. This criticism is so fake — a fake emotional condition they set up for one instance. Come on, thousands are dying. Maybe the one next to him was his brother. Maybe the way he was lying on the shore was different. But the media never showed his brother, stuck in the rocks just fifty meters away. Why don’t people talk about him? Why don’t they know his name? This kind of soap opera sentiment controls the mainstream mind and makes society the way it is today. Nobody cares, people only want their own emotions not to be affected, to not to be touched. They can still feel comfortable. They want to decide when they will shed tears.

IB: And yet you did this and there was an eruption of criticism.

Ai Weiwei: My response to this criticism is, ‘What the fuck? You want me to go do it again?’ But who cares about a single photograph, a single post, really? A single boat flips over and seven hundred people die. The media doesn’t care. A person drives a car into a few people in London and CNN covers it for a week; a boat flips over and complete silence. It is just so fake.

People are blind — they will never be enlightened beyond their own experience. You see many people visit Buddhist temples, but do you think they understand even a small sense of Buddhism? Do people understand anything about Buddhist philosophy? They love it, but don’t understand it. When they don’t love it, everybody abandons it. It is not that they abandon it because of the depth of their understanding; they have just become lazy and stupid.

IB: I think we have a long history of willful ignorance. But throughout the world there is also a long history of taking the voice of the poet or artist seriously. One thing that frustrates me right now is that in the United States we have many strong poets and artists voicing extraordinary truths, but we don’t see the larger public embracing them, and throughout American history they have virtually been ignored by the political elite. Why do you think this is such a characteristic of American culture?

Ai Weiwei: I can only talk about today. I don’t know the history. Today, people are overwhelmingly taken with materialism. As a result, the individual has become disassociated from the meaning of life and the concerns of humanity. I think this is one purpose of capitalism and it has been very successful in the United States. The capitalist system will not accept a life of abstract thinking in dealing with aesthetics. Reality is too strong in capitalism. It is about material possessions, money, power and status.

- The Conditions of Empathy, Ai Weiwei

Quote of the Day

Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms -- you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Quote of the Day

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Quote of the Day

What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through this galaxy.

Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea.

If we are the only rational beings in the Universe, as some recent evidence suggests, it matters even more whether we shall have descendants or successors during the billions of years in which that would be possible. Some of our successors might live lives and create worlds that, though failing to justify past suffering, would give us all, including some of those who have suffered, reasons to be glad that the Universe exists.

- Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume Three

Quote of the Day

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!

- Anne Frank

Quote of the Day

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.

- Maya Angelou

Quote of the Day

Therefore I feel that the aforementioned guiding principle must be modified to read: If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.

- Norman Borlaugh

Wisdom Of The Week

- Extreme Personalities at Work and in Life

Quote of the Day

We use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. One of things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean, the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.

- Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

A Global Assessment Of Atoll Island Planform Changes Over The Past Decades

Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical desta- bilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island smaller than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories' vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.

- Full Paper Here

Quote of the Day

The man who says he can, and the man who says he can not… Are both correct.

- Confucius

Quote of the Day

AI scientists tried to program computers to act like humans without first answering what intelligence is and what it means to understand. They left out the most important part of building intelligent machines, the intelligence! "Real intelligence" makes the point that before we attempt to build intelligent machines, we have to first understand how the brain thinks, and there is nothing artificial about that. Only then can we ask how we can build intelligent machines.

- Jeff Hawkins