Max Holiday Card 2020

Max 03/21/2006 - 12/20/2019

I love you forever and ever. I will miss you each second for the rest of my life.
You are part of me and I will see you in my dreams.

Quote of the Day

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

- Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind

Quote of the Day

The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Quote of the Day

Read books you hate. Nothing pushes you more strongly in the direction of your own voice as knowing precisely what you are not.

- Meg Elison

Quote of the Day

When we think about the adaptive fit of a species to its environment, we think about size, speed, coloration, feeding habits, and so on, but we don’t think about thinking. Sure, we talk about brain size as though it were just another morphological variable like height, but we don’t think about thinking in Darwinian terms. Things get weird when you go there.

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What if the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything can only be contemplated by dodos? What if the Ultimate Truths are dodo thoughts?

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.

- Arthur C. Clarke

Wisdom Of The Week

Larkin’s poetry, in particular, encourages us to take a more capacious view of the matter. This isn’t because his poetry is didactic in some straightforwardly moralistic way; indeed nothing could be more alien to Larkin than the vulgar notion that poetry is meant to make you a nicer person. Rather his poems, if we let them, awaken us to a certain sensibility that is not exhausted by an appreciation of their expressive originality and sublimity. In short, there’s an undeniable sense in which Larkin’s poems have the effect of making us a little deeper, perhaps even wiser too.

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My own take is from the perspective of someone who wishes to know if it’s possible to derive any insights of general human significance from Larkin’s poetry. But first a very brief word about my un-Larkinesque-sounding “insights of general human significance”.

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So what might these insights be? They are, I suggest, the lessons that can be wrought from the kind of uncompromisingly undeluded but humane poetic sensibility of Larkin. The qualities that we might associate with what we might call Larkin’s realism would include a sense of scepticism, honesty, humour, ambivalence and even courage. If we were to use Larkin’s more favoured and evocative compound adjectives we might describe it as undogmatic, undeceived, unbelieving, unconsoling, un-Orphic and undaunted. As for the actual perspective on or view of life itself, Larkin’s poem Ignorance gives us part of the answer:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure,

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so,

Someone must know.

With his typically light but unfailingly assured touch, Larkin conveys the inescapable subjectivity of modern life. No longer can we claim that any of our views about things of importance are grounded upon objective and unchanging foundations. The loss of the old, pre-modern reassuring certainties means that we have no choice but to rest our convictions on nothing more than our own personal and contingently-formed outlook. And yet part of us still can’t help yearning for the possibility that somewhere “someone must know” what’s really “true or right or real”. The disappearance of truth, or rather the acknowledgment of its absence, shouldn’t entail a strenuously ironic embrace of the arbitrary and meaningless.

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Never to lose sight of the preciousness of non-human life and what it can tell us about ourselves:

The little lives of earth and form,

Of finding food, and keeping warm,

Are not like ours, and yet

A kinship lingers nonetheless;

We hanker for the homeliness

Of den, and hole, and set.

   “The Little Lives of Earth and Form”

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But why should we think this is good for us? Well, one of the main benefits of reading Larkin is that it helps change our conception of what good means or at least might mean. He achieves this by broadening or, better still, deepening our understanding of the good. After reading Larkin, it becomes peculiarly difficult to retain our preconceived, unsceptical notion that the good is necessarily optimistic or inspirational, let alone pious or cosily moralistic. Rather it becomes far more natural and necessary to see the world as a largely cold and comfortless place where only the most exiguous and ephemeral forms of meaning and pleasure are derivable.

The eminent critic Christopher Ricks was definitely on to something when he compared Larkin’s unsanguine view of the world with that of Dr Johnson:

“Human life”, Johnson said, “is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Life is not something that can be made better other than palliatively (not that this is nothing), and life cannot be bested. Or worsted. Except by death. “Experience makes literature look insignificant beside life, as indeed life does beside death,” Larkin wrote.

There is much to learn from Ricks’s observation. His remark that life can be treated only palliatively strikes just the right chord with Larkin’s equivocal view of the world. Larkin is realistic and honest enough to declare the relative paltriness of poetry compared with the solidity of life, and then the relative paltriness of life compared with the certainty and finality of death. But we shouldn’t forget the inclusion of the not insignificant caveat “look” in the above quote from Larkin: literature is not rendered worthless by life or death. On the contrary, it’s one of the few palliatives that genuinely helps.

- Is Larkin good for you? by Johnny Lyons

Petz created Pet-Commerce

Quote of the Day

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Hentry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness, and worship without awareness.

- Anthony de Mello

Quote of the Day

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

- Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Quote of the Day

I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardor of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Quote of the Day

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Anya Plutynski's book Explaining Cancer; it is one of the richest and well-researched books on the current state of cancer research and to understand, why it is so difficult to find a cure. Her background in philosophy brings more rigor to the book. It is not an easy read but you will learn so much from it.

One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.

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How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.

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Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world. 

Quote of the Day

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand at the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, I

Quote of the Day

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quote of the Day

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought to himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, II, trans. G. D. H. Cole

Quote of the Day

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

- John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

Quote of the Day

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom Of The Week

New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to provide a heart rate profile for free-ranging blue whales. The resulting data shows how the hearts of these enormous cetaceans help them hold their breath for prolonged periods of time as well as how they’re suddenly able to exert the energy needed for lunge feeding and then replenish their blood oxygen levels when back at the surface.

At the same time, the new study, co-authored by marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen from the School of Humanities Sciences at Stanford University, suggests the blue whale has reached the largest size possible for an aquatic organism on Earth. The cardiovascular system of the blue whale, while impressive, is probably the limit of what is biologically possible, according to the new research.

Blue whales are the largest creatures to have ever lived on the planet. These aquatic mammals can reach upwards of 30 meters (98 feet) in length and weigh an astonishing 173 metric tons (380,000 pounds or 172,365 kilograms). To put this into perspective, that’s equal to about 292 very heavy African elephants—currently the largest terrestrial animal on Earth.

Living in the ocean is what allow blue whales to grow to such an enormous size possible, as no creature of that immensity could possibly support itself on land. The largest land animals to have ever lived were the titanosaurs, a group of four-legged, long-necked dinosaurs that included Argentinosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Rapetosaurus. These herbivores got as long as 15 meters (50 feet) and weighed nearly 82 metric tons (180,780 pounds or 82,000 kilograms). They were big, no doubt about it, but not nearly as big as the blue whale.>br>
The new research notes that another important factor allowing blue whales to grow so large is their highly specialized cardiovascular system. For marine biologists, however, understanding exactly what makes the blue whale’s heart tick has proven difficult given they’re almost too big to measure. To overcome this hurdle, Goldbogen and his colleagues developed an electrocardiogram (ECG) tag that they attached to a blue whale with suction cups.

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The heart rate profile for the blue whale came as a surprise even to the researchers. The observed bradycardia was 30 to 50 times lower than expected. The low rate was made possible by an elastic-like part of the whale’s body called an aortic arch, according to the new paper. This remarkable piece of whale anatomy transports blood to the outer reaches of the whale’s gigantic body, contracting slowly to maintain blood flow during the long interval between beats. The heart’s unique pulsations and shape keeps blood flowing and is what makes the whale’s higher heart rate possible.

During tachycardia, the blue whale’s heart rate is likely working at the highest maximum limit allowable by the constraints of biology, according to the authors. A more robust cardiovascular system is not likely, they argue, and the new research may actually explain why no species on Earth has grown bigger than the blue whale.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What I've Been Reading

To achieve stillness, we'll need to focus on three domains, the timeless trinity of mind, body, soul - the head, the heart, the flesh. 

Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday.

One of the best books of the year and one of the best books, I have ever read. The chapter titles of each of the three domains speaks volume of how much one can learn from this book.

Mind: 

• Become Present
• Limit Your Inputs
• Empty The Mind
• Slow Down, Think Deeply
• Start Journaling 
• Cultivate Silence
• Seek Wisdom
• Find Confidence, Avoid Ego
• Let Go

Spirit:

• Choose Virtue 
• Heal The Inner Child 
• Beware Desire
• Enough
• Bathe In Beauty
• Accept A Higher Power
• Enter Relationship
• Conquer Your Anger
• All Is One

Body:

• Say No
• Take A Walk
• Build A Routine
• Get Rid Of Your Stuff
• Seek Solitude
• Be A Human Being
• Go To Sleep
• Find A Hobby
• Beware Escapism
• Act Bravely

Quote of the Day

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What I've Been Reading

There are many things in life we can do nothing about - the circumstances of our childhoods; natural events in the outer world; the chaos and catastrophe of illness, accident, loss, and abuse - but there is one thing we can change. How we interact with our ego is up to us. We get very little help with this in life.

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The bottom line is this: The go needs all the help it can get. We can all benefit from getting over ourselves. 

Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself by Mark Epstein, M.D.

Much needed book in this me, me, me world - a beautiful amalgamation of Buddhism and psychology to eradicate ego to help ourselves and in the process make the world a better place. A must-read.

Awakening does not make the ego disappear: it changes one's relationship to it. The balance of power shifts, but there is still work to do. Rather than being driven by selfish concerns, one finds it necessary to take personal responsibility for them. In Buddhism, this engagement with the go is described as both the path to enlightenment and the path out of it. It is traditionally explained as an Eightfold Path:

• Right View - Right View asks us to focus on incontrovertible truth of impermanence rather than trying to shore up a flawed and insecure self.
• Right Motivation - Right Motivation encourages us to come out from our hiding place, to use our powers of observation for our good, and to be real with ourselves.
• Right Speech - Right Speech asks us to take seriously the stories we tell ourselves, but not to take them for granted. Seeing them clearly gives us back some power over them. "Just because you think it," I often say to my patients, "doesn't make it true."
• Right Action - Postponing the ego's need for immediate gratification is the core principle for this aspect of the Eightfold Path. There is a famous phrase in Japanese Buddism that tries to explain this. "Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self," it suggests. Then "body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest."
• Right Livelihood - Classically, it means avoiding some of the worst qualities of human beings are capable of: those involving deceit or exploitation. Examples from the Buddha's time include trading in weapons, buying and selling human beings, killing animals, selling drugs or other intoxicants, and manufacturing or distributing poison. As these ancient examples suggest, things have not changed very much. Buddha made the Right Livelihood the centerpiece of the Eightfold Path. Right Livelihood encourages us to be ethically aware of how we interact and how we relate - not just to our level of achievement.
• Right Effort - Right Effort suggests that it is possible, and often desirable, to gain control over one' ego's impulses. The precondition for this is the ability we all have, however underutilized, to observe our own minds.
• Right Mindfulness - The trick of Right Mindfulness is not to turn into another method for self-improvement. Mindfulness, once established, continues on its own stream. It hacks into the mind to see what is there, and, out of this self-observation, interesting, unexcepted, and sometimes uncomfortable things can emerge. The original word in the language of the Buddha's time was sati. Sati means remembering. Right Mindfulness - or Right Sati - means remembering to keep an eye on oneself. 
• Right Concentration - Concentration is "Right" when it connects with the other branches of the whole. It is "Right" when it demonstrates the feasibility of training the mind, when it supports the investigation of impermanence, when it erodes selfish preoccupation, and when it reveals the benefits of surrender. It is not "Right" when it is seen as an end in itself and when it is used to avoid painful truths. One can hide out in the peaceful states that meditative concentration makes possible, but in the context of Eightfold Path, this is considered a mistake. 

To counter the persistent and insidious influence of ego has on us - called 'self-grasping' in Buddhist thought - one has to be willing to work with it on all eight levels before awakening and after.

We are human as a result of suffering, not in spite of it. 

Quote of the Day

If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That's the truest version of our story of eating animals.

Can we tell a new story?

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

Quote of the Day

The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. …

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge.

Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

- Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Quote of the Day

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.”

- Jack Kornfield

Quote of the Day

If You Think You're Enlightened, Go Spend a Week with Your Family.

- Ram Dass

Wisdom Of The Week

Through his career, Hilbert was interested in the ultimate limits of mathematical knowledge: what can humans know about mathematics, in principle, and what (if any) parts of mathematics are forever unknowable by humans? Roughly speaking, Hilbert’s 1928 problem asked whether there exists a general algorithm a mathematician can follow which would let them figure out whether any given mathematical statement is provable. Hilbert’s hoped-for algorithm would be a little like the paper-and-pencil algorithm for multiplying two numbers. Except instead of starting with two numbers, you’d start with a mathematical conjecture, and after going through the steps of the algorithm you’d know whether that conjecture was provable. The algorithm might be too time-consuming to use in practice, but if such an algorithm existed, then there would be a sense in which mathematics was knowable, at least in principle.

In 1928, the notion of an algorithm was pretty vague. Up to that point, algorithms were often carried out by human beings using paper and pencil, as in the multiplication algorithm just mentioned, or the long-division algorithm. Attacking Hilbert’s problem forced Turing to make precise exactly what was meant by an algorithm. To do this, Turing described what we now call a Turing machine: a single, universal programmable computing device that Turing argued could perform any algorithm whatsoever.

Today we’re used to the idea that computers can be programmed to do many different things. In Turing’s day, however, the idea of a universal programmable computer was remarkable. Turing was arguing that a single, fixed device could imitate any algorithmic process whatsoever, provided the right program was supplied. It was an amazing leap of imagination, and the foundation of modern computing.

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There’s a wrinkle in this story. Deutsch is a physicist with a background in quantum mechanics. And in trying to answer his question, Deutsch observed that ordinary, everyday computers based on Turing’s model have a lot of trouble simulating quantum mechanical systemsResearchers such as Yu Manin and Richard Feynman had previously observed this, and as a result had speculated about computers based on quantum mechanics.. In particular, they seem to be extraordinarily slow and inefficient at doing such simulations. To answer his question affirmatively, Deutsch was forced to invent a new type of computing system, a quantum computer. Those quantum computers can do everything conventional computers can do, but are also capable of efficiently simulating quantum-mechanical processes. And so they are arguably a more natural computing model than conventional computers. If we ever meet aliens, my bet is that they’ll use quantum computers (or, perhaps, will have quantum computing brains). After all, it’s likely that aliens will be far more technologically advanced than current human civilization. And so they’ll use the computers natural for any technologically advanced society.

This essay explains how quantum computers work. It’s not a survey essay, or a popularization based on hand-wavy analogies. We’re going to dig down deep so you understand the details of quantum computing. Along the way, we’ll also learn the basic principles of quantum mechanics, since those are required to understand quantum computation.

Learning this material is challenging. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics are famously “hard” subjects, often presented as mysterious and forbidding. If this were a conventional essay, chances are that you’d rapidly forget the material. But the essay is also an experiment in the essay form. As I’ll explain in detail below the essay incorporates new user interface ideas to help you remember what you read. That may sound surprising, but uses a well-validated idea from cognitive science known as spaced-repetition testing. More detail on how it works below. The upshot is that anyone who is curious and determined can understand quantum computing deeply and for the long term.

- Quantum Computing for the Very Curious

Quote of the Day

My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone.

- Jack Kornfield on Tim Ferris Podcast

Quote of the Day

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead.”

- Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Quote of the Day

Gentle medicine is not the audacious proposal that physicians should not intervene at all. We have a few magic bullets in our arsenal and we should use them. Rather, gentle medicine is the more modest proposal that physicians should intervene less, perhaps much less, than is presently the case, and we should try to improve health with changes to our lives and to our societies.

- Medical Nihilism by Jacob Stegenga

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust—the human touch—between patients and doctors. Not only would we have more time to come together, enabling far deeper communication and compassion, but also we would be able to revamp how we select and train doctors.

- Eric Topol, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

Quote of the Day

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law… That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly, … and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Wisdom Of The Week

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages.

According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations.

The study, published this week in Science, combines anthropology, psychology and history to track the evolution of the West, as we know it, from its roots in “kin-based” societies. The antecedents consisted of clans, derived from networks of tightly interconnected ties, that cultivated conformity, obedience and in-group loyalty—while displaying less trust and fairness with strangers and discouraging independence and analytic thinking.

The engine of that evolution, the authors propose, was the church’s obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of “small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility,” along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society’s exposure to the church, the greater the effect.

Around A.D. 500, explains Joseph Henrich, chair of Harvard University’s department of human evolutionary biology and senior author of the study, “the Western church, unlike other brands of Christianity and other religions, begins to implement this marriage and family program, which systematically breaks down these clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families. And we make the case that this then results in these psychological differences.”

- Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo

Quote of the Day

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Quote of the Day

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher and hunter in earnest.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

- Lao Tzu

Quote of the Day

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Quote of the Day

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen

Quote of the Day

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

There are several implicit assertions in the JAFFE set. First there’s the taxonomy itself: that “emotions” is a valid set of visual concepts. Then there’s a string of additional assumptions: that the concepts within “emotions” can be applied to photographs of people’s faces (specifically Japanese women); that there are six emotions plus a neutral state; that there is a fixed relationship between a person’s facial expression and her true emotional state; and that this relationship between the face and the emotion is consistent, measurable, and uniform across the women in the photographs.

At the level of the class, we find assumptions such as “there is such a thing as a ‘neutral’ facial expression” and “the significant six emotional states are happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid, surprised.”At the level of labeled image, there are other implicit assumptions such as “this particular photograph depicts a woman with an ‘angry’ facial expression,” rather than, for example, the fact that this is an image of a woman mimicking an angry expression. These, of course, are all ‘performed” expressions—not relating to any interior state, but acted out in a laboratory setting. Every one of the implicit claims made at each level is, at best, open to question, and some are deeply contested.

[---]

In the case of ImageNet, noun categories such as “apple” or “apple butter” might seem reasonably uncontroversial, but not all nouns are created equal. To borrow an idea from linguist George Lakoff, the concept of an “apple” is more nouny than the concept of “light”, which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as “health.”[17] Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, and from the descriptive to the judgmental. These gradients have been erased in the logic of ImageNet. Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label, like taxidermy butterflies in a display case. The results can be problematic, illogical, and cruel, especially when it comes to labels applied to people.

ImageNet contains 2,833 subcategories under the top-level category “Person.” The subcategory with the most associated pictures is “gal” (with 1,664 images) followed by “grandfather” (1,662), “dad” (1,643), and chief executive officer (1,614). With these highly populated categories, we can already begin to see the outlines of a worldview. ImageNet classifies people into a huge range of types including race, nationality, profession, economic status, behaviour, character, and even morality. There are categories for racial and national identities including Alaska Native, Anglo-American, Black, Black African, Black Woman, Central American, Eurasian, German American, Japanese, Lapp, Latin American, Mexican-American, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Pakistani, Papuan, South American Indian, Spanish American, Texan, Uzbek, White, Yemeni, and Zulu. Other people are labeled by their careers or hobbies: there are Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, cognitive neuroscientists, hairdressers, intelligence analysts, mythologists, retailers, retirees, and so on.

As we go further into the depths of ImageNet’s Person categories, the classifications of humans within it take a sharp and dark turn. There are categories for Bad Person, Call Girl, Drug Addict, Closet Queen, Convict, Crazy, Failure, Flop, Fucker, Hypocrite, Jezebel, Kleptomaniac, Loser, Melancholic, Nonperson, Pervert, Prima Donna, Schizophrenic, Second-Rater, Spinster, Streetwalker, Stud, Tosser, Unskilled Person, Wanton, Waverer, and Wimp. There are many racist slurs and misogynistic terms.

Of course, ImageNet was typically used for object recognition—so the Person category was rarely discussed at technical conferences, nor has it received much public attention. However, this complex architecture of images of real people, tagged with often offensive labels, has been publicly available on the internet for a decade. It provides a powerful and important example of the complexities and dangers of human classification, and the sliding spectrum between supposedly unproblematic labels like “trumpeter” or “tennis player” to concepts like “spastic,” “mulatto,” or “redneck.” Regardless of the supposed neutrality of any particular category, the selection of images skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson, if you will, in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified.

[---]

In 1839, the mathematician François Arago claimed that through photographs, “objects preserve mathematically their forms.”[19] Placed into the nineteenth-century context of imperialism and social Darwinism, photography helped to animate—and lend a “scientific” veneer to—various forms of phrenology, physiognomy, and eugenics.[20] Physiognomists such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso created composite images of criminals, studied the feet of prostitutes, measured skulls, and compiled meticulous archives of labeled images and measurements, all in an effort to use “mechanical” processes to detect visual signals in classifications of race, criminality, and deviance from bourgeois ideals. This was done to capture and pathologize what was seen as deviant or criminal behavior, and make such behavior observable in the world.

And as we shall see, not only have the underlying assumptions of physiognomy made a comeback with contemporary training sets, but indeed a number of training sets are designed to use algorithms and facial landmarks as latter-day calipers to conduct contemporary versions of craniometry.

[---]

Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around “bias” in AI systems misses the mark: there is no “neutral,” “natural,” or “apolitical” vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical “fix” by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.

- Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen

Quote of the Day

We live in the age of philosophy, science, and intellect. Huge libraries are open for everyone. Everywhere we have schools, colleges, and universities which give us the wisdom of the people from many previous millennia. And what then? Have we become wiser for all this? Do we better understand our life, or the meaning of our existence? Do we know what is good for our life?

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as quoted by Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom

Quote of the Day

When someone isn’t seen for what they truly are, that’s a very dangerous thing.

- Paul Randolph in Motherless Brooklyn

Quote of the Day

If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Quote of the Day

The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others.

- Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

Quote of the Day

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of thought.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Quote of the Day

For too long, gentlemen by way of abuses that one can never too strongly accuse of having taken pace because of our lack of understanding and ignorance - for every long time, I say - we have been victims of your greed and your avarice. Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself...

- Toussaint Louverture, Letters to the General Assembly (1792)

Wisdom Of The Week

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.

• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.

• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.

• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.

[---]

• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Try to make life as easy as possible for your editing friends. Number pages and double space.

• After all this, send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation

• And don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.

• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

- Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper

Quote of the Day

Bushido teaches that men should behave according to an absolute moral standard, one that transcends logic. What’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. The difference between good and bad and between right and wrong are givens, not arguments subject to discussion or justification, and a man should know the difference. Finally, it is a man’s obligation to teach his children moral standards through the model of his own behavior: The first objective of samurai education was to build up Character. The subtler faculties of prudence, intelligence, and dialectics were less important. Intellectual superiority was esteemed, but a samurai was essentially a man of action. 

- Self Control and Character, One of the Eight Virtues of Samurai Code (The Bushido Code)

Quote of the Day

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Quote of the Day

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Quote of the Day

Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

- Naval

Quote of the Day

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

- Seneca

Wisdom Of The Week

Many survived after humans fled from a contaminated area, covering 1,000 square miles in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. They then went on to breed.Today, hounds freely roam the streets of abandoned towns and villages, as desperate for a tummy rub as ever — but at risk from a lack of food, harsh Ukrainian winters and wolves which prowl the nearby forests.
That’s where Lucas Hixson comes in.
The former radiation researcher has sacrificed his own career to care for the dogs of Chernobyl.

[---]

Lucas, 32, says: “Chernobyl is an isolating place to work. So having these animals around is good for the workers. There were around 1,000 dogs roaming in the area. They only lived until they were two or three — if one got to five we called him ‘Grandpa’. We started a vaccination and sterilisation programme to bring the number down and give them a better quality of life. The dog population is now around 750.”

The most pressing concern, though, as the bitter Ukrainian winter approaches — temperatures can drop to -20C — is the daily feeding routine.

A lack of funds means Lucas only provides food for the dogs through the winter, as they can find their own food in summer.Just like the soldier in the Chernobyl TV drama, Lucas whistles to entice the dogs from their hiding spots at each of the 15 feedings stations. But, instead of a gun, he is armed with a 30kg sack of dried dog food and distributes up to seven of them daily. He trains the dogs to return to the same location each day, so they know where to get food.

The divorced dad-of-two says: “Sometimes you don’t need to whistle because they recognise the van. As soon as I get out they are there waiting for me.”

For the first time last year, the Chernobyl authorities allowed him to rehome pups. Since then, 54 have been sent to families in America and Canada. Stricter quarantine laws in the UK means he is yet to do his first British adoption. Over in Pripyat, where 50,000 people used to live, nature is taking over. An eerie quiet hangs over abandoned apartment blocks and schools which are slowly being colonised by the forest.

- Former Radiation Researcher Sacrifices Career to Care for the Lost Dogs of Chernoby

Quote of the Day

A mind that listens with complete attention will never look for a result because it is constantly unfolding; like a river, it is always in movement. Such a mind is totally unconscious of its own activity, in the sense that there is no perpetuation of a self, of a “me,” which is seeking to achieve an end.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life: Daily Meditations With Krishnamurti

Quote of the Day

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence… Silence is the general consecration of the universe.

- Herman Melville

Quote of the Day

The first and most important field of philosophy is the application of principles such as “Do not lie.” Next come the proofs, such as why we should not lie. The third field supports and articulates the proofs, by asking, for example, “How does this prove it? What exactly is a proof, what is logical inference, what is contradiction, what is truth, what is falsehood?” Thus, the third field is necessary because of the second, and the second because of the first. The most important, though, the one that should occupy most of our time, is the first. But we do just the opposite. We are preoccupied with the third field and give that all our attention, passing the first by altogether. The result is that we lie – but have no difficulty proving why we shouldn’t.

- Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

Quote of the Day

A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wisdom Of The Week

Immanuel Kant might be wrong on many things but his concept of Categorical Imperative written in 1785 is very true. I have lived this in the past few weeks and most humans are incapable of understanding this beautiful concept leave alone embedding in their lives.

There might many moments I feel exceptionally sad by the human inability to be moral under dire circumstances but those million sad moments fade away when one human follows the concept of the categorical imperative for a moment without even knowing Kant and the categorical imperative. It goes without saying dogs and cats have that concept naturally embedded in their morals. I can speak of only dogs and cats since I have observed them for many months and years.

Quote of the Day

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.

- Buddha

Quote of the Day

If you can’t meditate in a boiler room, you can’t meditate.

- Alan Watts

Quote of the Day

Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with a perfectly disciplined will that refuses to give in. It's a state of mind -- you could call it character in action.

- Vince Lombardi

Quote of the Day

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

- Charles Darwin

Quote of the Day

To us snow and cold seem a mere delaying of the spring. How far we are from understanding the value of these things in the economy of Nature!

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

- Francis Bacon

Quote of the Day

To hold the mind still is an enormous discipline.

- Comedian Garry Shadling

Wisdom Of The Week

To Seneca and to his fellow adherents of Stoic Philosophy, if a person could develop peace within themselves - if they could achieve apatheia, as they called it - then the whole world could be at war, and they could still think well, work well, and be well.

[---]

The Buddist word for it was upekka. The Muslims spoke of aslama. The Hebrews, histavat. The second book of Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an "evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same." The Greeks, euthymia and hesyehia. The Epicureans, ataraxia. The Christians, aequaminitas.

In English: stillness.

To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude - exterior and interior - on command.

Buddism. Stoicism. Epicureanism. Christianity.Hinduism. It's all but impossible to find a philosophical school or religion that does not venerate this inner peace - this stillness - as the highest good and as the key to elite performance and a happy life.

And when basically all the wisdom of the ancient world agrees on something, only a fool would decline to listen.

- Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Quote of the Day

It is … easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

- C. S. Peirce

Quote of the Day

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Quote of the Day

Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Quote of the Day

Error is not only the absolute error of believing what is false, but also the quantitative error of believing more or less strongly than is warranted by the degree of credibility properly attaching to the proposition believed in relation to the believer's knowledge. A man who is quite convinced that a certain horse will win the Derby is in error even if he does win.

- Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge

Quote of the Day

The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic.

- Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph

Wisdom Of The Week

And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like failing behind.

[---]

The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benfits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasing incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

[---]

The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions. With cancer, we're still working on posing the right questions in the first place.

- Excerpts from the book I am currently reading - Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World

Quote fo the Day

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment. ... Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. ... So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.

- J. S. Mill, On Liberty

Quote of the Day

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavour.

- Henry David Thoreau

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

Quote of the Day

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

- Albert Camus

Wisdom Of The Week

Tyler Cowen in his Econtalk interview refutes Andy Matuschak's claim on Books and Learning:

Russ Roberts: I recently had Andy Matuschak on the program. It hasn't aired yet, so you have definitely not heard it. But, he argues that books are extremely inefficient ways to convey information. And, one of the ways he, one of the points he makes, is that, if you think of a nonfiction book that you read a year or two ago, maybe even 6 weeks ago, you will struggle to remember anything about it. You might remember what it's about. You might remember one or two things about it. And that would be true of a lecture as well as a book. In fact, with lectures, I would say you mostly remember--if you are lucky--the topic, months later. He thinks those are very inefficient ways of conveying information. And he describes them as--it's not his term, but I think it's someone else's--but it's 'transmissionism'--I tell you a bunch of stuff, hoping you'll absorb it. What are your thoughts on that?

Tyler Cowen: I think Andy is a brilliant guy. I'm supporting him through a charitable project I'm running called Emergent Ventures. But I don't completely agree with him on that, necessarily. So, you don't remember much from a book, but maybe you remember what you need to. And then you are then clearing the space for the next thing. And the fact that books don't exercise such a tyranny over your mind maybe is what allows you to keep on reading them. So, if a book was something that really just seized control of your mind, like, say, LSD [Lysergic acid Diethylamide] does, people would be afraid of books.

Russ Roberts: Hng, heh, heh, heh.

Tyler Cowen: So, maybe having a somewhat superficial relationship with books is how it ought to be.

Russ Roberts: I've read books like that, by the way--that take control of your mind. That you fall in love with. That you become obsessed with. Right? And that you maybe over-absorb.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. It happens more often when you are young, I think, than when you are old.

Quote of the Day

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough you haven't read enough.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day

Well, I don’t know about you, but I feel a little better than I did when I started. The hell with fascism. The hell with bigotry and paranoia. The hell with fools falling for the lies of charlatans; that’s what fools do. We’re just going to keep on doing what we do: Making and consuming art. Supporting the people who remind us that we are in this together. We are each only one poem, one painting, one song away from another mind, another heart. It’s tragic that we need so much reminding. And yet we have, in art, the power to keep reminding each other.

- Michael Chabon on What's the point of Art?

Quote of the Day

What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar — and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?

Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.

And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?

- Epictetus, The Discourses

Quote of the Day

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus

Quote of the Day

The ignorance that knows itself, judges and condemns itself, is not an absolute ignorance. … Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle one’s self in the innumerable errors that human fancy has produced? Is it not much better to suspend one’s persuasion than to intermeddle with these wrangling and seditious divisions?

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walking

Wisdom Of The Week

I have never heard someone summarize the different types of messages/purposes we infer from reading different types of books; that would be the only and only, Russ Roberts during his interview with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning:

Andy Matuschak: Wonderful. So, I guess, first off, some of those 112 details are somewhat less spitback. But I think the really important thing is what those 112 details let you think next. My colleague has this metaphor that I really enjoy, so I'll share it here. Reading a challenging technical textbook is often a little bit like beginning by reading a book in English, and then--let's assume you don't know Spanish--Spanish words start creeping in. And by the time you finish the first chapter, like everything is in Spanish. And you turn to the second chapter, and you're like, 'Whoa. Like, I thought I'd picked up a book off the English section. What happened?' And so, you're going to struggle with that second chapter. If you have those 112 details, which[?] we have a second chapter, you are going to have a lot easier time learning about the quantum search algorithm.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. But that's--Let me take you to a harder example. I'm going to give you two. Just for fun. Because they are both former EconTalk guests. So, I interviewed Yuval Harari a while back about his first book, which is Sapiens. My wife is reading it now. And, let's pretend you ask me: What do you remember about Sapiens? Which my wife taps into a little bit because we are talking about it. And it turns out we are remembering three things. Three things! Not good. It's a long book. I remember that he thinks that agriculture was a mistake and I didn't agree with him; it didn't sit well with me. I remember that his view of money is based on trust and I thought, took that idea a little too far even though there is a sense on which money is based on trust. As an economist I found that a little simplistic. And third, he's anti-religion. Those are the--that's the three things I remember. That's weird! That's depressing. Now, let me take a different book: Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb. Now, when that book came out--I read it--didn't write when it came out. I read it somewhat after, The Black Swan, his second book came out. And there were two views of that book, which I've mentioned here before. One view was: 'There is nothing original in this book. This guy is a fraud. He pretends he has figured out all this stuff.' And I said, 'You know, I agree with that. ' I didn't learn anything that I didn't know in this book before. I knew that probability is difficult. I knew that risk is a hard thing to wrap your mind around. I understand something about most of the ideas he talked about in the book. So, in some sense, I learned nothing. On the other hand, I learned something incredibly deep. That book really grabbed me by the guts and jerked me around. It forced me to confront some things that I "knew" but didn't really internalize. And I would put that as another category of learning. These are things that, um, I'm just going to give you another example, another EconTalk guest, A.J. Jacobs, who writes a book called Thanks, A Thousand. It's about being grateful. Being grateful is a really good idea. I already knew that before I read the book. But the book made me a little more grateful, maybe. But, even if I remember that that's idea of the book, and even if after reading, I thought, 'Yeah. I should be more grateful,' to get me to be more grateful--that's a very high level. And so, those are the sort of 3--you know, those are all nonfiction books. They are all kind of trying to convey some understanding that the author has of the world around us. And I have really, really, different grasps of all of them.

Andy Matuschak: That's wonderful. And, to some extent, it illustrates the variety of purposes for which books are intended. If we look at, classical rhetoric, only a small part of that information piece. But, if, for instance, in the second book where you were yanked around--I'm not actually sure if it was maybe ethos or pathos. It kind of could have been either depending on your predilections around Taleb. But that's something that's not going to come just from a flashcard.

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Quote of the Day

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

- Henry David Thoreau,  Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Quote of the Day

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

Quote of the Day

Memory represents to us not what we choose, but what she pleases; nay, there is nothing that so much imprints any thing in our memory as a desire to forget it. And ‘tis a good way to retain and keep any thing safe in the soul to solicit her to lose it.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger."

- Anthony de Mello

Quote of the Day

It always seems impossible until it's done.

- Nelson Mandela