There is beauty in patience and waiting :-)

Wisdom Of The Week

It’s crazy how often people mention antitrust lawsuits for everything in tech. If anything, the trend should be *away* from antitrust: competition is more important when the field is less well-understood

- via MR

Quote of the Day

If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible. Or fuhgetaboud the texts, just engage in acts of courage.

- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

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Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup. The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand. So don’t get demoralized.

- Paul Graham

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You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasures, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed.

- Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

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I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars -- I look for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

- Warren Buffet

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My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

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If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

- Reid Hoffman

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If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy. And in the meantime, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re all in it together against Lord Voldemort and the House Slytherin.

- Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Wisdom Of The Week

Now, this just leaves us with the choice of an aim, the heart of strategy. I am fascinated to see that most of the CA campaigns we know anything about were intended to discourage people from voting. Much of the conversation about this whole issue gets stuck on the point that nothing they produced was likely to win anyone over from D to R or vice versa, but this is just a statement of how wedded so many people are to the median-voter theorem and the associated model of advertising in which you aim to reach as many qualified leads as possible.

If you aren’t interested in convincing people in the middle of the spectrum, though, a lot of constraints are relaxed. The Cultural Cognition Blog makes a really interesting point here.

Advertising and campaigning aim to convince by advancing their version of the facts. Propaganda aims to mobilise by advancing its version of social consensus. Disinformation aims to demobilise and disorient by advancing its version of social conflict. If it’s really that bad and idiotic out there, maybe I should just nope out and stay at home? Here’s a case study of just that.

- More Here

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If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.

- Jeff Bezos

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Why are so many of these selfish human motivation kept unconscious in the first place, rather than simply being conscious and well hidden? … The obvious rebuttal here is that we should just have evolved to not have those leaky, difficult-to-suppress emotional responses, or for those responses not to have evolved in the first place.

- Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: The Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Quote of the Day

You don't have to get angry or bitter at the people who don't believe in your dream; you just have to surprise them with a massive success story. Have you forgotten that you were born to win?

- Edmond Mbiaka

Happy Birthday Max

Mr. Mischievous is 12 today :-)

Quote of the Day

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

- Dean Koontz, False Memory

What I've Been Reading

Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time by Simon Garfield.

Fascinating roller coaster ride on the perception of time.

But with railways, a new time consciousness affected all who traveled: the concept of 'punctuality' was born anew.

Quote of the Day

Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.

- Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart: Inspirational Thoughts for Living Your Best Life

Quote of the Day

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

What I've Been Reading

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

The book has nothing provocative and I agree with most of the book - take responsibility, be humble  and so on. He could have made the wordings little explicit (esp., while drawing analogies from religion and it might be confused for actual religious preaching); but I might be wrong since I haven't watched his lectures. Either way, Jordan has written a beautiful book - A much needed voice in the world of political correctness has become part of colloquial language.

It is our responsibility to see what s before our eyes, courageously, and learn from it, even it is seems horrible - even if horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and what we rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us. It is the act of seeing that informs the individual and updates the state. It was for this reason the Nietzsche said that a man's worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have - and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.

[---]

Something supersedes thinking, despite its truly awesome power. When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations - in the depths - it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick. Perhaps you might start by noticing this: when you love someone, it's not despite their limitations. It's because of their limitations. Of course, its complicated.

[---]

What shall i do with my infants death? Hold my other loved ones and heal their pain. It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father's funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There's a worthy and noble ambition: strength in face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.

What shall I do in the next dire moment? Focus my attention on the next move. The flood is always coming. The apocalypse is always upon us. That's why the story of Noah is archetypal. Things fall apart - we stressed that in the discussion surrounding Rule 10 (Be precise in your speech) - and the center cannot hold. When everything has become chaotic and uncertain, all that remain to guide you might be the character you constructed, previously, by aiming up and concentrating on the moment at hand. If you have failed in that, you will fail in the moment of crisis, and then God help you.

Quote of the Day

The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone.

- John Locke

Wisdom Of The Week

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

[---]

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

[---]

Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.

[---]

Sticking up for truth when its unpopular is far more of a virtue, because it costs you something - your reputation. If you are a journalist and act in way that risks ostracism, you are virtuous. Some people only express their opinion as part of mob shaming, when it is safe to do so, and, in the bargain, think that they are displaying virtue. This is not virtue but vice, a mixture of bullying and cowardice.

- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

- Immanuel Kant

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In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business.

- Marcus Aurelius

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Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

- Edsger Dijkstra

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Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change, or to avoid it altogether, and that is true whether we’re talking about corporate competition, changing residences or jobs, or building things. In an age when it is easier than ever before to dig in, the psychological resistance to change has become progressively stronger.

- Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

Quote of the Day

The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions. If I ask a question like ‘how many clicks did this link get?’ which is something we look at all the time, that’s not a data science question. It’s an analytics question. If I ask a question like, ‘based on the previous history of links on this publisher’s site, can I predict how many people from France will read this in the next three hours?’ that’s more of a data science question.

- Hilary Mason, Founder, Fast Forward Labs

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Data scientists are kind of like the new Renaissance folks, because data science is inherently multidisciplinary.

- John Foreman, Vice President of Product Management at MailChimp

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The best of prophets of the future is the past.

- Lord Byron

Wisdom Of The Week

I never knew this.. this is sad: What happened to Chinese-India's in 1962

In the bus back to Toronto, the group asked Bobby Wong, in his 70s, to sing. Looking at him and at the other passengers, I assumed idly that he would break into a Chinese song. After all, these folks “looked” Chinese.

Then Bobby sang, and he sang “Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh” (“This is a strange story”), the lyrical hit from the 1960 Bollywood hit Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (“My Heart is Mine but My Love Belongs to Someone Else”). It nearly brought tears to my eyes, for two reasons. One, here was this Chinese-Indian man who left India several decades ago, sitting in a bus on the highway from Ottawa to Toronto, singing an old Hindi song. It was charming, but there was also something inexpressibly sad about it. Two, to my chagrin, I realized my assumption was the same one that, decades earlier, sent Wong and thousands of others to a detention camp in Rajasthan. At that time, their only offense was that they “looked” Chinese.

On the morning of Aug. 24, 2017, Bobby and some 50 other Chinese-Indians gathered in the parking lot of the Splendid China Mall in Toronto. They had planned something rather remarkable for the day: an expedition to the Indian High Commission in Ottawa to hold a peaceful demonstration and hand over a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. After more than 50 years, this tiny community had decided to speak out and ask the Indian government for redress for the injustices they had endured.

For what happened to them was unjust indeed.

Starting in November 1962, the Indian government detained nearly 3,000 Chinese-Indians in a prison camp. An obvious parallel is the United States’ incarceration of 100,000 Japanese-Americans two decades earlier. The reason for both was war—World War II in 1942 and the India-China border war in October and November 1962. Their respective conflicts spurred the world’s two largest democracies to suspect the loyalties of thousands of their own citizens, solely based on their appearance. Suspicion quickly turned into incarceration.

Like the Japanese in the U.S., the Chinese have a long history in India. Starting in the late 18th century, they arrived as traders, tea-plantation workers, cobblers, dentists, and more, settling mostly in small towns across India’s northeast. As the generations slipped past, several families became integrated enough that they spoke only Indian languages. They were so much part of the local fabric that, in some of those towns, you can still find precincts known as “Chinapatty” (the best translation might be “Chinese ‘hood”).

Quote of the Day

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.

- Thomas Paine

Quote of the Day

Our world is increasingly complex, often chaotic, and always fast-flowing. This makes forecasting something between tremendously difficult and actually impossible, with a strong shift toward the latter as timescales get longer.

- Andrew McAfee, Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

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

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Quote of the Day

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.

- Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Quote of the Day

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

- C.S. Lewis

Quote of the Day

It might seem to you that living in the woods on a riverbank would remove you from the modern world. But not if the river is navigable, as ours is. On pretty weekends in the summer, this riverbank is the very verge of the modern world. It is a seat in the front row, you might say. On those weekends, the river is disquieted from morning to night by people resting from their work.
This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above the noise of their motors. They look neither left nor right. They don't slow down for - or maybe even see - an old man in a rowboat raising his lines...

I watch and I wonder and I think. I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.

- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

Wisdom Of The Week

COWEN: In your wonderful new book, The Elephant in the Brain, you outline a theory of human behavior where signaling has a great deal of explanatory power. If you had to, in as crude or blunt terms as possible, how much of human behavior ultimately can be traced back to some kind of signaling? What’s your short, quick, and dirty answer?

HANSON: In a rich society like ours, well over 90 percent.

[---]

COWEN: Here’s another response to the notion that everything’s about signaling. You could say, “Well, that’s what people actually enjoy.” If signaling is 90 percent of whatever, surely it’s evolved into being parts of our utility functions. It makes us happy to signal. So signaling isn’t just wasteful resources.

What we really want to do is set up a world that caters to the elephant in our brain, so to speak. We just want all policies to pander to signaling as much as possible. Maybe make signals cheaper, but just signals everywhere now and forever. What says you?

HANSON: I think our audience needs a better summary of this thesis that I’m going to defend here. The Elephant in the Brain main thesis is that in many areas of life, perhaps even most, there’s a thing we say that we’re trying to do, like going to school to learn or going to the doctor to get well, and then what we’re really trying to do is often more typically something else that’s more selfish, and a lot of it is showing off.

If that’s true, then we are built to do that. That’s the thing we want to do, and in some sense it’s a great world when we get to do it.

My complaint isn’t really that most people don’t acknowledge this. I accept that people may be just fine leaving the elephant in their brain and not paying attention to it and continuing to pretend one thing while they’re doing another. That may be what makes them happy and that may be OK.

My stronger claim would be that policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social world well enough to make recommendations for changes—they should understand the elephant in the brain. They should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes.

- Tyler Cowen interviews Robin Hanson about his book Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Quote of the Day

Invention is the most important product of the human brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Nikola Tesla

Quote of the Day

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

- Enrico Fermi

Quote of the Day

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

- C.G. Jung