Wisdom Of The Week

The Fermi paradox is the conflict between an expectation of a high {\em ex ante} probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and the apparently lifeless universe we in fact observe. The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggest that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations. We show that this conflict arises from the use of Drake-like equations, which implicitly assume certainty regarding highly uncertain parameters. We examine these parameters, incorporating models of chemical and genetic transitions on paths to the origin of life, and show that extant scientific knowledge corresponds to uncertainties that span multiple orders of magnitude. This makes a stark difference. When the model is recast to represent realistic distributions of uncertainty, we find a substantial {\em ex ante} probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it. This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.

- Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

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The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

- George. S. Patton

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If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late.

- Reid Hoffman

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Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

- E. E. Cummings

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No, those who genuinely show patience are rare. There is Warren Buffett, of course — his favourite holding period, “forever”, has served him well. And the Long Now Foundation, based in San Francisco and founded in the year “01996”, which supports ideas such as a modern Rosetta stone designed to preserve languages through time and ­catastrophe.

I am pleased that a few souls are willing to take the long view. Perhaps the champion is Anders Sandberg, a researcher at Oxford university’s Future of Humanity Institute. Dr Sandberg points out that since computation requires far less energy at ultra-cold temperatures, an advanced civilisation could get much more done with the resources available if it first waited a few trillion years for the entire universe to approach absolute zero.

- Tim Harford

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Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.

- Larry Winget

Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

Gomóz Valdás found that about 75% of the skulls examined so far belonged to men, most between the ages of 20 and 35—prime warrior age. But 20% were women, and 5% belonged to children. Most victims seemed to be in relatively good health before they were sacrificed. "If they are war captives, they aren't randomly grabbing the stragglers," Gómez Valdés says. The mix of ages and sexes also supports another Spanish claim, that many victims were slaves sold in the city's markets expressly to be sacrificed.

Chávez Balderas identified a similar distribution of sex and age in her studies of victims in smaller offerings within the Templo Mayor itself, which often contained skulls from the tzompantli that had been decorated and turned into eerie masks. Her colleagues also analyzed isotopes of strontium and oxygen that the teeth and bones had absorbed. The isotopes in teeth reflect the geology of a person's surroundings during childhood, whereas isotopes in bones show where a person lived before death. The results confirmed that the victims were born in various parts of Mesoamerica but had often spent significant time in Tenochtitlan before they were sacrificed. "They aren't foreigners who were brought into the city and directly to the ritual," Chávez Balderas says. "They were assimilated into the society of Tenochtitlan in some way." Barrera Rodríguez says some historical accounts record cases of captive warriors living with the families of their captors for months or years before being sacrificed.

Samples for isotopic analysis as well as ancient DNA studies have already been taken from many of the tzompantli skulls, Gómez Valdés says. He, too, expects to find a diversity of origins, especially because the tzompantli skulls display a variety of intentional dental and cranial modifications, which were practiced by different cultural groups at different times. If so, the skulls could yield information that extends far beyond how the victims died. "Hypothetically, in this tzompantli, you have a sample of the population from all over Mesoamerica," Vázquez Vallín says. "It's unparalleled."

- More Here

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This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids.

- A Physician in South Texas on an Unnerving Encounter with an Eight-Year-Old Boy in Immigration Detention

Wisdom Of The Week

During Box’s phase of very rapid growth, when it was doubling in size year after year, Dan invested heavily in people and culture. He felt strongly that a great leadership team — not just at the eStaff level but several layers down in the organization, was critical to its success. For example, Dan held a class in the cafeteria and personally taught every people manager in the company how to craft a great review, give hard feedback, and reward outstanding performance. Even years later, when Box was over a thousand employees, Dan led a book club to help every leader in the company, and every Boxer who wanted to attend, to become a better manager.

Dan knew that if Box wanted decisions to be made quickly, leaders had to be empowered to make calls locally — and that required them to both understand the company’s strategy and objectives, and to be operating with enough information to make good decisions.

He also knew that as the company grew, they would have to hire from the outside in order to add needed skills to the mix. But that if they could not grow talent quickly enough to enable them to promote from within as well — they would put their company culture at risk. Box established a goal of filling 50% of their management hires with existing Boxers — and reported out to the entire company every six months on their progress against that target — one that they never failed to hit.

But the only way that could happen — the only way that enough leadership talent could grow inside the company — was if leadership development was a key priority. Box made a huge statement when they hired Even Wittenberg, previously Chief Talent Officer at HP and Head of Global Leadership Development at Google!, to lead Box’s people team. Evan and Dan went on to build one of the strongest leadership development programs ever seen in a young technology company — and as a result, were able to promote from within to a much greater extent than can most young companies.

Dan brings that passion for teaching and mentoring leaders to Khosla, where he will work to help every one of our portfolio CEO’s become that best leader that they can be — and to solve critical challenges and entrepreneurial conflicts along the way with hands on advice and mentorship.

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The right advisor asks the questions you never knew were important.

Most of us don’t know what we don’t know when operating in a new area, or in a new (to us) job. We are, as the academics would say, unconsciously incompetent. The right advisor leverages their own experience (and their many mistakes!) to ask the questions you never knew were important, and by doing so, opens your eyes to the previously unseen. They also look beyond more immediate imperatives to longer term issues and to help create new “S” growth curves. They serve as guides, seeing around corners, and helping you navigate the difficult road of building a company from the ground up, using their experience to spot things that an entrepreneur might otherwise miss (risks and opportunities alike), or to look into the future by reflecting on their experiences with other, similar companies. They carry with them an extensive network that they can bring to bear on all the different problems and challenges that might crop up along the way, whether it’s finding a critical hire with the perfect match of skills and experience, or getting a company a make-or-break meeting with a decision-maker at a potential marquee customer.

- Vinod Kholsa, “Venture Assistance”: A philosophical view of what entrepreneurs need beyond just funding

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A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.

- David Brinkley

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Don’t be afraid to stand for what you believe in, even if that means standing alone.

- Andy Biersack

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Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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The actual time you have — which reason can prolong though it naturally passes quickly — inevitably escapes you rapidly: for you do not grasp it or hold it back or try to delay that swiftest of all things, but you let it slip away as though it were something superfluous and replaceable.

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

You will hear many people saying: ‘When I am fifty I shall retire into leisure; when I am sixty I shall give up public duties.’ And what guarantee do you have of a longer life? Who will allow your course to proceed as you arrange it? Aren’t you ashamed to keep for yourself just the remnants of your life, and to devote to wisdom only that time which cannot be spent on any business? How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end!

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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Men do not let anyone seize their estates, and if there is the slightest dispute about their boundaries they rush to stones and arms; but they allow others to encroach on their lives — why, they themselves even invite in those who will take over their lives. You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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Life is long if you know how to use it. But one man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by a laborious dedication to useless tasks. One man is soaked in wine, another sluggish with idleness. One man is worn out by political ambition, which is always at the mercy of the judgment of others. Another through hope of profit is driven headlong over all lands and seas by the greed of trading.
Some are tormented by a passion for army life, always intent on inflicting dangers on others or anxious about danger to themselves. Some are worn out by the self-imposed servitude of thankless attendance on the great. Many are occupied by either pursuing other people’s money or complaining about their own. Many pursue no fixed goal, but are tossed about in ever-changing designs by a fickleness which is shifting, inconstant and never satisfied with itself.

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Wisdom Of The Week

You know who does really well on the Monty Hall problem? Pigeons. At least, pigeons quickly learn to switch doors when the game is repeated multiple times over 30 days and they can observe that switching doors is twice as likely to yield the prize.

This isn't some bias in favor of switching either, because when the condition is reversed so the prize is made to be twice as likely to appear behind the door that was originally chosen, the pigeons update against switching just as quickly.

Remarkably, humans don't update at all on the iterated game. When switching is better, a third of people refuse to switch no matter how long the game is repeated.

And when switching is worse, a third of humans keep switching.

I first saw this chart when my wife was giving a talk on pigeon cognition (I really married well). I immediately became curious about the exact sort of human who can yield a chart like that. The study these are taken from is titled Are Birds Smarter than Mathematicians?, but the respondents were not mathematicians at all.

Failing to improve one iota in the repeated game requires a particular sort of dysrationalia, where you’re so certain of your mathematical intuition that mounting evidence to the contrary only causes you to double down on your wrongness. Other studies have shown that people who don’t know math at all, like little kids, quickly update towards switching. The reluctance to switch can only come from an extreme Dunning-Kruger effect. These are people whose inability to do math is matched only by their certainty in their own mathematical skill.

- Monty Hall in the Wild

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Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.

- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

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It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.

- Vincent van Gogh

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It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.

- Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

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There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.

- Peyton C. March

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No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

- Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom Of The Week

In The Evolution of Beauty (Doubleday, 2017), Richard O. Prum, a professor of ornithology at Yale, revives a long-neglected Darwinian idea: the claim that ornamental traits in animals — the curl of antlers, the gold splash of plumage, the trill of birdsong — are produced by aesthetic preferences. Darwin was troubled by the ubiquity of "useless beauty" in the animal world. Everywhere he looked he saw traits that were attractive but maladaptive. "The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail," he famously wrote, "whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" Prum insists, following Darwin, that such display traits evolve because they are attractive — not because they signal an animal’s fitness.

Prum’s defense of nonadaptive mate choice is the latest shot fired in a long war within evolutionary biology about how far natural selection, rather than other mechanisms such as sexual selection, can explain the evolution of physical traits. In a seminal 1979 essay, "The Spandrels of San Marco," Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin cautioned scientists against presuming that all biological traits are adaptations. Many traits are byproducts of adaptations, or genetically linked to adaptive traits — not selected for in their own right.

Nearly four decades later, adaptationism still rules evolutionary biology. Evolutionary scientists, when examining a given organ or structure, typically begin, the philosopher of science Elisabeth Lloyd observes, by asking "What is the function of this trait?" instead of the more modest "Does this trait have a function?" Traits are assumed adaptive until proven otherwise.

The world brims with adaptations: the dangling tongue of an anteater, the bulging hump of a camel. But other evolutionary factors also affect biological traits. A maladaptive characteristic can persist because of embryological constraints, or because prior adaptations have blocked off more optimal evolutionary pathways. Other biological features evolve as byproducts of traits strongly selected for in the opposite sex of the species. Male nipples, for example, are a "useless" byproduct trait, present because of strong selection on nipples in females. Prum, like Gould and Lewontin — and, for that matter, like Darwin — sees evolutionary change as having multiple causes.

Yet because adaptive explanation remains the field’s gold standard, many evolutionary biologists have recast sexual selection as natural selection by other means. The most influential version of this recasting is the "handicap principle" developed by the Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi. According to Zahavi, sexual ornaments (such as the male peacock’s tail) signal adaptive fitness by imposing a survival cost — a handicap — on the signaler. Males who survive despite their costly ornaments are likely to have "better" genes. A mating preference for a costly display trait, to this view, is adaptive: The sexual ornament provides honest information about mate quality.

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Beauty differs from the other ideals with which it is often grouped — truth, goodness, justice — in that its presence in the world is not disputable. To deny the existence of beauty is to reject the evidence of our senses. When we are in the presence of beauty, Plato writes, "the whole soul seethes and throbs" in a stinging composite of anguish and joy.

Beauty, in other words, is a sensuous, bodily experience. By locating aesthetic perception in nonhuman animals, by marking the close relation between aesthetic preferences and sexuality, and by theorizing about the neural mechanisms that govern judgments of beauty, Prum and Ryan restore beauty to the body. This expansion of "beauty studies" to biology signals a shift from the ascetic to the aesthetic — from beauty as purified ideal to beauty as a fact of ordinary perception. Yet this somatization of beauty is no disenchantment. The ubiquity of sexual selection suggests that aesthetics helped determine the development of the organic world.

In the monastic culture of academic study in an age of austerity, the lure of beauty will almost always lose to the (equally seductive) promise of the clarity fueled by self-denial. And yet the academy remains, in other ways, the holding ground for aesthetic sensibility in a period that places scant value on natural or artistic beauty. Scholars in the humanities are fond of saying that the aesthetic yearnings of human beings express, and nourish, our humanity. If aesthetic desires have shaped the course of evolution, as Prum and Ryan would have us think, then a stronger claim seems possible. It may be no exaggeration to say that the longing for beauty, felt over countless generations, has literally made us human — and made, beyond us, a world of endless forms.

- A shift from the ascetic to the aesthetic is underway. At its center: evolutionary biology.

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Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

- Michel de Montaigne

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There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.

- Jean de la Bruyere

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The quieter you become the more you are able to hear.

- Rumi

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Only in quiet waters do thing mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

- Hans Margolius

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A climate-change denier could find no encouragement in Aristotle. As a natural scientist who believed in meticulous research based on repeated acts of empirical observation and rigorous examination of hypotheses, he would be alarmed at the current evidence of human-caused environmental damage. The first reference to the extinction of a species by human activity (over-fishing) occurs in Aristotle’s The History of Animals. By seeing humans as animals, he effected a transformation in the ethical relationship between us and our material environment that has unlimited significance. His commitment to living planned lives in a deliberated way, taking long-term and total responsibility for our physical survival as well as our mental happiness, would, scientists and classicists agree, make him an environmental campaigner today. Only humans have moral agency, and therefore, as co-inhabitants of planet Earth with an astounding number of plants and animals, have the unique responsibility for conservation. But humans also have the capacity, because of their unique mental endowment, to cause terrible damage: as Aristotle said, drawing a chilling distinction, a bad man can do 10,000 times more harm than an animal.

- Why read Aristotle today?

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Top 15 Things Money Can’t Buy
Time. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity.

- Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

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Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.

- Anonymous

Wisdom Of The Week

• A better understanding of man’s relation to the (non-human) animals.
• Many ways of thinking about the environment — not all of them correct — have flowered only in relatively recent times.
• Economics, and what we have learned from economic imperialism, including its failures.
• Singapore, and in fact most other places/polities in the world.
• Most literary works are understood much better today than they were in earlier eras.
• Musical languages are far better developed and better understood.

- Tyler's question - Has there been progress in philosophy?

And Agnes Callard's reply:

• So you are pretty much constantly thinking thoughts that, in one way or another, you inherited from philosophers. You don’t see it, because philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are. So the reason to read Aristotle isn’t (just) that he’s a great philosopher, but that he’s colonized large parts of your mind.
• It is not the point of philosophy to end philosophy, to ‘solve’ the deep questions so that people can stop thinking about them.  It is the point of people to think about these questions, and the job of philosophers to rub their faces in that fact.  Of all of philosophy’s achievements, perhaps the greatest one is just sticking around in the face of the fact that, from day one, anyone who has plumbed the depths of our ambitions has either joined us or … tried to silence, stop or kill us.  This is an “old debate” indeed.

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Everything I know I learned from dogs.

- Nora Roberts

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Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

- Richard Hamming