Quote of the Day

Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence. To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to.

This claim is not absolute: it depends on the norms that we allow to govern our culture and our expectations of technology. Human beings have, in the past, attributed great power and genius even to lifeless totems. It is entirely possible that we will come to treat artificially intelligent machines as so vastly superior to us that we will naturally attribute creativity to them. Should that happen, it will not be because machines have outstripped us. It will be because we will have denigrated ourselves.

- A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

You have to assemble your life yourself…If you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble.

- Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it—turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself—so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.

- Marcus Aurelius

How To Develop Virtue In A Stoic Way - Chris Gill & Tim LeBon

Chris: The Stoics also stress much more than Aristotle the idea that virtues fall into four main groups, that is, the four cardinal virtues (wisdom – both practical and theoretical – courage, justice and temperance or moderation). These virtues map the four main areas of human experience: gaining knowledge and reasoning well, facing dangers and difficulties, relating to other people, and dealing with emotions and desires. These four cardinal virtues have many subdivisions; these subdivisions are rather like the ‘strengths’ of the Positive Psychologists, except that they are also virtues and not different in kind from them. Here’s a rough outline of the Stoic theory of virtue – see what you think about that and then we can go on to discuss Stoic views on how we develop these virtues.

[---]

Tim: So in the example of courage we are discussing, the Aristotelian ‘feels the fear and does it anyway’ whereas the Stoic does not feel fear. I wonder if this difference applies to temperance, justice and wisdom as well? With temperance, Aristotle is in line with the Stoics in saying that the truly virtuous person will not have to overcome temptation. However Aristotle has another category, the self-controlled person, who is not fully virtuous but is better than the vicious person. To take the case of someone who has decided on moral grounds to become a vegetarian. An Aristotelian fully virtuous temperate person would not even feel tempted to eat meat, whereas the self-controlled person might well feel urges to have a tasty burger but would overcome these urges.  What would the Stoics say about these two cases?

Chris: The Stoics would agree with Aristotle about temperance: the Stoic temperate person (like the Aristotelian) simply does not want to eat meat if she is convinced this is wrong. But there are some related differences. The Stoics see all the virtues as similar to temperance in this respect, even courage. The Stoic virtuous person does not experience any of the feelings (‘passions’, such as fear) that run counter to her principles. Also, according to the Stoics, Aristotle’s self-controlled person is not virtuous at a lower level, as she is for Aristotle, but lacking in virtue. However, she may be regarded as wanting to make ‘progress’ towards virtue (having virtue as her aim); this idea of progress is a very important one for the Stoics and for virtually all of us, ethical life operates at this level.

[---]

Tim: Finally let’s come back to wisdom. We’ve already talked about how the Stoics see wisdom as shaping our emotions and desires rather than just being an intellectual quality. Is this the main difference between the Stoics and Aristotle regarding wisdom?

Chris: It’s a bit more complicated than that. Different Stoics have slightly different views on wisdom: some thinkers see all virtues as subdivisions of wisdom (so on this view, ‘wisdom’ is equivalent to ‘virtue’); others regard all four cardinal virtues as interdependent, but still see wisdom as the leading virtue. However, for virtually all Stoic thinkers, wisdom is both practical and theoretical (not divided into two as in Aristotle). So the wise person, the Stoic ideal figure, does everything well, whether it’s going to a party, ruling a state, or working out a logical argument. Wisdom consists in knowing how to live well, in every possible human situation. If you are wise you will also have the other virtues, including courage and temperance, and so you will have feelings and desires in line with correct principles. So wisdom is a unitary kind of virtue – not subdivided between ‘character’ virtue and ‘intellectual’, or between ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’, as in Aristotle. Of course, again, wisdom is an ideal; we are all working towards wisdom, aiming to make progress towards reaching it.

[---]

Tim: Well, this seems pretty bad news for people wanting to make progress towards Stoic virtue. Is there anything we can do about this situation and do the Stoic thinkers offer any guidance to help us become better people?

Chris: Emphatically – ‘yes’ to both questions. The Stoics believe that the capacity to make progress is in-built in all human beings, and throughout their lives. Nobody is seen as irredeemably corrupt or as incapable of improvement. And much of the surviving Stoic writing on ethics is directed at offering guidance to enable progress. This is another point of contrast with Aristotle.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of Marcus Aurelius

Wisdom Of The Week

First, we have three families (we call them generations) each consisting of four matter particles: two quarks and two, so-called, leptons. In the first family we find our by now familiar up-quark, down-quark and electron, as well as a fourth particle, the electron neutrino. This is an almost massless particle that is produced in huge quantities in the sun but mostly passes right through ordinary matter. The pattern of two quarks and two leptons is repeated twice more, so that there are twelve matter particles in total, grouped into three generations. Apart from being heavier, the particles in the latter two generations have exactly the same properties as those in the first. This is a rather strange state of affairs, but it seems to just be that way.

Next, there are four, so-called, gauge bosons, of which the photon is one. The gauge bosons are associated with three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the gluon corresponds to the strong nuclear force, the photon to the electromagnetic force, and the W and Z bosons to the weak nuclear force. (The fourth fundamental force is gravity – more on this in the followup articles.)

Finally, there is the Higgs boson, world-famous since its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012 . The Higgs boson is perhaps the strangest of the known fundamental particles (even stranger than the aptly named strange quark). If you followed its discovery, you may recognize the claim that particles gain mass through their interactions with the Higgs boson.

The particles shown in the table above, together with Einstein's theory of gravity, account for every observation ever made in physics, with only a small handful of exceptions (mostly in astronomy, you can read more in the final article). In particular, all of the things we encounter in our regular lives ultimately arise from these particles interacting with each other; the interactions individually are rather simple, but together adding up to all the complexity we observe, like a complex machinery where each component on its own behaves according to simple rules.

- Our theory of very nearly everything: the particles

Quote of the Day

I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent— no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.

- Seneca

The Secret To A Long & Happy Life Is So Simple - Charlie Munger

• You don't have a lot of envy.
• You don't have a lot of resentment.
• You don't overspend your income.
• You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles.
• You deal with reliable people.
• And you do what you're supposed to do.
• And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they're so trite.
  
  - More Here

Quote of the Day

It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

- Julius Caesar

Quote of the Day

The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.

- William James

Quote of the Day

While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.

- Abraham Lincoln

Quote of the Day

If you set out to design a conceptual system to make weak and timid people who can’t operate in the world, you couldn’t do a better job than to create what constitutes the safe-space culture that currently permeates university campuses.

[---]

You see this in the broad political scale. There’s tremendous — what do you call that pining for the past? What’s the word for that? Nostalgia. Nostalgia for the former Soviet Union in Russia. You see that in Eastern Europe as well. “Well, the good old days were much better than what we have now.” It’s like, “Well, yeah, the tyranny had its advantages.” And now you’re cast out into horrible, horrible freedom. And that is a desert through which you wander.

- Conversations with Tyler - Jordan Peterson

Radical Optimism

Optimism is radical. It is the hard choice, the brave choice. And it is, it seems to me, most needed now, in the face of despair—just as a car is most useful when you have a distance to close. Otherwise it is a large, unmovable object parked in the garage.

These days, the safest way for someone to appear intelligent is being skeptical by default. We seem sophisticated when we say “we don’t believe” and disingenuous when we say “we do.”

History and fable have both proven that nothing is ever entirely lost. David can take Goliath. A beach in Normandy can turn the tide of war. Bravery can topple the powerful. These facts are often seen as exceptional, but they are not. Every day, we all become the balance of our choices—choices between love and fear, belief or despair. No hope is ever too small.

Optimism is our instinct to inhale while suffocating. Our need to declare what “needs to be” in the face of what is. Optimism is not uncool; it is rebellious and daring and vital.

The American writer Theodore Sturgeon once said: ”Ninety percent of everything is crap” and I believe he was right. But surely that also means that “Ten percent of everything is worth the damn effort.”

And so it goes time after time, choice after choice, that we decide to leave behind a biography or an epitaph. Look around you now and decide between the two.

Inhale or die.

- Guillermo Del Toro sends this much needed message (this is not to be confused with regular bull shit optimism) and remember Albert Camus had "settled" this a long long time ago: 

Quote of the Day

The miracle is this: The more we share the more we have.

- Leonard Nimoy

Wisdom Of The Week

My personal and political character was formed in a different era that was kinder, if not necessarily gentler. We observed modicums of respect even as we fought, often bitterly and savagely, over issues that were literally life and death to a degree that — fortunately – we see much less of today.

[---]

Please note: All of these challenges were addressed by Congress. Maybe not as fast as we wanted, or as perfectly as hoped. The work is certainly not finished. But we’ve made progress — and in every case, from the passage of Medicare through the passage of civil rights, we did it with the support of Democrats and Republicans who considered themselves first and foremost to be Americans.

I’m immensely proud, and eternally grateful, for having had the opportunity to play a part in all of these efforts during my service in Congress. And it’s simply not possible for me to adequately repay the love that my friends, neighbors and family have given me and shown me during my public service and retirement.

[---]

In my life and career, I have often heard it said that so-and-so has real power — as in, “the powerful Wile E. Coyote, chairman of the Capture the Road Runner Committee.”

It’s an expression that has always grated on me. In democratic government, elected officials do not have power. They hold power — in trust for the people who elected them. If they misuse or abuse that public trust, it is quite properly revoked (the quicker the better).

I never forgot the people who gave me the privilege of representing them. It was a lesson learned at home from my father and mother, and one I have tried to impart to the people I’ve served with and employed over the years.

As I prepare to leave this all behind, I now leave you in control of the greatest nation of mankind and pray God gives you the wisdom to understand the responsibility you hold in your hands.

May God bless you all, and may God bless America.

- John Dingell: My last words for America

Quote of the Day

Advocates of team science have claimed that a shift to larger teams in science and technology fulfils the essential function of solving  problems in modern society that are complex and which require interdisciplinary solutions. Although much has been demonstrated about the professional and career benefits of team size for team members, there is little evidence that supports the notion that larger teams are optimized for knowledge discovery and technological invention9. Experimental and observational research on groups reveals that individuals in large groups think and act differently—they generate fewer ideas10, recall less learned information, reject external perspectives more often and tend to neutralize each other’s viewpoints. Small and large teams may also differ in their response to the risks associated with innovation. Large teams, such as large business organizations, may focus on sure bets with large potential markets, whereas small teams that have more to gain and less to lose may undertake new, untested opportunities with the potential for high growth and failure, leading to markedly different outcomes. These possibilities led us to explore the consequences of smaller and larger teams for scientific and technological advance, and how such teams search and assemble knowledge differently.

- Full Paper, Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology

Quote of the Day

The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back.

- Abigail Van Buren

Quote of the Day

The Importance Of Goal Alignment

So if you're a leader of a government institution, business, organization, or otherwise want to accomplish something that you cannot do by yourself, how can you do this?  What "force" can change people's trajectory?  Well, there is a massive amount of literature on the subject of change, so we clearly can't even scratch the surface here.  But what we can do is cut to the chase and tie this back together to "goal alignment" and why this matters.

And this is where ideology comes in - or - put a slightly different way, the power of ideas.  And this is where true leadership shines.  Great leaders authentically represent a particular idea and inspire people (oftentimes, even extremely diverse populations) to act in accordance with the goal that the leader wants to accomplish by relating the goal to the population's values and getting them to contextualize the goal within their personal frame of reference.

There are numerous examples throughout history of leaders who excelled at this.

• Ghandi was a tremendous leader who exemplified the ideals he espoused of non-violent protest and inspired hundreds of millions of people to succeed at creating a self-governed India.
• 
  
• Martin Luther King Jr. fought against the status quo of racial segregation and drove the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
• 
  
• John F. Kennedy inspired the United States through a time of national crisis in competition with the USSR and is largely credited with leading the efforts to successfully put a man on the moon - and let's talk about this for a moment, because this is a great example of leadership.

I mentioned in the previous entry that "a problem well stated is a problem half-solved".  When you apply that concept to the challenge of leadership, some leadership responsibilities quickly become apparent.  Leaders must:

1. Identify the right problem to solve (ie. set the correct goal.)
2. Clearly communicate WHAT the goal is and WHY it is important
3. Own the responsibility of execution and inspire confidence that the goal is achievable

[---]

At the end of the day, the bottom line is that the way you drive meaningful change with humans is by getting people aligned on a particular goal and inspiring them to take effective action.  This happens by getting people to appreciate why the goal is important and inspiring confidence in people that it CAN be accomplished.  This requires authenticity, commitment, creativity, a willingness to challenge convention and many other elements.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

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

Street Dogs As Tennis Ball Boys

Why is America so Divided?

Hopefully this information will help us all take a moment to reflect on our own behavior, how much true diversity we experience and what is influencing our thoughts, attitudes and behaviors towards others. Why does this slippery slope matter? Because as the great Mahatma Gandhi said:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, 
 Your thoughts become your words,
 Your words become your actions, 
 Your actions become your habits,
 Your habits become your values
 Your values become your destiny.”

In other words, our beliefs matter. These beliefs need to be challenged through healthy civil debate and through rigorous self-examination and through teaching people how to engage in metacognition, or “thinking about thinking”. In a free society, we have a high burden on our educational system and on other critical institutions, such as the family unit, religious groups, and I would argue, corporations, to help reinforce healthy beliefs and teach people about personal best practices that will build a just and more-inclusive society. Two such organizations that are attempting to build a curriculum to help institutions learn how to be truly inclusive are OpenMind, which is building a curriculum and platform for companies to foster mutual understanding across differences, and the Heterodox Academy, which is an organization of thousands of college professors who are trying to reinforce diversity of thought and civil discourse in college campuses so students learn how to engage with people whom they disagree with and get exposed to dangerous historical ideologies, so we hopefully avoid repeating mistakes from the past.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

This correlation of populism and profit in fact marks a worrisome historical shift. At the end of the 19th century, when populism first emerged as a coherent political force in the United States, it acted in large part as a check on the dominant capitalist forces of the day. The People’s Party platform of 1892 attacked monopolies, championed workers’ rights, and declared that “the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.” Populists campaigned for government regulation, not against it. Today, populist furies constitute a direct source of profit for some of the most dynamic and economically important companies on the planet. The Koch brothers do not even bother to squirm away from this obvious fact. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg do squirm, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they do not control the forces they have unleashed.

Faced with this very real crisis, what should we do? At the end of her book, Rosenfeld quickly runs through a number of worthwhile initiatives: working to preserve judicial independence and the integrity of elections, fostering and protecting investigative journalism and higher education, and so forth. She also argues that, to counter the unruly economic forces that have helped to generate the current crisis, the most important answer lies in political action and government regulation. “We in the United States and elsewhere need to think long and hard,” she writes, “about the pitfalls of allowing a fully free-market approach, where money is unlimited,” to dominate the mechanisms by which we arrive at political truths. “Enhanced rules and regulations for communication are required if truth is to be either the starting point of our political process or the aim.”

This is, admittedly, a project fraught with peril. The line between enhanced rules and regulations for communication and the repressive abridgment of free speech can all too easily be transgressed, especially when the power to regulate falls into the wrong hands. In addition, such projects can easily backfire, as increasing regulation feeds conspiracy theories about government control and makes it easier than ever for populist firebrands to depict mainstream reporting and opinion as “fake news.” In the end, the most effective way to address the problem is to restrain the economic power of the companies and interests that profit most directly from populist attacks on epistemological authority, as well as the underlying distributions of power that have led to the current popular discontent.

But even as progressive forces work toward this long-term goal, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are not about to start moderating their opinions, and Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to do much to regulate themselves, no matter how much earnest criticism they receive in The New York Times. It is also time to start serious discussions about how to keep the immensely powerful communications forces unleashed in the past generation from immeasurably harming the public good. These are discussions to be entered into carefully, judiciously, moderately. But they are important to have.

- Where does truth fit into democracy?

Quote of the Day

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

- Abraham Lincoln

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

Quote of the Day

Everything I know I learned from dogs.

- Nora Roberts

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

Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Quote of the Day

Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live to the limit, every minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows.

- Michael Landon

Quote of the Day

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

- Maya Angelou

Wisdom Of The Week

Turn Every Page! - What a wisdom !

Brilliant dive into the world of investigative reporting; every data scientist should savor and learn from Caro's work.

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me. And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life. Each discovery I made that helped to prove that was a thrill. I don’t know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, it’s because they are closer to reality, to genuineness—not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn’t notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up, and that was a surprise. I went back to the office, and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found.

I had previously worked at a newspaper in New Jersey, and my wife, Ina, and I hadn’t yet moved to Long Island. Early on Monday morning, my day off, the phone rang, and it was Mr. Hathway’s secretary, June Blom. Alan wanted to see me right away, she said. I said, “I’m in New Jersey.”

[---]

He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.”

I responded with my usual savoir faire: “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.”

Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.

[---]

For some time after Johnson’s arrival in Congress, in May, 1937, his letters to committee chairmen and other senior congressmen had been in a tone befitting a new congressman with no power—the tone of a junior beseeching a favor from a senior, or asking, perhaps, for a few minutes of his time. But there were also letters and memos in the same boxes from senior congressmen in which they were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of his time. What was the reason for the change? Was there a particular time at which it had occurred?

Going back over my notes, I put them in chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month—and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election Day—the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn’t just with powerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by mid-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously, the change had had something to do with the election. But what?

At that time, I was constantly flying back and forth between Austin and Washington. Papers don’t die; people do, and I was giving first priority to interviewing the men and women who, during the nineteen-thirties, had been members of a circle of New Deal insiders to which the young congressman from Texas had been admitted.

[---]

I am constantly being asked why it takes me so long to finish my books. Well, it’s the research that takes the time—the research and whatever it is in me that makes the research take so very much longer than I had planned. I’m currently working on the fifth and final book in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” about the nineteen-sixties. I am also planning to write a full-scale memoir, describing in some detail my experiences in researching and writing my books about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson—my experiences in learning about these two men and their methods of acquiring and using power—and also the efforts that were made to keep me from learning about these men and their methods.

Quote of the Week

What’s your advice to new writers?

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

We Will Raise ! Cory Booker

The lines that divide us are nowhere near as strong as the ties that bind us. When we join together and work together — we will rise.

- Cory Booker

Quote of the Day

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

- David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life