Quote of the Day

Specific Knowledge Is Highly Creative or Technical

• Specific knowledge can be taught through apprenticeships or self-taught.
• It’s the highest paying knowledge because it involves things that society has not yet figured out how to broadly teach or automate.
• Specific knowledge tends to be creative or technical. It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, art and communication.
• Specific knowledge is highly specific to the individual, obsession, situation, and problem.
• You can’t be too deliberate about assembling specific knowledge. The best way is to follow your obsession, so you go deep enough into it to be the best.
• Build specific knowledge where you are a natural. Everyone is a natural at something.

- More here from Naval

Wisdom Of The Week

Life seemed to be unraveling everywhere that year. The date was May 6, 1968. Vietnam was in full swing, and King had been assassinated just one month earlier. Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country, he wrote in his journal.

Thomas Merton was perhaps the most important Christian mystic of the twentieth century. For the past twenty-six years, he had lived as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and for the past three he had lived in a cinder-block hermitage in the woods. I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of in the desert like St. John the Baptist, he wrote to a friend. Whatever else can be said about Merton, and much has been said, one thing is certain: he was a monk who loved trees. One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest, he wrote. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence … Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.

He had been searching for that center his whole life.

[---]

So many of us are looking for escape routes these days: from depressing news cycles, from yet another school shooting, from climate change. Most days, though, my escapist fantasies are avoidance strategies for those mundane responsibilities of adult life. Still, I wonder: In our imaginative flights from reality, is there some original impulse that is worthy and true? Can we redeem the desire to run from and turn it into a desire to run toward? If so, toward what? I pick up my copy of Merton’s essay “From Pilgrimage to Crusade” and read the opening paragraph:

Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of “origin,” the “home” where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication with heaven, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.

Merton’s essay describes two forking paths in the spiritual life, the choice between pilgrimage and its warped image, the crusade. But on another level we can see Merton working out his own restless desire for pilgrimage, why he felt unsettled at Gethsemani Abbey, why he needed to go in search of his own “center and source of indefectible life.” Did he really need to leave the monastery to find that center? Or was he, too, a victim of the geographical cure? Who were his models to help him discern the difference?

- On the Road with Thomas Merton

Quote of the Day

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.

- John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

Quote of the Day

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

It often happens that a man develops a deeper love and friendship with his pet cat or dog than he does with most of the other humans in his life.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

- Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

Principle 1: Scalability, I

• Between the concrete individual and the abstract collective there are a certain number of  tangible fractal gradations.

Commentary

• An immediate implication: politics is not scale-free. One can be "libertarian at the federal level, Republican at the state level, Democrat at the county level, socialist within the commune, and communist at the family level."
• The conflict "nationalism" vs "globalism" is ill defined.Both ignore fractal strata under monolithic absorbing concepts.
• More technically, groups are never (you) or infinity (mankind plus living things), but renormalize into clusters of intermediate sizes.

Background 

• The fragility interpretation: scalability is a simple property of an object that has a concave or convex response.For instance an elephant has more fragility than a mouse for an equivalent proportional random shock.
• The impossibility of comparing two items of different size without scale transformation is illustrated as follows.Take a human and increase his or her size. Contact with the floor would grow by squares, while the volume is cubic, therefore increasing the pressure on the bone architecture. The compensation would change the shape of the limbs. Few realize that a "giant" human would end up needing to look like an elephant.

Limitations

• One cannot compare scales across heterogeneous items. A scale for restaurants and land animals differs from the one for distribution houses and marine mammals.
• Scale is gauged empirically.

- Multiscale Localism: Political Clarity under Complexity, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Happy Birth Day Max !!

Quote of the Day

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

- Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

All cruelty springs from weakness.

- Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

Quote of the Day

Accustom yourself to the belief that death is of no concern to us, since all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death. Therefore the true belief that death is nothing to us makes a mortal life happy, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the desire for immortality. For there is no reason why the man who is thoroughly assured that there is nothing to fear in death should find anything to fear in life. So, too, he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because the anticipation of it is painful; for that which is no burden when it is present gives pain to no purpose when it is anticipated. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or to the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are.

- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Wisdom Of The Week

In 1992, the AIDS/HIV “parallel track” was approved as a regulatory change for FDA to allow patients exclusive access to AIDS/HIV drugs that had passed safety tests but had not yet passed all efficacy tests. Other drugs did not have access to this approval option. As a result of parallel track, the highly effective anti-viral drug stavudine was approved, saving thousands of lives.

…In the years that followed, FDA and Congress created several paths to speed approval and open access to promising medications, including accelerated approval, priority review, fast track, breakthrough therapy, right to try, and expanded access, or “compassionate use.” Unfortunately, these approaches are often confusing, and it is difficult for drug developers to determine which approach to pursue. None of these reforms have matched the openness and simplicity of the parallel track…

- Alex Tabarrok

Quote of the Day

What we desire makes us vulnerable.

- Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic

Quote of the Day

Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them—much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close. Montaigne’s merging of favorite authors with his own father says a lot about how he read: he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.

- Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Quote of the Day

We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.

- Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way

Quote of the Day

We are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, disgrace and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave the former and not to be afraid of the latter. Let us fight the battle the other way round - retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us.

- Seneca, Letters to a Stoic

Quote of the Day

We are independent of the change we detect. The longer the lever, the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west.

- Henry David Thoreau

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

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

Wisdom Of The Week

But data isn’t the new oil, in almost any metaphorical sense, and it’s supremely unhelpful to perpetuate the analogy. Oil is literally a liquid, fungible, and transportable commodity. The global market is designed to take a barrel of oil from the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia and, as frictionlessly as possible, turn it into a heated apartment in Boston or a moving commuter bus in New York. With data, by contrast, the abstract bits are functionally static.

Let’s consider this Coen brothers–esque thought experiment: Thanks to some eccentric, long-lost uncle, I inherit the Phoenix Beacon, a 50,000-ton, Panamanian-registered crude oil tanker. The thing is filled to the brim with petroleum and the captain awaits my orders. To realize my newfound wealth, I’d call refinery offloading ports and oil-futures brokers in Chicago. After much drama, I’d monetize my inheritance at the prevailing price for West Texas Intermediate light, sweet crude, multiplied by the number of barrels in the ship (minus lots of fees).

Now, let’s consider a different inheritance: Amazon sends a delivery van to my home filled with hard drives containing all its sales and user browsing data for the past year. What do I do with it?

Keep in mind, this trove is worth billions. Accounting rules don’t call (yet) for tech companies to specify their data as a separate asset on the balance sheet, but by any reasonable valuation, Amazon’s purchase data is worth an immense fortune … to Amazon.

That’s because Amazon has built an expansive ecommerce presence, a ruthlessly efficient recommendation and advertising engine, and a mind-bogglingly complex warehouse and fulfillment operation around the data on those hard drives. Ditto Google, Uber, Airbnb, and every other company you’d identify as an “oil field” in this tired metaphor.

Sure, you could maybe sell some of that data—there are companies that would love to know Amazon’s sales data or Google’s search queries or Uber’s routing and pricing history. But here’s the key thing: Those interested outside parties are competitors, and the owners of the data would never in a million years sell it. Uber isn’t selling data to Lyft, Amazon isn’t selling data to Walmart, and Airbnb sure isn’t selling user lists to Hotels.com.

[---]

As happened with the CCPA, which was inspired by a wealthy activist’s concerns around Google’s data trove, future legislation will be lobbied by the Googles and Facebooks into aiming, not at them, but at the smaller data players. This will succeed mostly in conveniently solidifying those leaders’ positions. That sounds corrupt and self-serving, and it is. But it’s the right thing for users, whose fears around their data being pimped out are legitimate in the case of third-party brokers but much less so in the case of the first-party apps they actually use.

Ultimately, the majors like Google and Facebook will raise the castle walls around their data (and users) and disclaim any knowledge of data brokering, the “data-as-oil” traders. It’ll be first-party data all around: Publishers, apps, and ecommerce all huddling around their data and user piles, projecting that data externally in data-safe ways if absolutely necessary, but not otherwise.

No, data isn’t the new oil. And it never will be, because the biggest data repositories don’t want it to be.

- No, Data Is Not The New Oil

Quote of the Day

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Quote of the Day

The fact is, inner peace isn't something that comes when you finally paint the whole house a nice shade of cream and start drinking herbal tea. Inner peace is something that is shaped by the wisdom that 'this too shall pass' and is fired in the kiln of self-knowledge.

-Tania Ahsan

Quote of the Day

This may seem far-fetched at first. The idea that our mental health can be impacted by the health of our gut biomes is not exactly intuitive. In fact, it seems downright bizarre.

However, when one takes into consideration that the human body is home to an almost equal ratio of total bacteria to human cells, the idea that such a massive colony of organisms could exert some influence over their host becomes a bit more plausible. It becomes even more plausible when one ceases to think of the bacteria as a collective ghost in the machine and more as a symbiotic biosystem that helps to govern the production of neurotransmitters in hosts. These neurotransmitters, in turn, then regulate biological functions such as sleep, immune response, metabolism, as well as cognitive functions, mood, and even behavior.

- A new study strengthens the link between microbiota and mental health

Quote of the Day

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

Quote of the Day

The world might call you a pessimist. Who cares? It’s far better to seem like a downer than to be blindsided or caught off guard.

If we have prepared ourselves for the obstacles that are inevitably on their way, we can rest assured that it’s other people who have not. In other words, this bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We become like runners who train on hills or at altitude so they can beat racers who expected the course would be flat.

- Daily Stoic

Quote of the Day

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

- Malcolm X

Dr. Andrew Weil on Dog Saliva

Tim Ferriss: When you look at periods in your life where you feel like you’re in the zone, however you would define that, what are some of the daily or weekly practices that you spot, just in terms of the pattern of recognition, when you look back at these sweet spots, when you’ve just really been performing well and feeling good, are there any particular daily, weekly practices, morning habits, whatever comes to mind that you see as consistent?

Dr. Andrew Weil: Yeah. Well, I do have a sitting meditation practice, sometimes quite brief. But I do it when I first get up in the morning. And I’ve done that quite regularly for a long time. Part of that is my breathing work. Another is being physically active. And the forms of my physical activity have changed over my lifetime. In my 20s, I ran. Then I got signals from my knees that they didn’t like that. And I started biking, instead. Always did a lot of walking and hiking. And in later life, I’ve really gotten into swimming. That’s my favorite physical activity at the moment. I’ve lived with dogs for most of my adult life. And I can’t imagine life without dogs. And that has been a very important part of my emotional wellbeing, I would say. My connection with plants, which we started out talking about, brings me a great deal of fulfillment. But growing plants, using them as medicine, cooking.

[---]

Tim Ferriss: I don’t know what your current troupe looks like, but do you still have your – I want to say Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

Dr. Andrew Weil: I have two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, a male and a female who are – this is my third generation of them. And they’re stellar. For me, living with them has really taught me to be good at nonverbal communication. We’re really good at reading each other’s needs and wants and attentions. And that’s been remarkable training. There’s been also some – you probably have seen some of this research on some of the positive interactions with dogs, especially. One is that dogs are the only animal that holds our gaze. And most animals regard looking into the eyes as a threat. And dogs have evolved the ability to hold our gaze. And there’s research showing that when a dog holds your gaze, there is oxytocin released both in the dog’s brain and the human brain.

And the longer the eye connection is, the greater the release of oxytocin which is the bonding hormone. The results of a paper that came out in this past year, showing that when you exchange saliva with a dog – I won’t go into how that happens, but it happens – that this does very good things for your microbiome. And in particular, it changed it in ways that seemed to protect against obesity.

- Tim Ferriss Podcast

Quote of the Day

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

David Brooks Calls On Americans To Transcend Their Differences

Wisdom Of The Week

… Fiction is a certain packaging of the truth, or higher truths. Indeed I find that there is more truth in Proust, albeit it is officially fictional, than in the babbling analyses of the New York Times that give us the illusions of understanding what’s going on. Newspapers have officially the right facts, but their interpretations are imaginary – and their choice of facts are arbitrary. They lie with right facts; a novelist says the truth with wrong facts.

- Taleb Explains Why Literature Is Good

Quote of the Day

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.

- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Quote of the Day

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

- Marcus Aurelius