Saturday, December 30, 2023

Meta Values - 13

Max helped live these wise words from Pascal long before I read it. 

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Of course, Fluffy and Garph teach me everyday by showing the pleasures of sitting quietly and have a splendid life. In John Gray's words

We are at one with all other creatures. Humans do not rank above other animals, or below them. There is no cosmic scale of value, no great chain of being; no external standard by which the worth of a life can be judged. Humans are humans, cats are cats. The difference is that, while cats have nothing to learn from us, we can learn from them how to lighten the load that comes with being human. 

One burden we can give up is the idea that there could be a perfect life. It is not that our lives are inevitably imperfect. They are richer than any idea of perfection. The good life is not a life you might have led or may yet lead, but the life you already have. Here, cats can be our teachers, for they do not miss the lives they have not lived. 

What else can there be to ask from life when I have more than I ever dreamed of?



Friday, December 29, 2023

Meta Values - 12

Minimize to avoid outsourcing the care for your dogs, cats and anyone else you care for, food you eat, cleaning your home, tending your garden, finance, thinking, and zillion little things we do everyday.  

Self sufficiency and redundancy goes together.  

It's worth the time and effort to the learn to do above things and imbibe them into simple pleasures of te day. 

If we are spending most of life outsourcing the above, we are missing life. 

Read legislations, proposed government bills, rules and regulations etc. Most political polarizations spark because of not reading the fine lines and outsourcing to folks who's paycheck depends on misreading it. 

My rule is if I am doing something very rarely then outsourcing is the best option. 


Monday, December 25, 2023

Max Holiday Card 2024

 



The work is yours, but not the fruits thereof.

- Bhagavad Gita 


If we keep repeating the same stories, then we will keep doing the same things, which do not work. But we are addicted to this repetition! We need to get fed up with these same stories. We need new stories.

Myths give us courage. If it is already true in the story, then, paradoxically, we can make it happen. As we tell and live new stories, we change what can happen in the world around us.


















Sunday, December 24, 2023

Meta Values - 11

Sometimes a simple one-liner quote can have a profound impact on how we live. 

Thanks to Tim Ferris for popularizing this quote by Jerzy Gregorek:

Hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life.

Honestly, I don't meditate on this line everyday but yet when complacency sets in, this rescues me and puts me back on track. 

In other words, it helps me NOT to outsource what is in my control.


Saturday, December 23, 2023

Plant Trees & Not Cut Tress For X'mas

Amidst global warming, this mindless culture and tradition of chopping trees is insanity. 

Virtue signaling of driving Tesla to nationalism of self is far from being rare.  But yet, these folks  irrespective of their ideologies don't even reflect for a minute chopping trees which takes decades to grow. 

When Max was a puppy, he and I planted a tree next to the AC unit where it was close to impossible for the tree to grow. It was filled with hard rocks plus there was this huge AC unit. I was talking to Max all along for an hour or so as I was digging the hole and at one point after planting the tree I told him: 

Max, this tree will outlive both of us. Of the living beings in the world, this tree will remember us when we both are gone. 

Close to fifteen years later, that tree indeed is flourishing because of anti-fragility. A tree grows in Max's home and will remember those simple moments decades or centuries later when a dog and a human planted him when he was a baby. 

There is immense beauty in it. 

What is beautiful about cutting a baby tree to keep it inside the house for 2 weeks and throwing it in the dumpster?

I haven't met Jesus but I see him as a kind man. Maybe one of the kindest men ever. I bet he would love the idea of planting trees for Christmas instead of cutting them. 

Thankfully, some humans in France have started questioning this insanity:

"I have nothing against Christmas trees. I have my own fond memories of decorating them as a girl," Ms André says.

"But times have changed. We are living through an ecological transition. Everything that pollutes has got to stop.

"People in cities are fooled by the marketing which tells them that Christmas trees are 'natural' - as if they're all from some magic forest. The reality is that it's a form of intensive agriculture."

It is not just environmental campaigners who are questioning the ethics of Christmas trees.

French consumers are also increasingly curious about the provenance of their Nordmanns and Epiceas.

Is it responsible, they are asking, to fast-track millions of baby trees only for them to be cut down and kept in living rooms for perhaps a fortnight?

Friday, December 22, 2023

Chicken For Dinner - Cruelty At A Genetic Level...

Broiler chicken is a prime example of science unleashing evil.

Remember, ideologies such religion, politics, nationality etc., are not the only "privileged" ones to unleash evil. Everything under the sun and touching human minds have the potential to become evil. 

If your plate is filled with misery, you are indeed feasting on misery (when there zillion misery free alternatives). Diet of misery can never be a healthy diet from your body. 

There is an unending quest to find a better chicken because humans simply cannot control their taste buds even when billions live a miserable life. 

When Peterson was a child, a typical chicken would take around four months to reach its slaughter weight of 2.5 pounds. Growth rates began to crank upwards in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, as Peterson rose to the heights of his reputation, the chicken was well on its way to becoming a new beast — one featuring a “distinctive new morphotype,” according to scientists. Today, chickens reach 5 pounds in two months, while consuming less food.

Consistently fast-growing and fat chickens became the foundation of a small empire. Before Peterson passed away in 2007, his company was cranking out more than a million broilers each week and bringing in $180 million in annual sales. That made Peterson one of the country’s top 25 poultry operators — and one of the biggest businesses in Arkansas.

The domesticated chicken — Gallus gallus domesticus — had meanwhile been turned into one of the planet’s most important animals: our most-consumed meat. With a global standing population of at least 25 billion, these birds outnumber every other vertebrate species. The total standing biomass of domesticated poultry is around three times higher than the biomass of all wild birds combined.

Understanding the human relationship with our fellow animals — and considering the future of how we might or might not eat those animals — requires reckoning with this unlikely bird.

[---]

But the rise of poultry, and of poultry science, has not been great for the chickens themselves. They are now less functional animals than meat-growing machines. So much of a chicken’s energy gets devoted to growing as big as possible as fast as possible that the parts less useful to us humans — lungs and hearts, say — are neglected and wither. Due to underdeveloped immune systems, the birds are dosed with antibiotics. Many full-grown broilers are unable to stand under their weight. Activists and critics have called them “prisoners in their own bodies.”

They’re also more literally prisoners: Most broilers spend their brief lives locked inside massive sheds alongside tens of thousands of their genetic cousins. Each bird gets around a square foot of space, so many that are still young enough to walk have no choice but to step over their immobilized relatives. This is an ethical nightmare, clearly, but also an existential threat: So many identical chickens packed so close together is a breeding ground for disease. The latest strains of avian influenza have grown so severe that endangered wild birds have to be immunized to prevent their extinction. That several humans have tested positive for bird flu over the past few years is also worrying; the worst pandemic in the past century, with a death toll perhaps 30 times worse than Covid, came after bird flu jumped through poultry farms into human populations in 1918.

The specter of chickens killing us through disease is what first led me into the annals of the industry, and eventually to Peterson. What hope is left, I wanted to know, for those of us who enjoy eating meat?

[---]

In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped sponsor several “chicken of tomorrow” contests, competitions meant to see who could develop the fastest-growing birds. Many of the entrants attempted to tweak and perfect one of the classic, long-known chicken breeds. But the initial winner took a more daring approach: He crossed a popular East Coast meat bird with a different breed developed in California, creating an entirely new hybrid chicken. Three years later, the same breeder won a second national contest, again with a crossbred bird. A revolution had begun.

[---]

Many of the companies that advertise “free-range” or “pastured” chicken raise these Cornish Cross hens. Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for safer, healthier and more humane agricultural practices, argued that it hardly matters where such a chicken spends its life. Cornish Cross hens need so much help from humans that they may lead better lives if kept indoors, he said. Studies have found that the greatest factor impacting a chicken’s welfare is its breed. The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.

[---]

Even if you do not care about animal welfare, there are reasons to despair over industrial chicken. You might worry about human welfare, for example: Modern chicken production is a labor nightmare, sometimes conducted by underaged and undocumented immigrants. And if you don’t care about laborers, there’s a more self-serving reason to worry: Chickens are a major public health risk. The use of antibiotics could drive the evolution of drug-resistant super-bacteria that could infect humans, too.  

Perhaps scarier, though, is that chicken CAFOs are breeding grounds for influenza. Population density helps increase pathogen transmission, while genetic homogeneity helps drive pathogen evolution, so sometimes mild viruses become far more deadly. Even early animal agriculture practices created what anthropologist James C. Scott called “a perfect epidemiological storm.” Since then, the scale and density of agriculture has increased enormously.

[---]

Decades of advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more authoritarian political viewpoints.) As a man myself, perhaps my desire to eat meat is the result of brainwashing. 


Saturday, December 16, 2023

Meta Values - 10

In any worthwhile and "what matters" discussions (outside of self centered and family) as a sequence of why, what and how questions crop up. 

These conversations are precious. 

But there comes a point where most become nihilist (if polite) or unleash ad hominem. Both of these traits are roots of hindrance to moral progress. 

My answers would start from "I don't know" how to change everything and "I do know" how to change myself and will change myself to pave a path towards marginal macro impact in my lifetime. 

I am at peace at the thought of dying without seeing a positive impact and not anyone "remembering" me. 

The work is yours, but not the fruits thereof.

- Bhagavad Gita

 

 

Sunday, December 10, 2023

On Charisma

Most of us will have experienced the allure of a charismatic individual in our lives. Few have experienced the feeling of being charismatic, where your desires, beliefs and actions are having a disproportionately powerful influence on those around you. But when people try to break down how it feels to experience it, they veer into cryptic comparisons. “When she [Elizabeth Holmes] speaks to you, she makes you feel like you are the most important person in her world in that moment,” Tyler Shultz, a whistleblower who worked at Theranos, told CBS News. “She almost has this reality distortion field around her that people can just get sucked into.” 

About a meeting with Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky wrote: “I can not express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: ‘I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.’” 

Reflecting on her rare experiences of charisma across 25 years of interviewing notable figures, the newspaper columnist Maggie Alderson wrote: “I still don’t understand what creates the effect. … If not fame, beauty, power, wealth and glory then what? It must be innate. I find that quite thrilling.”

“Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is afoot when charisma is present.”

[---]

As Mazzarella reminded me, people also use charisma to talk about the most admired and inspiring figures in their lives and the charismatic teachers they’ve had. “There the implication is that this person helped me to become myself or transcend myself in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” he said. “That’s what’s interesting about charisma: It touches the darkest fundamentals of human impulses while having the capacity to point to our highest potentials. Charisma has these two faces, and it’s the fact that we seem to not be able to have one without the other that is so uncanny and disturbing. Inspiring charismatic figures can become exploitative, manipulative or violent. Violence gives way to liberation, or liberation gives way to violence. The problem is not just that we have a hard time telling the good charisma from the bad charisma, but that one has a way of flipping into the other.”

[---]

For over a decade, Antonakis has been experimenting with ways to break charisma down into its composite parts, therefore making it measurable and teachable. He believes it can be the great leveler in a world obsessed with physical appearance. His resulting definition is that charisma is “values-based, symbolic and emotion-laden leader signaling.” 

Along with a team of researchers, he boiled it all down to 12 “charismatic leadership tactics,” or CLTs for short. The CLTs include nine verbal techniques — like the use of metaphors, anecdotes, contrasts and rhetorical questions — as well as three nonverbal ones like facial expressions and gestures. Anyone trained in these CLTs, he said, can become more “influential, trustworthy and leaderlike in the eyes of others.” He and his team developed an artificial intelligence algorithm, which they trained on almost 100 TED talks, that can identify the charismatic quality of speeches. The algorithm is called “Deep Charisma” but Antonakis calls it his “charismometer.” 

The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma


Friday, December 8, 2023

Define Your Values (Not In Your Work & Affiliations)

Don't try to find "impactful" or "meaningful" work, initiatives and affiliations. We live in a complex system and above all, we are part of a complex system. 

Define your values first and live by it in your personal life. Everything else will follow it. 

I love animals but I will find meaning if my job was cleaning toilets. Worse, if I worked in a slaughterhouse for some time, I would learn the economics of the meat industry better and might learn a thing or two to eradicate meat and animal suffering. 

We are indeed astronomers on warships, we are biologists on an imperial voyage, and we can make marginal changes in the world if we work as part of the world we want to make an impact. 

Avoid living in an idealistic world where only signaling works. 

This is such a beautiful (and insightful for many) piece -  We're All Astronomers on Warships:

Stop holding yourself to an impossible standard of ethical associations, and do the most good you can in the organizations that will empower you to do it best — even if those organizations are imperfect. News flash: all organizations are imperfect. Of course they are. They’re run by people.

Our businesses, our employers, our communities, our churches — we can’t mold them all to our perfect moral standards. We can’t even mold ourselves to our standards most of the time. But neither can we sever ourselves from all of these associations.

Why? Because in all their imperfection, they can still help facilitate our best intentions.

My marketing work helps provide for my family, and provides a work life that lets me be extremely present in my two sons’ lives.

My teaching gives me the opportunity to (hopefully) positively touch the lives of young people on their path into adulthood and the lifelong pursuit of personal fulfillment.

My church affiliation provides me a mechanism for service and volunteer work, as well as the inspiration that comes from regularly sitting down in a room with a bunch of people who are actively trying to become better human beings.

Your affiliations don’t have to define your values. They just have to help you define your own values.

We’d all prefer not to be on the warship in the first place. We would love for it to be a Peaceful Vessel for the Advancement of Astronomy and Common Good. But don’t jump ship just yet. The world needs to know what you see through your telescope.


The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing

Review of the new book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing.

Why should a mushroom make it possible to understand capitalism — better than the Internet, for example, or the arms trade, or the sale of grain? The reason defines both the method and the object of this investigation: a problem of scale. It is not possible to cultivate this mushroom because it has a capricious life cycle and depends heavily on other factors; it is not a scalable object.

One of the major contributions of this book is that it redefines capitalism by its capacity to create local conditions that may be scaled up, and plantations are the precursor and the prototype. Gathering matsutake eludes all forms of scalability, as do those gathering it in Oregon or China, whose perilous economy Tsing tracks closely. Criticizing the disputed notion of the Anthropocene, Tsing could in fact put forward a serious candidate, as Donna Haraway suggests: the “Plantationocene.”

But the truly ingenious thing about this book is that resistance to scalability also applies to its method of investigation. Tsing effectively rehabilitates what could be called “pure and simple” description — though there is nothing pure or simple about it. Describing is inventing a science of the concrete, which does not seek to generalize but to penetrate ever more deeply into the specificity of places and history. This specificity is so difficult to describe that “all terrain” sciences, which, like development projects, are obsessed by scalability, systematically fail to understand the ever so particular situation of overlapping species, thus multiplying the fields of ruins.

And becoming accustomed to living in the ruins, and knowing how to do so, is what this book is about. The reason is rooted in its object of investigation: this occluded mushroom that likes ruins, particularly pine forests laid waste by loggers. Its mode of life is devoid of the harmony and equilibrium of nature. Everything about it is artificial; everything in its development is counterintuitive. It resists all stable and lasting definition, all changes of scale. Additionally, like other members of its genus, it refuses to be defined as a species. The matsutake prospers amid disruption, a term to which Tsing imparts a positive meaning, against all hope of return to a “natural” situation.


Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Meta Values - 9

On Courage. 

I learnt from Max during 2 years of his cancer and it came naturally to him. 

For sapiens, Nelson Mandela said it eloquently:

Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave.


Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace - Humanity Raises Its Head From Its Collective Abyss Of Ignorance

Darwin is not ready for this blow. His infant son, Charles Waring Darwin, born with Down syndrome, is not doing well: the boy is infected with the bacterium that causes scarlet fever, the same disease that killed his older sister seven years ago.

After this girl, Anne, had finally succumbed to the disease, Darwin wrote that his wife Emma and he had buried “the joy of the household,” and he settled into a long sadness.

And now it is happening again.

These catastrophes transpire while Darwin is laboring on a huge book about a simple idea he calls natural selection. For over twenty years he has solicited specimens from collectors scattered all over the world; selectively bred pigeons and orchids; sat for hours observing the behaviors of ants; boiled the flesh from rabbit carcasses and compared their bones. In the process he has accumulated thousands of pages of manuscript.

This is all done to propose a mechanism for an old idea–“the transmutation of species,” what Darwin prefers to call “descent with modification”–an idea that has not gone away in spite of scorn heaped on it by natural philosopher and clergyman alike.

The essay in Darwin’s possession has come from the hand of one of those collectors from whom he has solicited evidence. Alfred Russel Wallace is no stranger to suffering and loss. Like Darwin, he once spent four years in South America collecting massive numbers of specimens. During that time, he nearly shot off his own hand; lost his brother, Herbert, to the mosquito-borne virus that causes yellow fever; became shipwrecked in the middle of the Atlantic, losing everything he had accumulated except his diary and some sketches.

The essay he sent Darwin was written under extreme duress: Wallace had contracted malaria, another mosquito-borne plague, this time a parasitic protozoan instead of a virus. While feverish in bed, he envisioned the same mechanism for species change that Darwin had been documenting for decades.

[---]

Convinced his life’s work has been “forestalled,” he gives the paper to his friends Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology, and Joseph Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, as Wallace has requested him to do. They come up with a plan to simultaneously credit Wallace’s originality while preserving Darwin’s precedence: They solicit from Darwin a book extract, “On the Variation of Organic Beings in a state of Nature; etc.”, and they present these men’s ideas jointly at an upcoming meeting of the Linnean Society of London and publish them side-by-side in the Society’s journal.

As these revolutionary works are being read aloud to an audience of thirty listeners, one author recovers from illness in faraway Borneo; the other attends his baby son’s burial in Downe.

Thus, on two sturdy limbs, humanity raises its head from its collective abyss of ignorance. Through them, we are permitted to gaze back, back, back upon our original selves and discover that we are not what we once thought we were.

- More Here


Sunday, December 3, 2023

Derek Parfit's Philosophy

If you look carefully at Parfit’s reasoning in Reasons and Persons, a common theme emerges: The general approach to moral life that has been taken for granted by most in the West (and, really, the world) is profoundly mistaken. Put simply, the mistake is that this approach has been too personal—too concerned with duties to those who are close to us, too preoccupied with the distinctness of individual people, too hung up on people having souls that unite our experiences, too concerned with who deserves what. Instead, as Parfit sums up at the end of the book, “Our reasons for acting should become more impersonal.”

And that, I believe, is the clue to understanding Parfit’s life.

More Here


Saturday, December 2, 2023

Meta Values - 8

It's almost an impossible mission to change people minds. Changing the system is much more optimal and works. As a matter of fact, that's the only thing that worked to change the madness of the mass without them noticing. 


Friday, December 1, 2023

The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay

We humans define ourselves by our extraordinary mental powers—feats of memory among them. The Latin name we gave our species, Homo sapiens, translates as “wise man.” And yet, in our hyperdistracted modern lives, we fall victim to what is popularly known as refrigerator blindness, a common affliction defined in a (tongue-in-cheek) paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal as the “selective loss of visual acuity in association with a common foraging behavior.” Many of us have faced the seemingly impossible task of finding the peanut butter hidden behind the pickles. But it actually wasn’t hidden at all—we just overlooked it. For us, it’s a forgivable lapse, and easily rectified. Not so for Canada jays, who use boreal and subalpine forests like a massive refrigerator-freezer.

Canada jays don’t store their food at a single location, like the average 0.5-cubic-meter North American fridge. They cache it in the innumerable trees covering a territory of 26 to 130 hectares, or 36 to 180 soccer fields. To see themselves through the winter, they will store just about anything, including spiders, berries, seeds, and carrion, plus bits of bread, nuts, and cheese procured from passing humans. Their survival, and that of their brood, depends on their formidable memory—and their capacity to understand thievery.

Corvids are aware that other birds may be watching where they cache their food. To avoid getting robbed, scrub jays, for example, employ highly elaborate tactics similar to a magician’s use of misdirection. They discreetly hide food in one location while pretending to hide it in numerous other places to draw the observer’s attention away from the real thing. That kind of awareness requires a high level of perception, says psychologist Nicola Clayton, who founded the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England. She shares Strickland’s fascination with corvids. One of the big ideas her team explores is mental time travel, the ability to recall the past or plan for the future, an ability we have long assumed is unique to humans. What this reveals, Clayton concludes, is that these jays can put themselves in the place of another individual and alter their behavior based on what might happen in the future.

Our prodigious brains can store vast amounts of information. London cab drivers, for example, must memorize the Knowledge, a set of famously grueling exams covering the location of 25,000 city streets. Not bad, but a Canada jay can cache up to 1,000 food items per day—then remember and retrieve upward of 100,000 of them over the course of a season.

- More Here