Wisdom Of The Week

Larkin’s poetry, in particular, encourages us to take a more capacious view of the matter. This isn’t because his poetry is didactic in some straightforwardly moralistic way; indeed nothing could be more alien to Larkin than the vulgar notion that poetry is meant to make you a nicer person. Rather his poems, if we let them, awaken us to a certain sensibility that is not exhausted by an appreciation of their expressive originality and sublimity. In short, there’s an undeniable sense in which Larkin’s poems have the effect of making us a little deeper, perhaps even wiser too.

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My own take is from the perspective of someone who wishes to know if it’s possible to derive any insights of general human significance from Larkin’s poetry. But first a very brief word about my un-Larkinesque-sounding “insights of general human significance”.

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So what might these insights be? They are, I suggest, the lessons that can be wrought from the kind of uncompromisingly undeluded but humane poetic sensibility of Larkin. The qualities that we might associate with what we might call Larkin’s realism would include a sense of scepticism, honesty, humour, ambivalence and even courage. If we were to use Larkin’s more favoured and evocative compound adjectives we might describe it as undogmatic, undeceived, unbelieving, unconsoling, un-Orphic and undaunted. As for the actual perspective on or view of life itself, Larkin’s poem Ignorance gives us part of the answer:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure,

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so,

Someone must know.

With his typically light but unfailingly assured touch, Larkin conveys the inescapable subjectivity of modern life. No longer can we claim that any of our views about things of importance are grounded upon objective and unchanging foundations. The loss of the old, pre-modern reassuring certainties means that we have no choice but to rest our convictions on nothing more than our own personal and contingently-formed outlook. And yet part of us still can’t help yearning for the possibility that somewhere “someone must know” what’s really “true or right or real”. The disappearance of truth, or rather the acknowledgment of its absence, shouldn’t entail a strenuously ironic embrace of the arbitrary and meaningless.

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Never to lose sight of the preciousness of non-human life and what it can tell us about ourselves:

The little lives of earth and form,

Of finding food, and keeping warm,

Are not like ours, and yet

A kinship lingers nonetheless;

We hanker for the homeliness

Of den, and hole, and set.

   “The Little Lives of Earth and Form”

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But why should we think this is good for us? Well, one of the main benefits of reading Larkin is that it helps change our conception of what good means or at least might mean. He achieves this by broadening or, better still, deepening our understanding of the good. After reading Larkin, it becomes peculiarly difficult to retain our preconceived, unsceptical notion that the good is necessarily optimistic or inspirational, let alone pious or cosily moralistic. Rather it becomes far more natural and necessary to see the world as a largely cold and comfortless place where only the most exiguous and ephemeral forms of meaning and pleasure are derivable.

The eminent critic Christopher Ricks was definitely on to something when he compared Larkin’s unsanguine view of the world with that of Dr Johnson:

“Human life”, Johnson said, “is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Life is not something that can be made better other than palliatively (not that this is nothing), and life cannot be bested. Or worsted. Except by death. “Experience makes literature look insignificant beside life, as indeed life does beside death,” Larkin wrote.

There is much to learn from Ricks’s observation. His remark that life can be treated only palliatively strikes just the right chord with Larkin’s equivocal view of the world. Larkin is realistic and honest enough to declare the relative paltriness of poetry compared with the solidity of life, and then the relative paltriness of life compared with the certainty and finality of death. But we shouldn’t forget the inclusion of the not insignificant caveat “look” in the above quote from Larkin: literature is not rendered worthless by life or death. On the contrary, it’s one of the few palliatives that genuinely helps.

- Is Larkin good for you? by Johnny Lyons

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Anya Plutynski's book Explaining Cancer; it is one of the richest and well-researched books on the current state of cancer research and to understand, why it is so difficult to find a cure. Her background in philosophy brings more rigor to the book. It is not an easy read but you will learn so much from it.

One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.

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How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.

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Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world. 

Wisdom Of The Week

New research published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to provide a heart rate profile for free-ranging blue whales. The resulting data shows how the hearts of these enormous cetaceans help them hold their breath for prolonged periods of time as well as how they’re suddenly able to exert the energy needed for lunge feeding and then replenish their blood oxygen levels when back at the surface.

At the same time, the new study, co-authored by marine biologist Jeremy Goldbogen from the School of Humanities Sciences at Stanford University, suggests the blue whale has reached the largest size possible for an aquatic organism on Earth. The cardiovascular system of the blue whale, while impressive, is probably the limit of what is biologically possible, according to the new research.

Blue whales are the largest creatures to have ever lived on the planet. These aquatic mammals can reach upwards of 30 meters (98 feet) in length and weigh an astonishing 173 metric tons (380,000 pounds or 172,365 kilograms). To put this into perspective, that’s equal to about 292 very heavy African elephants—currently the largest terrestrial animal on Earth.

Living in the ocean is what allow blue whales to grow to such an enormous size possible, as no creature of that immensity could possibly support itself on land. The largest land animals to have ever lived were the titanosaurs, a group of four-legged, long-necked dinosaurs that included Argentinosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Rapetosaurus. These herbivores got as long as 15 meters (50 feet) and weighed nearly 82 metric tons (180,780 pounds or 82,000 kilograms). They were big, no doubt about it, but not nearly as big as the blue whale.>br>
The new research notes that another important factor allowing blue whales to grow so large is their highly specialized cardiovascular system. For marine biologists, however, understanding exactly what makes the blue whale’s heart tick has proven difficult given they’re almost too big to measure. To overcome this hurdle, Goldbogen and his colleagues developed an electrocardiogram (ECG) tag that they attached to a blue whale with suction cups.

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The heart rate profile for the blue whale came as a surprise even to the researchers. The observed bradycardia was 30 to 50 times lower than expected. The low rate was made possible by an elastic-like part of the whale’s body called an aortic arch, according to the new paper. This remarkable piece of whale anatomy transports blood to the outer reaches of the whale’s gigantic body, contracting slowly to maintain blood flow during the long interval between beats. The heart’s unique pulsations and shape keeps blood flowing and is what makes the whale’s higher heart rate possible.

During tachycardia, the blue whale’s heart rate is likely working at the highest maximum limit allowable by the constraints of biology, according to the authors. A more robust cardiovascular system is not likely, they argue, and the new research may actually explain why no species on Earth has grown bigger than the blue whale.

- More Here

Wisdom Of The Week

Through his career, Hilbert was interested in the ultimate limits of mathematical knowledge: what can humans know about mathematics, in principle, and what (if any) parts of mathematics are forever unknowable by humans? Roughly speaking, Hilbert’s 1928 problem asked whether there exists a general algorithm a mathematician can follow which would let them figure out whether any given mathematical statement is provable. Hilbert’s hoped-for algorithm would be a little like the paper-and-pencil algorithm for multiplying two numbers. Except instead of starting with two numbers, you’d start with a mathematical conjecture, and after going through the steps of the algorithm you’d know whether that conjecture was provable. The algorithm might be too time-consuming to use in practice, but if such an algorithm existed, then there would be a sense in which mathematics was knowable, at least in principle.

In 1928, the notion of an algorithm was pretty vague. Up to that point, algorithms were often carried out by human beings using paper and pencil, as in the multiplication algorithm just mentioned, or the long-division algorithm. Attacking Hilbert’s problem forced Turing to make precise exactly what was meant by an algorithm. To do this, Turing described what we now call a Turing machine: a single, universal programmable computing device that Turing argued could perform any algorithm whatsoever.

Today we’re used to the idea that computers can be programmed to do many different things. In Turing’s day, however, the idea of a universal programmable computer was remarkable. Turing was arguing that a single, fixed device could imitate any algorithmic process whatsoever, provided the right program was supplied. It was an amazing leap of imagination, and the foundation of modern computing.

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There’s a wrinkle in this story. Deutsch is a physicist with a background in quantum mechanics. And in trying to answer his question, Deutsch observed that ordinary, everyday computers based on Turing’s model have a lot of trouble simulating quantum mechanical systemsResearchers such as Yu Manin and Richard Feynman had previously observed this, and as a result had speculated about computers based on quantum mechanics.. In particular, they seem to be extraordinarily slow and inefficient at doing such simulations. To answer his question affirmatively, Deutsch was forced to invent a new type of computing system, a quantum computer. Those quantum computers can do everything conventional computers can do, but are also capable of efficiently simulating quantum-mechanical processes. And so they are arguably a more natural computing model than conventional computers. If we ever meet aliens, my bet is that they’ll use quantum computers (or, perhaps, will have quantum computing brains). After all, it’s likely that aliens will be far more technologically advanced than current human civilization. And so they’ll use the computers natural for any technologically advanced society.

This essay explains how quantum computers work. It’s not a survey essay, or a popularization based on hand-wavy analogies. We’re going to dig down deep so you understand the details of quantum computing. Along the way, we’ll also learn the basic principles of quantum mechanics, since those are required to understand quantum computation.

Learning this material is challenging. Quantum computing and quantum mechanics are famously “hard” subjects, often presented as mysterious and forbidding. If this were a conventional essay, chances are that you’d rapidly forget the material. But the essay is also an experiment in the essay form. As I’ll explain in detail below the essay incorporates new user interface ideas to help you remember what you read. That may sound surprising, but uses a well-validated idea from cognitive science known as spaced-repetition testing. More detail on how it works below. The upshot is that anyone who is curious and determined can understand quantum computing deeply and for the long term.

- Quantum Computing for the Very Curious

Wisdom Of The Week

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages.

According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations.

The study, published this week in Science, combines anthropology, psychology and history to track the evolution of the West, as we know it, from its roots in “kin-based” societies. The antecedents consisted of clans, derived from networks of tightly interconnected ties, that cultivated conformity, obedience and in-group loyalty—while displaying less trust and fairness with strangers and discouraging independence and analytic thinking.

The engine of that evolution, the authors propose, was the church’s obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of “small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility,” along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society’s exposure to the church, the greater the effect.

Around A.D. 500, explains Joseph Henrich, chair of Harvard University’s department of human evolutionary biology and senior author of the study, “the Western church, unlike other brands of Christianity and other religions, begins to implement this marriage and family program, which systematically breaks down these clans and kindreds of Europe into monogamous nuclear families. And we make the case that this then results in these psychological differences.”

- Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo

Wisdom Of The Week

There are several implicit assertions in the JAFFE set. First there’s the taxonomy itself: that “emotions” is a valid set of visual concepts. Then there’s a string of additional assumptions: that the concepts within “emotions” can be applied to photographs of people’s faces (specifically Japanese women); that there are six emotions plus a neutral state; that there is a fixed relationship between a person’s facial expression and her true emotional state; and that this relationship between the face and the emotion is consistent, measurable, and uniform across the women in the photographs.

At the level of the class, we find assumptions such as “there is such a thing as a ‘neutral’ facial expression” and “the significant six emotional states are happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid, surprised.”At the level of labeled image, there are other implicit assumptions such as “this particular photograph depicts a woman with an ‘angry’ facial expression,” rather than, for example, the fact that this is an image of a woman mimicking an angry expression. These, of course, are all ‘performed” expressions—not relating to any interior state, but acted out in a laboratory setting. Every one of the implicit claims made at each level is, at best, open to question, and some are deeply contested.

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In the case of ImageNet, noun categories such as “apple” or “apple butter” might seem reasonably uncontroversial, but not all nouns are created equal. To borrow an idea from linguist George Lakoff, the concept of an “apple” is more nouny than the concept of “light”, which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as “health.”[17] Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, and from the descriptive to the judgmental. These gradients have been erased in the logic of ImageNet. Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label, like taxidermy butterflies in a display case. The results can be problematic, illogical, and cruel, especially when it comes to labels applied to people.

ImageNet contains 2,833 subcategories under the top-level category “Person.” The subcategory with the most associated pictures is “gal” (with 1,664 images) followed by “grandfather” (1,662), “dad” (1,643), and chief executive officer (1,614). With these highly populated categories, we can already begin to see the outlines of a worldview. ImageNet classifies people into a huge range of types including race, nationality, profession, economic status, behaviour, character, and even morality. There are categories for racial and national identities including Alaska Native, Anglo-American, Black, Black African, Black Woman, Central American, Eurasian, German American, Japanese, Lapp, Latin American, Mexican-American, Nicaraguan, Nigerian, Pakistani, Papuan, South American Indian, Spanish American, Texan, Uzbek, White, Yemeni, and Zulu. Other people are labeled by their careers or hobbies: there are Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, cognitive neuroscientists, hairdressers, intelligence analysts, mythologists, retailers, retirees, and so on.

As we go further into the depths of ImageNet’s Person categories, the classifications of humans within it take a sharp and dark turn. There are categories for Bad Person, Call Girl, Drug Addict, Closet Queen, Convict, Crazy, Failure, Flop, Fucker, Hypocrite, Jezebel, Kleptomaniac, Loser, Melancholic, Nonperson, Pervert, Prima Donna, Schizophrenic, Second-Rater, Spinster, Streetwalker, Stud, Tosser, Unskilled Person, Wanton, Waverer, and Wimp. There are many racist slurs and misogynistic terms.

Of course, ImageNet was typically used for object recognition—so the Person category was rarely discussed at technical conferences, nor has it received much public attention. However, this complex architecture of images of real people, tagged with often offensive labels, has been publicly available on the internet for a decade. It provides a powerful and important example of the complexities and dangers of human classification, and the sliding spectrum between supposedly unproblematic labels like “trumpeter” or “tennis player” to concepts like “spastic,” “mulatto,” or “redneck.” Regardless of the supposed neutrality of any particular category, the selection of images skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson, if you will, in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified.

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In 1839, the mathematician François Arago claimed that through photographs, “objects preserve mathematically their forms.”[19] Placed into the nineteenth-century context of imperialism and social Darwinism, photography helped to animate—and lend a “scientific” veneer to—various forms of phrenology, physiognomy, and eugenics.[20] Physiognomists such as Francis Galton and Cesare Lombroso created composite images of criminals, studied the feet of prostitutes, measured skulls, and compiled meticulous archives of labeled images and measurements, all in an effort to use “mechanical” processes to detect visual signals in classifications of race, criminality, and deviance from bourgeois ideals. This was done to capture and pathologize what was seen as deviant or criminal behavior, and make such behavior observable in the world.

And as we shall see, not only have the underlying assumptions of physiognomy made a comeback with contemporary training sets, but indeed a number of training sets are designed to use algorithms and facial landmarks as latter-day calipers to conduct contemporary versions of craniometry.

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Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around “bias” in AI systems misses the mark: there is no “neutral,” “natural,” or “apolitical” vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical “fix” by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.

- Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen

Wisdom Of The Week

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.

• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.

• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.

• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.

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• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Try to make life as easy as possible for your editing friends. Number pages and double space.

• After all this, send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation

• And don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.

• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

- Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper

Wisdom Of The Week

Many survived after humans fled from a contaminated area, covering 1,000 square miles in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. They then went on to breed.Today, hounds freely roam the streets of abandoned towns and villages, as desperate for a tummy rub as ever — but at risk from a lack of food, harsh Ukrainian winters and wolves which prowl the nearby forests.
That’s where Lucas Hixson comes in.
The former radiation researcher has sacrificed his own career to care for the dogs of Chernobyl.

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Lucas, 32, says: “Chernobyl is an isolating place to work. So having these animals around is good for the workers. There were around 1,000 dogs roaming in the area. They only lived until they were two or three — if one got to five we called him ‘Grandpa’. We started a vaccination and sterilisation programme to bring the number down and give them a better quality of life. The dog population is now around 750.”

The most pressing concern, though, as the bitter Ukrainian winter approaches — temperatures can drop to -20C — is the daily feeding routine.

A lack of funds means Lucas only provides food for the dogs through the winter, as they can find their own food in summer.Just like the soldier in the Chernobyl TV drama, Lucas whistles to entice the dogs from their hiding spots at each of the 15 feedings stations. But, instead of a gun, he is armed with a 30kg sack of dried dog food and distributes up to seven of them daily. He trains the dogs to return to the same location each day, so they know where to get food.

The divorced dad-of-two says: “Sometimes you don’t need to whistle because they recognise the van. As soon as I get out they are there waiting for me.”

For the first time last year, the Chernobyl authorities allowed him to rehome pups. Since then, 54 have been sent to families in America and Canada. Stricter quarantine laws in the UK means he is yet to do his first British adoption. Over in Pripyat, where 50,000 people used to live, nature is taking over. An eerie quiet hangs over abandoned apartment blocks and schools which are slowly being colonised by the forest.

- Former Radiation Researcher Sacrifices Career to Care for the Lost Dogs of Chernoby

Wisdom Of The Week

Immanuel Kant might be wrong on many things but his concept of Categorical Imperative written in 1785 is very true. I have lived this in the past few weeks and most humans are incapable of understanding this beautiful concept leave alone embedding in their lives.

There might many moments I feel exceptionally sad by the human inability to be moral under dire circumstances but those million sad moments fade away when one human follows the concept of the categorical imperative for a moment without even knowing Kant and the categorical imperative. It goes without saying dogs and cats have that concept naturally embedded in their morals. I can speak of only dogs and cats since I have observed them for many months and years.

Wisdom Of The Week

To Seneca and to his fellow adherents of Stoic Philosophy, if a person could develop peace within themselves - if they could achieve apatheia, as they called it - then the whole world could be at war, and they could still think well, work well, and be well.

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The Buddist word for it was upekka. The Muslims spoke of aslama. The Hebrews, histavat. The second book of Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an "evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same." The Greeks, euthymia and hesyehia. The Epicureans, ataraxia. The Christians, aequaminitas.

In English: stillness.

To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude - exterior and interior - on command.

Buddism. Stoicism. Epicureanism. Christianity.Hinduism. It's all but impossible to find a philosophical school or religion that does not venerate this inner peace - this stillness - as the highest good and as the key to elite performance and a happy life.

And when basically all the wisdom of the ancient world agrees on something, only a fool would decline to listen.

- Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Wisdom Of The Week

And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like failing behind.

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The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benfits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasing incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.

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The difference between winning at Jeopardy! and curing all cancer is that we know the answer to Jeopardy! questions. With cancer, we're still working on posing the right questions in the first place.

- Excerpts from the book I am currently reading - Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World

Wisdom Of The Week

Tyler Cowen in his Econtalk interview refutes Andy Matuschak's claim on Books and Learning:

Russ Roberts: I recently had Andy Matuschak on the program. It hasn't aired yet, so you have definitely not heard it. But, he argues that books are extremely inefficient ways to convey information. And, one of the ways he, one of the points he makes, is that, if you think of a nonfiction book that you read a year or two ago, maybe even 6 weeks ago, you will struggle to remember anything about it. You might remember what it's about. You might remember one or two things about it. And that would be true of a lecture as well as a book. In fact, with lectures, I would say you mostly remember--if you are lucky--the topic, months later. He thinks those are very inefficient ways of conveying information. And he describes them as--it's not his term, but I think it's someone else's--but it's 'transmissionism'--I tell you a bunch of stuff, hoping you'll absorb it. What are your thoughts on that?

Tyler Cowen: I think Andy is a brilliant guy. I'm supporting him through a charitable project I'm running called Emergent Ventures. But I don't completely agree with him on that, necessarily. So, you don't remember much from a book, but maybe you remember what you need to. And then you are then clearing the space for the next thing. And the fact that books don't exercise such a tyranny over your mind maybe is what allows you to keep on reading them. So, if a book was something that really just seized control of your mind, like, say, LSD [Lysergic acid Diethylamide] does, people would be afraid of books.

Russ Roberts: Hng, heh, heh, heh.

Tyler Cowen: So, maybe having a somewhat superficial relationship with books is how it ought to be.

Russ Roberts: I've read books like that, by the way--that take control of your mind. That you fall in love with. That you become obsessed with. Right? And that you maybe over-absorb.

Tyler Cowen: Yes. It happens more often when you are young, I think, than when you are old.

Wisdom Of The Week

I have never heard someone summarize the different types of messages/purposes we infer from reading different types of books; that would be the only and only, Russ Roberts during his interview with Andy Matuschak on Books and Learning:

Andy Matuschak: Wonderful. So, I guess, first off, some of those 112 details are somewhat less spitback. But I think the really important thing is what those 112 details let you think next. My colleague has this metaphor that I really enjoy, so I'll share it here. Reading a challenging technical textbook is often a little bit like beginning by reading a book in English, and then--let's assume you don't know Spanish--Spanish words start creeping in. And by the time you finish the first chapter, like everything is in Spanish. And you turn to the second chapter, and you're like, 'Whoa. Like, I thought I'd picked up a book off the English section. What happened?' And so, you're going to struggle with that second chapter. If you have those 112 details, which[?] we have a second chapter, you are going to have a lot easier time learning about the quantum search algorithm.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. But that's--Let me take you to a harder example. I'm going to give you two. Just for fun. Because they are both former EconTalk guests. So, I interviewed Yuval Harari a while back about his first book, which is Sapiens. My wife is reading it now. And, let's pretend you ask me: What do you remember about Sapiens? Which my wife taps into a little bit because we are talking about it. And it turns out we are remembering three things. Three things! Not good. It's a long book. I remember that he thinks that agriculture was a mistake and I didn't agree with him; it didn't sit well with me. I remember that his view of money is based on trust and I thought, took that idea a little too far even though there is a sense on which money is based on trust. As an economist I found that a little simplistic. And third, he's anti-religion. Those are the--that's the three things I remember. That's weird! That's depressing. Now, let me take a different book: Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb. Now, when that book came out--I read it--didn't write when it came out. I read it somewhat after, The Black Swan, his second book came out. And there were two views of that book, which I've mentioned here before. One view was: 'There is nothing original in this book. This guy is a fraud. He pretends he has figured out all this stuff.' And I said, 'You know, I agree with that. ' I didn't learn anything that I didn't know in this book before. I knew that probability is difficult. I knew that risk is a hard thing to wrap your mind around. I understand something about most of the ideas he talked about in the book. So, in some sense, I learned nothing. On the other hand, I learned something incredibly deep. That book really grabbed me by the guts and jerked me around. It forced me to confront some things that I "knew" but didn't really internalize. And I would put that as another category of learning. These are things that, um, I'm just going to give you another example, another EconTalk guest, A.J. Jacobs, who writes a book called Thanks, A Thousand. It's about being grateful. Being grateful is a really good idea. I already knew that before I read the book. But the book made me a little more grateful, maybe. But, even if I remember that that's idea of the book, and even if after reading, I thought, 'Yeah. I should be more grateful,' to get me to be more grateful--that's a very high level. And so, those are the sort of 3--you know, those are all nonfiction books. They are all kind of trying to convey some understanding that the author has of the world around us. And I have really, really, different grasps of all of them.

Andy Matuschak: That's wonderful. And, to some extent, it illustrates the variety of purposes for which books are intended. If we look at, classical rhetoric, only a small part of that information piece. But, if, for instance, in the second book where you were yanked around--I'm not actually sure if it was maybe ethos or pathos. It kind of could have been either depending on your predilections around Taleb. But that's something that's not going to come just from a flashcard.

Russ Roberts: Exactly.

Wisdom Of The Week

Simard’s inquiries confirmed that beneath her forest floor there did indeed exist what she called an “underground social network,” a “bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species” that linked sapling to sapling. She also discovered that the hyphae made connections between species: joining not only paper birch to paper birch and Douglas fir to Douglas fir, but also fir to birch and far beyond—forming a non-hierarchical network between numerous kinds of plants.

Simard had established a structure of connection between the saplings. But the hyphae provided only the means of mutualism. Its existence did not explain why the fir saplings faltered when the birch saplings were weeded out, or details as to what—if anything—might be transmitted via this collaborative system. So Simard and her team devised an experiment that could let them track possible biochemical movements along this invisible buried lattice. They decided to inject fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes. Using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, they were then able to track the flow of carbon isotopes from tree to tree.

What this tracking revealed was astonishing. The carbon isotopes did not stay confined to the individual trees into which they were injected. Instead, they moved down the trees’ vascular systems to their root tips, where they passed into the fungal hyphae that wove with those tips. Once in the hyphae they traveled along the network to the root tips of another tree, where they entered the vascular system of that new tree. Along the way, the fungi drew off and metabolized some of the photosynthesized resources that were moving along their hyphae; this was their benefit from the mutualism.

Here was proof that trees could move resources around between one another using the mycorrhizal network. The isotope tracking also demonstrated the unexpected intricacy of the interrelations. In a research plot thirty meters square, every single tree was connected to the fungal system, and some trees—the oldest—were connected to as many as forty-seven others. The results also solved the puzzle of the fir–birch mutualism: the Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting. When paper birches were weeded out, the nutrient intake of the fir saplings was thus—counterintuitively—reduced rather than increased, and so the firs weakened and died.

The fungi and the trees had “forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest,” wrote Simard in a bold summary of her findings. Instead of seeing trees as individual agents competing for resources, she proposed the forest as a “cooperative system,” in which trees “talk” to one another, producing a collaborative intelligence she described as “forest wisdom.” Some older trees even “nurture” smaller trees that they recognize as their “kin,” acting as “mothers.” Seen in the light of Simard’s research, the whole vision of a forest ecology shimmered and shifted—from a fierce free market to something more like a community with a socialist system of resource redistribution.

- The Understory by Robert Macfarlane excerpts from his book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Wisdom Of The Week

13 years ago, I didn't follow my instincts and went with what society preached... I never felt comfortable with that decision but there is no turning back. Now, Alexandra Horowitz (Author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know) has voiced a powerful concern against the "Automatic Spay-Neuter" policy we blindly follow - Dogs Are Not Here for Our Convenience:

For by our widespread policies of desexing dogs, we are not just removing their gonads: we are changing their bodies, their health, and their behavior — not always for the better. We are implying that dogs should be asexual, in body and mind. We are altering the future of the species, to its peril.

[---]

More troubling, despite the unambiguous statements made by proponents of the salutary effects of spay-neuter on dogs, a series of long-term research programs has begun to show that the effects are far more subtle — and sometimes outright damaging. Benjamin Hart, a researcher and veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, has led the biggest effort to date to see exactly what the repercussions of desexing might be, in the long term, using the database from his university’s veterinary hospital. By removing dogs’ reproductive organs, gonadectomies also remove their main source of hormones — estrogen, testosterone and progesterone — each of which has a role not just in reproduction, but systemically through the body.

The first publication by Dr. Hart and his team, in 2013, reported that desexing golden retrievers, especially before six months of age, increased their risk of serious joint diseases, four to five times over the risk intact dogs face. They have since found higher rate of joint diseases among desexed Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, Doberman pinschers, Bernese mountain dogs and St. Bernards. Risks of cancer increase multifold in spayed goldens, neutered boxers and all Bernese. Desexed dogs of all types suffer higher rates of obesity. One of the most touted claims of spay-neuter — that it increases an animal’s life span — may be tempered by the finding that with an increased life span comes an increase rate of life-taking cancers.

[---]

We could also change the culture of ownership. In Europe, desexing has not been routine. Until recently, it was illegal to desex a dog in Norway. Only 7 percent of Swedish dogs are desexed (compared with more than 80 percent in the United States). Switzerland has a clause in its Animal Protection Act honoring the “dignity of the animal,” and forbidding any pain, suffering or harm, such as would be incurred by desexing. Yet none of these countries has a problem with excessive stray dogs.

The Norwegian dog trainer Anne-Lill Kvam told me that stray dogs are “not a problem” because “everyone takes care” of their dogs. They keep their animals close, attend to them and train them not to behave in such a way that would lead to unwanted animals. As a Norwegian animal-welfare official was quoted as saying, “Neutering can never be a substitute for proper training of a dog.”

Wisdom Of The Week

The doxographer Diogenes Laertius said that the Stoics described the supreme good as “honorable” because it consists of the four factors (virtues) required for the perfection of human nature: wisdom, justice, courage, and orderliness (self-discipline). 

The “honorable”, he says, denotes those qualities which make their possessor genuinely praiseworthy, by allowing him to fulfil his natural potential as a human being. The Stoics that the wise man alone is honorable and “that only the honorable is good”. The good and the honorable are synonymous, in other words, as far as the Stoics are concerned. However, the good is also that which is beneficial. The Stoics believed that doing what is honorable is in our own best interests because it allows us to flourish as human beings.
We might briefly summarize the Stoic code of honor described below as follows:

• Love the truth and seek wisdom

• Act with justice, fairness, and kindness toward others

• Master your fears and be courageous

• Master your desires and live with self-discipline

In addition to this fourfold scheme, some of the Stoics also refer to a threefold rule of life, which Epictetus describes as the distinction between the Discipline of Assent, the Discipline of Action, and the Discipline of Desire and Aversion. It’s easy to combine these threefold and fourfold models, though, as shown below. The Stoics regarded courage and moderation as two aspects of the discipline required to live consistently in accord with wisdom and justice, by mastering our fears and desires. We can see that in the famous slogan attributed to Epictetus: endure and renounce. Endure our fears (courage) and renounce our desires (moderation) — the Discipline of Desire and Aversion.

- The Stoic Virtues and Code of Honor

Wisdom Of The Week

Published by the Business Roundtable, Aug. 19, 2019

Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment, and economic opportunity for all.

Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation, and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications, and other services that underpin economic growth.

While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

• Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or ­exceeding customer expectations.

• Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity, and respect.

• Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.

• Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.

• Generating long-term value for shareholders. [They] provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow, and innovate. We are ­committed to trans­parency and effective engagement with shareholders.

Each of our stake­holders is essential. W­e commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.

- Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation - I never thought even in my wildest dreams, I would live to see this statement !

Wisdom Of The Week

In fairness, these optionality-obsessed professionals often wind up happier than the other type I’ve become accustomed to seeing in my office: the lottery ticket buyers. These individuals are just one payday away from securing the resources they need to begin their work toward their true ambition, be it political, civic, or familial. They believe that one Silicon Valley startup or one stint at a hedge fund will allow them to begin their true journey.

While the serial option and lottery ticket buyers seem like different creatures, they are, in fact, close cousins. Both types postpone their dreams and undertake choices that they think will enable their dreams. But they fail to understand that all of these intervening choices will change them fundamentally—and they are, in fact, the sum total of those choices.

[---]

By emphasizing optionality, these students ignore the most important life lesson from finance: the pursuit of alpha. Alpha is the macho finance shorthand for an exemplary life. It is the excess return earned beyond the return required given risks assumed. It is finance nirvana.

But what do we know about alpha? In short, it is very hard to attain in a sustainable way and the only path to alpha is hard work and a disciplined dedication to a core set of beliefs. Given the ambiguity over the correct risk-adjusted benchmark, one never even knows if one has attained alpha. It is the golden ring just beyond your reach—and, one must enjoy the pursuit of alpha, given its fleeting and distant nature. Ultimately, finding a pursuit that can sustain that illusion of alpha is all we can ask for in a life’s work.

So, give up on optionality and lottery tickets and go for alpha. Our elite graduates need to understand that they’ve already been winners in the lottery of life—and they certainly don’t need any more safety nets.

- Mihir A. Desai, The Trouble with Optionality

Wisdom Of The Week

Sustainable sources of competitive advantage. This might be the most important topic in business and investing because other than luck it is the only path to long-term success. The only truly sustainable sources of competitive advantage I know of are:

• Learn faster than your competition.
• Empathize with customers more than your competition.
• Communicate more effectively than your competition.
• Be willing to fail more than your competition.
• Wait longer than your competition.

Everything else – intelligence, design, insight – gets smashed to pieces by competitors who are almost certainly as smart as you.

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.

Start with the assumption that everyone is innocently out of touch and you’ll be more likely to explore what’s going on through multiple points of view, instead of cramming what’s going on into the framework of your own experiences. It’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable when you do. But it’s the only way to get closer to figuring out why people behave like they do.

- Ideas That Changed My Life

Wisdom Of The Week

In the coming years, expect a lot of other omnivores to have similar epiphanies. Impossible Foods has performed more than 26,000 blind taste tests on its burger, which is on track to surpass ground beef in those tests in the near future. What happens then? Impossible has been laser focused on creating the perfect simulacrum of ground beef. But why? The cow never had a lock on gastronomic perfection. It was just the best we could do given the limitations of the natural material. Firelight was fine until electricity came along. Then things got really interesting.

Look for something similar to happen with alt meat. For now, it’s necessary to make people comfortable with the familiar, the way Steve Jobs loaded the early iPhones with faux felt and wood grain. But once people stop expecting burgers to refer to a hunk of flesh, the brakes on deliciousness will be released.

This will be generational. All change is. Most Baby Boomers are going to stick with their beef, right up to the point where their dentures can’t take it anymore. But Gen Z will find the stuff as embarrassing as Def Leppard and dad jeans.

[---]

Recent projections suggest that 60 percent of the meat eaten in 2040 will be alt, a figure I think may actually be too conservative. An estimated 95 percent of the people buying alt burgers are meat-eaters. This is not about making vegetarians happy. It’s not even about climate change. This is a battle for America’s flame-broiled soul. Meat is about to break free from its animal past. As traditional meat companies embrace alt meat with the fervor of the just converted, making it cheap and ubiquitious, it’s unclear if Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods can survive the feeding frenzy (though Impossible’s patents on its core IP may help), but at least they’ll be able to comfort themselves with a modern take on Gandhi’s wisdom:

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they sue you.
Then they try to buy you.
Then they copy you.
Then they steal your shelf space.
Then they put you out of business.
Then you’ve won.

- This Is the Beginning of the End of the Beef Industry