Quote of the Day

So simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

- Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Wisdom Of The Week

My favorite medical diagnosis is “failure to thrive.”

Not because patients are failing to thrive — that part makes me sad. But because of the diagnosis’s bold proposition: Humans, in their natural state, are meant to thrive.

My patient, however, was not in his natural state. Cancer had claimed nearly every organ in his body. He’d lost a quarter of his body mass. I worried his ribs would crack under the weight of my stethoscope.

“You know,” he told me the evening I admitted him. “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have cared if I made it. ‘Take me God,’ I would’ve said. ‘What good am I doing here anyway?’ But now you have to save me. Sadie needs me.”

He’d struggled with depression most of his life, he said. Strangely enough, it seemed to him, he was most at peace while caring for his mother when she had Parkinson’s, but she died years ago. Since then, he had felt aimless, without a sense of purpose, until Sadie wandered into his life.

Sadie was his cat.

Only about a quarter of Americans strongly endorse having a clear sense of purpose and of what makes their lives meaningful, while nearly 40 percent either feel neutral or say they don’t. This is both a social and a public health problem: Research increasingly suggests that purpose is important for a meaningful life — but also for a healthy life.

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This work hints at an underlying truth: Finding purpose is rarely an epiphany, nor is it something you pick up at the mall or download from the app store. It can be a long, arduous process that requires introspection and conversation, then a commitment to act.

The key to a deeper, healthier life, it seems, isn't knowing the meaning of life — it's building meaning into your life. Even if meaning is a four-legged friend named Sadie.

- Finding Purpose for a Good Life. But Also a Healthy One

Quote of the Day

Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge: the serenity to accept the things we cannot predict, the courage to predict the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - But Some Don't

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

If you’re a lazy and not-too-bright computer scientist, machine learning is the ideal occupation, because learning algorithms do all the work but let you take all the credit.

- Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Putin's Revenge... There were pictures of naked Trump

On April 10, 2017, an assistant to Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Donald Trump’s campaign for possible collusion with the Kremlin, patched in a long-planned call from Andriy Parubiy, the speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. Parubiy said he had some potentially explosive information about Trump’s visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

“I would just caution that our Russian friends may be listening to the conversation, so I wouldn’t share anything over the phone that you don’t want them to hear,” Schiff warned.

But Parubiy persisted. “In November 2013, Mr. Trump visited Moscow, he visited competition Miss Universe, and there he met with Russian journalist and celebrity Ksenia Sobchak,” he said in his heavily accented, awkward English. He explained that in addition to having ties to Putin, Sobchak is “also known as a person who provides girls for escort for oligarchs. And she met with Trump and she brought him one Russian girl, celebrity Olga Buzova.” Schiff soberly asked for clarification, and Parubiy answered directly: Sobchak, he said, is a “special agent of Russian secret service.”

Buzova “got compromising materials on Trump after their short relations,” Parubiy said. “There were pictures of naked Trump.”

Schiff betrayed no emotion. “And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the compromising material?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” Parubiy said. Putin wanted it communicated to Trump that “all those compromising materials will never be released if Trump will cancel all Russian sanctions.” The biggest bombshell: He had obtained a recording of Buzova and Sobchak talking about the kompromat while the two were visiting Ukraine. He told Schiff, “We are ready to provide [those materials] to FBI.”

Parubiy had more to say. He told Schiff about meetings that Trump’s former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, had had with a Russian pop singer who served as an intermediary for the Kremlin. They’d met at a café in Brighton Beach, a Russian-immigrant enclave in Brooklyn, where, Parubiy said, “they used a special password before their meetings.” One would say, “Weather is good on Deribasovskaya.” The right response was “It rains again on Brighton Beach.”

“All righty. Good, this is very helpful. I appreciate it,” Schiff said. He told Parubiy that the U.S. would welcome the chance to review the evidence he had described. “We will try to work with the FBI to figure out, along with your staff, how we can obtain copies.”

Schiff was right to be concerned about “our Russian friends” listening in, though not in the way he imagined. It wasn’t Parubiy who’d called. It was Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, two Russian pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus. There was no kompromat, no meetings between Flynn and a Russian pop star in Brighton Beach. The call made the Americans look gullible, which suited the callers. Kuznetsov and Stolyarov immediately sent the recording to Kremlin-friendly media, which gleefully made hay of it: another dumb American, ready to believe the most-ludicrous stories about a Russia run by sneaky, evil spies. Any Russian listening to the tape would have instantly recognized how silly the conversation was. There were the B-list Russian celebrities, plus other cultural signals, like the code phrase Flynn allegedly used, which is actually the title of a classic Russian comedy.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Forget economic growth, social reforms, and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry. .. A growing percentage of the population is taking psychiatric medicines on a regular basis. .. As the biochemical pursuit of happiness accelerates, so it will reshape politics, society, and economics, and it will become ever harder to bring it under control.

Many people will be happy to transfer much of their decision-making processes into the hands of such a system, or at least consult with it whenever they face important choices. Google will advise us which movie to see, where to go on holiday, what to study in college, which job to accept, and even whom to date and marry. .. Once Google, Facebook and other algorithms become all-knowing oracles, they may well evolve into agents and finally into sovereigns. .. Eventually we may reach point where it will become impossible to disconnect form this all-knowing network even for a moment. Disconnection will mean death.

The same technologies that can upgrade humans into gods might also make humans irrelevant. Computers powerful enough to understand and overcome the mechanisms of aging and death will probably also be powerful enough to replace humans in any and all tasks.

- Yuval Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Quote of the Day

Some time ago I went with my six-year-old nephew Matan to hunt for Pokémon. As we walked down the street, Matan kept looking at his smartphone, which enabled him to spot Pokémon all around us. I didn’t see any Pokémon at all, because I didn’t carry a smartphone. Then we saw two others kids on the street who were hunting the same Pokémon, and we almost got into a fight with them. It struck me how similar the situation was to the conflict between Jews and Muslims about the holy city of Jerusalem. When you look at the objective reality of Jerusalem, all you see are stones and buildings. There is no holiness anywhere. But when you look through the medium of smartbooks (such as the Bible and the Qur’an), you see holy places and angels everywhere.

The idea of finding meaning in life by playing virtual reality games is of course common not just to religions, but also to secular ideologies and lifestyles. Consumerism too is a virtual reality game. You gain points by acquiring new cars, buying expensive brands and taking vacations abroad, and if you have more points than everybody else, you tell yourself you won the game.

- Yuval Noah Harari

What I've Been Reading

The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier  and Dan Sperber.

It's wacky how the brain works; one of my all time favorite papers is Why Do Humans Reason but I forgot the name of the authors. Weird enough when I saw the title of this book, I immediately bought it. Only after reading the first few pages, I realized it was by the same authors.This is one of the most important books of this century. I see this as a follow-up of Damasio's Descartes' Error from the psychological perspective.

The premise of the books is simple:

Reason evolved to help us justify ourselves and to convince others, which is essential for co-operation and communication.

The British abolitionists didn't invent most of the arguments against slavery. But they refined them, backed them with masses of evidence, increased their creditability by relying on trustworthy witnesses, and made them more accessible by allowing people to see life through a slave's eyes. Debates, public meetings, and newspapers brought these strengthened arguments to a booming urban population. And it worked. People were convinced not only of the evils of slavery but also of the necessity of doing something about it. They petitioned, gave money, and - with the help of other factors, from economy to international politics - had first the slave trade and then slavery itself banned.

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Yet we do not quite share the pessimism regarding the ability of reason to change people's minds. People do not just provide their own justification and arguments; they also evaluate those of others. As evaluators, people should be able to recognize strong arguments and be swayed by them in all domains, including the moral realm. Clearly, arguments that challenge the moral values of one's community can be met with disbelief, distrust of motives, even down right hostility. Still, on many moral issues, people have been influenced by good arguments, from local politics - for example, how to organize the local school curriculums - to major societal issues - such as abolition of the slave trade. 

Quote of the Day

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

- Bertrand Russell