Reviews of the books I've read
A list of all the books I've read this year. For these reviews, this is my book review scale:
burn | Burn any copy you find of this book, it is horrific. |
mock | This book is awful. Don't read this book and mock anyone you see reading this book. |
don't | Don't read this book. |
desert | If you're on a desert island and are bored out of your mind, this book is okay to read. |
fan | If you're a fan of this author / genre, this book is worth reading. |
worth | This book is interesting, fun, entertaining, and thus worth reading. I would hand this book to a friend who asked for a _____ type book. |
strongly | I strongly recommend this book |
amazing | OMG, this book is amazing and/or life-changing, let me buy you a copy. |
Post date:
The Road to Unfreedom
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 18:15 on 10 February 2019I picked up this book after expressing enthusiasm for Snyder's much shorter book, On Tyranny, and being told, oh, right, that shorter book was written while writing this book, and this book is also recommended. And I concur with the recommendation. Strongly.
Recognize that this book was written before Cheetoh had gained the insane head of steam he has now, and just how awful our situation can get once he gets going. Okay, so, we know that Russia helped elect Cheetoh. We know that they have been interfering with not only our political systems, but pretty much every other political system in the world. A super power like the USSR does not go down quietly, and Russia as emerged as a worthy successor.
In order to do that well, you need that whole nationalist thing. And in that light, we have Putin who has set himself up to be a god. How does one do that? Well, tell you what, I have no idea, but Synder does. And here's where this book comes in: a history of Russia sufficient to understand just how much shit we are in, how the soft pudgy of America and the rise of white nationalism has allowed America to be torn apart from the inside, with careful nudging from the outside by Russia. The fat, happy cow being led to the slaughter.
Except, except, hell, I really don't know enough about Russian history to know how much of this is true, and how much of it is, in itself, propaganda. I have no idea. Which is why I asked Rob to read the book when I was done, and let me know just how justified my newly found dislike for the country is. He said he'd let me know.
In the meantime, I strongly recommend the book.
During self-inflicted catastrophes of this kind, a certain kind of man always finds a way to blame a woman. In Vladimir Putin’s case, that woman was Hillary Clinton.
Page 53
The only escape from the alternatives of inevitability and eternity was history: understanding it or making it.
Page 109
To think historically is not to trade one national myth for another,
Page 112
No other land attracted as much colonial attention within Europe. This reveals the rule: European history turns on colonization and decolonization.
Page 119
This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the heights of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life.
Page 122
The reflex of protecting the future, triggered in the minds of students by the fear of losing Europe, was triggered in others by the fear of losing the one generation raised in an independent Ukraine.
Page 125
Once again the word went out, and Kyivans of all walks of life decided to put their bodies in front of batons. A young businesswoman recalled that her friends “were shaving and putting on clean clothes in case they should die that night.”
Page 125
The history of the Maidan between November 2013 and February 2014, the work of more than a million people presenting their bodies to the cold stone, is not the same thing as the history of the failed attempts to put it down. Bloodshed had been unthinkable for protestors within Ukraine; only bloodshed made Americans and Europeans notice the country; bloodshed served Moscow as an argument to send the Russian army to bring much more. And so the temptation is strong to recall Ukraine as it was seen from the outside, the arc of narrative following the arc of bullets.
Page 127
For those who took part in the Maidan, their protest was about defending what was still thought to be possible: a decent future for their own country.
Page 127
The violence mattered to them as a marker of the intolerable.
Page 127
Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves.
Page 128
Hrytsak and others recalled the French philosopher Albert Camus and his idea of a revolt as the moment when death is chosen over submission.
Page 130
Poland and Lithuania were not in fact enemies of Russia in the Great Northern War. Getting one’s own history wrong is essential to eternity politics.
Page 133
On January 9, 2014, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine informed Yanukovych that Ukrainian riot policemen would be given Russian citizenship after the coming operation to crush the Maidan. This was a very important assurance, since it meant that these policemen did not need to fear the consequences of their actions. If the opposition won in the end, they would still be safe.
Page 134
Russian military intelligence created fictitious personae on the internet to spread these stories.
Page 138
She claimed that Western objections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were a matter of “double standards.” This common Russian argument made of law not a general principle but a cultural artifact located among non-Russian peoples. Because Western states do not always follow every law, it ran, law had no validity. Russia, too, might violate laws; but since Russia did not accept the rule of law, this was not hypocritical. Since Russia was not hypocritical, it was innocent. If there are no standards, went the reasoning, then there are no double standards.
Page 143
This was Ilyin’s politics of eternity: a cycle back to the past replaces the forward movement of time; law means what Russia’s leader says it means; Russia is repairing God’s failed world with violence. Putin was the redeemer from beyond history who emerged to alter time.
Page 143
This was a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence. It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.” According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism.
Page 145
Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future.
Page 150
Putin returned to the office of president with a parliamentary majority in violation of the laws of his own country. The leader who came to power by such means had to divert attention, blame, and responsibility to external enemies.
Page 151
A coup involves the military or the police or some combination of the two.
Page 153
Yanukovych’s flight to Russia placed Ukrainian citizens and lawmakers in an unusual situation: a head of state, during an invasion of his country, sought permanent refuge in the invading country. This was a situation without legal precedent. The agent of transition was a legally elected parliament.
Page 153
It makes a difference whether young people go to the streets to defend a future or arrive in tanks to suppress one.
Page 154
At the crucial junctures, an innocent Russia is always repelling a sinful West.
Page 155
It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than in 1939. The year 1941 is a moment of Russian innocence only if it is forgotten that the Soviet Union had begun the war in 1939 as Germany’s ally, and that between 1939 and 1941 had undertaken policies in occupied lands that were not so very different from Germany’s own.
Page 155
The Russian supreme court later confirmed that a Russian citizen could be convicted of a crime for a re-posting of elementary facts about Russian history on social media.
Page 156
The future held only more ignorance about the more distant future. As he wrote in Almost Zero: “Knowledge only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.”
Page 160
As Ilyin had done, Surkov invoked familiar biblical verses in order to invert their meanings. In his novel, he has a nun refer to First Corinthians 13: 13: “Uncertainty gives hope. Faith. Love.” If citizens can be kept uncertain by the regular manufacture of crisis, their emotions can be managed and directed. This is the opposite of the plain meaning of the biblical passage Surkov was citing: hope, faith, and love are the trinity of virtues that articulate themselves as we learn to see the world as it is.
Page 160
The first thing we learn when we see from the perspective of another is that we are not innocent.
Page 160
Its employees and those of other Russian state networks were taught that power was real but that the facts of the world were not.
Page 161
RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction.
Page 161
The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis.
Page 164
In the Russian invasion, the strong used the weapons of the weak—partisan and terrorist tactics—in order to pretend to be the weak.
Page 165
Seeing violent death made people vulnerable to stories that imparted to these deaths some larger sense. These stories were provided by Russian television. It was impossible to know who had launched the shell that landed in your neighborhood;
Page 173
Once separatists had brought about the same kind of death that they had seen, the stories of innocence became unimpeachable truth. It is hard to resist lies for which one has already killed.
Page 173
Armies usually evacuate civilians from an artillery range so that they will not be killed by the enemy’s return fire. Russian authorities gave no such orders, presumably because they were confident no counterstrike was coming.
Page 176
Some local Russians felt ill at ease about this one-way war, in which their farmsteads were used to rain down death on people not so different from themselves.
Page 177
Russia needed a monopoly on martyrdom. In order to preserve it, Russia would make war on a nation with a far greater record of suffering (the Ukrainians), while abusing the memory of a people with a still greater record of victimhood (the Jews).
Page 186
Anton Tumanov’s family received a report: the place of death was listed as “location of unit”; the time of death as “time of performing military service”; the cause of death as “blood loss after having lost his legs.” His mother learned more about how her son died because one of his comrades took the risk of telling her. “What I don’t understand,” Tumanov’s mother said, “is what he died for. Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves?” It pained her that her son was killed in a war that was not officially taking place. “If they sent our soldiers there, let them admit it.” When she posted the facts of her son’s death on social media, she was attacked as a traitor.
Page 188
Despite promises of safe passage, Ukrainian soldiers attempting to exit the pocket were killed.
Page 190
He meant that factuality was the enemy. This was the case made by the Izborsk Club in its manifesto and by the Russian commander Antyufeyev before the summer invasion: facts were “information technologies” from the West, and to destroy factuality was to destroy the West. Opinion polls suggest that the denial of factuality did suppress a sense of responsibility among Russians.
Page 194
The underlying logic of the Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and America was strategic relativism. Given native kleptocracy and dependence on commodity exports, Russian state power could not increase, nor Russian technology close the gap with Europe or America. Relative power could however
Page 195
What Europeans and Americans had that Russians lacked were integrated trade zones and predictable politics with respected principles of succession. If these could be damaged, Russian losses would be acceptable since enemy losses would be still greater. In strategic relativism, the point is to transform international politics into a negative-sum game, where a skillful player will lose less than everyone else.
Page 195
Russia would bomb Syria to generate refugees, then encourage Europeans to panic. This would help the AfD, and thus make Europe more like Russia.
Page 198
In her decision to accept Syrian refugees, Merkel was motivated by the history of the 1930s, when Nazi Germany made its own Jewish citizens into refugees. The Russian response was in effect to say: If Merkel wants refugees, we will provide them, and use the issue to destroy her government and German democracy.
Page 199
The undesired exposure of private conversations was incipient totalitarianism, in a country that had been a focal point of Nazi and Soviet aspirations during the twentieth century. This point was rarely made. Polish memories of German and Soviet aggression tended to congeal around heroism and villainy. What got lost was the memory of how totalitarianism endured into the 1970s and 1980s: not by atrocities where the distinction between the perpetrator and victim is clear, but by an erosion of the line between private and public life that demolishes the rule of law and invites the population to participate in the demolition. Poles returned to a world of bugged conversations, unexpected denunciations, and constant suspicion.
Page 202
Public life cannot be sustained without private life. It is impossible to govern, even for the best of democrats, without the possibility for discreet conversations. The only politicians who are invulnerable to exposure are those who control the secrets of others, or those whose avowed behavior is so shameless that they are invulnerable to blackmail.
Page 202
By accepting that the private lives of public figures are the same thing as politics, citizens cooperate in the destruction of a public sphere.
Page 203
If Russians believed that all leaders and all media lied, then they would learn to dismiss Western models for themselves. If the citizens of Europe and the United States joined in the general distrust of one another and their institutions, then Europe and America could be expected to disintegrate. Journalists cannot function amidst total skepticism; civil societies wane when citizens cannot count on one another; the rule of law depends upon the beliefs that people will follow law without its being enforced and that enforcement when it comes will be impartial. The very idea of impartiality assumes that there are truths that can be understood regardless of perspective.
Page 208
A few weeks earlier, on Russian state television, a Russian anchor had claimed that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves; and her interlocutor, Alexander Prokhanov, had agreed. Putin’s government paid the anchorwoman, and Putin himself made media appearances with Prokhanov (who also took a joyride in a Russian bomber, a rather clear expression of official support). These people were not condemned.
Page 212
Pilger wrote his article under the influence of a text he found on the internet, purportedly written by a physician, detailing supposed Ukrainian atrocities in Odessa—but the doctor did not exist and the event did not take place.
Page 213
None of these influential American and British writers visited Ukraine, which would have been the normal journalistic practice. Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality; in so doing, they submerged their own countries and themselves.
Page 214
When Moscow brought to bear in the United States the same techniques used in Ukraine, few on the American Right or the American Left noticed. And so the United States was defeated, Trump was elected, the Republican Party was blinded, and the Democratic Party was shocked. Russians supplied the political fiction, but Americans were asking for it.
Page 215
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. —OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1770
Page 217
“Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism. Russians raised “a creature of their own” to the presidency of the United States. Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.
Page 219
Russia is not a wealthy country, but its wealth is highly concentrated. It is thus common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later.
Page 221
In June 2017, after Russia’s victory, Putin spoke for himself, saying that he had never denied that Russian volunteers had made cyberwar against the United States. This was the precise formulation he had used to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine: that he had never denied that there were volunteers. Putin was admitting, with a wink, that Russia had defeated the United States in a cyberwar.
Page 227
American exceptionalism proved to be an enormous American vulnerability.
Page 227
Unlike Ukrainians, Americans were unaccustomed to the idea that the internet might be used against them.
Page 227
In 2016, about a million sites on Facebook were using a tool that allowed them to artificially generate tens of millions of “likes,” thereby pushing certain items, often fictions, into the newsfeeds of unwitting Americans.
Page 228
An important scholarly study published the day before the polls opened warned that bots could “endanger the integrity of the presidential election.” It cited three main problems: “first, influence can be redistributed across suspicious accounts that may be operated with malicious purposes; second, the political conversation can be further polarized; third, spreading of misinformation and unverified information can be enhanced.”
Page 229
Having used its Twitter bots to encourage a Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, Russia now turned them loose in the United States.
Page 230
As in Poland in 2015, so in the United States in 2016: no one considered the totalitarian implications of the selective public release of private communications. Totalitarianism effaces the boundary between the private and public, so that it is normal for us all to be transparent to power all of the time.
Page 232
More fundamentally, it was a foretaste of what modern totalitarianism is like: no one can act in politics without fear, since anything done now can be revealed later, with personal consequences.
Page 232
Of course, citizens play their part in creating a totalitarian atmosphere. Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism.
Page 232
If they take as knowledge only what is revealed by foreign hackers, citizens become beholden to hostile powers.
Page 233
The drama of revelation of one thing makes us forget that other things are hidden.
Page 233
This was a telling omission, since no American presidential campaign was ever so closely bound to a foreign power. The connections were perfectly clear from the open sources.
Page 233
One success of Russia’s cyberwar was that the seductiveness of the secret and the trivial drew Americans away from the obvious and the important: that the sovereignty of the United States was under visible attack.
Page 233
In important respects, American media had become like Russian media, and this made Americans vulnerable to Russian tactics.
Page 244
The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse.
Page 245
Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.
Page 245
The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage.
Page 245
Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia.
Page 246
Russians exploited American gullibility.
Page 247
Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.
Page 247
The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others.
Page 249
Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.
Page 249
Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an expectation of the future that calms the present. The meaning of each democratic election is promise of the next one. If we anticipate that another meaningful election will take place, we know that the next time around we can correct our mistakes, which in the meantime we blame upon the people whom we elect. In this way, democracy transforms human fallibility into political predictability, and helps us to experience time as movement forward into a future over which we have some influence. If we come to believe that elections are simply a repetitive ritual of support, democracy loses its meaning.
Page 249
The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle.
Page 249
The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness.
Page 250
Russia’s support of the NRA resembled its support of right-wing paramilitaries in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Page 251
Democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, where “free” means “without the threat of violence.”
Page 251
An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.
Page 251
Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.
Page 252
As a result of gerrymandering, Democratic voters in Ohio or North Carolina in effect have, respectively, about one-half or one-third as much ability to elect a representative in Congress as do Republican voters. Citizens did not have an equal vote.
Page 252
When a minority president and a minority party control the executive and legislative branches of government, they can be tempted into a politics where victory depends not upon policy that pleases majorities but upon further limitation of the franchise.
Page 252
In 2016 in Florida, some 23% of African Americans were denied the vote as convicted felons. Felonies in Florida include releasing a helium balloon and harvesting lobsters with short tails.
Page 253
The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made clear that the Senate would not consider any nominee of Barack Obama. This broke one of the most important conventions of the federal government of the United States, and was commented upon in Moscow.
Page 255
Moscow was attacking, and Congress declined to defend the country.
Page 256
Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.
Page 257
It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics.
Page 257
Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion.
Page 257
Russian oligarchy emerged in the 1990s, but was consolidated as the kleptocratic control of the state by a single oligarchical clan under Putin in the 2000s.
Page 258
The appeal of the politics of eternity to such men is all too understandable. Far better to shackle a nation and rattle the world than to risk the loss of so much.
Page 258
address. Russians used shell companies to purchase American real estate, often anonymously.
Page 259
Since the 1980s, the tax rates paid by the top 0.1% of American earners fell from about 65% to about 35%, and for the top 0.01% from about 75% to below 25%.
Page 260
In the 2010s, the United States approached the Russian standard of inequality.
Page 261
Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism. American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations.
Page 261
The problem was that American leaders took globalization as the solution to its own problems, rather than as an invitation to reform the American state.
Page 262
Persistent opioid use makes it harder for people to learn from experience, or to take responsibility for their actions.
Page 265
The politics of eternity triumphs when fiction comes to life.
Page 266
In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle.
Page 267
His spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that Hitler did not kill “his own people.” The idea that German Jews were not part of the German people is how the Holocaust began.
Page 268
The politics of eternity demands that effort be directed against the enemy, which can be the enemy within.
Page 268
of eternity takes racial inequality and makes it a source of economic inequality, turning whites against blacks, declaring hatred normal and change impossible.
Page 270
Americans living in the countryside tend to believe that their taxes are distributed to people in the cities, although the opposite is the case.
Page 270
Trump was a loser since he could only win thanks to Russia; Republicans were greater losers since he had trapped their party; Democrats were still greater losers since they were excluded from power; and the Americans who suffer from deliberately engineered inequality and health crisis were the greatest losers of all.
Page 271
Trump was called a “populist.” A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sadopopulist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate.
Page 272
On another level, such a voter is changing the currency of politics from achievement to suffering, from gain to pain, helping a leader of choice establish a regime of sadopopulism.
Page 272
Moscow won a negative-sum game in international politics by helping to turn American domestic politics into a negative-sum game.
Page 273
Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.
Page 273
If people who support the government expect their reward to be pain, then a democracy based upon policy competition between parties is endangered.
Page 273
In the long term, a government that cannot assemble a majority through reforms will destroy the principle of rule by majority.
Page 274
The electoral logic of sadopopulism is to limit the vote to those who benefit from inequality and to those who like pain, and take the vote away from those who expect government to endorse equality and reform.
Page 274
The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all. If all the federal government did was maximize inequality and suppress votes, at some point a line would be crossed. Americans, like Russians, would eventually cease to believe in their own elections; then the United States, like the Russian Federation, would be in permanent succession crisis, with no legitimate way to choose leaders. This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia’s problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalization of Russia’s syndromes by way of contagion.
Page 275
Politics is international, but repair must be local. The presidential campaign
Page 275
To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others.
Page 275
To experience its destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee.
Page 277
Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history, ways of experiencing our time that accelerate its trends while slowing our thoughts.
Page 277
The virtues of equality, individuality, succession, integration, novelty, and truth depend each upon all the others, and all of them upon human decisions and actions. An assault upon one is an assault upon all; strengthening one means affirming the rest.
Page 277
All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all.
Page 278
Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.
Page 278
To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.
Page 278
If it is true that we are individuals, and if it is true that we live in a democracy, then each of us should have a single vote, not greater or lesser power in elections as a result of wealth or race or privilege or geography.
Page 278
A fascist says “the people” and means “some people,” those he favors at the moment.
Page 279
If there is no truth, there can be no trust, and nothing new appears in a human vacuum.
Page 279
In conditions of distrust and isolation, creativity and energy veer towards paranoia and conspiracy, a feverish repetition of the oldest mistakes.
Page 279
Atomic Habits
Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 19:18 on 5 February 2019, kitt created this:I have been a fan of BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits methodology for breaking bad habits and learning good (often new) habits. BJ Fogg did not write this book. James Clear did, with methodologies that are strongly drawn from Fogg's work.
Fogg's new habit forming process is 1. start small (like, way smaller than you just thought for "small"), 2. piggyback on an existing routine, and 3. reward yourself immediately after doing the new habit. Fogg has shown much success at Stanford with this process, and I love it. It works very, very well for me.
Fogg does not have a book about this particular technique of developing good habits. With this book, James Clear does.
Atomic Habits is pretty much a long version of those three steps from BJ Fogg. Until Fogg writes a book on them, this is a fantastic substitute, interpretation of Fogg's work.
Much of the book is rah-rah, how-to-internalize-good-internal-chatter, "obvious," self-help rhetoric, which, let's face it, if you're picking up this book to learn good habits, you actually need. And, while I'm not a fan of the "habit journal" (you can draw lines on a notebook page for the same effect), I do appreciate the habit making guides in the book.
For anyone not a Fogg fan or even aware of BJ Fogg, I strongly recommend this book. If you don't have good habits, aren't the person you want to be, ignore the kabillion quotes I have from the book here, grab a copy and read it.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.
Page 15
Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.
Page 15
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Page 18
In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
Page 24
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
Page 24
Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.
Page 24
Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
Page 32
Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
Page 32
It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
Page 33
It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
Page 33
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
Page 34
Doing the right thing is easy. After all, when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.
Page 34
Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.
Page 35
The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it. It can feel comfortable to believe what your culture believes (group identity) or to do what upholds your self-image (personal identity), even if it’s wrong.
Page 35
We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
Page 37
First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?
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Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
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But the true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?” The first step is not what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be.
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Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
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The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
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This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently.
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Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
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The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.*
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Because the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
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Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
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Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
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The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
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a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it.
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Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
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The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving.
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Your brain is a reward detector.
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All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Sometimes the problem is that you notice something good and you want to obtain it. Sometimes the problem is that you are experiencing pain and you want to relieve it. Either way, the purpose of every habit is to solve the problems you face.
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How to Create a Good Habit The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.
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How to Break a Bad Habit Inversion of the 1st law (Cue): Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving): Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response): Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward): Make it unsatisfying.
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Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself: How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?
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Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human nature.
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Your habits are shaped by the systems in your life.
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A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
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Consider hunger. How do you know when you’re hungry? You don’t necessarily have to see a cookie on the counter to realize that it is time to eat. Appetite and hunger are governed nonconsciously.
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As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and non-conscious mind. You fall into old patterns before you realize what’s happening. Unless someone points it out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth with your hand whenever you laugh, that you apologize before asking a question, or that you have a habit of finishing other people’s sentences.
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If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
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If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?” Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad.
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If you waste time online, notice that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.
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Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real. It adds weight to the action rather than letting yourself mindlessly slip into an old routine.
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With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
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The sentence they filled out is what researchers refer to as an implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
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Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals,
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Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
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If you aren’t sure when to start your habit, try the first day of the week, month, or year. People are more likely to take action at those times because hope is usually higher. If we have hope, we have a reason to take action. A fresh start feels motivating.
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Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
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Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet.
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Finances. When I want to buy something over $ 100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing.
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One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits.
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People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
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In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P, E).
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Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones.
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Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice cues that stand out.
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Making a better decision is easy and natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
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Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people live in a world others have created for them.
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Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
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Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.
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The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits.
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Habits thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose.
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Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment.
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The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness.
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The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.
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When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
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The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.
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Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
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This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible.
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Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
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People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
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One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it. Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.
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The 1st Law: Make It Obvious 1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. 1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” 1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” 1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
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Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible 1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
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A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
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The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming. Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.
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Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it.
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Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.
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Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
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You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
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Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.”
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It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
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Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to
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We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
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Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.
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We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.
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Proximity has a powerful effect on our behavior.
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We pick up habits from the people around us. We
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As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
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One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
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Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
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Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
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Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
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This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
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Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?”
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The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.
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There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
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When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
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Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status.
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Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
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Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature.
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Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
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Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not. As we
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our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
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You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.
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A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
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You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
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You simply practice associating your habits with something you enjoy, then you can use that cue whenever you need a bit of motivation.
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It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change:
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We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
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If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
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If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it.
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To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to make practice happen is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it easy.
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Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.
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You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state.
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Certainly, you are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that some days you feel like doing the hard work and some days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way. The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge.
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For example, when deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
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Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
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As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
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The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.
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It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
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Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
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How To Stay Sane
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 09:07 on 2 February 2019I really need to do my book reviews immediately after reading the book, lest I, like in this instance, not recall what I actively thought about the book as I was reading it.
I liked this book enough to say, "This book belongs on my bookshelf." Rather than reading a borrowed copy from the library and returning it, likely never to read it again, I bought a copy of the book to keep on my shelf, to pull down and perhaps read again, or to loan to a friend.
The book has elements of Stoicism in it, always an attraction to me these days, but also includes some active how-tos and exercises on surviving these end of days. There are elements of journaling, active reflection, some disassociation, and whoa whoa whoa wait is that true? that help one, well, stay sane.
I"m not sure I'd recommend the book to anyone not actively asking for a book on how to settle, even if just a little bit, but I will strongly recommend this one to, even buy a copy for, anyone who does, indeed, ask for a guidebook on growing up, staying sane, and existing as an adult.
Our ways of bonding to others; how we trust; how comfortable we generally feel with ourselves; how quickly or slowly we can soothe ourselves after an upset have a firm foundation in the neural pathways laid down in the mammalian right brain in our early years.
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You may be aware of the influence of both what I am calling the left and the right brains when you experience the familiar dilemma of having very good reasons to do the sensible thing, but find yourself doing the other thing all the same. The
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1. Self-Observation Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.
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2. Relating to Others We all need safe, trusting, reliable, nourishing relationships.
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... someone who not only listens but reads between the lines and perhaps even gently challenges us.
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The right kind of stress creates positive stimulation. It will push us to learn new things and to be creative, but it will not be so overwhelming that it tips us over into panic.
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4. What’s the Story? (Personal Narrative) If we get to know the stories we live by, we will be able to edit and change them if we need to.
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We may have beliefs that start with ‘I’m the sort of person who …’ or ‘That’s not me; I don’t do that …’
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The ability to observe and listen to feelings and bodily sensations is essential to staying sane.
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There is a difference between saying ‘I am angry’ and saying ‘I feel angry’. The first statement is a description that appears closed. The second is an acknowledgement of a feeling, and does not define the whole self.
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It may help to think of our self-observing part as a distinct component of ourselves. It is self-accepting and non-judgemental. It acknowledges what is, not what should be, and does not assign values such as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It notices emotions and thoughts but gives us space to decide how to act on them.
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To begin self-observing, ask yourself these questions: What am I feeling now? What am I thinking now? What am I doing at this moment? How am I breathing?
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What do I want for myself in this new moment?
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... take time to notice what I call post-rationalization, which could also be called self-justification. This describes the way we have of mentally ‘tidying up’ what is going on inside and outside of ourselves, often coming up with convenient explanations which may actually be nonsense, to justify our behaviour.
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Instead we can increase our tolerance for uncertainty, nurture our curiosity and continue to learn.
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A feeling cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is how we act out our feelings that is moral or immoral.
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What you write is up to you. I am a fan of random memories, as well as what you are thinking and feeling at the moment of writing. I also like dreams.
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... stream-of-consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning just after waking, has been found to be effective in raising self-awareness.
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If you read your diary back to yourself you may identify some of your behavioural and emotional habits. For example, can you spot how much justification or reasoning you are using, or how much compassion you show yourself, or how much of what you write is fantasy?
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Our heads are always full of chatter, littered with phrases, images, repeated messages, running commentaries on our actions and thoughts. Much may be harmless, but some can be toxic:
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Throughout our lives we have a desire and a need to be acknowledged and understood. Although this is most productively achieved in conjunction with another person, contemplative practice is one way we can achieve this on our own.
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A brain, like a neuron, is not much use on its own. Our brains need other brains –or, as we more often put it, people need people.
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We run about, earning a living, achieving things and making a decent show of it all (or not), but what affects us most are the people around us: our parents, our children, our lovers, our colleagues, our neighbours and our friends.
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In crowded countries such as Japan and Britain we tend to have ‘negative-politeness’. This means that people are aware of others’ need for privacy, and their desire not to be intruded upon. In countries where there is more space, like the USA, people are more inclined to practise ‘positive politeness’, where the emphasis is on inclusion and openness. The anthropologist Kate Fox says that what looks like stand-offishness in a negative-politeness culture is really a sort of consideration for people’s privacy.
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The War On Normal People
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 10:56 on 30 January 2019I really wish I had kept track of where books are recommended to me. Difficulty with that is that it means I'm actually curating my to-read pile and not using serendipity to read something interesting.
Wait....
Okay, this book is, self-described, better titled "How We Are All Fucked." Yang does a phenomenal job of describing society not from the loftiest learned lofts, nor from the victor's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of the normal person, the non-famous, the person who is middle class or below, has a family or doesn't, has an education or doesn't, and is making it or isn't.
The book describes the global and federal and societal forces that shape the success of those lives, though not successfully and not well, because the normal person is definitely losing this war. The realization of which should cause everyone to both thank Yang, and read this book.
Read this book, because there is hope at the end. The hope requires effort, something we seem to keep forgetting.
There is really only one entity—the federal government—that can realistically reformat society in ways that will prevent large swaths of the country from becoming jobless zones of derelict buildings and broken people. Nonprofits will be at the front lines of fighting the decline, but most of their activities will be like bandages on top of an infected wound. State governments are generally hamstrung with balanced budget requirements and limited resources.
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It was less the buildings and surroundings and more the people. They seemed despondent and depressed, like their horizons had been lowered to simply scraping by.
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As for me, I had gone from being an underdog to one of the guys with the answers, from finding the most marginalized or excluded person in the room to finding the richest person and making him or her feel special.
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spent a lot of time with people who had already won, which was not what I’d envisioned.
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Think of your five best friends. The odds of them all being college graduates if you took a random sampling of Americans would be about one-third of 1 percent, or 0.0036.
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Google “Adsum” by Iamus and take a listen.
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Surgeons are among the highest-trained, most highly compensated doctors because cutting people open is a big deal. Yet their highest-value work is, for the most part, manual and mechanical.
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Some patients also might prefer seeing a human doctor, though I suspect this preference will fade over time.
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There’s a big distinction between humans as humans and humans as workers. The former are indispensable. The latter may not be.
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It’s worth considering whether humans are not actually best suited for many forms of work. Consider also the reverse: Are most forms of work ideal for humans? That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?
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Voltaire wrote that “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” The total absence of work is demonstrably a bad thing for most people.
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Part of this understanding in America is a high level of commitment to work—educated Americans are working longer hours than they did 30 years ago, and many are expected to be available via email on nights and weekends, even as working hours have dropped in other developed countries.
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Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, argues that if a cashier’s job were a video game, we would call it completely mindless and the worst game ever designed. But if it’s called a job, politicians praise it as dignified and meaningful. Hunnicutt observes that “Purpose, meaning, identity, fulfillment, creativity, autonomy—all these things that positive psychology has shown us to be necessary for well-being are absent in the average job.” Most jobs today are a means for survival. Without their structure and support, people suffer psychologically and socially, as well as financially and even physically.
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Whether work is good for humans depends a bit on your point of view. We don’t like it and we’re almost certainly getting too much of it. But we don’t know what to do with ourselves without it. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Unfortunately that may describe the vast majority of us.
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The challenge we must overcome is that humans need work more than work needs us.
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Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past.
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History repeats itself until it doesn’t.
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The United States instituted universal high school; in 1910 only 19 percent of American teenagers were in a high school, and barely 9 percent of 18-year-olds graduated.
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In college, I learned about the efficient capital market hypothesis: stock market prices reflect all available information, and attempts to beat the market are going to be ineffective over time. Now, most every investment professional believes that this is grossly incorrect or at least incomplete given the financial crash, the rise of behavioral economics, the success of certain hedge funds, and the fact that trading firms are investing millions in having a faster pipe to the exchanges to front-run other traders.
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The employment market is loaded with friction. We all know that in real life. Yet so much of our policy assumes a dream world where people are infinitely mobile across state lines, know what jobs are there, have the savings to wait it out, make wise decisions about school, are endlessly resilient, and encounter understanding employers who are rooting for them and can see their merits.
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The demise of retail could make drone pilots more of a need over time. The
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Short story - drone pilot to deliver, dodge other drones trying to steal delivery
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Successfully retraining large numbers of displaced workers would require a heroic number of assumptions to prove true. The government needs to be able to identify displaced workers over a range of industries and have both the resources to pay for mass retraining and the flexibility to accommodate individual situations. Each person needs to have the capacity and will to be retrained in an in-demand field. The government needs to be an effective disseminator of information to thousands of individuals in real time. The worker needs to actually learn new marketable skills from the course or school in question. Last, there need to be new employers in the region that want to hire large numbers of newly trained middle-aged workers as opposed to, say, younger workers.
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We should 100 percent invest in successful retraining of employees. But we should also know that we’re historically very bad at it even in situations where we know displacement is happening.
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There are presently a record 95 million working-age Americans, a full 37 percent of adults, who are out of the workforce.
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Ryan Avent of the Economist poses a theory that technology has created an abundance of labor, both human and machine, and that companies when faced with both low labor costs and a low-growth environment invest less in new technology, which leads to lower productivity growth. This would suggest that we’re in an environment where employers are faced with low incentives to innovate because people are quite cheap to hire.
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The way management teams work is that we generally try to grow and take advantage of opportunities. We try to operate efficiently, but it’s not our number one priority all of the time. We also don’t walk around trying to be jerks in periods of relative prosperity.
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We joked at Venture for America that “smart” people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC. Conventional wisdom says the “smartest” things to do today are to head to Wall Street and become a financial wizard or go to Silicon Valley and become a tech genius.
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Instead of seeing college as a period of intellectual exploration, many young people now see it as a mass sort or cull that determines one’s future prospects and lot in life.
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It turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies. This will have effects for decades to come.
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This is a disaster in the making because technology is transforming society and our economy while politicians are left responding to the effects ineffectively years after the fact or, worse yet, ignoring them.
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Occasionally we see people leave for a more hospitable or child-friendly environment. We envy them a little, while also patting ourselves on the back for sticking it out. Professional empathy is limited.
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On some level, most of us recognize that we are servants to the tide of innovation and efficiency. As the water rises, we will protest as we clamber to higher ground.
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The underlying logic of the meritocratic system is this: If you’re successful, it’s because you’re smart and hardworking, and thus virtuous. If you’re poor or unsuccessful, it’s because you’re lazy and/ or stupid and of subpar character. The people at the top belong there and the people at the bottom have only themselves to blame.
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Being good at these tests, however, has very little to do with character, virtue, or work ethic. They just mean you are good at the tests.
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We say success in America is about hard work and character. It’s not really. Most of success today is about how good you are at certain tests and what kind of family background you have, with some exceptions sprinkled in to try to make it all seem fair. Intellect as narrowly defined by academics and test scores is now the proxy for human worth. Efficiency is close behind. Our system rewards specific talents more than anything.
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The meritocracy was never intended to be a real thing—it started out as a parody in a British satire in 1958 by Michael Young. At the time, a world where “intelligence fully determined who thrived and languished was understood to be predatory, pathological and far-fetched,” observes journalist David Freedman.
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gives everything a tinge of justice. It makes the suffering of the marginalized more palatable, in that there’s a sense that they deserve it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that they often agree—they think they deserve it, too. They’re wrong. Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all.
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People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else.
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Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that “the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.”
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also thought—correctly—that even if it didn’t work out I’d be fine. My story is one of relative abundance, and it should feel familiar.
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There’s a substantial correlation between one’s socioeconomic background and starting a successful company.
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The truth is that it’s a lot easier to start a company if you have a few things going for you. In addition to resources, you have a mindset of abundance. After you make one thing work out, you kind of think you can make anything work out.
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But the mechanics of entrepreneurship make it a lot more accessible to people who can realistically gather meaningful resources, defer money, and take on risk.
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That’s an environment of abundance. Money comes to you and good things happen to you seemingly for no reason, though the real reason is where you happen to be sitting.
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A mindset of scarcity is more than just “stress”—it actually makes one less rational and more impulsive by consuming bandwidth.
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We all respond poorly to scarcity.
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One could argue that it is essential for any democracy to do all it can to keep its population free of a mindset of scarcity in order to make better decisions.
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A culture of scarcity is a culture of negativity. People think about what can go wrong. They attack each other. Tribalism and divisiveness go way up. Reason starts to lose ground. Decision-making gets systematically worse. Acts of sustained optimism—getting married, starting a business, moving for a new job—all go down.
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When jobs leave a city or region, things go downhill pretty fast.
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They don’t want to move because this is what they are used to. Do you want to go and do your own thing, or be with your family? They say places are what you make of them, but it’s hard to make something beautiful when it is shit.”
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The central point is this: In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart. The public sector and civic institutions are poorly equipped to do much about it. When a community truly disintegrates, knitting it back together becomes a herculean, perhaps impossible task. Virtue, trust, and cohesion—the stuff of civilization—are difficult to restore. If anything, it’s striking how public corruption seems to often arrive hand-in-hand with economic hardship.
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In a growing organization, people are more optimistic, imaginative, courageous, and generous. In a contracting environment, people can become negative, political, self-serving, and corrupt.
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One of the great myths in American life is that everything self-corrects. If it goes down, it will come back up. If it gets too high, it will come back down to earth.
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Historically, virtually all American cities had more businesses open than close in a given year, even during recessions. After 2008, that basic measurement of dynamism collapsed.
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realized that, if you’re managing in a contracting environment, it’s possible that leaving the urinal duct-taped might be a perfectly reasonable way to go. Optimism could be stupid. When you’re used to losing people and resources, you make different choices.
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Getting married is an act of optimism, stability, and prosperity. It also can be expensive.
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Women are now the clear majority of college graduates—in 2017 women comprise 57 percent of college graduates, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years.
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Single mothers outnumber fathers more than four to one.
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J. D. Vance made the same observation about school being something boys were supposed to ignore: “As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were ‘sissies’… studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.”
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Frederick Douglass wrote that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
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I realized that there are many similarities between being a parent and being an entrepreneur. Here is a partial list: • Everyone’s got an opinion. But no one knows what they’re doing. • The first two years are brutal. • No one cares as much as you do. • On its best days it fills you with meaning and purpose. • People lie about it all the time. • Choose your partner wisely. • Heart is more important than money. But money helps. • It is very, very hard to outsource. • You find out who your friends are. And you make some new ones. • Occasionally the responsibility blows your mind. • If you knew what it entailed you might not get started. But you’re glad you did. • There will be a thousand small tasks you never imagined. • How you spend your time is more important than what you say. • Everything costs more than you thought it would. • Most of the work is dirty, thankless, and gritty. • You learn a lot about yourself. You get tested in ways that you can’t imagine. • When you find someone who can really help you’re incredibly grateful. • You have to try to make time for yourself or it won’t happen. • Whatever your weaknesses are, they will come out. • You think it’s fragile. But it will surprise you. • You sometimes do things you weren’t sure you were capable of. • When it does something great, there’s nothing like it. • You start out all-important. Yet the goal is to make yourself irrelevant. • People sometimes give you too much credit. • There is a lot of noise out there, but at the end of the day it’s your call. • It gives your life a different dimension. You grow new parts of yourself. • It’s harder than anyone expects. It’s the best thing ever.
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A study showed that one out of every 550 patients started on opioid therapy died of opioid-related causes a median of 2.6 years after their first opioid prescription.
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The percentage of working-age Americans who received disability benefits was 5.2 percent in 2017, up from only 2.5 percent in 1980.
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Disability payments received by beneficiaries in these five states exceed $ 1 billion per month.
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One judge who administers disability decisions said that “if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.”
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J. D. Vance writes of how the people in Ohio became angry that they were working hard and scraping by while others were doing nothing and living off of government checks.
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The numbers have grown to a point where more Americans are currently on disability than work in construction.
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We pretend that our economy is doing all right while millions of people give up and “get on the draw” or “get on the check.” It’s a $ 143 billion per year shock absorber for the unemployed or unemployable, whose ranks are growing all of the time.
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And it’s likely easier to think of yourself as genuinely disabled than as someone cheating society for a monthly draw.
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They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/ geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.
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How exactly are these game-playing men getting by? They live with their parents.
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You experience a continuous feeling of progress and accomplishment.
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We have entered an age of transparency where we can see our institutions and leaders for all of their flaws. Trust is for the gullible. Everything now will be a fight. Appealing to common interests will be all the more difficult.
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We are the most heavily armed society in the history of mankind—disintegration is unlikely to be gentle.
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In his book Ages of Discord, the scholar Peter Turchin proposes a structural-demographic theory of political instability based on societies throughout history. He suggests that there are three main preconditions to revolution: (1) elite oversupply and disunity, (2) popular misery based on falling living standards, and (3) a state in fiscal crisis. He uses a host of variables to measure these conditions, including real wages, marital trends, proportion of children in two-parent households, minimum wage, wealth distribution, college tuition, average height, oversupply of lawyers, political polarization, income tax on the wealthy, visits to national monuments, trust in government, and other factors.
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By his analysis, “the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s [before the Civil War] and, more surprisingly, with… France on the eve of the French Revolution.” He projects increased turmoil through 2020 and warns that “we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp at which American society will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval.”
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Even now, people of color report higher levels of optimism than poor whites, despite worse economic circumstances. It’s difficult to go from feeling like the pillar of one’s society to feeling like an afterthought or failure.
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Contributing to the discord will be a climate that equates opposing ideas or speech to violence and hate. Righteousness can fuel abhorrent behavior, and many react with a shocking level of vitriol and contempt for conflicting viewpoints and the people who hold them. Hatred is easy, as is condemnation. Addressing the conditions that breed hatred is very hard.
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However, it would be nearly impossible to curb automation for any prolonged period of time effectively across all industries.
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Time only flows in one direction, and progress is a good thing as long as its benefits are shared.
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Doing nothing leads to almost certain ruin. Trying to forestall progress is likely a doomed strategy over time.
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When you’re left with no other options, the unthinkable becomes necessary.
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Robert Kennedy famously said that GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play… it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
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Peter Frase, author of Four Futures, points out that work encompasses three things: the means by which the economy produces goods and services, the means by which people earn income, and an activity that lends meaning or purpose to many people’s lives.
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Twelve thousand dollars a year is not enough to do more than scrape by. Very few people will quit their jobs because of a guaranteed income at this level unless they were in a marginal or exploitative situation. The available data bears this out. On the other hand, the benefits would be absolutely enormous: • It would be a massive stimulus to lower-cost areas. • It would empower people to avoid making terrible decisions based on financial scarcity and month-to-month needs. • It would be a phenomenal boon to creativity and entrepreneurship. • It would enable people to more effectively transition from shrinking industries and environments to new ones. • It would reduce stress, improve health, decrease crime, and strengthen relationships. • It would support parents and caretakers for the work that they do, particularly mothers. • It would give all citizens an honest stake in society and a sense of the future. • It would restore a sense of optimism and faith in communities around the country. • It would stimulate and maintain the consumer economy through the automation wave. • It would maintain order and preserve our way of life through the greatest economic and social transition in history. • It would make our society more equitable, fair, and just.
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Putting money into people’s hands and keeping it there would be a perpetual boost and support to job growth and the economy.
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Businesses will benefit immensely from the fact that their customers will have more money to spend each month—most Americans will spend the vast majority of their money locally.
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You may not recall that the U.S. government printed over $ 4 trillion in new money for its quantitative easing program following the 2008 financial collapse. This money went to the balance sheets of the banks and depressed interest rates. It punished savers and retirees. There was little to no inflation.
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With the Freedom Dividend, money would be put in the hands of our citizens in a time of unprecedented economic dislocation. It would grow the consumer economy. It’s a stimulus of people. The vast majority of the money would go directly into the economy each month, into paying bills, feeding children, visiting loved ones, youth sports, eating at the local restaurant, piano lessons, extra tutoring help, car repairs, small businesses, housing improvements, prenatal vitamins, elder care, and so on. Most Americans are so cash-strapped that most of the money would be spent locally and quickly.
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To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Americans will always do the right thing. After they’ve tried everything else.”
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We’re trying relative deprivation and it’s not working. Half-measures are wasting time. Scarcity will not save us. Abundance will.
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Money has to come from somewhere. We’re used to the government spending billions wastefully to no great effect.
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By definition, none of the money would be wasted because it goes to citizens. It’s analogous to a company giving dividends or moneys to its shareholders. No one regards that as a waste of money, because the shareholders theoretically are the owners of the company.
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Are we not, as the citizens of the United States, the owners of this country?
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You know what’s really expensive? Dysfunction. Revolution. Keeping people and families functional will largely pay for itself.
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“It will destroy people’s incentives to work.” All of the available data shows that work hours stay stable or at most decrease modestly with a basic income.
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First, work is vital and the core of the human experience. Second, no one will want to work if they don’t have to. These two ideas are at complete odds with each other. Either work is a core of the human experience and we’ll do it even if we don’t necessarily have to, or work is something we have no interest in doing and we do it only to survive.
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“People will spend the money on stupid things, like drugs and alcohol.” The data doesn’t show this. In every basic income study, there has been no increase in drug and alcohol use. If anything, an improved sense of the future motivates people to figure out a plan for how to improve their lot.
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There are true addicts, and some people are self-destructive. But it’s not like a lack of money is presently keeping people from using opioids and alcohol—they find a way to get both money and drugs right now, sometimes illicitly.
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Here’s the thing—poor people tend to be much more careful with their money than rich people.
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The idea that poor people will be irresponsible with their money and squander it seems to be a product of deep-seated biases rather than emblematic of the truth. There’s a tendency for rich people to dismiss poor people as weak-willed children with no cost discipline. The evidence runs in the other direction. As the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman and others put it, “Poverty is not a lack of character. It’s a lack of cash.”
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Many of the populations people are most eager to see employed and kept from idleness are among the least competent and able to be employed by the private sector. The natural tendency is to spend a lot of money on people doing things that aren’t actually that valuable.
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But an economy where most people work for the government has been tried and failed in many environments—
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Perhaps most crucially, endless new businesses would form. If you are in a town of 5,000 people in Missouri and everyone is struggling to get by, starting, say, a bakery may not be that attractive. But with a UBI, there will be an additional $ 60 million being spent in that town next year. You personally will have an income to fall back on if the bakery doesn’t work out.
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Time banking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks—transporting an item, walking a dog, cleaning up a yard, cooking a meal, providing a ride to the doctor, and so on.
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Some might ask, “Why create a new digital currency instead of just using dollars?” First, people will respond to points in a different way than they would if they were paid very low monetary amounts.
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Second, everyone will feel much more open and comfortable sharing balances if it’s a new social currency. You want people to advertise and reinforce their behavior. Behavior is much more likely to be reinforced if it’s social and recognized.
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Third, by creating a new currency, the government could essentially induce billions of dollars of positive social activity without having to spend nearly that amount.
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At present, the market systematically tends to undervalue many things, activities, and people, many of which are core to the human experience.
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First, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist system. There
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Our current form of institutional capitalism and corporatism is just the latest of many different versions.
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Now imagine a new type of capitalist economy that is geared toward maximizing human well-being and fulfillment.
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Human Capitalism would have a few core tenets: 1. Humanity is more important than money. 2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. 3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.
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Our economic system must shift to focus on bettering the lot of the average person. Capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals, rather than have our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace. We shape the system. We own it, not the other way around.
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In addition to GDP and job statistics, the government should adopt measurements such as: • Median income and standard of living • Levels of engagement with work and labor participation rate • Health-adjusted life expectancy • Childhood success rates • Infant mortality • Surveys of national well-being • Average physical fitness and mental health • Quality of infrastructure • Proportion of elderly in quality care • Human capital development and access to education • Marriage rates and success • Deaths of despair/ despair index/ substance abuse • National optimism/ mindset of abundance • Community integrity and social capital • Environmental quality • Global temperature variance and sea levels • Reacclimation of incarcerated individuals and rates of criminality • Artistic and cultural vibrancy • Design and aesthetics • Information integrity/ journalism • Dynamism and mobility • Social and economic equity • Public safety • Civic engagement • Cybersecurity • Economic competitiveness and growth • Responsiveness and evolution of government • Efficient use of resources
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I’m no fan of big government. The larger an organization is, the more cumbersome and ridiculous it often gets.
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We have so many brilliant doctors—they should be innovators, detectives, guides, and sources of comfort, not glorified assembly line workers. And freeing health care from being locked to a job would be a massive boon to economic growth and dynamism.
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Similar to health care, the automation wave should lead us to invest more people in education and human capital development. It should also drive us to dramatically increase our emphasis on technical and vocational training and apprenticeships at the high school level to take advantage of the jobs that will continue to exist.
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In an age with less and less employment, the abilities to self-manage and socialize will become the new keys to success in life. We
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Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant.
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The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.
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People teach other people. If you want to teach thousands of students well, you teach one student well. Then you do it thousands of times.
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Climb to the hilltop and tell others behind us what we see. What do you see? And build the society we want on the other side.
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How To Think
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 16:00 on 27 January 2019Okay, so, I read this book at the beginning of the year, but for reasons I cannot recall, I didn't review it immediately after finishing it. Which meant I should either not review it, or, you know, reread it. I recalled the book took me about two hours to read it the first time. Given the title, and my general inclination to liking thinking, I figured I'd read it again. Unsure how to count this in my book total for the year, I'll probably count it twice.
I so enjoyed this book. All of about a tenth into it, I recalled how much I enjoyed the book the first time. Unlike The Art of Thinking Clearly, which is a list of all the various biases and quirks people have in thinking, this book is a journey about how one should approach thinking. We, in general, don't want to think. It's hard, effort is required. We have to go against much of the social conditioning we've been in for the thousands of years of evolution we've needed to survive to this point. And thoughts are the result of reactions to others' thoughts. All of this is explored in Jacobs' writing.
The book hops down various paths related to thinking, and circles back around in a wonderful way. I enjoyed this book the first reading, and the second reading 11 months later. Recommended and worth a read.
This is what thinking is : not the decision itself but what goes into the decision , the consideration , the assessment . It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence ; it’s grasping , as best you can and with all available and relevant senses , what is , and it’s also speculating , as carefully and responsibly as you can , about what might be . And it’s knowing when not to go it alone , and whom you should ask for help .
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For me , the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will : we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking . Relatively few people want to think . Thinking troubles us ; thinking tires us . Thinking can force us out of familiar , comforting habits ; thinking can complicate our lives ; thinking can set us at odds ,
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or at least complicate our relationships , with those we admire or love or follow . Who needs thinking ?
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After the first few moments of the speaker’s lecture , Fried had effectively stopped listening : he had heard something he didn’t agree with and immediately entered Refutation Mode — and in Refutation Mode there is no listening . Moreover , when there is no listening there is no thinking . To enter Refutation Mode is to say , in effect , that you’ve already done all the thinking you need to do , that no further information or reflection is required .
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It could be coincidence , or synchronicity , or fate ; but sometimes there’s a blessed convergence between what you read and what you need . A
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In a 1994 essay called “ Puritans and Prigs , ” Robinson challenges the contemptuous attitudes many people have toward the Puritans — the very word is no more than an insult now — and gives a more generous and accurate account of what they thought and why they thought it .
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Puritanism . ” That is , the kinds of traits we label “ puritan ” — rigidity , narrowness of mind , judgmentalism — are precisely the ones people display whenever they talk about the Puritans . *
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“ Very simply , ” Robinson writes , “ it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged , when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved . ”
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The word doesn’t have any meaning as such , certainly not any historical validity ; it’s more like the password to get into the clubhouse .
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Robinson further comments that this kind of usage “ demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry , ”
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The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group , the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against — well , against any kind of standard .
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They are invested , for the moment anyway , in not thinking .
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T . S . Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century : “ When there is so much to be known , when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings , when everyone knows a little about a great many things , it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not . ”
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People invested in not knowing , not thinking about , certain things in order to have “ the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved ” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified — and wrathful when it is thwarted .
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( Social bonding is cemented by shared emotion , shared emotion generates social bonding . It’s a feedback loop from which reflection is excluded . )
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Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world .
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The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures , confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup .
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It’s very rewarding to show them not necessarily that their beliefs are wrong , but that they haven’t defended them very well , haven’t understood their underlying logic , haven’t grasped the best ways to commend
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their views to skeptical Others . *
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Harding’s essay is “ Representing Fundamentalism : The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other , ”
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The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us , all of us , and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “ the war of every man against every man . ”
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simply knowing the forces that act on us to prevent genuine reflection , making an accurate diagnosis of our condition , is the first course of treatment .
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Eno and Schmidt called the card deck Oblique Strategies because they knew that when an artist is blocked , direct approaches meant to fix the problem invariably make it worse . In a similar way , sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking .
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We’re probably all subject to what the literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls “ backshadowing ” — “ foreshadowing after the fact , ” that is , the temptation to believe that we can look into the past and discern some point at which the present became inevitable .
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This ending deprives us of the easy comforts that Sapere aude stories tend to offer — the reassurance that , though life in the bigger world may be hard at times , may even be miserable , it is nonetheless the right trade to make because the security of community is not really the most vital thing in the long run . Le Guin’s swerve from the more familiar form of the trope says : We don’t know that . To think , to dig into the foundations of our beliefs , is a risk , and perhaps a tragic risk . There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction .
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To think independently of other human beings is impossible , and if it were possible it would be undesirable . Thinking is necessarily , thoroughly , and wonderfully social . Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said . And when people commend someone for “ thinking for herself ” they usually mean “ ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of . ”
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This is a point worth dwelling on . How often do we say “ she really thinks for herself ” when someone rejects views that we hold ? No : when someone departs from what we believe to be the True Path our tendency is to look for bad influences . She’s fallen under the spell of so - and - so . She’s been reading too much X or listening to too much Y or watching too much Z . Similarly , people in my line of work always say that we want to promote “ critical thinking ” — but really we want our students to think critically only about what they’ve learned
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at home and in church , not about what they learn from us . *
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When we believe something to be true , we tend also to see the very process of arriving at it as clear and objective , and therefore the kind of thing we can achieve on our own ; when we hold that a given notion is false , we ascribe belief in it to some unfortunate wrong turning , usually taken because an inquirer was led astray ,
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all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons , and false things for good reasons , and that whatever we think we know , whether we’re right or wrong , arises from our interactions with other human beings .
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Gladwell assumes that if Wilt had been thinking rationally , the only thing he would have
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been concerned about was success in his job . But that’s because Gladwell , like many of us , seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do , they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity ( like the rest of us ) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts , and doing so in a way that gives them delight . We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight .
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Many professional athletes have confessed that , while they do sometimes find great satisfaction and even , yes , delight in their work , they never forget that it is indeed work .
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In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind , Jonathan Haidt tries to understand why we disagree with one another — especially , but not only , about politics and religion — and , more important , why it is so hard for people to see those who disagree with them as equally intelligent , equally decent human beings .
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Central to his argument is this point : “ Intuitions come first , strategic reasoning second . Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously , long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started , and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning . ” Our “ moral arguments ” are therefore “ mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly , crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives . ”
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Such networks of affiliation are complicated , and discerning their presence requires what the ancients called “ prudence , ” a virtue that , like many virtues , is cultivated largely by avoiding certain vices : the kind of optimism that Scruton calls “ unscrupulous ” and its accompanying rushes to judgment , its reluctance to question its preferred means .
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Roger Scruton , The Uses of Pessimism ( Oxford University Press , 2010 ) , p . 17 .
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3 That is , many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien Tribe . And — this is perhaps the most telling and troubling finding of all — their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup .
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Here we might recall the “ unscrupulousness , ” the headlong rush forward , of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques . When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed , once and for all , then people who don’t share your optimism , or who do share it but invest it in a different system , are adversaries of Utopia . ( An “ adversary ” is literally one who has turned against you , one who blocks your path . ) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable — indeed , it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries .
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is , I believe that it is reasonable and wise , in a democratic social order , to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism : an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules , because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order .
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That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people . And I have seen this in both academic and ecclesial settings as well : using the existing rules against your opponents , or formulating new ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them , without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair , or even whether they might be turned against you someday , when the political winds are blowing in a different direction . Such is the power of sheer animus : it disables our ethical and our practical judgment .
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And this is why learning to think with the best people , and not to think with the worst , is so important . To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world , which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices . These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with
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them :
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interlocutors . When people cease to be people because they are , to us , merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate ,
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then we , in our zeal to win , have sacrificed empathy : we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires , principles , fears . And that is a great price to pay for supposed “ victory ” in debate .
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The myths we choose , or more likely simply inherit , do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us . Even more than the empty words and phrases of Orwell’s “ tired hack on the platform , ” these myths do our thinking for us . We can’t do without them ; the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking , and we always and inevitably strive to understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know .
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Our social taxonomies are useful , but if we think of them as something more than that , if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another , if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible , they serve us poorly .
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The problem , of course , and sadly , is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled , and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled .
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one . Economists speak of sunk costs as investments in a particular project that cannot be recovered , and some of them have pointed out that sunk costs have a disproportionate influence on decision making . The more people have invested in a particular project , the more reluctant they are to abandon it , no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause .
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Fundamentally , for Hoffer , mass movements are a psychological phenomenon — however many roots they may have in
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particular cultural and political circumstances . He called the book in which he explores this psychology The True Believer ( 1951 ) .
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You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup . If you quote some unapproved figure , or have the “ wrong ” website open in your browser , and someone turns up his nose and says , “ I can’t believe you’re reading that crap ” — generally , not a good sign . Even if what you’re reading is Mein Kampf , because there are actually good reasons for reading Mein Kampf .
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In short , the Usage Wars are a kind of miniature embodiment of Culture Wars in all their endless variety — and therefore a kind of test case for how we deal with disagreement , especially when there’s disagreement on matters we care about very deeply .
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If it’s not exactly clear what all this has to do with the Democratic Spirit , perhaps Wallace’s definition of that Spirit will help : A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility , i.e . , passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others . As any American knows , this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain , particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about . Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity — you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe , and to do it more or less continually .
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( Which is more or less what this book is all about . I could take those three sentences as my epigraph . )
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failure . It is the failure to recognize other dialects , other contexts , other people , as having value that needs to be respected — especially , it’s tempting to say , if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members , but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code - switch does to the social fabric . It rends it .
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Remember : Humani nihil a me alienum puto . Human beings , like you , who happen through
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circumstance or temperament to have come to different conclusions than yours . This does not mean that their views are correct , or even as likely to be correct as your own ; you need not admit any such thing , but when they are wrong they’re wrong in the same way that you are , when that happens to you ( as it assuredly does ) .
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death . Better to follow the principle articulated by W . H . Auden : “ The same rules apply to self - examination as apply to auricular confession : Be brief , be blunt , be gone . ” *
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We shouldn’t expect moral heroism of ourselves . Such an expectation is fruitless and in the long run profoundly damaging . But we can expect to cultivate a more general disposition of skepticism about our own motives and generosity toward the motives of others .
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You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you : the kind of person who , at least some of the time , cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position . And working toward the truth is one of life’s great adventures .
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To cease thinking , as Thomas Aquinas explained , is an act either of despair — “ I can’t go any further ” — or of presumption — “ I need not go any further . ” * 2 What is needed for the life of thinking is hope : hope of knowing more , understanding more , being more than we currently are .
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The Thinking Person’s Checklist 1 . When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said , give it five minutes . Take a walk , or weed the garden , or chop some vegetables . Get your body involved : your body knows the rhythms to live by , and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm , you’ll have a better chance of thinking . 2 . Value learning over debating . Don’t “ talk for victory . ” 3 . As best you can , online and off , avoid the people who fan flames . 4 . Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right - mindedness .
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5 . If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right - mindedness , or else lose your status in your community , then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring . 6 . Gravitate as best you can , in every way you can , toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity . 7 . Seek out the best and fairest - minded of people whose views you disagree with . Listen to them for a time without responding . Whatever they say , think it over . 8 . Patiently , and as honestly as you can , assess your repugnances . 9 . Sometimes the “ ick factor ” is telling ; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters . 10 . Beware of metaphors and myths that do
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too much heavy cognitive lifting ; notice what your “ terministic screens ” are directing your attention to — and what they’re directing your attention away from ; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth . 11 . Try to describe others ’ positions in the language that they use , without indulging in in - other - wordsing . 12 . Be brave .
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Hello, My Name is Awesome
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 16:00 on 27 January 2019Okay, wow, I STRONGLY recommend this book for anyone who is naming a business or product. Like, don't expect to have a name in two days, do the work to figure out a good name, and yes, this book will help. I wish I had a product or company to name at this point, because this book is the way I'd find the name.
Watkins comments early in the book that her colleagues were concerned about her giving away her naming secrets by writing and publishing this book. Her response was something to the tune of, "Nah, I'll be fine, people don't want to do the work of finding the best name, I'm good," Which is totally believe.
Watkins gives step-by-step instructions on finding options and choosing them. For the record: I have fully sucked in naming my projects, by a lot. I now know it.
I originally borrowed this book from the library, but appreciated the content enough to go buy a copy from the book. I strongly recommend you do the same if you're naming a product. If you're not naming a product (or company), keep this on the back burner for when you do. You won't regret it.
clever ad headlines get noticed , get buzz , and get sales because they make strong emotional connections with consumers .
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SMILE : The 5 Qualities of a Super - Sticky Name Suggestive — evokes something about your brand Meaningful — resonates with your audience Imagery — is visually evocative to aid in memory Legs — lends itself to a theme for extended mileage Emotional — moves people SCRATCH : The 7 Deadly Sins Spelling challenged — looks like a typo Copycat — is similar to competitors ’ names Restrictive — limits future growth Annoying — is forced or frustrates customers Tame — is flat , descriptive , uninspired Curse of Knowledge — makes sense only to insiders
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Suggestive — Evokes Something about Your Brand A name can’t be expected to say everything , but it should suggest something about your brand .
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These names , also known as portmanteaus , work well because they cleverly marry two words together , are intuitive to spell , and easy to pronounce .
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Meaningful —
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Resonates with Your Audience It’s important to make sure your name is meaningful to potential customers , not just to you . Most of the time when people encounter your name , you won’t be there to explain it to them .
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Do Not Name Your Company after yourself While it may evoke warm thoughts to your friends and family , your personal name is meaningless to your future customers .
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Imagery — Visually Evocative to Aid in Memory
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Legs — Lends Itself to a Theme for Extended Mileage To get the most out of your name , give it one that has legs . Strive for a theme with mileage you can build your brand around . Names with legs provide endless wordplay and verbal branding opportunities .
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If you have a catchy name that makes people smile , you can slap it on merchandise that people will pay for because they love your name and want to show it off .
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Emotional — Moves People A recent Fast Company article revealed that 50 percent of every buying decision is driven by emotion .
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“ A name should make you smile instead of scratch your head . ”
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SCRATCH is an acronym for the seven deal breakers . A good way to remember this : if it makes you scratch your head , scratch it off the list .
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Spelling Challenged — Not Spelled like It Sounds If you have to spell your name out loud for people , Siri butchers it , or it looks like a typo , it’s a mistake .
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Don’t Get Cute with Numbers While it may work for texting and clever license plates , embedding numbers in a brand name looks cutesy and unprofessional .
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Test the Siri Theory The true test to see if a name is spelling challenged is to see and hear how voice recognition software spells it .
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Copycat — Similar to a Competitor Hijacking another company’s original idea isn’t good for your business reputation or for building trust with your customers .
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Restrictive — Locks You In , Limits Growth
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Do Not Use the Same Name for Your Product and Company
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Annoying — Forced , Frustrates Customers Annoying of course is subjective , but if you think about your
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name from a customer’s point of view , you can avoid causing frustration if your name does not appear forced , random , or grammatically incorrect .
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Clunky Coined Names If you invent a new word for your name , be careful that it doesn’t sound unnatural . Mashing two words together or mixing up a bunch of letters to form a new word rarely appears or sounds smooth .
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Resist the Temptation to Be Mysterious
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Tame — Flat , Descriptive , Uninspired If you want your name to stand out in a sea of sameness and get noticed — without a massive advertising budget — you can’t afford to be shy .
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Curse of Knowledge — Only Insiders Get It No one is more of an expert on the company or product you are naming than you . But when communicating with potential customers who are unfamiliar with your world , insider knowledge can become a curse . We can’t unlearn what we know , so we find it extremely difficult to think like a newbie . We talk in acronyms , internal shorthand , code words , and
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industry jargon — all of which sounds like a foreign language to outsiders . Don’t alienate potential customers .
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Avoid Alphanumeric Brain - benders
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Is Your Name in Urban Dictionary ? If your brand is targeted at teens or young adults , be sure to look up your name in Urban Dictionary ( urbandictionary.com ) before you give it the green light .
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Hard to Pronounce — Not Obvious , Unapproachable
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Avoid Acronyms Speaking of capital letters , FYI , people have ADD . You can expect them to remember only one name , not two .
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Two Pronunciations Is Double Trouble Words that can be pronounced two different ways are also pronunciation pitfalls .
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3 Strategies to Get a Good Domain Name for $ 9.95 Here are three simple strategies that will help you nab a domain name that people can spell , pronounce , and understand . Strategy # 1 : Add Another Word or Two
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5 Silly Ideas to Steer Clear Of Here are some amateur mistakes to watch out for . Silly Idea # 1 : Spell It Creatively
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Sil.ly Idea # 2 : Use an Obscure Domain Extension to Spell Your Name
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Silly Idea # 3 : Use . org For a For - Profit Business
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Silly Idea # 4 : Domain Name = Trademark Just because you own a domain name does not mean you own the trademark .
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Silly Idea # 5 : Don’t Look before You Leap Before you pounce on a domain name , make sure the words mashed together don’t spell something unintentional , which is called a SLURL — a clever portmanteau of Slur + URL .
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GOAL OF ASSIGNMENT What do you want to accomplish ?
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IN A NUTSHELL Sum it up it in 140 characters or less .
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BRAND POSITIONING How do you want your brand to be positioned in the marketplace ?
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CONSUMER INSIGHTS Consumer insights reveal people’s behaviors , as opposed to preferences . For instance , when naming an herbal tea brand , it helps to think beyond what tea drinkers like about herbal tea ( e.g . , flavor , fragrance , health benefits ) and consider what circumstances lead them to enjoy their tea . It could be getting home after a long commute , relaxing with a book in their favorite chair , or sipping a cup before bedtime to help them get a restful sleep .
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TARGET AUDIENCE Who are the customers you want to reach ?
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COMPETITION List your competitors so you know what you are up against and to help you steer clear of similar names , which could pose trademark conflicts .
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DESIRED BRAND EXPERIENCES The best names evoke a positive brand experience that makes a strong emotional connection , such as “ This tastes great , ” “ I will feel better , ” or “ This is fun ! ”
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BRAND PERSONALITY The 5 – 12 adjectives that best describe the tone and personality of your brand . ( This exercise is much easier to do if you think of your brand as a person . )
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WORDS TO EXPLORE List some words you may like to have in your new name .
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THEMES / IDEAS TO AVOID Don’t even think of going here :
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WORDS TO AVOID
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List any words you would not like to have in your new name .
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DOMAIN NAME MODIFIERS List modifier words that will help you secure a domain name , which may not be available as an exact match to your new name or may be out of your price range :
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NAME STYLE LIKES & DISLIKES List 5 brand names that you collectively like the style of ( and why ) .
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List 5 brand names that you collectively dislike the style of ( and why )
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ACID TEST FOR USING THE NEW NAME Write how the new name would be used in a sentence .
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ALSO GOOD TO KNOW List anything else you think would be important to the name development .
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THE WARM - UP — LIST 12 WORD SPARKS
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Mine the Online Goldmine
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Open the Thesaurus Treasure Chest Begin your online brainstorming on a thesaurus website , where you can find a jackpot of synonyms and related words .
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Supercharge Your Imagination with Images A picture says a thousand words . And many of those words can inspire awesome names , which is why I always do image searches to fuel my creativity .
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Comb through Glossaries of Terms Every sport has its own lingo of fun words and phrases . You can find pages and pages of them online by searching for “ glossaries , ” “ lingo , ” “ vernacular , ” “ jargon , ” “ dictionaries , ” “ thesaurus , ” “ terms , ” “ words , ” or “ slang , ” which are essentially the same thing but will turn up different results in searches .
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Dictionaries Have More Than Just Definitions
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Sometimes Clichés Are Good
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Go Googlestorming !
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Movie Title Madness
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Breeze through Some Book Titles
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Tune into iTunes
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12 Rules for Reviewing Your Names Rule 1 Have people initially review the list of names independently , as opposed to in a group .
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Rule 2
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Is it right ? which is much more objective and effective .
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Rule 3 Refrain from negative comments .
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Rule 4 Keep in mind that a name can’t say everything —
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Rule 5
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print out the list to review on paper instead of viewing it online . Read it multiple times , top to bottom and bottom to top . Give yourself a few days to let all the names sink in .
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Rule 6 As tempting as it is , do not share your list with outsiders and ask for their opinions on SurveyMonkey .
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Rule 7
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A good way to review company names is to imagine each one on your caller ID , name badge , store sign , website , or business card . Imagine product names on the product , a sales sheet , or on the shelf .
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Rule 8 Don’t be afraid to be different .
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Rule 9 Refrain from looking up domain names this early in the process .
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Rule 10 Each reviewer should select at least ten names from the list .
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Rule 11 Don’t fall in love with any one name until after you have conducted trademark screens .
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Rule 12 Have fun !
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How To Be Interesting
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 01:55 on 25 January 2019This is a cute, adorable, simple book that I'm pretty sure I didn't include in my list of books I've read because it is a 15 minute read and does it really qualify in my "Read 100 books this year" goal?
I mean, yes, by definition, it is a book, so yes. But it is a 15 minute read, if you linger, so does it?
This is a book of short bits of wisdom, delightfully illustrated with Venn Diagrams and Hagy's whimsical style.
You know how you have the "Oh the Places You'll Go" book that you give to every high school graduate?
Consider this book instead.
Yes, I am a fan of Jessica Hagy. I still think this book is worth reading. And gifting.
Dance. Talk. Build. Network. Play. Help. Create. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you’re doing it. Sitting around and complaining is not an acceptable form of “something,” in case you were wondering.
Location 109
If it is unappetizing: Do not eat, date, or sign up for it. If the mere thought of it is depressing: Do not major in it, sit through it, or devote your life to it. If it is not important to you: Do not do it only because it is important to someone else.
Location 115
A love ignored will wither and die.
Location 151
You are not wrong to be unique. You not incorrect because you are different. You should not be sorry for being interesting.
Location 170
The only way to exceed expectations is to ignore them—and do what needs doing instead.
Location 180
Amazing is rare, if only because so few people reach for it. Risking the ordinary is the only way to get something extraordinary.
Location 224
Acknowledge the roles coincidence, chance, systemic processes (and yes, maybe even luck), play in our world.
Location 270
Don’t feel guilty for taking a shot at something. Don’t feel terrible for wanting something. Save the guilt for never giving yourself the chance to try.
Location 293
If things are unsatisfactory: Document them. Change them. Few people ever bother with that second bit.
Location 397
If you’ve got bad memories attached to places, things, and even people: Let them go. You will feel lighter almost immediately.
Location 407
After all, it’s only an interesting backstory if you can get past it.
Location 434
If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?
Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 17:43 on 23 January 2019, kitt created this:I really loved this book. I mean, I was expecting to like it, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Probably helps that Alan Alda was my favorite actor when I was growing up. God, I hope he doesn't Kevin Spacey that opinion. Anyway.
This book was about Alda's journey into his improving scientific communication with "the masses" (my word, not his). He's been excited about science, and wanted to convey that enthusiasm. Here's how, including the scientific basis for some of the techniques he used. Here's how, including how improv can help one become a better communicator. Here's how, including practicing empathy. it was just such a great book.
I wish I had read it with the Caltech Book Club, mostly so that I would have someone to talk with about this book. I know that Tech offers improv classes, and the Book Club organized an online class for the members to take. I love the idea of an improv class, while being simultaneously overwhelmingly nervous about them. I can talk tech to a room of 1500 people, but improv with a group of 10 people? YIKES!
I recommend the book. If you're in science and/or tech and want to improve your communication skills, I strongly recommend this book. Good stuff.
It’s being so aware of the other person that, even if you have your back to them, you’re observing them. It’s letting everything about them affect you; not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their body language, even subtle things like where they’re standing in the room or how they occupy a chair. Relating is letting all that seep into you and have an effect on how you respond to the other person.
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I so loved this idea—that on the stage the other actor has to be able to affect you if a scene is to take place—that I came to the conclusion that, even in life, unless I’m responding with my whole self—unless, in fact, I’m willing to be changed by you—I’m probably not really listening. But if I do listen—openly, naïvely, and innocently—there’s a chance, possibly the only chance, that a true dialogue and real communication will take place between us.
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Ignorance was my ally as long as it was backed up by curiosity. Ignorance without curiosity is not so good, but with curiosity it was the clear water through which I could see the coins at the bottom of the fountain.
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His letter has come to be known as Jefferson’s dialogue between Head and Heart.
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In fact, it’s not until about the age of four or five that it even occurs to children that deception is possible. There’s no point in lying if everybody knows what you’re thinking!
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I coach from the side and explain that it’s his responsibility to help the mirror, his partner, keep up with him. This is the students’ first glimmer of the basic idea: The person who’s communicating something is responsible for how well the other person follows him.
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If I’m trying to explain something and you don’t follow me, it’s not simply your job to catch up. It’s my job to slow down.
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In other studies, simply tapping in sync, like tapping on a table, produced the same results. After they had spent some time tapping in sync, the subjects paid more attention to the good of the group, and they made fewer selfish choices.
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One thing she’ll learn from this is that there are many different ways to express the same thought, depending on whom you’re talking with.
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What could predict it, though, were three factors: the ability of the members of the group to freely take part in discussions, members’ scores on a standardized test of empathy, and, surprisingly, the presence of women in the group.
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If you get the sense that the rest of the group is aware of your feelings and won’t punish you for speaking up, you might be more inclined to offer an idea.
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Whether face-to-face or online, they reported, “some teams consistently worked smarter than others.” And the reasons they worked smarter were the same: They had “members who communicated a lot, participated equally, and possessed good emotion-reading skills.”
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He struck a chord when he wrote about the pitfalls of assuming students are totally responsible for their own motivation, noting that “this can lead researchers to blame group members for their lack of motivation.” Instead, he feels that it’s up to the leader of the group to motivate the students, or else things can break down. This is the very thing that happens in the mirror exercise when the leader doesn’t take responsibility for helping the other person to follow. They lose the connection that could keep them in sync. It happens when a teacher blames the student or a speaker blames the audience for not understanding what they have to say.
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The responsibility really belongs to the person speaking, not the person listening.
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“The goal,” he was saying, “is to provide people with the conditions that enhance their natural self-motivated behavior.”
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Some of my limited experience as a boss has included the unpleasant task of firing people who, it suddenly turned out, were wrong for the job—that remarkable transformation where someone you thought was perfect has turned into a werewolf. They haven’t actually become something else, of course. They’re the same perfectly fine people they were months earlier. But with all my supposed sensitivity and mind-reading ability, I hadn’t picked up on who they really were when I hired them.
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I could have avoided all the mind reading I needed in firing them humanely if I had been better at it when I was hiring them.
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He seems aware that good communication is the responsibility of the person delivering the information, not the person receiving
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we teach scientists that it’s not necessary to tell the audience everything you know in one gulp. Sometimes, telling us just enough to make us want to know more is exactly the right amount. We gag on force-feeding.
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Leek says, “It’s people’s nature where if they don’t understand something, they tend to say, ‘No.’
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When I can’t open a hard plastic “clamshell” container with scissors or a knife, or even a hammer, I wonder, Has the president of the company ever personally tried to open this thing?
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Social awareness became one of the key attributes of emotional intelligence as described in the work of Daniel Goleman. Goleman has refined the notion of social awareness to three separate steps: first, having an instantaneous, primal awareness of another’s inner state (empathy); then, grasping their feelings and thoughts (Theory of Mind); and, finally, understanding—or, as he says, “getting complicated social situations.” Goleman has described social awareness as “the ability to identify a client’s or customer’s often unstated needs and concerns and then match them to products or services.” He adds that “this empathic strategy distinguishes star sales performers from average ones.”
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You’re vulnerable when you laugh. You let the other person in.
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What’s the story? Where are you in the story?…
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He asks himself the same kind of questions we suggest our scientists ask: “Who is receiving it? Who are you? Why are you listening to this? Why would you care? Should you care?… I think,”
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I asked them to make imaginary objects out of space and pass them around in a circle, just as I would if I were working with scientists. Next, they tossed balls made of nothing to one another, but the kids had to make sure the ball they caught was the same size and weight as the one that was thrown to them. As always, the better they got at that, the more you believed you could see the ball passing from one person to another. The kids were delighted to see imaginary objects coming into existence simply because they were observing one another and responding—making contact. Then I asked them to toss not a ball, but an emotion around the circle. That was hard to grasp at first. It was confusing enough to toss around a ball that didn’t really exist; now I was asking them to pass around a feeling. To get them started, I made a sound and a gesture that I hoped conveyed a sense of joy and tossed it to the girl standing next to me. Her job was to catch it, the same way she had caught the imaginary ball, then mimic the emotion and pass it on to someone else. The emotion made its way around the circle, and soon the natural expressiveness of musicians took over and they were tossing passions to one another.
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You accept what you get from the other person, and then let it grow into something else. You keep moving things forward.
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Life, of course, is an improvisation. You don’t know what’s coming next.
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Self-regulation has to take place: You know what the other person is going through because you recognize their emotion in yourself, but you don’t have to act out that emotion. You take responsibility for regulating your own feelings.
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Training in improv and acting in general both lead to improvement on standardized tests designed to measure a person’s ability to connect with the state of mind of another person.
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The Three Rules of Three 1. When I talk to an audience, I try to make no more than three points. (They can’t remember more than three, and neither can I.) In fact, restricting myself to one big point is even better. But three is the limit. 2. I try to explain difficult ideas three different ways. Some people can’t understand something the first couple of ways I say it, but can if I say it another way. This lets them triangulate their way to understanding. 3. I try to find a subtle way to make an important point three times. It sticks a little better. But even
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I stopped practicing empathy for a while; it was exhausting.
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I began to look at people’s faces not only to guess what they were feeling, but to actually name it. I would mentally attach a word to what I thought was their emotion. Labeling it meant that I wasn’t just observing them; I was making a conscious effort to settle on the exact word that described what I saw.
Page 105
But what emotion are they going through? Identifying it doesn’t make me more sympathetic, but it does give me a chance to respond more appropriately. It kind of heads off impatience.
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He briefly outlined a method where he could give people an app for their smartphones that they could tap every time they read someone’s emotion and named it. They could do this for a week, and he could use standardized tools for testing empathy before and after a run. He thought for a moment and said, “I’d love to do that study.”
Page 107
In fact, I’d be happy to report on a failure, I thought. I have a lot of respect for failed experiments. It’s how scientists know what doesn’t work. I wish more so-called failures in research got attention. It would save others from going down the same dead-end alleys. It could be helpful to report on this if it didn’t pan out.
Page 108
He reminded me that the study was still going on and told me he was being very careful about not committing the error of peeking at the results before all the data were in.
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Matt mentioned that the harder it is for someone to read their own emotions, the harder it is for them to read the emotions of others. Maybe I should have been working on becoming better aware of my own emotions.
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Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
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The first time I took it, I scored 33 out of 36. This time I got 36 out of 36. This proves nothing at all, of course, and ranks on a scale of reliable evidence just above wishing. But I was delighted anyway.
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Even when we think of empathy as a tool for good, it might not be a good idea to oversell its strengths, and we should remember that there will always be people who will use it against others for their own benefit.
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For Bloom, empathy is harder to achieve than we realize, and it doesn’t lead to moral behavior or good policy as much as rationality does.
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There are times we know what the rational action should be, but don’t take it until we consider what the other person is feeling. I know, in my own life, I sometimes respond to a question with an answer that isn’t really helpful.
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George Gopen wrote with Judith Swan, called “The Science of Scientific Writing,”
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As Gopen says, “Readers expect [a sentence] to be a story about whoever shows up first.”
Page 135
Richard Feynman told the story of a boy who taunted him when he was young, challenging him to name a bird they’d just seen. When he couldn’t, the boy said, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But his father already had taught him something that was more important than the name of a thing. He’d said to him, “See that bird? It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” Feynman could tell his father had made up the name. Then he started to give Richard fictitious names of the same bird in several languages. “You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world,” he said, “but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird…. so let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.”
Page 140
And we believe that the body’s stress-hormone response acts to enhance memory.”
Page 154
So, emotion helps us remember. That was clear. But this was new to me: that a bit of stress can help make that memory stick and feel more important than other memories.
Page 155
And there was no deodorant in my suitcase. I have a pathological fear of smelling bad, especially in front of twenty-eight hundred people.
Page 156
Laughter, he’s found, is far better than anger. And not just as an aid to memory, but as a way to connect.
Page 157
If we’re looking for a way to bring emotion to someone, a story is the perfect vehicle. We can’t resist stories. We crave them.
Page 161
As Mike has written: “Though the left hemisphere had no clue, it would not be satisfied to state it did not know. It would guess, prevaricate, rationalize, and look for a cause and effect, but it would always come up with an answer that fit the circumstances.”
Page 166
As Steve Strogatz told me, the trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven’t been asked.
Page 169
So, what is a story? Aristotle is often quoted as saying that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Page 171
We can identify with someone who has a goal, but we root for someone with both a goal and an obstacle.
Page 172
Having a goal in the first place is crucially important. What does the hero or heroine want? What has she set out to achieve that is, at this moment, the most important thing in her life?
Page 172
I’ve often thought there ought to be a sign in the wings that says, “No one permitted beyond this point unless you know what you want with all your heart, and you know how you’re going to get it.”
Page 172
Here’s where the importance of the middle comes in. If an obstacle complicates the story and puts everything in doubt, then we have suspense and at the height of that suspense there’s going to be a turning point, where things are either going to get a lot better or a lot worse. There’s something very engaging about this because it’s difficult not to be caught up in someone’s struggle to achieve something.
Page 174
For me, the acknowledgment of an opposing thought is one of the things that makes science such a dramatic thing to watch.
Page 175
The more commonality between the storyteller and the listener, the more an MRI will show their brains in sync.
Page 178
Communication works only in cases when you understand something about what I’m going to say to you.”
Page 179
But even though any single study is seldom the final answer to anything, it can point you in a direction that’s worth exploring.
Page 181
And an awareness of similarity seems to be worth exploring, because it’s helpful in figuring out what the other person is thinking.
Page 181
There’s something appealing about a private language. It can be intoxicating. Jargon is like that, and the more rarefied it is—the fewer people who understand it besides you—the more it resembles the common hydrofloxia. It has a seductive aroma. You can get drunk on it.
Page 185
The three computer scientists at MIT who created SCIgen had shown how easily jargon gone amok can open the door to fraudulent research papers: nonsense leading to non-science.
Page 187
“Automatic SBIR Proposal Generator”
Page 187
Speaking jargon to the right person can save time and it can also lead to fewer errors.
Page 188
Their shocking conclusion was that very often extra knowledge is a disadvantage. At first it seems nonsensical that knowledge could be a burden, and even a curse. The problem, of course, is not in the knowledge itself. The problem is when you can’t imagine what it’s like not to have that knowledge.
Page 190
There’s something about having knowledge that makes it difficult to take the beginner’s view, to be able to think the way you did before you had that knowledge. And unless you’re aware that you actually know something the other person doesn’t know, you can be at a disadvantage.
Page 190
It’s like the line from a poem by Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Page 194
Scientists fail better when they’re looking for more truth rather than some absolute true-for-all-time truth.
Page 194
Virtue and Terror
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 20:11 on 20 January 2019This is one of those books that sits with you for a long while after you have finished reading it. If you don't know the circumstances happening at the time of the writing, or about the author, Maximilien Robespierre, himself, then the book might not linger.
If you recognize that the earlier works of Robespierre are what you want to hear from a leader, someone who is actively championing the underdog, the little guy, the poor, who believes in basic human rights for everyone, who actively fights against slavery; and then realize that the same man led the new government that overthrew the previous government and subsequently started murdering anyone who opposed the new government (or who was even suspected of opposing the new government), then you begin to recognize why the book is sticking with you for so long.
Yes, we want things to be fair. Yes, we want to be rewarded for our hard work. Yes, it would be great if everyone had an equal chance at opportunities. Yes, we want justice and equality.
But here we have a man who was against the death penalty, but argued strongly for the right of a government to execute, murder, anyone who opposed said government. You will have your Liberty by force, dammit.
Much of the justification he uses, yeah, I agree with. Some of it, not so much. This isn't a period in history that I paid strong attention to, though I wish I had, but from these kinds of writings. You can read about history, and yes, it reads like a story book. Then you read some of these works, you hear the words, you feel the emotions, and realize it wasn't a story, it happened, these were people. Suddenly, history becomes this absolutely fascinating saga about human nature. You can see how Robespierre played people, how our motivations are the same, how influence works, and how neuroscience has helped us understand many of these things.
We're still confusing creatures, but we have patterns. This book shows just how much they haven't changed.
I strongly recommend this book. It is a slow read.
Unformatted quotes that caught my attention:
The further crucial point to bear in mind is that, for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation.
Location 107
And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the moderates that what they really want is a ‘revolution without a revolution’: they want a revolution deprived of the excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to pre-existing norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the ‘divine’ dimension and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited goals: Citizens, did you want a revolution without a revolution? What is this spirit of persecution that has come to revise, so to speak, the one that broke our chains? But what sure judgement can one make of the effects that can follow these great commotions? Who can mark, after the event, the exact point at which the waves of popular insurrection should break? At that price, what people could ever have shaken off the yoke of despotism? For while it is true that a great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous movement, and that tyranny can only be hit by the portion of citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever dare to attack it if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold them responsible for the duration or violence of the political torment that had saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by tacit proxy for the whole of society. The French, friends of liberty, meeting in Paris last August, acted in that role, in the name of all the departments. They should either be approved or repudiated entirely. To make them criminally responsible for a few apparent or real disorders, inseparable from so great a shock, would be to punish them for their devotion.
Location 151
The best way to approach it is via Freud’s reluctance to endorse the injunction ‘Love thy neighbour!’ –the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbour –for example, what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the neighbour as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.
Location 196
Robespierre, in a true master stroke, assumes full subjectivization –waiting a little bit for the ominous effect of his words to take place, he then continues in the first-person singular: ‘I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.’ 16
Location 244
there are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself –exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing does not really concern me –is the highest treason.
Location 250
This is how Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, described the proper attitude of a warrior: every day without fail one should consider oneself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand. 18
Location 270
Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how are we to relate to the explicit norms, how are we to apply them: to what extent are we to take them literally, how and when are we allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, etc. –and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the metarules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to use a choice which is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (as in the case of potlatch).
Location 295
Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a ‘habit’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no –but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes.
Location 300
To cast off the yoke of habit means: if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such.
Location 314
Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct ‘terrorist’ imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal wages, equal health treatment …), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged).
Location 342
How are we to reinvent the Jacobin terror?
Location 406
Actually, what IS jacobian terror?
Location 406
Kant’s well-known thesis that Reason without Intuition is empty, while Intuition without Reason is blind: is not its political counterpart Robespierre’s dictum according to which Virtue without Terror is impotent, while Terror without Virtue is lethal, striking blindly?
Location 424
It is only such a radical stance that allows us to break with today’s predominant mode of politics, post-political biopolitics, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a defence against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the politics of the status quo: it is not the difference between two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself (with its burdensome taxation), fear of ecological catastrophes –such a (post) politics always amounts to a frightening rallying of frightened men.
Location 452
liberty consists in obeying laws voluntarily adopted, and servitude in being forced to submit to an outside will.
Location 987
All men born and domiciled in France are members of the political society called the French nation, in other words French citizens. That is what they are by the nature of things and by the main principles of the law of nations. The rights attached to this title depend neither on the fortune each individual possesses, nor on the amount of taxation to which he is subject, because it is not tax that makes us citizens; the quality of citizen only obliges him to contribute to the common expenditure of the state, according to his abilities. Now you can give laws to the citizens, but you cannot annihilate them.
Location 990
I ought only to answer with a word or two: the people, that multitude of men whose cause I am defending, have rights that come from the same origin as your own. Who gave you the power to take them away? General practicality,
Location 1007
There is more: unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more. The least resource left to despotism will soon restore its power.
Location 1026
The law, the public authority: is it not established to protect weakness against injustice and oppression? It is thus an offence to all social principles to place it entirely in the hands of the rich.
Location 1044
Do you really believe in all honesty that a hard and laborious life produces more faults than softness, luxury and ambition? And
Location 1063
Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest;
Location 1077
It gives the citizens this astonishing lesson: ‘Be rich, whatever the cost, or you will be nothing.’
Location 1155
To make laws to restore and establish the rights of your constituents. It is thus not possible for you to strip them of those same rights.
Location 1184
It falls only to the essentially infallible Being to be immutable; to change is not just a right but a duty for any human will that has faltered. Men who decide the fate of other men are less exempt than anyone from this common obligation.
Location 1200
it is necessary for surveillance by honest people to stand against the forces of ambitious and corrupt intriguers.
Location 1276
It is in the nature of things that the march of reason should be slow and gradual.
Location 1397
The most depraved government finds powerful support in the prejudices, the habits, the education of peoples.
Location 1397
In a sort of despair, they want to hurl themselves into a foreign war, as if they hoped that the mere change brought about by war would bring us to life, or that order and liberty would eventually emerge from the general confusion.
Location 1417
There are in revolutions movements contrary to liberty and movements that favour it, as in illnesses there are salutary crises and mortal ones. The favourable movements are those aimed directly against tyrants, like the Americans’ insurrection, or that of 14 July. But war on the outside, provoked, directed by the government in the circumstances we are in now, is a movement in the wrong direction, a crisis that could lead to the death of the body politic. Such a war can only send public opinion off on a false scent, divert the nation’s well-founded anxieties, and forestall the favourable crisis that attacks by enemies of liberty might have brought on.
Location 1420
During a foreign war the people, as I said, distracted by military events from political deliberations affecting the essential foundations of its liberty, is less inclined to take seriously the underhand manoeuvres of plotters who are undermining it and the executive government which is knocking it about, and pay less attention to the weakness or corruption of representatives who are failing to defend it.
Location 1425
The sort of man who would look with horror on the betrayal of the homeland can still be led by adroit officers to run its best citizens through with steel;
Location 1438
I am enlightening it; to enlighten free men is to awaken their courage, to prevent that courage itself from becoming a stumbling-block to their liberty;
Location 1472
I neither deny them nor believe them; for I have heard too many calumnies to believe denunciations that come from the same source and that all bear the imprint of bias or passion.
Location 1539
Might you not also reproach us for having illegally smashed the mercenary scribblers, whose profession was to propagate fraud and blaspheme against liberty?
Location 1551
Who can mark, after the event, the exact point at which the waves of popular insurrection should break? At that price, what people could ever have shaken off the yoke of despotism?
Location 1571
For while it is true that a great nation cannot rise in a simultaneous movement, and that tyranny can only be hit by the portion of citizens that is closest to it, how would these ever dare to attack it if, after the victory, delegates from remote parts could hold them responsible for the duration or violence of the political torment that had saved the homeland? They ought to be regarded as justified by tacit proxy for the whole of society.
Location 1572
M. Louvet himself generalized, in a very vague way, the accusation directed earlier against me personally; from this it seems certain that calumny had been doing its work in the shadows.
Location 1587
To form an accurate idea of these events, the truth should be sought, not in the writings or slanderous speeches that have misrepresented them, but in the history of the recent revolution.
Location 1596
So you only talk about dictatorship in order to exercise it yourself without any restraint; you only talk about proscriptions and tyranny because you want to proscribe and tyrannize.
Location 1656
I renounce the just vengeance I would have a right to pursue against the slanderers; I ask that that vengeance be nothing more than the return of peace and the triumph of liberty.
Location 1663
In every country where nature provides for the needs of men with prodigality, scarcity can only be imputed to defects of administration or of the laws themselves; bad laws and bad administration have their origins in false principles and bad morals.
Location 1678
You need at least to subject to severe examination all the laws made under royal despotism and under the auspices of noble, ecclesiastical or bourgeois aristocracy; and so far you have no others at all.
Location 1684
freedom of trade is necessary up to the point where homicidal greed starts to abuse it;
Location 1694
Common sense indicates, for example, the truth that foodstuffs that are in no way essential to life can be left to untrammelled speculation by the merchant; any momentary scarcity that might be felt is always a bearable inconvenience; and it is acceptable in general that the unlimited freedom of such a market should turn to the greater profit of the state and some individuals; but the lives of men cannot be subjected to the same uncertainty. It is not necessary that I be able to purchase brilliant fabrics; but I do need to be rich enough to buy bread, for myself and my children. The merchant is welcome to retain goods coveted by wealth and vanity in his shops, until he finds the moment to sell them at the highest possible price; but no man has the right to amass piles of wheat, when his neighbour is dying of hunger.
Location 1704
What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the imprescriptible rights of man. What is the first of those rights? The right to life.
Location 1710
The first social law is therefore the one that guarantees all members of society the means to live; all the others are subordinate to that one; property was only instituted and guaranteed to consolidate it; it is primarily to live that people have property.
Location 1711
No doubt if all men were just and virtuous; if cupidity were never tempted to devour the people’s substance; if the rich, receptive to the voices of reason and nature, regarded themselves as the bursars of society, or as brothers to the poor, it might be possible to recognize no law but the most unlimited freedom;
Location 1726
Let the circulation of goods be protected throughout the whole Republic; but let the necessary measures be taken to ensure that circulation takes place. It is precisely the lack of circulation that I am complaining about. For the scourge of the people, the source of scarcity, is the obstacles placed in the way of circulation, under the pretext of rendering it unlimited. Does public subsistence circulate when greedy speculators are keeping it piled in their granaries? Does it circulate, when it is accumulated in the hands of a small number of millionaires who withhold it from the market, to make it more valuable and rare; who coldly calculate how many families must perish before the commodity reaches the release date fixed by their atrocious avarice?
Location 1735
Ha! what sort of good citizen can complain of being obliged to act with probity and in broad daylight?
Location 1754
I am well aware that when we examine the circumstances of some particular riot, aroused by the real or imagined scarcity of wheat, we sometimes recognize the influence of an outside cause. Ambition and intrigue need to start trouble: sometimes it is those same men who stir up the people, to find the pretext to slaughter it and to make liberty itself seem terrible in the eyes of weak and selfish individuals. But it is no less true that the people is naturally upright and peaceable; it is always guided by a pure intention; the malevolent can only stir it up by presenting a motive that is powerful and legitimate in its eyes.
Location 1772
the greatest service the legislator can perform for men is to force them to be honest folk.
Location 1789
do not forget that the source of order is justice; that the surest guarantor of public peace is the well-being of the citizens,
Location 1798
It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us.
Location 1836
When a nation has been forced to resort to the right of insurrection, it returns to the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the social pact? He has annihilated it. The nation can still keep it, if it thinks fit, for everything concerning relations between citizens; but the effect of tyranny and insurrection is to break it entirely where the tyrant is concerned; it places them reciprocally in a state of war. Courts and legal proceedings are only for members of the same side.
Location 1842
Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Location 1849
It is less a question of enlightenment than of avoiding voluntary blindness.
Location 1920
Why is it that what seems clear to us at one time seems obscure at another?
Location 1921
There was no need for a revolution, surely, to teach the universe that extreme disproportion between fortunes is the source of many ills and many crimes, but we are nevertheless convinced that equality of possessions is a chimera.
Location 1970
Now, where public contributions are concerned, is there any principle more obviously derived from the nature of things and from eternal justice, than one that obliges the citizens to contribute to public expenditure progressively, in accordance with the size of their fortune, in other words in accordance with the advantages they draw from society?
Location 1998
XIX. In any free state, the law above all should defend public and individual liberty against abuse of authority by those who govern. Any institution that does not assume the people to be good, and the magistrate corruptible, is itself depraved.
Location 2044
XXXI. In both these cases, subjecting resistance against oppression to legal forms is the ultimate refinement of tyranny.
Location 2065
XXXIII. Offences committed by people’s representatives should be severely and promptly punished. No one has the right to claim to be more inviolable than other citizens.
Location 2067
The truth is that under the old empress, as under all women who hold the sceptre, it is men who govern.
Location 2323
That country combines the ferocity of savage hordes with the vices of civilized peoples.
Location 2324
Force can overthrow a throne; only wisdom can found a Republic.
Location 2368
They say their authority is its work. No: God created tigers; but kings are the masterpieces of human corruption.
Location 2443
Aristides11
Location 2469
Successes send weak souls to sleep; they spur strong souls on. Let
Location 2524
If revolutionary government should be more active in its working and freer in its movements than ordinary government, does that make it less just and less legitimate? No. It is supported by the holiest of all laws: the salvation of the people; by the most indisputable of all entitlements: necessity.
Location 2554
Yes! If it is accepted that there are moderates and cowards of good faith, why should there not be patriots of good faith, who are sometimes carried away by a praiseworthy sentiment to go too far?
Location 2582
By sketching the duties of revolutionary government, we have marked the pitfalls that threaten it. The greater its power, the more free and rapid its action, the more it should be directed by good faith. On
Location 2589
Let us raise our souls to the height of republican virtues and examples from antiquity. Themistocles7 had more genius than the Lacedaemonian general commanding the Greek fleet: however, when the general answered a much-needed piece of advice meant to save the country by raising his baton to strike him, Themistocles merely said ‘Strike then, but listen’, and Greece triumphed over the Asian tyrant.
Location 2603
Punishing a hundred obscure and subordinate culprits is less useful to liberty than executing the head of a conspiracy.
Location 2665
commerce the source of public wealth and not just the monstrous opulence of a few houses.
Location 2735
We want in our country to substitute morality for egoism, probity for honour, principles for practices, duties for proprieties, the rule of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, greatness of soul for vanity, love of glory for love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for fine wit, truth for brilliance, the charm of happiness for the boredom of luxury, the greatness of man for the pettiness of great men, a magnanimous, powerful, happy people for an amiable, frivolous and miserable people; in short all the virtues and miracles of the Republic for all the vices and absurdities of monarchy.
Location 2735
A democracy is not a state in which the people, continually assembled, manages all public business for itself, still less one in which a hundred thousand fractions of the people, through isolated, precipitate and contradictory measures, would decide the fate of the whole society: no such government has ever existed, and it could only exist to take the people back to despotism. Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does for itself all that it can do properly, and through delegates all that it cannot do for itself.
Location 2746
Thus, anything that tends to arouse love of the homeland, to purify morals, to elevate souls, to direct the passions of the human heart towards the public interest, should be adopted or established by you. Anything that tends to concentrate them on the abjectness of the personal self, to arouse crazes for small things and contempt for great ones, should be rejected or repressed by you.
Location 2775
A nation is really corrupted when, having lost by slow degrees its character and its liberty, it moves from democracy to aristocracy or monarchy; that is the death of the body politic through decrepitude.
Location 2795
From all of this we should deduce a great truth: that the character of popular government is to be trusting towards the people and severe with itself.
Location 2814
If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is virtue and terror both: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless.
Location 2827
Nature’s law is that any physical and moral entity must provide for its own preservation;
Location 2834
he would rather wear out a hundred red caps than perform one good act.
Location 2905
Do we need to assert the rights of the people oppressed by the government? They speak only of respect for the law and obedience to the constituted authorities.
Location 2933
The wish to forestall evil is always to them a reason for augmenting it. In the North the poultry were killed, depriving us of eggs, under the pretext that poultry eat grain. In the Midi, people wanted to uproot mulberry and orange trees, on the pretext that silk is a luxury product, and oranges unnecessary.
Location 2938
Would you believe that in the areas where superstition has had most influence, not content with loading the operations concerning religion with all the forms most calculated to render them odious, they spread terror among the people by starting a rumour that all children under ten and all old people over seventy were going to be killed? That this rumour was spread particularly in former Brittany and in the departments of Rhine and Moselle?
Location 2941
In perfidious hands all the remedies for our ills become poisons; whatever you can do, whatever you can say, they will turn it against you, even the truths we have just been developing.
Location 2954
Thus, for example, after having planted the seeds of civil war everywhere, with the violent attack on religious prejudices, they will seek to arm fanaticism and aristocracy with the very measures that sound policy recommended to you in favour of freedom of religion.
Location 2956
Democracy perishes through two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the people’s contempt for the authorities it has itself established, a contempt that results in each coterie, each individual appropriating public power, and brings the people, through excess of disorder, to annihilation or rule by a single individual.
Location 2971
There are two powers on earth, reason and tyranny; wherever one is predominant, the other is banned. Those who denounce the moral strength of reason as a crime are therefore seeking to revive tyranny.
Location 3112
Which is the more guilty, one who threatens its security through violence, or one who undermines its justice through seduction and perfidy? To mislead it is to betray it; to push it into acts contrary to its intentions and principles is to risk its destruction; for its power is based on virtue itself and on the confidence of the nation.
Location 3123
Why do those who used to say: I declare to you that we are walking on volcanoes, believe today that they are walking on nothing but roses?
Location 3177
Think about the end of the campaign; be afraid of internal factions; be afraid of the intrigues favoured by absence in a foreign land.
Location 3192
There should be no question of hobbling the people’s justice through new forms; penal law ought necessarily to have something vague about it because, the current character of the conspirators being one of dissimulation and hypocrisy, justice needs to be able to grasp them in all forms.
Location 3200
So the safeguard of patriotism lies not in the slowness or weakness of national law, but in the principles and integrity of those entrusted with it, in the good faith of the government, in the open protection it gives to patriots, and the energy with which it represses the aristocracy; in the public mind, and in certain moral and political institutions that, without hampering the workings of the law, offer a safeguard to good citizens and repress bad ones, through their influence on public opinion and on the direction of the revolutionary march; these will be proposed to you as soon as the most immediate conspiracies allow the friends of liberty time to draw breath.
Location 3203
Let us not be mistaken: establishing an immense Republic on foundations of reason and equality, holding all the parts of this immense empire together with vigorous bonds, is not an enterprise that can be completed thoughtlessly: it is the masterpiece of virtue and human reason. A host of factions springs up inside a great revolution; how can they be repressed, if you do not subject all the passions to constant justice? Your only guarantor of liberty is rigorous observation of the principles and the universal morality you have proclaimed. If reason does not reign, then crime and ambition must reign; without it, victory is just an instrument of ambition and a danger to liberty, a lethal pretext misused by intrigue to lull patriotism to sleep on the edge of the precipice; without it, what is the very meaning of victory?
Location 3243
know that every friend of liberty will always be trapped between a duty and a calumny; that those who cannot be accused of betrayal will be accused of ambition; that the influence of probity and principle will be likened to the strength of tyranny and the violence of factions; that your trust and your esteem will be certificates of proscription for all your friends; that the cries of oppressed patriotism will be called cries of sedition, and that, not daring to attack you in the mass, they will proscribe you singly in the persons of all good citizens, until the ambitious have organized their tyranny.
Location 3290
The Courage To Be Disliked
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 02:06 on 15 January 2019I actively did not like this book.
I was expecting the book to be a Japanese flavor of Stoicism, told in an interesting way.
Instead, it is an Adlerian philosophy lesson wrapped up in a conversation. The conversation part isn't the part that annoys me, so much as the Adler philosophy.
Basic tenets:
1. You act or feel a certain way because you chose to and you use your past or other circumstances to justify the behavior.
2. All problems are interpersonal relationship problems
3. All relationships should be horizontal, treat everyone as equals.
The second rule manifests itself in the Stoic philosophy of control, mostly that just about everything except how you react is outside of your control. Adler says don't take on other people's "life tasks." You can’t control what other people think of you, so why worry about it? This is pretty much the only part I agreed with.
The first rule is the one that completely annoyed me. it puts the blame on the individual for systemic prejudices against her, and says it's her fault for feeling angry or frustrated or annoyed or mad. Hey, are you upset that you're told no you can't go to a conference, but your male coworker can go, that's your problem you feel angry at that unfairness. Hey, are you mad that you and two other women were all "laid-off" because of "budget concerns" because you thought Cowboy was irresponsible and called him on it, well that's your problem you've been fired, not the boys club we had here at work, you didn't bow down fast enough.
I am pretty sure that anyone who says Adler's philosophy is great is at the top of his (yes, male gendered noun on purpose) power landscape.
Did not like this book. Do not like Adler's philosophy, mock anyone who you see reading this book.
PHILOSOPHER: There is no change in what I say. The world is simple and life is simple, too.
YOUTH: How? Anyone can see that it’s a chaotic mass of contradictions.
PHILOSOPHER: That is not because the world is complicated. It’s because you are making the world complicated.
Location 120
PHILOSOPHER: None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.
Location 125
There is no escape from your own subjectivity. At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.
Location 138
It’s as if you see the world through dark glasses, so naturally everything seems dark. But if that is the case, instead of lamenting about the world’s darkness, you could just remove the glasses. Perhaps the world will appear terribly bright to you then and you will involuntarily shut your eyes. Maybe you’ll want the glasses back on, but can you even take them off in the first place?
Location 142
But why does everyone feel they want to change? There’s only one answer: because they cannot change. If it were easy for people to change, they wouldn’t spend so much time wishing they could.
Page 8
He is not pretending to be sick. The anxiety and fear your friend is feeling are real. On occasion, he might also suffer from migraines and violent stomach cramps. However, these too are symptoms that he has created in order to achieve the goal of not going out.
Page 11
But Adler, in denial of the trauma argument, states the following: “No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”
Page 13
So, Stoicism. Gotcha
Page 13
We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.
Page 13
Every criminal has an internal justification for getting involved in crime. A dispute over money leads someone to engage in murder, for instance. To the perpetrator, it is something for which there is a justification and which can be restated as an accomplishment of “good.” Of course, this is not good in a moral sense, but good in the sense of being “of benefit to oneself.”
Page 29
The Greek word for “good” (agathon) does not have a moral meaning. It just means “beneficial.” Conversely, the word for “evil” (kakon) means “not beneficial.” Our world is rife with injustices and misdeeds of all kinds, yet there is not one person who desires evil in the purest sense of the word, that is to say something “not beneficial.”
Page 29
PHILOSOPHER: People are constantly selecting their lifestyles. Right now, while we are having this tête-à-tête, we are selecting ours. You describe yourself as an unhappy person. You say that you want to change right this minute. You even claim that you want to be reborn as a different person. After all that, then why are you still unable to change? It is because you are making the persistent decision not to change your lifestyle.
Page 34
What you should do now is make a decision to stop your current lifestyle. For instance, earlier you said, “If only I could be someone like Y, I’d be happy.” As long as you live that way, in the realm of the possibility of “If only such and such were the case,” you will never be able to change. Because saying “If only I could be like Y” is an excuse to yourself for not changing.
Page 37
He wants to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if he only had the time, or that he could write if he just had the proper environment, and that he really does have the talent for it.
Page 37
Adler’s teleology tells us, “No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.” That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life.
Page 40
PHILOSOPHER: Her story certainly isn’t unusual. Students preparing for their exams think, If I pass, life will be rosy. Company workers think, If I get transferred, everything will go well. But even when those wishes are fulfilled, in many cases nothing about their situations changes at all. YOUTH: Indeed.
Page 48
Why do you dislike yourself? Why do you focus only on your shortcomings, and why have you decided to not start liking yourself? It’s because you are overly afraid of being disliked by other people and getting hurt in your interpersonal relationships.
Page 50
But don’t forget, it’s basically impossible to not get hurt in your relations with other people. When you enter into interpersonal relationships, it is inevitable that to a greater or lesser extent you will get hurt, and you will hurt someone, too.
Page 51
YOUTH: In other words, the feelings of inferiority we’re suffering from are subjective interpretations rather than objective facts?
Page 58
PHILOSOPHER: That’s right. We cannot alter objective facts. But subjective interpretations can be altered as much as one likes. And we are inhabitants of a subjective world.
Page 58
PHILOSOPHER: This is the other aspect of the inferiority complex. Those who manifest their inferiority complexes in words or attitudes, who say that “A is the situation, so B cannot be done,” are implying that if only it were not for A, they’d be capable and have value.
Page 65
As Adler points out, no one is capable of putting up with having feelings of inferiority for a long period of time. Feelings of inferiority are something that everyone has, but staying in that condition is too heavy to endure forever.
Page 65
The healthiest way is to try to compensate through striving and growth. For instance, it could be by applying oneself to one’s studies, engaging in constant training, or being diligent in one’s work. However, people who aren’t equipped with that courage end up stepping into an inferiority complex. Again, it’s thinking, I’m not well educated, so I can’t succeed. And
Page 66
PHILOSOPHER: A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.
Page 73
YOUTH: Does that mean you dropped out of competition? That you somehow accepted defeat? PHILOSOPHER: No. I withdrew from places that are preoccupied with winning and losing. When one is trying to be oneself, competition will inevitably get in the way.
Page 75
PHILOSOPHER: This is what is so terrifying about competition. Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. You don’t want to be a loser. And you always have to keep on winning if you don’t want to be a loser. You can’t trust other people. The reason so many people don’t really feel happy while they’re building up their success in the eyes of society is that they are living in competition. Because to them, the world is a perilous place that is overflowing with enemies.
Page 78
PHILOSOPHER: Certainly, there are times when I feel indignation with regard to social problems. But I would say that rather than a sudden burst of emotion, it is indignation based on logic. There is a difference between personal anger (personal grudge) and indignation with regard to society’s contradictions and injustices (righteous indignation). Personal anger soon cools. Righteous indignation, on the other hand, lasts for a long time. Anger as an expression of a personal grudge is nothing but a tool for making others submit to you.
Page 82
PHILOSOPHER: If someone were to abuse me to my face, I would think about the person’s hidden goal. Even if you are not directly abusive, when you feel genuinely angry due to another person’s words or behavior, please consider that the person is challenging you to a power struggle.
Page 83
PHILOSOPHER: The first thing that I want you to understand here is the fact that anger is a form of communication, and that communication is nevertheless possible without using anger. We can convey our thoughts and intentions and be accepted without any need for anger.
Page 87
PHILOSOPHER: The moment one is convinced that “I am right” in an interpersonal relationship, one has already stepped into a power struggle.
Page 88
PHILOSOPHER: In the first place, the rightness of one’s assertions has nothing to do with winning or losing. If you think you are right, regardless of what other people’s opinions might be, the matter should be closed then and there. However, many people will rush into a power struggle and try to make others submit to them. And that is why they think of “admitting a mistake” as “admitting defeat.”
Page 89
PHILOSOPHER: Because of one’s mind-set of not wanting to lose, one is unable to admit one’s mistake, the result being that one ends up choosing the wrong path. Admitting mistakes, conveying words of apology, and stepping down from power struggles—none of these things is defeat. The pursuit of superiority is not something that is carried out through competition with other people.
Page 89
Adler does not accept restricting one’s partner. If the person seems to be happy, one can frankly celebrate that condition. That is love. Relationships in which people restrict each other eventually fall apart.
Page 97
The kind of relationship that feels somehow oppressive and strained when the two people are together cannot be called love, even if there is passion.
Page 98
As Adler says, “Children who have not been taught to confront challenges will try to avoid all challenges.”
Page 136
PHILOSOPHER: Maybe it is easier to live in such a way as to satisfy other people’s expectations. Because one is entrusting one’s own life to them. For example, one runs along the tracks that one’s parents have laid out. Even if there are a lot of things one might object to, one will not lose one’s way as long as one stays on those rails. But if one is deciding one’s path oneself, it’s only natural that one will get lost at times. One comes up against the wall of “how one should live.”
Page 139
And, in that case, one has no choice but to discipline oneself on the basis that other people are watching. To aspire to be recognized by others and live an honest life. Other people’s eyes are my guide. PHILOSOPHER: Does one choose recognition from others, or does one choose a path of freedom without recognition? It’s an important question—let’s think about it together. To live one’s life trying to gauge other people’s feelings and being worried about how they look at you. To live in such a way that others’ wishes are granted. There may indeed be signposts to guide you this way, but it is a very unfree way to live.
Page 139
Unless one is unconcerned by other people’s judgments, has no fear of being disliked by other people, and pays the cost that one might never be recognized, one will never be able to follow through in one’s own way of living. That is to say, one will not be able to be
Page 145
The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked.
Page 146
Though this might be termed a “you and I” relationship, if it is one that can break down just because you raise an objection, then it is not the sort of relationship you need to get into in the first place. It is fine to just let go of it. Living in fear of one’s relationships falling apart is an unfree way to live, in which one is living for other people.
Page 177
Do not cling to the small community right in front of you. There will always be more “you and I,” and more “everyone,” and larger communities that exist.
Page 177
One wishes to be praised by someone. Or conversely, one decides to give praise to someone. This is proof that one is seeing all interpersonal relationships as “vertical relationships.”
Page 181
Even if you do derive joy from being praised, it is the same as being dependent on vertical relationships and acknowledging that you have no ability. Because giving praise is a judgment that is passed by a person of ability onto a person without ability.
Page 186
When receiving praise becomes one’s goal, one is choosing a way of living that is in line with another person’s system of values.
Page 186
It is about having concern for others, building horizontal relationships, and taking the approach of encouragement.
Page 189
Adler goes so far as to warn that those who sacrifice their own lives for others are people who have conformed to society too much.
Page 220
PHILOSOPHER: Do not treat it as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots. Seemingly linear existence is actually a series of dots; in other words, life is a series of moments. YOUTH: A series of moments? PHILOSOPHER: Yes. It is a series of moments called “now.” We can live only in the here and now. Our lives exist only in moments.
Page 246
PHILOSOPHER: And Adler, having stated that “life in general has no meaning,” then continues, “Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.”
Page 259
Perenniel Seller
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 17:14 on 13 January 2019This is one of those books that was not what I was expecting, but was still fascinating to read. It made me wish I had a project that I was working on, so that I could apply the wisdom of the book to said project.
The unfortunate part of the book is that it is not a "here's how to do this thing you want to do so well that you have a hit, and as such, you can spend the rest of your life satisfied with that knowledge that 'you done good'." But really, if such a book did exist, it would be said hit, and then everything would be amazing, and we'd be back to the point where when everything's amazing, nothing is.
So, what is the fortunate part of the book? Eh.... it says, 'If you have a good idea and work really hard at it, and focus on it, ignoring all the distractions," you'll be successful (not necessarily financially or famously successful, but successful for some definition of successful).
At that point, promote the hell out of the work.
And here's how to do that.
Again, I really wish I had a project I could apply this book to. Honestly, I'm likely to come back to this book when I do. Worth reading if you have a project / product that you're willing to embrace the long-tail on, and not some flash in the pan, fleeting, POS thing that modern society seems to thrive on these days.
People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds.
Page 3
Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they’re heard about.
Page 19
To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus.
Page 19
Phil Libin, the cofounder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share with clients: “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”
Page 20
When we look to great works of history as our example, we see one thing: that powerful work is a struggle and that it requires great sacrifice. The desire for lasting greatness makes the struggle survivable, the sacrifice worth it.
Page 20
I’ve met with no shortage of smart, accomplished people who, I’ve realized, don’t actually want to write a book despite what they say. They want to have a book.
Page 22
To make something great, what’s required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can’t not.
Page 22
Every project must begin with the right intent. It might also need luck and timing and a thousand other things, but the right intent is nonnegotiable—and, thankfully, intent is very much in your control.
Page 24
willingness to trade off something—time, comfort, easy money, recognition—lies at the heart of every great work. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always a significant sacrifice that needs to happen. If it didn’t, everyone would do it.
Page 27
“If you focus on near-term growth above everything else,” he has written, “you miss the most important question you should be asking: Will this business still be around a decade from now?”
Page 33
Doing so is not simple, however. It can mean tough choices, saying no when everyone wants you to say yes—sometimes even the people closest to you who are counting on you.
Page 37
Frank Darabont, the director and writer of The Shawshank Redemption, was offered $ 2.5 million to sell the rights so that Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise could be cast as the stars.
Page 37
As Hemingway supposedly said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Page 37
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has some forty-seven alternative endings for Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He rewrote the first part of the book, by his own count, more than fifty times. He wrote all of them, trying them like pieces of a puzzle until one finally fit.
Page 38
On the other end of the creative spectrum, the brilliant military strategist John Boyd utilized what he called “drawdown periods.” After a one a.m. breakthrough, he’d spend weeks just looking at an idea, testing whether others had already come up with it, identifying possible problems with it. Only after this period ended would he begin the real work on the project.
Page 40
Creative people naturally produce false positives. Ideas that they think are good but aren’t. Ideas that other people have already had. Mediocre ideas that contain buried within them the seeds of much better ideas. The key is to catch them early. And the only way to do that is by doing the work at least partly in front of an audience.
Page 42
These conflicting, contradictory notes can be simultaneously ego-boosting or soul-crushing if you’re not careful. The proper approach is to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, so you can parse the constructive criticism you need from the notes you need to ignore.
Page 42
Creating is often a solitary experience. Yet work made entirely in isolation is usually doomed to remain lonely.
Page 43
You don’t have to be a genius to make genius—you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.
Page 43
Ask questions. How can I give people a sample of what I’m thinking? How does the idea resonate in conversation? What does an online audience think of it? What does a poll of your friends reveal?
Page 43
Instead, it’s about finding the germ of a good idea and then making it a great product through feedback and hard work. Forget going off into some cave.
Page 44
There is no question that planning is really important, but it’s seductive to get lost in that planning—to hope that the perfect project simply floats your way instead of deciding that it’s on you to make it.
Page 44
An audience isn’t a target that you happen to bump into; instead, it must be explicitly scoped and sighted in. It must be chosen.
Page 45
For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE.
Page 45
If you don’t know who you’re writing for or who you’re making for, how will you know if you’re doing it right? How will you know if you’ve done it? You are unlikely to hit a target you haven’t aimed for. Hope is not helpful here; having something and someone to measure against is.
Page 47
A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?
Page 48
People need to socialize, they need a job, and a place to live, and more.
Page 49
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten as a creator was from a successful writer who told me that the key to success in nonfiction was that the work should be either “very entertaining” or “extremely practical.”
Page 49
You want what you’re making to do something for people, to help them do something—and have that be why they will talk about it and tell other people about it.
Page 49
The bigger and more painful the problem you solve, the better its cultural hook, and the more important and more lucrative your attempt to address it can be.
Page 50
So the creator of any project should try to answer some variant of these questions: What does this teach? What does this solve? How am I entertaining? What am I giving? What are we offering? What are we sharing?
Page 51
They can’t seem to understand that most customers won’t get excited about a moderate improvement—because most people don’t even care. I’m always wary of any description that resembles “It’s like ______ but with ______.” I’m wary of it not only because it’s inherently unoriginal, but also because, again, it forces the creators to compete with the very dominant entity they are supposedly improving on.
Page 53
The higher and more exciting standard for every project should force you to ask questions like this: What sacred cows am I slaying? What dominant institution am I displacing? What groups am I disrupting? What people am I pissing off?
Page 54
The point is that you cannot violate every single convention simultaneously, nor should you do it simply for its own sake.
Page 56
Great books of timeless wisdom offer the same joys. Pick them up and open them at random—something will call out to you and help alleviate your suffering, even if you’ve already read the book a dozen times.
Page 57
If the first step in the process is coming to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save you—there’s no one to take this thing off your hands and champion it the rest of the way home—then the second is realizing that the person who is going to need to step up is you.
Page 67
Adults create perennial sellers—and adults take responsibility for themselves. Children expect opportunities to be handed to them; maturity is understanding you have to go out and make them.
Page 68
This is the most counterintuitive part of any creative process—just when you think you’re “done,” you’ll often find you’re not even close to being finished.
Page 70
Here is another famous Hemingway line on writing: “The first draft of anything is shit.”
Page 70
Imagine if every author or creator were given carte blanche to make whatever he or she wanted—a world in which no one ever challenged others’ work and green-lighted it sight unseen. As appealing as this might seem to creators, the result would be an avalanche of terrible first drafts released as final products.
Page 70
The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making.
Page 75
Nobody creates flawless first drafts. And nobody creates better second drafts without the intervention of someone else. Nobody.
Page 76
For that reason, Amazon actually requires managers who are launching a new product to write a press release about it before the idea is even given the green light.
Page 78
For creators, it’s typically easier to reach the smaller, better-defined group. If you reach the smaller group and wow them, there will be many opportunities to spread outward and upward.
Page 87
For books, the superagent and publishing entrepreneur Shawn Coyne (Robert McKee, Jon Krakauer, Michael Connelly) likes to use ten thousand readers as his benchmark. That’s what it takes, in his experience, for a book to successfully break through and for the ideas in it to take hold.
Page 88
You must create room for the audience to inhabit and relate to the work. You must avoid the trap of making this about you—because, remember, you won’t be the one buying it.
Page 89
The democratization of production was great news—it empowered people like you and me. The bad news is that it empowered millions of other people too.
Page 90
Three critical variables determine whether that will happen: the Positioning, the Packaging and the Pitch. Positioning is what your project is and who it is for. Packaging is what it looks like and what it’s called. The Pitch is the sell—how the project is described and what it offers to the audience. Each is essential.
Page 90
That saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover”? It’s total nonsense. Of course you can judge a book by its cover—that’s why books have covers.
Page 91
Consider how someone would describe your book, movie, restaurant, campaign, candidacy—whatever—at a party. Consider someone trying to tell someone else about it in just 140 characters. What would they say? Will they feel stupid saying it? It’s a ______ that does ______ for ______. Have you made filling in those blanks as easy and exciting as possible? Have you done the hard work for them?
Page 95
That is: What’s your sell for this thing? How do you tell people what it is and why they should care?
Page 95
At some point in the near future (the third section of this book), you’re going to have to describe to other human beings what this project is in an exciting and compelling way. You’re going to need to explain to reporters, prospective buyers or investors, publishers, and your own fans: Who this is for Who this is not for Why it is special What it will do for them Why anyone should care The one sentence and one paragraph can be taken and tweaked for public consumption. It’s creating a literal elevator pitch: You’ve got fifteen seconds to catch an important person’s attention.
Page 97
The answer should be clear by now: I am making a ______ that does ______ for ______ because ______. The “why” doesn’t need to be public—but if you can’t define your goal for yourself, how will you know if you’ve achieved it? How will you know how to make decisions in situations where that goal is threatened or jeopardized?
Page 98
Once that has occurred, there is one last thing you must do. You must deliberately forsake all other missions.
Page 99
Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.
Page 100
Only crazy people would compare themselves to people on totally different tracks.
Page 101
The fashion designer Marc Ecko has good advice: We can’t prioritize the gatekeepers (the media) over the goalkeepers (the audience). To do so is foolishly shortsighted.
Page 103
Herb Cohen, considered one of the world’s greatest negotiators, famously said, “You’re better off with a great salesman and a mediocre product than with a masterpiece and a moron to sell it.”
Page 111
The idea that you won’t have to work to sell your product is more than entitled. “‘ If you build it they will come’ can happen, but to count on that is naive,”
Page 112
I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.
Page 114
The mark of a future perennial seller is a creator who doesn’t believe he is God’s gift to the world, but instead thinks he has created something of value and is excited and dedicated to get it out there. Guess what? A sense of entitlement is not how you’re going to reach them. Hunger and humility make the difference.
Page 116
Our marketing efforts, then, should be catalysts for word of mouth. We are trying to create the spark that leads to a fire.
Page 119
no one gets coverage for thinking about maybe doing something. You get coverage for taking a stand, for risking something, for going out there and creating news where there wasn’t any before. You don’t get coverage for what you feel or what you believe. Only what you do with those beliefs or feelings.
Page 158
And that’s a useful standard for good advertising: is it about your ego or is it about doing something of value? The fact is, humor and levity will probably do more for your brand over the long term than trying to beat people over the head with brilliantly effective advertising copy. So if you are going to advertise—if you have determined that it is wiser to spend a dollar there than on anything else you might do—then at least make sure you have a good time and that your audience has one too.
Page 169
The best strategy is to try everything and see what works for your project—because it’s going to be different for every single project. When you find something, stick with it. Marketing is the art of allocating resources—sending more power to the wheels that are getting traction, sending it away from the ones that are spinning. And investing in each strategy until the results stop working. Then find the next one!
Page 171
Everyone wants a platform when they need one. People want to have a big list—they just don’t want to lay the groundwork for one beforehand. They think a robust platform is their God-given right for being so smart and talented. Or they think that since they’ve been successful in the past, obviously everyone is going to line up to buy whatever they’re doing now. Sorry—not how it works.
Page 182
It’s hard to be an artist when a middleman gets to decide which pieces of your art make it to viewers.
Page 183
They’re afraid of carving their own path and finding nothing at the end of it. They’re overly concerned with the vanity and status consciousness of fans who are comfortable in the traditional system.
Page 183
Mainstream media is learning the hard way what happens when you outsource audience engagement to search engines or social media.
Page 187
Eight-and nine-figure social media metrics can be very intoxicating, but we should be wary of overinvesting in social platforms, because they come and go—ask all the folks who had large Myspace followings—and it’s entirely outside our control. Their policies can change; they can get acquired or go bankrupt. They can suddenly start charging you money for services that you once expected would be free.
Page 187
The best way to create a list is to provide incredible amounts of value. Here are some strategies to help you do that: Give something away for free as an incentive. (Maybe it’s a guide, an article, an excerpt from your book, a coupon for a discount, etc.) Create a gate. (There used to be a Facebook tool that allowed musicians to give away a free song in exchange for a Facebook like or share—that’s a gate. BitTorrent does the same thing with its Bundles—some of the content is free, and if you want the rest of it, you’ve got to fork over an email address.) Use pop-ups. (You’re browsing a site and liking what you see and BOOM a little window pops up and asks if you want to subscribe. I put such pop-ups at the back of all my books.) Do things by hand. (I once saw an author pass around a clipboard and a sign-up sheet at the end of a talk. It was old-school, but it worked. Also, at the back of my books I tell people to email me if they want to sign up, and then I sign them up by hand.) Run sweepstakes or contests. (Why do you think the lunch place by your office has a fishbowl for business cards? Those cards have phone numbers and email addresses. They give away a sandwich once a week and get hundreds of subscribers in return.) Do a swap. (One person with a list recommends that their readers sign up for yours; you email your fans for theirs.) Promise a service. (The last one is the simplest and most important. What does your list do for people? Promise something worth subscribing to and you’ll have great success.) Lists vary in size and quality, but they all have one thing in common—they start at zero. I
Page 190
To get your first one hundred subscribers, Noah recommends doing this: Put a link in your email signature. How many emails do you send a day? See which social networks allow you to export your followers and send them a note asking them to join. Post online once a week asking your friends/ family/ coworkers to join your mailing list. Ask one group you are active in to join your newsletter. Create a physical form you can give out at events. That’s a pretty decent start, requiring very little effort.
Page 191
Some of Tim’s strategies: Never dismiss anyone—You never know who might help you one day with your work.
Page 193
Play the long game—It’s not about finding someone who can help you right this second. It’s about establishing a relationship that can one day benefit both of you. Focus on “pre-VIPs”—The people who aren’t well known but should be and will be.
Page 193
Be generous, do favors, help other people with their products.
Page 194
The comedian Marc Maron perfectly encapsulates how we feel when we see a peer or competitor snag some big opportunity or score a big break. In such moments of jealousy and envy, we say, “How did you get that?” The emphasis there on “you” is important, as in, “It should have been me,” and the “that,” as in, “You don’t deserve something so great.” We’re mad that others were more successful than us, that somehow everything seemed to break their way, perhaps bitter that people opened doors for them and not for us. This is not only a miserable way to live, but it also misses the point. No one is entitled to relationships only because their work is genius. Relationships have to be earned, and maintained.
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As I see it, not everyone who publishes a book is an author. He or she is just someone who has published a book. The best way to become an author is to write more books, just as a true entrepreneur starts more than one business. The best way to become a true comedian, filmmaker, designer, or entrepreneur is to never stop, to keep going. Obviously there are exceptions to this—there are plenty of brilliant creators who have made only one thing. They are still entrepreneurs just as Harper Lee is clearly an author.
Page 208
As Goethe’s maxim goes, “The greatest respect an author can have for his public is never to produce what is expected but what he himself considers right and useful for whatever stage of intellectual development has been reached by himself and others.” This is true for any type of creative person.
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There’s another reality of creative businesses that we need to consider: Most of the real money isn’t in the royalties or the sales. For authors, the real money comes from speaking, teaching, or consulting.
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Luck is polarizing. The successful like to pretend it does not exist. The unsuccessful or the jaded pretend that it is everything. Both explanations are wrong. No matter what we have heard from our parents and internalized as part of the American Dream, hard work does not trump all. At the very, very top, the world is not a simple meritocracy, and it never has been.
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Incognito
Book Notes kitt decided around 17:48 on 12 January 2019 to publish this:I started reading this book and thought, very quickly, hey, I know this stuff already. This feels very familiar.
And a few pages into the book, I realized why when my first highlight appeared: I'd read this book before.
I don't recall when I'd read the book before, as it isn't in my notes for the last 4 years, but I had read it before. After debating for a bit on whether to reread it or put it down in favor of a new book, I figured I could give it a read, and read it quickly. Was not disappointed in myself.
The brain does a lot. We are oblivious to pretty much all of it. We can, however, be aware of some of that blindness, be aware of how we are going to react even when we expect and want to react differently, be aware of how small changes can improve our lives, and be gentle with ourselves when we are strange.
This book is seven years old. While we have more research, more theories, and more data about the brain, the fundamentals are the same, which makes this a great second read, too. I'd be interested in a follow up book with curation of the latest research.
Anyway, definitely worth reading, even recommended.
As far as anyone can tell, we’re the only system on the planet so complex that we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That’s us.
Page 2
Alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts.
Page 3
The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.
Page 4
The men were consistently more attracted to the women with dilated eyes.
Page 4
This might explain a few things for me.
Instead, they simply felt more drawn toward some women than others, for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Page 5
In the largely inaccessible workings of the brain, something knew that a woman’s dilated eyes correlates with sexual excitement and readiness.
Page 5
How is it possible to get angry at yourself: who, exactly, is mad at whom?
Page 19
It is interesting to consider that the majority of human beings live their whole lives unaware that they are only seeing a limited cone of vision at any moment.
Page 24
One of the most pervasive mistakes is to believe that our visual system gives a faithful representation of what is “out there” in the same way that a movie camera would.
Page 24
As Mariotte delved more deeply into this issue, he realized that there is a hole in our vision—what has come to be known as the “blind spot” in each eye. To demonstrate this to yourself, close your left eye and keep your right eye fixed on the plus sign. Slowly move the page closer
Page 32
My blind spot caused me all sorts of grief after I started having migraines at nine years old. I couldn't tell migraine spots from my blind spot and had to see a few doctors to figure out what the blindness was.
But more significantly, no one had noticed because the brain “fills in” the missing information from the blind spot.
Page 33
When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern.
Page 33
Unless you're having a migraine with auras, then all bets are off.
He discovered that outfielders use an unconscious program that tells them not where to end up but simply how to keep running. They move in such a way that the parabolic path of the ball always progresses in a straight line from their point of view. If the ball’s path looks like its deviating from a straight line, they modify their running path.
Page 37
Fascinating!
Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light.
Page 40
Consider the way you are reading the letters on this page. Your eyes flick effortlessly over the ornate shapes without any awareness that you are translating them: the meaning of the words simply comes to you. You perceive the language, not the low-level details of the graphemes.
Page 41
The second is that the people experiencing the hallucinations are discomfited by the knowledge that their visual scene is at least partially the counterfeit coinage of their brains.
Page 45
Though, if you grew up with migraines, you kinda learn early on not to trust absolutely what you see, and always take a second look.
In this way, the brain refines its model of the world by paying attention to its mistakes.
Page 49
It will come as no surprise to you that the mere exposure effect is part of the magic behind product branding, celebrity building, and political campaigning: with repeated exposure to a product or face, you come to prefer it more. The mere exposure effect is why people in the public spotlight are not always as disturbed as one might expect by negative press.
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Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true.
Page 65
F'ing brain.
Nothing is inherently tasty or repulsive—it depends on your needs. Deliciousness is simply an index of usefulness.
Page 76
Each organism has its own umwelt, which it presumably assumes to be the entire objective reality “out there.”
Page 77
Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.
Page 89
Researchers (as well as purveyors of pornography) have been able to discern a surprisingly narrow range for the female proportions that males find most attractive: the perfect ratio between the waist and hips usually resides between 0.67 and 0.8. The waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy centerfolds has remained at about 0.7 over time, even as their average weight has decreased. 22 Women with a ratio in this range are not only judged by males as more attractive, but are also presumed to be more healthy, humorous, and intelligent.
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When men ranked the beauty of women’s faces, they found the women with dilated eyes more attractive, because dilated eyes signal sexual interest.
Page 92
The Babylonian Talmud contains a passage in the same spirit: “In came wine, out went a secret.”
It later advises, “In three things is a man revealed: in his wine goblet, in his purse, and in his wrath.”
Page 103
Many people prefer a view of human nature that includes a true side and a false side—in other words, humans have a single genuine aim and the rest is decoration, evasion, or cover-up. That’s intuitive, but it’s incomplete.
Page 104
Your brain, as well, interprets your body’s actions and builds a story around them. Psychologists have found that if you hold a pencil between your teeth while you read something, you’ll think the material is funnier; that’s because the interpretation is influenced by the smile on your face. If you sit up straight instead of slouching, you’ll feel happier. The brain assumes that if the mouth and spine are doing that, it must be because of cheerfulness.
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Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.
Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.
Page 138
A popular model in the neuroscience literature suggests that dream plots are stitched together from essentially random activity: discharges of neural populations in the midbrain. These signals tickle into existence the simulation of a scene in a shopping mall, or a glimpse of recognition of a loved one, or a feeling of falling, or a sense of epiphany. All these moments are dynamically woven into a story, and this is why after a night of random activity you wake up, roll over to your partner, and feel as though you have a bizarre plot to relate.
Page 139
Consider the concept of a secret. The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.
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After years of study, Pennebaker concluded that “the act of not discussing or confiding the event with another may be more damaging than having experienced the event per se.”
He and his team discovered that when subjects confessed or wrote about their deeply held secrets, their health improved, their number of doctor visits went down, and there were measurable decreases in their stress hormone levels.
Page 145
The main reason not to reveal a secret is aversion to the long-term consequences. A friend might think ill of you, or a lover might be hurt, or a community might ostracize you. This concern about the outcome is evidenced by the fact that people are more likely to tell their secrets to total strangers; with someone you don’t know, the neural conflict can be dissipated with none of the costs.
Page 146
If we hope to invent robots that think, our challenge is not simply to devise a subagent to cleverly solve each problem but instead to ceaselessly reinvent subagents, each with overlapping solutions, and then to pit them against one another. Overlapping factions offer protection against degradation (think of cognitive reserve) as well as clever problem solving by unexpected approaches.
Page 147
Some people are constitutionally incapable of keeping a secret, and this balance may tell us something about the battles going on inside them and which way they tip. Good spies and secret agents are those people whose battle always tips toward long-term decision making rather than the thrill of telling.
Page 150
When your biology changes, so can your decision making, your appetites, and your desires. The drives you take for granted (“ I’m a hetero/ homosexual,” “I’m attracted to children/ adults,” “I’m aggressive/ not aggressive,” and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery.
Page 155
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices.
It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong.
Page 157
As far as we can tell, all activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network. For better or worse, this seems to leave no room for anything other than neural activity—that is, no room for a ghost in the machine. To consider this from the other direction, if free will is to have any effect on the actions of the body, it needs to influence the ongoing brain activity. And to do that, it needs to be physically connected to at least some of the neurons. But we don’t find any spot in the brain that is not itself driven by other parts of the network. Instead, every part of the brain is densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore “free.” So in our current understanding of science, we can’t find the physical gap in which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
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However, at this point, no one can see a clear way around the problem of a nonphysical entity (free will) interacting with a physical entity (the stuff of the brain).
Page 167
To help a citizen reintegrate into society, the ethical goal is to change him as little as possible to allow his behavior to come into line with society’s needs.
Page 182
Poor impulse control is a hallmark characteristic of the majority of criminals in the prison system.
Page 182
If it seems difficult to empathize with people who have poor impulse control, just think of all the things you succumb to that you don’t want to. Snacks? Alcohol? Chocolate cake? Television? One doesn’t have to look far to find poor impulse control pervading our own landscape of decision making. It’s not that we don’t know what’s best for us, it’s simply that the frontal lobe circuits representing the long-term considerations can’t win the elections when the temptation is present. It’s like trying to elect a party of moderates in the middle of war and economic meltdown.
Page 182
Recall the patients with frontotemporal dementia who shoplift, expose themselves, urinate in public, and burst out into song at inappropriate times. Those zombie systems have been lurking under the surface the whole time, but they’ve been masked by a normally functioning frontal lobe.
Page 184
The same goes for the mentally retarded or schizophrenic; punitive action may slake bloodlust for some, but there is no point in it for society more broadly.
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Biological explanation will not exculpate criminals. Brain science will improve the legal system, not impede its function. 36 For the smooth operation of society, we will still remove from the streets those criminals who prove themselves to be over-aggressive, under-empathetic, and poor at controlling their impulses. They will still be taken into the care of the government. But the important change will be in the way we punish the vast range of criminal acts—in terms of rational sentencing and new ideas for rehabilitation. The emphasis will shift from punishment to recognizing problems (both neural and social) and meaningfully addressing them.
Page 190
Effective law requires effective behavioral models: understanding not just how we would like people to behave, but how they actually behave.
Page 191
Visual illusions reveal a deeper concept: that our thoughts are generated by machinery to which we have no direct access.
Page 194
The dethronement led to a richer, deeper understanding, and what we lost in egocentrism was counterbalanced in surprise and wonder.
Page 196
(It is also the case that a virtuous actor can have minimal temptations and therefore no requirement for good brakes, but one could suggest that the more virtuous person is he who has fought a stronger battle to resist temptation rather than he who was never enticed.)
Page 197
All of this leads to a key question: do we possess a soul that is separate from our physical biology—or are we simply an enormously complex biological network that mechanically produces our hopes, aspirations, dreams, desires, humor, and passions? 7 The majority of people on the planet vote for the extrabiological soul, while the majority of neuroscientists vote for the latter: an essence that is a natural property that emerges from a vast physical system, and nothing more besides.
Page 203
As soon as your drink is spiked, your sandwich is sneezed upon, or your genome picks up a mutation, your ship moves in a different direction. Try as you might to make it otherwise, the changes in your machinery lead to changes in you. Given these facts on the ground, it is far from clear that we hold the option of “choosing” who we would like to be.
Page 209
Who you turn out to be depends on such a vast network of factors that it will presumably remain impossible to make a one-to-one mapping between molecules and behavior (more on that in the moment).
Page 209
If there’s something like a soul, it is at minimum tangled irreversibly with the microscopic details.
Page 209
In other words, a lower level of social acceptance into the majority correlates with a higher chance of a schizophrenic break. In ways not currently understood, it appears that repeated social rejection perturbs the normal functioning of the dopamine systems.
Page 211
In my view, the argument from parsimony is really no argument at all—it typically functions only to shut down more interesting discussion. If history is any guide, it’s never a good idea to assume that a scientific problem is cornered.
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Keep in mind that every single generation before us has worked under the assumption that they possessed all the major tools for understanding the universe, and they were all wrong, without exception.
Page 223
“Vision after early blindness.”
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eagleman.com/ incognito for interactive demonstrations of how little we perceive of the world. For excellent reviews on change blindness, see Rensink, O’Regan, and Clark, “To see or not to see”; Simons, “Current approaches to change
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Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 20:51 on 9 January 2019Okay, I really have no idea why I picked up this book. It was on some list, it sounded interesting, so I picked it up.
This is not a guide to political revolution.
This is a Bernie Sanders Manifesto, along with resources to work within the system.
The book is a long iteration of his platform, is beliefs, what he stands for. The book says, "Here is a problem. Here is how I think this problem could be solved." Not, "Here's how to solve this problem, and the data to prove it will work." Not, "Here's the legislation I have introduced." Not, "Here is the cultural problem that contributes to this social problem and do these actions to fix it."
Revolution is painful, the callouts in this book to "get involved" are not. Yes, they are time consuming, but revolution means an overhaul of the system, not an evolution of the system.
One can appreciate what Sanders is trying to do to make the country better. A complete upheaval might be the way to go. This is not the guidebook for that revolution. Better to look at The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for a guide, even if I disagree with that book's actual politics.
The book is worth a read to understand what Sanders stands for. For that part, it was worth the read. I don't disagree with much of his platform, I just don't see the pilot programs, the supporting data, or the means to implement.
In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a basic principle of American economic life should be that if you work forty hours or more a week, you do not live in poverty.
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Increasing the minimum wage is good for businesses as well as workers because it reduces employee turnover. When workers earn a living wage, they are more likely to stay with their company.
Location 120
And spend money.
Public assistance given to low-wage workers is essentially subsidizing the profits of the companies paying the low wages.
Location 126
Which is bullshit.
Walmart makes profits by paying wages so low that the workers not only qualify for but also need public assistance just to get by.
Location 131
Hate Walmart.
I do not believe that the government should burden taxpayers with the financial support of profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country. That’s absurd.
Location 145
If we are serious about reversing the decline of the middle class, we need a major federal jobs program that puts millions of Americans to work at decent-paying jobs. We need workers to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure—our roads, bridges, water systems, wastewater plants, airports, railways, levees, and dams.
Location 258
Our tax code essentially legalizes tax dodging for large corporations.
Location 349
America is not broke. The very wealthy and huge, profitable corporations just aren’t paying the taxes that, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. more than a century ago, “are what we pay for a civilized society.”
Location 364
The Roundtable also wants to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to seventy, and to cut cost-of-living adjustments for seniors and disabled veterans. These CEOs callously promote the idea that increasing their corporate profits is more important than their fellow Americans receiving the benefits they have earned by working or by serving in the military.
Location 369
We have been losing millions of jobs as a direct result of our disastrous trade policies. This is a major contributor to the decline of the middle class, rising poverty, and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else. We must do everything possible to stop companies from outsourcing American jobs.
Location 444
Americans see that there are different rules for the rich and powerful than for everyone else. They see kids arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana or for other minor crimes. But when it comes to Wall Street executives, whose illegal behavior hurts millions of Americans, they see that there are no arrests, no police records, and no jail time.
Location 555
There is something fundamentally wrong with our criminal justice system when not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy in 2008.
Location 565
“Equal Justice Under Law” cannot just be words engraved over the doors of the Supreme Court.
Location 567
 To create an economy that works for all americans and not just a handful of billionaires, we have to address the ever-increasing size of the megabanks.
 We must end, once and for all, the scheme that is nothing more than a free insurance policy for wall street: “too big to fail.”
 We need a banking system that is part of a productive economy—making loans at affordable rates to small and medium-sized businesses—so we can create a growing economy with decent-paying jobs.
 We need a banking system that encourages homeownership by offering affordable mortgage products that are designed to work for both the lender and the borrower.
 We need a banking system that is transparent and accountable and that adheres to the highest ethical standards as well as to the spirit and the letter of the law.
Location 574
One might have thought that as part of the bailout, these huge banks would have been reduced in size to make certain that we never experience a recurrence of what happened in 2008. In fact, the very opposite occurred. Today, three of the four largest financial institutions—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—are about 80 percent bigger than they were before we bailed them out.
Location 585
No financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure would send the world economy into crisis.
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If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
Location 592
Today, commercial banks still have over $ 177.46 trillion of derivatives contracts on their books. That is insane.
Location 603
All derivatives trading should be done in an open, transparent exchange similar to the stock market, without exceptions. As
Location 615
Needless to say, this game of high-speed speculation adds absolutely nothing to a productive economy.
Location 628
We have to discourage reckless gambling on Wall Street and encourage productive investments in a job-creating economy.
Location 631
we need to turn for-profit credit-rating agencies into transparent nonprofit institutions that are independent from Wall Street and accountable to a board of directors that represents the public interest.
Location 656
The decisions that the Federal Reserve made during the 2008 crisis sent a very clear message: while the rich and powerful are “too big to fail” and are worthy of an endless supply of cheap credit, ordinary Americans must fend for themselves. This was a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.
Location 687
We must require the Government Accountability Office to conduct a full and independent audit of the Fed every year.
Location 718
Health care should be a right, not a perk of being employed.
Location 757
it has never made sense to me that our health care system is primarily designed to make huge profits for multibillion-dollar insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and medical equipment suppliers.
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The details of the national health systems vary in each of these countries, but all of them guarantee health care for all their citizens, and none of them allow private health insurance companies to profit off human illness.
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Think about the extraordinary impact it would have on our economy if all Americans had the freedom to follow their dreams and not worry about whether the family had health insurance.
Location 824
The pharmaceutical industry, because of its great power, rarely loses legislative fights. It has effectively purchased the Congress, and there are Republican and Democratic leaders who support its every effort.
Location 863
There was a time, forty or fifty years ago, when many people could graduate from high school and move right into a decent-paying job with good benefits. Strong unions offered apprenticeships, and a large manufacturing sector provided opportunities for those without an advanced degree.
Location 974
Exactly how much do students benefit by having, in some cases, dozens of vice presidents of this or that, each earning hundreds of thousands of dollars or more?
Location 989
Another reason college educations are becoming so expensive is that colleges are increasingly being run as businesses competing for market share.
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In fact, it is much easier for a big bank or corporation to declare insolvency and be forgiven for outstanding debts than it is for an individual going through personal bankruptcy to be discharged from a student loan.
Location 1011
America rightfully outlawed debtors’ prisons in the mid-nineteenth century, but some cities and states are issuing contempt-of-court warrants that get around those rules.
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The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, of which I have long been a member, found that these for-profit schools spend, on average, about 30 percent more per student on marketing and recruiting than on actual instruction.
Location 1035
Not everybody wants to go to college, and not everybody needs to go to college. This country needs carpenters, plumbers, welders, bricklayers, ironworkers, mechanics, and many other professions that pay workers, especially those in unions, good wages for doing very important, skilled work.
Location 1049
In today’s world, that’s not quite the way it works. In opposition to science and what the people want are enormously powerful forces who want to maintain the status quo. They are more interested in short-term profits for fossil fuel companies than in the future of the planet.
Location 1188
Forty percent of energy used in this country goes to heat, cool, and light buildings and run electricity through them.
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The great irony of climate change is that American taxpayers are subsidizing the most profitable industry in history, whose products are quite literally killing us, to the tune of more than $ 20.5 billion every single year.
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For every dollar of taxpayer funds invested in renewable energy over the past fifteen years, fossil fuels have received eighty dollars!
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We should also end all new federal leases for oil, gas, or coal extraction on public lands and waters. Public lands and waters are for the public to enjoy for generations to come—not for the oil companies to exploit for profit in the short term.
Location 1277
The hypocrisy of those who argue that solar and wind tax credits are too expensive or are no longer needed because the industries should be able to stand on their own is stunning. Taxpayers have been subsidizing fossil fuel companies through tax credits for more than one hundred years, and Congress long ago made those incentives permanent features of the federal tax code.
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Police officers must be held accountable. In a society based on law, nobody can be above the law, especially those who are charged with enforcing it.
Location 1407
African Americans and Latinos together comprised 57 percent of all prisoners in 2015, even though neither of these two groups makes up even one-quarter of the U.S. population.
Location 1431
The time is long overdue for this country to understand that we cannot jail our way out of health problems like mental illness and drug addiction.
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We have around 4 percent of the world’s population, yet we have more than 20 percent of all prisoners.
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And we spend $ 80 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars to lock them up.
Location 1458
Private corporations should not be making profits off of the incarceration of human beings.
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No one, in my view, should be allowed to profit from putting more people behind bars.
Location 1469
Every effort should be made to have police forces reflect the diversity of the communities they work in. And that must include in positions of leadership and training departments.
Location 1504
We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies. Police departments must be part of the community they serve and be trusted by the community.
Location 1506
We should federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold everyone accountable, while also establishing standards to protect the privacy of innocent people.
Location 1509
When policing becomes a source of revenue, officers are often pressured to meet quotas that can lead to unnecessary or unlawful traffic stops and citations. And civil asset forfeiture laws allow police to take property from people even before they are charged with a crime.
Location 1516
Undocumented immigrants are woven into the fabric of our society and our economy. They work in some of the hardest and lowest-paid jobs.
Location 1587
Moreover, the institute estimates that they pay an average of 8 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes—which, by the way, is 48 percent more than the 5.4 percent paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers.
Location 1602
All too often, farmworkers are paid horrendously low wages, exposed to pesticides, and deprived of the most basic decent living conditions.
Location 1621
When employers report that they need to bring in foreign labor because there is no one in this country able to do their jobs, what is really going on is that there is no one here willing to do the job for the low wages being offered.
Location 1654
To my mind, the U.S. government should not be in the painful and inhumane business of locking up families who have fled violence.
Location 1684
Immigration reform must allow individuals to apply for relief, even if convicted of nonviolent offenses.
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Binding workers to a specific employer or not allowing their family members to work creates a situation rife with abuse and exacerbates an already unequal relationship between the employer and the employee.
Location 1726
Immigration reform means making sure our borders are modern and secure, especially in this era when terrorism can come from anywhere.
Location 1728
The word “government” refers to the way people organize authority to perform essential functions. It usually describes who does what, who has what power, and who is responsible for what. When there is no organized authority, there is no government, and that is called anarchy.
Location 1796
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 20:13 on 7 January 2019The gist of this book is "Social media is making us assholes. Don't be an asshole, stop playing the social media game."
There is merit to this. Social media comes at us uncurated and at ungodly speeds. We are easily manipulated (see 2016 elections and Twitter Outrage du Jour). Having a larger view of life, of issues, of the crisis, is very, very difficult in the moment, and lashing out to destroy is far, far easier than reaching out to build.
Lanier gives many compelling arguments: SM companies mine data about your without your knowledge and sell it, SM is addictive, SM turns us all into assholes.
If I hadn't already cut back on social media for other reasons, I suspect I'd be going through withdrawal trying to be less active on social media. As it is, I have my journals, and this site, and, yeah, I'm pretty okay with that.
This book is worth reading for everyone. Unfortunately, the people who are most likely to listen and agree with Lanier are the people you WANT on social media, because they care, because they are trying NOT to be assholes, because they want social media to be a good place to be. Alas, the sucky people will be the ones to stay. Fortunately, we don't have to stay with them.
The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.
Page 10
The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy.
Page 11
We know that relevant companies take in an astounding amount of money and that they don’t always know who their customers are. Therefore, there are likely to be actors manipulating us—manipulating you—who have not been revealed.
Page 24
To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.
Page 24
The problem occurs when all the phenomena I’ve just described are driven by a business model in which the incentive is to find customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behavior. Remember, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change. Your specific behavior change has been turned into a product.
Page 26
As explained in the first argument, the scheme I am describing amplifies negative emotions more than positive ones, so it’s more efficient at harming society than at improving it: creepier customers get more bang for their buck.
Page 26
If we could just get rid of the deleterious business model, then the underlying technology might not be so bad.
Page 27
How about “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”? BUMMER.
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BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real. Even at their best, BUMMER algorithms can only calculate the chances that a person will act in a particular way. But what might be only a chance for each person approaches being a certainty on the average for large numbers of people.
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One of the secrets of present-day Silicon Valley is that some people seem to be better than others at getting machine learning schemes to work, and no one understands why.
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To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasized clickbait and were detachable from context.
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I don’t want to be an asshole. Or a fake-nice person. I want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force.
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In the early days, before everyone was doing it, the air was clearer and it was easier to notice how bizarre it is when your inner troll starts talking. It’s like an ugly alien living inside you that you long ago forgot about. Don’t let your inner troll take control! If it happens when you’re in a particular situation, avoid that situation! It doesn’t matter if it’s an online platform, a relationship, or a job. Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.
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The pattern is found whenever people form into groups. Street gangs perceive only pack concepts such as territory and revenge, even as they destroy their lives, families, and neighborhoods. The Pack setting of the switch makes you pay so much attention to your peers and enemies in the world of packs that you can become blind to what’s happening right in front of your face. When the Solitary/ Pack switch is set to Pack, we become obsessed with and controlled by a pecking order. We pounce on those below us, lest we be demoted, and we do our best to flatter and snipe at those above us at the same time.
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collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.
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Full disclosure: I have a professional connection to LinkedIn that might impair my objectivity (even though I don’t have an account on the site). You should not accept what I say without thinking about it critically, and my disclosure of a conflict of interest is a great starting point to do that. Think for yourself!
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most people will choose to be something other than an asshole, given the choice. A
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If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, then leave that platform. Simple.
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Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.
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Truth, meaning a claim that can be tested or events that are honestly documented—the stuff that all people can hold in common—
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Leaving aside explicitly fake people like Alexa, Cortana, and Siri, you might think that you’ve never interacted with a fake person online, but you have, and with loads of them. You decided to buy something because it had a lot of good reviews, but many of those reviews were from artificial people. You found a doctor by using a search engine, but the reason that doctor showed up high in the search results was that a load of fake people linked to her office. You looked at a video or read a story because so many other people had, but most of them were fake. You became aware of tweets because they were retweeted first by armies of bots.
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Whatever you can do, bots can do a million times while you blink. Fake people are a cultural denial-of-service attack.
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You might think I’m being elitist when I am more appalled that “educated” parents, who are more likely to be affluent, foment dangerous nonsense, but isn’t the whole point of education supposed to be that it diminishes people’s susceptibility to dangerous nonsense?
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People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed.
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The ability of humans to enjoy our modern luxuries, such as a diminution of deadly epidemics, while even temporarily rejecting the benefits of hard-won truths is a testament to how far we’ve come as a technological species.
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Public health measures and modern medicine have doubled our life spans. Doubled! The unintended result is that now some of us can believe nonsense and not pay for that belief with our lives. At least for a while.
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What you say isn’t meaningful without context.
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The advertisers are the true customers, so they have a voice.
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The most common extreme examples, however, might arise when women and girls who attempt to express themselves online find that their words and images are sexualized or incorporated into a violent or manipulative framework.
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These extreme examples occur only because the rules of the game in BUMMER are that you don’t know the context in which you are expressing anything and you have no reliable way of knowing how it will be presented to someone else.
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We have given up our connection to context.
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Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit.
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To become a number is to be explicitly subservient to a system. A number is a public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.
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A news source will keep tweaking what it does until further tweaks no longer yield better results. After that, repetition. That’s why so much clickbait is so similar. There’s only this one weird trick to optimize clickbait. 6
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Feedback is a good thing, but overemphasizing immediate feedback within an artificially limited online environment leads to ridiculous outcomes.
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What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?
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But when everyone is on their phone, you have less of a feeling for what’s going on with them. Their experiences are curated by faraway algorithms. You and they can’t build unmolested commonality unless the phones are put away.
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The ability to theorize about what someone else experiences as part of understanding that person is called having a theory of mind. To have a theory of mind is to build a story in your head about what’s going on in someone else’s head. Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it’s a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It’s why stories exist.
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When you can only see how someone else behaves, but not the experiences that influenced their behavior, it becomes harder to have a theory of mind about that person. If you see someone hit someone else, for instance, but you did not see that they did it in defense of a child, you might misinterpret what you see.
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What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.
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Yes, of course it’s great that people can be connected, 12 but why must they accept manipulation by a third party as the price of that connection? What if the manipulation, not the connection, is the real problem? 13
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Since the core strategy of the BUMMER business model is to let the system adapt automatically to engage you as much as possible, and since negative emotions can be utilized more readily, of course such a system is going to tend to find a way to make you feel bad. It will dole out sparse charms14 in between the doldrums as well, since the autopilot that tugs at your emotions will discover that the contrast between treats and punishment is more effective than either treats or punishment alone. Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia. 15
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An insecurity, a feeling of not making the grade, a fear of rejection, out of nowhere.
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This feeling was coincident with discovering my inner troll, which I described in the argument about assholes, but it could also be felt distinctly. I took an experimental approach to myself. If I felt bad after using an internet design, what were its qualities? How was it different from designs that left me happy?
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More and more people rely on the gig economy, which makes it hard to plan one’s life. Gig economy workers rarely achieve financial security, even after years of work. To put it another way, the level of risk in their financial lives seems to never decline, no matter how much they’ve achieved. In the United States, where the social safety net is meager, this means that even skilled, hardworking people may be made homeless by medical bills, even after years of dedicated service to their profession.
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I hate raining on dreams, but if you think you are about to make a living as an influencer or similar, the statistics are voraciously against you, no matter how deserving you are and no matter how many get-rich-quick stories you’ve been fed.
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The problem is that BUMMER economics allow for almost no remunerative roles for near-stars. In a genuine, deep economy, there are many roles. You might not become a pro football player, but you might get into management, sports media, or a world of other related professions. But there are vanishingly few economic roles adjacent to a star influencer. Have a backup plan.
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Before the BUMMER era, the general thinking was that once a country went democratic, it not only stayed that way but would become ever more democratic, because its people would demand that. Unfortunately, that stopped being true, and only recently. 2 Something is drawing young people away from democracy.
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What social media did at that time, and what it always does, is create illusions: that you can improve society by wishes alone; that the sanest people will be favored in cutting contests; and that somehow material well-being will just take care of itself. What actually happens, always, is that the illusions fall apart when it is too late, and the world is inherited by the crudest, most selfish, and least informed people. Anyone who isn’t an asshole gets hurt the most.
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A year after the election, the truth started to trickle out. It turns out that some prominent “black” activist accounts were actually fake fronts for Russian information warfare. Component F. The Russian purpose was apparently to irritate black activists enough to lower enthusiasm for voting for Hillary. To suppress the vote, statistically.
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Most of what happened was probably the “redlined” promotion of cynicism, a dismissive attitude, and a sense of hopelessness (“ redlining” refers to a sneaky way that U.S. banks historically biased creditworthiness algorithms to disfavor black neighborhoods). I
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(As it happens, the individuals who work at BUMMER companies tend to be liberal and are probably mostly sympathetic to black activism, but that’s utterly irrelevant to their effect upon the world so long as they adhere to the mass manipulation business model.)
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BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game.
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One activist reportedly said, “They are using our pain for their gain. I’m profoundly disgusted.” That is an informed, reasonable statement, and a brave one, for it is not easy to accept that one has been tricked.
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Each of the arguments for deleting your accounts is at first glance about a practical issue, such as trust, but on closer inspection, the arguments confront the deepest and most tender concerns about what it means to be a person.
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So BUMMER intrinsically enacts a structural, rather than an ontological, change in the nature of free will. It will continue to exist, if under a barrage of insults. The important change is that you now have less free will, and a few people whom you don’t know have more of it. Some of your free will has been transferred to them. Free will has become like money in a gilded age.
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Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.
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The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning.
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Here are some tough truths: We currently don’t have a scientific description of a thought or a conversation. We don’t know how ideas are represented in a brain. We don’t know what an idea is, from a scientific point of view. That doesn’t mean we never will understand these things scientifically, just that we don’t yet understand them.
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The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common. BUMMER rejects it.
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The purpose of life, according to BUMMER, is to optimize.
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Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that “every single person has a sense of purpose and community.” 5 A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.
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The best way you can help is not to attack those who would manipulate you from afar, but simply to free yourself.
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You can even still watch YouTube videos, for now at least, without a Google account. Watching without an account and with some privacy plugins will give you access to a much less manipulative experience.
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You can’t use the internet well until you’ve confronted it on your own terms, at least for a while. This is for your integrity, not just for saving the world.
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However, unless and until you know yourself, even you won’t have standing to argue about what’s right for you.
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You need to make sure your own brain, and your own life, isn’t in a rut. Maybe you can go explore wilderness or learn a new skill. Take risks. But whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing: detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say? Note that I didn’t name this book Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and Keeping Them Deleted Forever. After you experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide.
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How To Be A Stoic
Book Notes Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 19:54 on 6 January 2019Okay, anyone who knows me knows I am a big fan of Classic Stoicism, which is a far cry from Modern Stoicism which is essentially, "Grin, shut the f--- up, bear it," as best represented by the character Spock. Classic Stoicism is more about accepting reality as it is, being neither really happy nor really sad, knowing that pretty much everything but ourselves is outside of our control, recognizing fortune is fickle, and that we are all going to f'ing die so accept it already. There are elements of acceptance in Stoicism, but the acceptance is of things outside of our control, not for things inside of our control nor for things we can affect. As someone with a strong sense of fair play and a large amount of frustration with the lack of fairness in the world, I find Stoicism to be a way to endure the crappiness of being human.
Which is to say, I've been looking for a book that I can hand to people who are curious about Classic Stoicism, without suggesting they read a dozen books to gather the different parts into one cohesive unit, much as I would hand over a copy of Mindfulness in Plain English if asked for a book about mindfulness.
I think this book might be that book, that I recommend for Stoicism. Maybe. It's hard to beat Meditations and many of Seneca's works. I'll reread it at the end of the year and see if it holds up.
Yet, I do strongly recommend this book.
Although public criticism of religion (or of any idea) is the staple of a healthy democratic society, people don’t respond very well to being belittled and insulted.
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Seneca connected this test to the rest of our existence on earth: “A man cannot live well if he knows not how to die well.”
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Of course, Stoicism is a philosophy, not a type of therapy. The difference is crucial: a therapy is intended to be a short-term approach to helping people overcome specific problems of a psychological nature; it doesn’t necessarily provide a general picture, or philosophy, of life. A philosophy of life is something we all need, however, and something we all develop, consciously or not.
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One of the first things he learned from his new teacher was to practice not being ashamed of things of which there is nothing to be ashamed.
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Like Socrates before them—and unlike a number of other philosophers then and since—they were not interested in theory for theory’s sake. If philosophy was not useful to human life, then it wasn’t useful at all.
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There are three departments in which a man who is to be good and noble must be trained. The first concerns the will to get and will to avoid; he must be trained not to fail to get what he wills to get nor fall into what he wills to avoid. The second is concerned with impulse to act and not to act, and, in a word, the sphere of what is fitting: that we should act in order, with due consideration, and with proper care. The object of the third is that we may not be deceived, and may not judge at random, and generally it is concerned with assent.
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Moreover, biologists have systematically been finding that a long list of allegedly unique human traits are actually not unique to us at all. We are not the only animals to live in cooperatively social groups, nor the only ones to use tools. Nor are we the only species with complex communication abilities, nor even the only ones displaying what we would call moral behavior (which can be seen among bonobos and other primates).
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In the end, it seems that neither biological variation nor cultural diversity can be reasonably deployed to reject what the ancients thought was obvious: we are a very different species from anything else that planet Earth has produced over billions of years of evolution, both for better (our stunning cultural and technological achievements) and for worse (the environmental destruction and the pain and suffering we have imposed on other species as well as on our own).
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When we consult the belly, or our passions, when our actions are random or dirty or inconsiderate, are we not falling away to the state of sheep? What do we destroy? The faculty of reason.
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The Stoics perfected this idea of ethical development and called it oikeiôsis, which is often translated as “familiarization with” or “appropriation of” other people’s concerns as if they were our own.
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First, it is a forceful reminder that they were interested in practice, not just theory: their aphorisms were meant to benefit the prokoptôn, that is, to help the student of Stoicism make progress. Unlike modern bumper stickers, T-shirt slogans, and so forth, which primarily signal membership in a particular group and tend to be used as a metaphorical club with which to beat those who are not like-minded, Stoic stock phrases were employed by practitioners as personal reminders, as aids for daily meditation, or as a guide to behavior when they were in doubt.
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Being vegetarian, in and of itself, is no proof of superior moral quality, but it is a good thing to do if other considerations do not outweigh that choice.
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We live in far too intricate social environments to be able to always do the right thing, or even to do the right thing often enough to know with sufficient confidence what the right thing is to begin with. Most of the different demands made on us have an ethical dimension (animal suffering, environmental damage, the treatment of waiters), but some are also more practical (I need to eat, but where is my food coming from? I need to bank, but which bank am I supporting?).
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Stoicism is about developing the tools to deal as effectively as humanly possible with the ensuing conflicts, does not demand perfection, and does not provide specific answers: those are for fools (Epictetus’s word) who think the world is black and white, good versus evil, where it is always possible to clearly tell the good guys from the bad guys. That is not the world we live in, and to pretend otherwise is more than a bit dangerous and not at all wise.
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In other words, by all means go ahead and avoid pain and experience joy in your life—but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.
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I would be intellectually dishonest, however, if I did not put forth my own opinion, just as I did during my friendly chat with Epictetus. This is what good philosophers—and reasonable people in general—are supposed to do: listen to each other’s arguments, learn and reflect, and go out for a beer to talk it over some more.
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Hume’s point is subtle but crucial: he is basically saying that arguments from analogies, of which the one from design is an example, are notoriously problematic because analogies are always imperfect, and in some cases downright misleading.
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The only difference between human beings and other animals is that we are capable of the highest attribute of God/ Universe: reason. That is why the proper way to live our lives is by using reason to tackle our problems.
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Seneca aptly put it, “That which is true is mine,” meaning that a reasonable person makes truth her own, regardless of whether it comes from friends or foes.
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One of the things that attracted me to it from the get-go is precisely what others may consider one of its weaknesses: given the Stoic ambiguity over how to interpret the Logos, Stoics can build a very large tent indeed, welcoming everyone from atheists to agnostics, from pantheists and panentheists to theists, as long as none of these guests impose their own metaphysical views on the others.
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‘And I am bound to say what seems right to me.’ ‘But, if you say it, I shall kill you.’ ‘When did I tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine. It is yours to kill, mine to die without quailing: yours to banish, mine to go into exile without groaning.’
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Conservatives tend to talk a lot about both character and virtue, even when they do not actually practice the latter, while liberals reflexively treat their valorization as thinly disguised tools of oppression.
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The reason why wisdom is the “chief good,” according to Socrates, is rather simple: it is the only human ability that is good under every and all circumstances.
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To be sure, being wealthy is better than being poor, being healthy is better than being sick, and being educated is better than being ignorant (standard pairs of preferred and dispreferred indifferents).
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The Stoics adopted Socrates’s classification of four aspects of virtue, which they thought of as four tightly interlinked character traits: (practical) wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Practical wisdom allows us to make decisions that improve our eudaimonia, the (ethically) good life. Courage can be physical, but more broadly refers to the moral aspect—for instance, the ability to act well under challenging circumstances, as Priscus and Malala did. Temperance makes it possible for us to control our desires and actions so that we don’t yield to excesses. Justice, for Socrates and the Stoics, refers not to an abstract theory of how society should be run, but rather to the practice of treating other human beings with dignity and fairness.
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Basically, Aquinas kept the four Stoic virtues and added three peculiarly Christian ones, originally proposed by Paul of Tarsus: faith, hope, and charity.
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a set of six “core” virtues: Courage: Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal; examples include bravery, perseverance, and authenticity (honesty). Justice: Civic strengths that underlie healthy community life; examples include fairness, leadership, and citizenship or teamwork. Humanity: Interpersonal strengths that involve “tending and befriending” others; examples include love and kindness. Temperance: Strengths that protect against excess; examples include forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-control. Wisdom: Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge; examples include creativity, curiosity, judgment, and perspective (providing counsel to others). Transcendence: Strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and thereby provide meaning; examples include gratitude, hope, and spirituality.
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at the center of the Cynic-Stoic concept of cosmopolitanism: the idea that we ought to extend the sympathy we have for kin to our friends, acquaintances, fellow countrymen, and beyond to humanity at large (and even, some Stoics hinted, to the suffering of sentient animals).
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conservatives insisting that we should go back to emphasizing character in schools, families, and the country at large, and liberals rejecting such talk as a not-so-subtle attempt to maintain white male privilege, patriarchy, and the like.
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In other words, your character is your best calling card, and if you interact with good judges of character, that’s all you’ll need.
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Indeed, what will be needed are exactly the fundamental virtues: the courage to do the right thing under difficult circumstances, the temperance to rein in excesses, a sense of justice in considering how people are going to be affected by his decisions, and of course the practical wisdom that will allow him to negotiate treacherous and always-changing waters.
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Epictetus used an apt seafaring metaphor to make a related point: For the helmsman to wreck his vessel, he does not need the same resources, as he needs to save it: if he turn it but a little too far to the wind, he is lost; yes, and if he do it not deliberately but from mere want of attention, he is lost all the same. It is very much the same in life: if you doze but a little, all that you have amassed up till now leaves you. Keep awake then and watch your impressions: it is no trifle you have in keeping, but self-respect, honor, constancy, a quiet mind, untouched by distress, or fear, or agitation—in a word, freedom. What are you going to sell all this for? Look and see what your purchase is worth.
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And above all, we need to be cognizant of what our integrity is worth: if we decide to sell it, it shouldn’t be for cheap.
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One of the intriguing characteristics of the piece is that it can be (and has been) read either as a tale of misogyny and xenophobia (Medea is a woman and a barbarian) or as a proto-feminist story of a woman’s struggle in a patriarchal society.
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‘Suppose I am in error, my father, and ignorant of what is fitting and proper for me. If, then, this cannot be taught or learnt, why do you reproach me? If it can be taught, teach me, and, if you cannot, let me learn from those who say that they know.
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The point is that nobody errs on purpose. Whatever we do, we think it is the right thing to do, according to whatever criterion we have developed or adopted to establish right action.
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Part of the controversy hinged on the idea Arendt developed that “evil” is often the result of lack of thought, meaning that people usually don’t want to do evil, and certainly don’t think of themselves as evildoers. But they also tend to follow the general opinion without critical analysis, and indeed—as in Eichmann’s case—they are often convinced that they are doing a good job.
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There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing, correct?
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If what we are doing is simply labeling a particularly nasty type of bad behavior, then there is little problem. But not infrequently, when we talk of evil, we slide into a fallacy known as “reification” (literally, making a thing), which means speaking of a concept as if it has some kind of mind-independent existence, as if it is in some sense “out there.”
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It has no metaphysical consistency: it is simply a shorthand for the really, really bad stuff that people do, or for the really, really bad character that leads people to do said stuff.
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“A-gnoia means literally ‘not-knowing’; a-mathia means literally ‘not-learning.’ In addition to the type of amathia that is an inability to learn, there is another form that is an unwillingness to learn.… Robert Musil in an essay called On Stupidity, distinguished between two forms of stupidity, one he called ‘an honorable kind’ due to a lack of natural ability and another, much more sinister kind, that he called ‘intelligent stupidity.’”
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Medea knew it was wrong to make her children suffer to punish Jason, but emotion (vengeance), not reason, drove her to act as she did. Epictetus
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That is, Medea did not wish to err, but was simply convinced that she was doing the right thing.
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Cognitive dissonance is a very uncomfortable psychological state that occurs when someone becomes aware of the conflict between two judgments that he holds to be equally true. People do not want to experience cognitive dissonance, just as Epictetus said that people do not want to knowingly be in error.
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The uncomfortable truth is, again, that people suffering from cognitive dissonance are neither stupid nor ignorant.
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As the writer Michael Shermer has observed, the more clever people are, the better they are at rationalizing away the sources of their cognitive dissonance.
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As far as the rest of us are concerned, remembering that people do bad things out of lack of wisdom is not only a reminder to be compassionate toward others, it also constantly tells us just how important it is to develop wisdom.
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I had moved to the United States from Rome a couple of years earlier, and the whole idea of televised debates as “infotainment” was very new to me.
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When he was asked in an interview who didn’t make it out of the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale replied: Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh,
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Epictetus’s Handbook
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Stockdale understood an important truth about war that applies to life in general: holding the moral high ground and maintaining self-respect is more important than the facts on the ground, be they the weaponry on each side (in the case of war) or the circumstances of our ordinary lives.
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The results were striking: those who had spent less than two years in confinement said that torture was the worst; those who had spent more than two years in isolation said that the latter experience trumped even torture.
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Stockdale interpreted Rutledge’s finding in the light of Epictetus’s teachings—that it is shame, not physical pain, that truly brings down a human being.
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Observing and imitating role models, then, is one powerful way to work on our own virtue.
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The problem nowadays is that, by and large, we do a pretty bad job of picking role models. We glorify actors, singers, athletes, and generic “celebrities,”
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A similar problem arises with the contemporary, highly inflated use of the word “hero,” especially in the United States. Some brave people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good truly deserve that appellative (though they don’t have to be almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of the military or the police). But someone who dies, say, as a result of a terrorist attack is not a hero—he is a victim. He probably did not display courage and other-regard; he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We should most certainly mourn him, but labeling him a “hero” does not do justice to what actually happened, and it does a great injustice to actual heroes, confusing people about the very meaning of the term.
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The other thing to remember about role models—and the Stoics understood this very well—is that they are not perfect human beings, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Moreover, making perfection an integral part of our concept of role model means that we are setting a standard that is impossibly high.
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For Christians, the model of universally good behavior is Jesus, but that’s a tough role model to actually attempt to emulate, since believers are literally trying to be like gods. Bound to fail, we have to accept the divinity’s mercy as our path to salvation.
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For instance, in 72 bce, he volunteered to fight against the rebel slave Spartacus, clearly not having paused to consider that the revolt might have been a reaction to extreme injustice.
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But that would be exactly the wrong way to look at him, because it would be an attempt to make him a godlike figure capable of doing what no human being can do: completely transcend his own upbringing.
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“Alea iacta est” (The die is cast).
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by hearing about great deeds that we not only become inspired by what human beings at their best can do, but also are implicitly reminded of just how much easier most of our lives actually are.
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Larry’s first point is to realize the importance of agency. It has been crucial for him to feel like an agent in the world, not a patient.
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After you have reclaimed your agency, Larry points out, you are in the same position as everyone else: you have to become good at being an agent. This, he says, requires lining up the following elements: values, preferences, goals, deliberations, decisions, and actions. If these are incoherent, incomplete, or weak, then you are paralyzed no matter what your physical condition happens to be. You can also be paralyzed by indecision, because you are not committed to a particular course of action and wish to keep multiple possibilities open. Facing too many choices on the menu, or too many cars on the dealer’s lot, isn’t a good thing, as modern cognitive science clearly shows. To complicate things, there is the fact that the world itself changes, requiring constant adjustments to our goals, decisions, and actions. In other words, we need to learn how to maintain agency under changing circumstances.
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Knowing our physical and psychological abilities includes knowing our limits. Ignorance, or worse, self-deception about our own abilities can be very dangerous. We need to keep an up-to-date, accurate account of what is possible for us.
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Larry also counsels us to train ourselves to recognize when we have lost a good fit between our abilities and our activities. We must develop what he calls an internal alarm system, which will tell us when it’s time to stop suffering and begin (or resume) taking charge.
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Oh.
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Rather, Larry suggests making a habit of reflecting on what is important to us and on the best way to achieve it, and also to continuously revise our life plan, according to our changing abilities and circumstances. Our dynamic plan should be coherent, ambitious, achievable, revisable, and—ideally—compatible with a generally rising level of life satisfaction.
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Lastly, Larry cautions us to beware of brick walls. We need to recognize them when we hit them; even better is to see them coming before we hit them hard. The
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To begin with, he says that one of the crucial things for people affected by depression is to constantly monitor themselves and their mental condition. If there is anything that Stoicism trains people to do it is to monitor their own reactions and reflect critically on how they perceive and interpret the world.
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suffering from a depression that stemmed in part from the gulf he had gradually realized existed between his expectations about his life and the world, on the one hand, and his life and the world as they were, on the other hand.
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“Depressed people are rather self-aware; in fact, they are too self-aware, and too negatively so, often deriding themselves for small infractions of their own idealized standards, putting themselves down for not being perfect even in a world they recognize as being full of imperfections and human capital squandered.
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For one thing, I have become a collector of insults: On being insulted, I analyze and categorize the insult. For another thing, I look forward to being insulted inasmuch as it affords me the opportunity to perfect my ‘insult game.’
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Think of Irvine’s “insult game”: what someone says to us is his opinion, which may or may not be grounded in fact. Whether we perceive someone else’s remark as an insult or not is entirely up to us, quite regardless of the intention of our interlocutor.
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Well, is it true? At one time in my life it was. In which case, why get offended? What does it even mean to feel insulted by a fact? Conversely, is it not true? Then the fellow who hurled the insult is both childish in his behavior and factually wrong. How is that going to injure me? If anything, he is the one who loses in the confrontation.
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The basic idea, again adopted by modern cognitive behavioral therapy and similar approaches, is to regularly focus on potentially bad scenarios, repeating to yourself that they are not in fact as bad as they may seem, because you have the inner resources to deal with them.
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Now, why would anyone, let alone someone who is depressed, want to imagine the worst on purpose? Well, for one thing there is the empirical observation that it actually works: visualizing negative happenings decreases our fear of them and mentally prepares us to deal with the crisis when and if it ensues. But there is a flip side to visualizing the negative: we gain a renewed sense of gratitude and appreciation for all the times when bad things do not happen to us, when we leisurely drive down the road on a beautiful day or enjoy the presence of our loved ones because they are very much alive and well.
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Seneca wrote about self-knowledge and suggested that sometimes we are the worst obstacles to our own improvement: we see where we should go, which is where we want to go, and yet somehow we can’t pick ourselves up and begin the journey.
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all the major Stoic authors insist that it is crucial that we reflect on our condition and truly make an effort to see things in a different light, one that is both more rational and more compassionate.
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The second point Epictetus makes is crucial: we are so distraught about the prospect of our own death precisely because, unlike wheat and most other species on earth presumably, we are capable of contemplating that thought. And yet, knowing something does not change the nature of the thing of course—it just changes our attitude about it.
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the fundamental Stoic idea of the dichotomy of control: death itself is not under our control (it will happen one way or another), but how we think about death most definitely is under our control.
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“Will you realize once for all that it is not death that is the source of all man’s evils, and of a mean and cowardly spirit, but rather the fear of death?
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Those around us cannot cure our illness or save us from death, but they can accompany us part of the way, comforting us before we get there.
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“What do you mean by ‘die’?” Epictetus corrected me. “Do not use fine words, but state the facts as they are. Now is the time for your material part to be restored to the elements of which it was composed. What is there dreadful in that?
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If so, how would an already diseased planet sustain the thirst for natural resources of a population that grows so relentlessly and manage its ever-escalating production of waste products?
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Others must come into being, even as you did, and being born must have room and dwellings and necessaries. But if the first comers do not retire, what is left for them?
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Just as, for the Stoics, death itself is what gives urgent meaning to life, the possibility of leaving life voluntarily gives us the courage to do what is right under otherwise unbearable circumstances.
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It is, in other words, our own judgment that tells us whether it is time to walk through the open door or whether we should stay and fight another day.
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he was a flawed man (as he himself repeatedly wrote) who tried his best under nearly impossible circumstances. Seneca succeeded in guiding Nero and containing the damage for the first five years of his reign, even if he eventually lost control of the increasingly unhinged emperor.
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Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
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It is not in our power to make thievery disappear from the world, but it is in our power to engage in a battle of attention with thieves, if we think that’s worth our efforts and time.
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And Seneca explicitly advised taking a deep breath and going for a walk around the block upon first feeling the uncontrollable rise of rage, which he considered a type of temporary madness.
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The APA tells us to change standard phrases like “this is terrible!” to something along the lines of “I’d rather not have to deal with this, but I can manage it, and getting angry isn’t going to help me at all.”
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Epictetus—reminds us: “Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it’s justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself.”
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we need to realize that—contra common cultural belief—it just isn’t the case that every problem has a solution. We therefore need to cut ourselves some slack for not being able to solve everything, so long as we have done all we can reasonably do under the circumstances.
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Additional suggestions from professional psychologists include changing your environment, for instance, by taking a physical break from the problematic situation; shifting the timing of your interaction with another person if the present moment seems not to be the best time to handle the problem, but being sure to set an alternative time for coming back to it in order to send the signal that you are not dodging it; practicing avoidance by not exposing yourself, if possible, to the cause of your distress; and finding alternative ways of doing what you need to do that may reduce the opportunity for conflict while still allowing you to accomplish your goals.
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Killeen distinguishes loneliness from similar, yet separate, related concepts, such as alienation (which may be the result, or in some cases the cause, of depression) and solitude (which actually has a positive connotation, more akin to my own behavior).
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The Killeen paper provides a handy summary diagram identifying a series of causes related to our situations and our characters that lead to loneliness, including bereavement, psychological vulnerability, reduced social network, depression, and radical life changes.
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As Killeen says: there is no reason to be embarrassed because (some degree of) loneliness is a natural condition for humanity, and Stoics reject the whole idea of embarrassment, especially with respect to societal expectations, because we have no influence over other people’s judgments, only over our own behavior.
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We may have little or no control over the external circumstances that force us into being alone at some times in our lives. But (save for pathological conditions, for which one needs to seek medical help), it is our choice, our own attitude, that turns solitude into loneliness. We may be alone, but we do not consequently need to feel helpless.
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The point, rather, is that human affection needs to be guided—trained even—by a sound assessment of whatever situation triggers our feelings.
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true friendship, like true love, is revealed when the going gets tough, not when things are nice and easy.
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friendship of the good is that rare phenomenon when two people enjoy each other for their own sake because they find in each other an affinity of character that does not require externalities like a business exchange or a hobby. In those cases, our friends become, as Aristotle famously put it, mirrors to our souls, helping us grow and become better persons just because they care about us.
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Each day reread Epictetus’s words several times, whenever you have a minute, and focus on putting into practice that day a specific piece of advice.
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four Stoic virtues: (Practical) wisdom: Navigating complex situations in the best available fashion Courage: Doing the right thing, both physically and morally, under all circumstances Justice: Treating every human being—regardless of his or her stature in life—with fairness and kindness Temperance: Exercising moderation and self-control in all spheres of life
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1. Examine your impressions.
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stepping back to make room for rational deliberation, avoiding rash emotional reactions, and asking whether whatever is being thrown at us is under our control (in which case we should act on it) or isn’t (in which case we should regard it as not of our concern).
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2. Remind yourself of the impermanence of things.
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we should constantly remind ourselves of just how precious our loved ones are precisely because they may soon be gone. Anyone
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“Memento homo” (Remember, you are only a man).
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I always regretted the way I responded to my father’s illness—until Stoicism taught me that regret is about things we can no longer change and the right attitude is to learn from our experiences, not dwell on decisions that we are not in a position to alter. Which
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None of this made the experience any less hard, since Stoicism isn’t a magic wand. But I tried my best to be present in the hic et nunc, the here and now, as the Romans used to say.
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he is advising us to care and appreciate very much what we now have, precisely because Fate may snatch it from us tomorrow.
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3. The reserve clause.
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I love the “which is impossible if I go all to pieces whenever anything bad happens” bit. It conjures an image of people who are too fragile to withstand even minor challenges in life because they let themselves be fragile. They always assume that of course things will go well, since bad things only happen to other people (possibly because they somehow deserve them). Instead, as Stoics, we should bring the reserve clause to anything we do, and even use it as a personal mantra: Fate permitting.
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There is a nice analogy in Stoic lore meant to explain the point. It is attributed to Chrysippus—the third head of the original Stoa of Athens—and was allegedly recounted in one of Epictetus’s lost volumes of the Discourses. Imagine a dog who is leashed to a cart. The cart begins to move forward, in whatever direction the driver, but certainly not the dog, chooses. Now, the leash is long enough that the dog has two options: either he can gingerly follow the general direction of the cart, over which he has no control, and thereby enjoy the ride and even have time to explore his surroundings and attend to some of his own business, or he can stubbornly resist the cart with all his might and end up being dragged, kicking and screaming, for the rest of the trip, accumulating much pain and frustration and wasting his time in a futile and decidedly unpleasant effort. We humans are, of course, the dog: the universe keeps churning according to God’s will (if you have religious inclinations) or cosmic cause and effect (if your taste is more secular).
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Rather, it is to deploy the wisdom that sometimes things will not go our way even if we do our best, and regardless of whether we deserved to win the match or get the promotion.
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4. How can I use virtue here and now? “For every challenge, remember the resources you have within you to cope with it.
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you cannot control disease and pain, and it will happen at some point or another in your life. But you can manage it, not just with medications (there is certainly nothing in Stoic doctrine that precludes the use of medicine when appropriate), but also by way of your own mental attitude.
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5. Pause and take a deep breath. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.
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6. Other-ize.
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Naturally, it is far easier to maintain equanimity (which, again, is not to be confused with emotional impassivity!) when little inconveniences, or even disasters, happen to others rather than to ourselves.
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Accidents, injuries, disease, and death are unavoidable, and while it is understandable to be distraught over them
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we can take comfort in knowing that they are in the normal order of things. The universe isn’t after anyone—or at least, it isn’t after any one of us in particular!
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7. Speak little and well. “Let silence be your goal
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Why should we care at all about what the Kardashians (or any other celebrities of the moment) are doing? To say that an interest in such matters is the hallmark of a rather shallow mind sounds elitist of course, and therefore distasteful to our modern sensibilities, but only because we have been conditioned to think that “serious” talk is boring and at any rate requires more background knowledge and attention than most of us associate with good conversation.
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8. Choose your company well.
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people who are interested in following virtue and cultivating their character.
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Even more generally, this is simply the sound advice that our life is short, temptation and waste are always lurking, and so we need to pay attention to what we are doing and who our companions are.
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we want to be with friends who are better than ourselves, so that we can learn from them. At the very least, we want our friends to be the sort of people who can hold up a mirror to our soul, so that we can look into it frankly and gain a better idea of just how much work needs to be done on it
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9. Respond to insults with humor.
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“If you learn that someone is speaking ill of you, don’t try to defend yourself against the rumors; respond instead with, ‘Yes, and he doesn’t know the half of it, because he could have said more.’”
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I have begun to internalize the concept that an insult works, not because it is intended as such by the person who delivers it, but because the target allows it to become an insult.
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The more you train yourself to endure insults the stronger you feel psychologically, and therefore the more you can react appropriately and effectively, and vice versa: taking a stance against bullying enables you to see it for the infantile attitude that it really is (even, or especially, when engaged in by “adults”), and this insight then leads to the fostering of greater resilience.
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Is this person a friend or someone you look up to? If yes, then it is more likely that she is just offering advice, perhaps in a somewhat pointed fashion, but with good intentions nonetheless.
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10. Don’t speak too much about yourself.
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It feels good because, as we have seen with a number of the other exercises—and indeed as the Stoics themselves clearly recognized—there is a peculiar pleasure in being able to exercise some self-control.
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gym. I don’t know about you, but when I get to my local gym and someone from behind the reception desk smiles and greets me with a loud and cheerful, “Enjoy your workout!” the first thought that comes to my mind is: Who on earth enjoys working out? Yes, I know, some people actually do enjoy it, but most of us don’t. And yet, it is the sort of thing we do because we have reflected on the benefits of doing it and decided that the gain is worth the pain, as they say. But it is also the case that once we get to the end of the workout and head to the shower, we feel a peculiar sort of satisfaction, not only from the physiological benefits of the exercise but also from being able to pat ourselves on the back and say: it was hard, we didn’t really want to do it, but we did it!
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11. Speak without judging.
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The idea is to distinguish between matters of fact—to which we can assent if we find them justified by observation—and judgments, from which we generally ought to abstain, since we usually don’t have sufficient information.
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12. Reflect on your day.
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“Admit not sleep into your tender eyelids till you have reckoned up each deed of the day—How have I erred, what done or left undone? So start, and so review your acts, and then for vile deeds chide yourself, for good be glad.”
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conceal nothing from myself, and omit nothing: for why should I be afraid of any of my shortcomings, when it is in my power to say, “I pardon you this time: see that you never do that anymore”?…
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How To Age
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 14:51 on 3 January 2019I would argue that this book is less a how to book on aging and more a plea for those who have not yet aged to the point of infirmary or elderly or even somewhat slowing down to be more considerate of those who are aged.
"Aged" has so many different meanings these days. Used to be old was 50, now it's when you stop living, when you give up, when the years of treating your physical and mental health for shit and said years come rumbling back on top of you. If you're still active, if you're still learning, if you move and think and moderate, then the sagging skin doesn't sag as much, the white hair doesn't matter as much, and the joys of living are larger than the accumulated pains of living.
Sadly, I don't know that I'd have been positively influenced in any meaningful way if I had read this book when young. Currently being in the middle, not young, not old, I'd have to say I see the wall of old age that I'm going to crash into, but it won't be head first. I'm going feet first with the intent of jumping off it.
Growing old means "still alive" and what a "privilege" (the book's word) that would be!
This book is worth reading, as many of the School of Life books are, I recommend it.
It sees ageing as a lifelong process, not something confined to its latter stages, and an opportunity to develop –indeed an intrinsic part of life itself.
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A long life signals that we’re privileged, either through genetic serendipity, affluence or sheer luck.
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This acknowledgement of ageing involves mourning, because there are inevitable losses associated with getting older, whether in function
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or the death of friends and family, or the recognition of one’s own mortality.
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Gina’s fear of ageing is directed at some amorphous, creeping, malign change, which prevents her from appreciating the benefits that she has already derived from the ageing process.
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The capacity to be surprised, curious and engaged isn’t the prerogative of young people
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and indeed it can intensify as we age.
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The man-child holds on tightly to his video games and comics, and refuses to change. He equates being grown up with joylessness.
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But perhaps it’s less about having a mortgage or a pension and more about learning to take responsibility for your spending; about being able to defer gratification instead of insisting ‘I want it now’; about not saying the first thing that comes into your head and thinking about other people as well as yourself?
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similarly, we can try to foster in ourselves qualities that deepen and enrich over the years. These qualities differ for each of us, but for most people they include finding enduring sources of meaning –in work, or through relationships, interests or making a social contribution; getting to know themselves; making genuine contact with other people; and developing the capacity to love –whether people, ideas or experiences.
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But the ability to laugh, like any other emotional facility, develops through use, and finding oneself convulsed with laughter, decades after childhood when it’s so common, is sweet indeed.
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It’s much easier to adopt this outlook if we don’t take a long lifespan for granted, but recognize instead that it isn’t given to the majority of people in the world, especially the developing world: that to age is in fact to be blessed.
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Those who age best are those who travel lightest, who can jettison the prescriptive ideas they’ve cleaved to at one stage of their lives when they find them ill-suited to another. A certain suppleness of spirit is needed.
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Letting go of old narratives can be an extremely painful business: it involves mourning what never happened as well as what did, and admitting failure, wrong-headedness and poor decisions. Most unforgivably, it demands that we recognize that life unfurls beyond our control.
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For to age is to live and to live is to age, and being anti-age (as so many products proudly proclaim themselves) is tantamount to being anti-life.
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By embracing age we embrace the life process itself, with all its pain, joy and difficulty. If
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metaphors). We’re no longer at risk of an invasion of triffids or Martians but of old people –invariably portrayed as a major social problem and a drain on resources, rather than as a resource themselves.
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What they don’t realize is that they’re banking disgust that they’ll have to draw on themselves –ourselves.
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this unique feature of ageism: that it’s prejudice against one’s future self.
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It’s fuelled, as we’ll see, by a refusal to admit that we too will age –by a profound dis-identification with old people.
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people. Clare Temple in Norah Hoult’s remarkable 1944 novel, There Were No Windows, is a woman aware of her creeping dementia:
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Older people are rarely referred for psychotherapy
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because depression is seen as just another inevitable aspect of old age.
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since third-agers like Sara and Clive have convinced themselves that, with enough discipline and self-control, the body can always be transcended. But it can’t. Perhaps
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For the truth is that we all have to go into that good night eventually, gently or otherwise –to deny this is nothing more than magic thinking.
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They encourage you to deal with the prejudice against old people not by challenging it but by trying not to look old.
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It’s all very well intoning ‘use it or lose it’, but this doesn’t allow for the possibility that you may still lose it despite using it.
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switch:
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each time we see an older person, we need to imagine them as our future self, and, rather than recoil from their wrinkles or infirmities, applaud their resilience. We need to rehumanize older people, to attribute to them the same rich internal world, set of passions and network of complex human relationships that we assume exist in younger people and in ourselves.
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At some point or other, age resistance becomes frankly futile –you’ll either die or start to look old –but the energy you use to accept the fact of ageing but refuse its stereotypes will serve you well for the rest of your life.
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Although it might seem paradoxical, mourning is an essential part of ageing with gusto, because it helps you say goodbye to some features of life, freeing you to welcome in new ones.
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We’ve learnt to assume that age will bring radical discontinuities to our lives, whether at 4 or 40. But it doesn’t. Perhaps this is one of the truths about ageing that we find hardest to learn.
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Perhaps the greatest calumny committed against old people –and the one that most frightens the not-yet-old –is the belief that ageing causes us to leech vitality.
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Cicero clocked this. People, said the Roman orator in De Senectute, his treatise on old age, ‘who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome.’
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As Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain, observes, for years most research into ageing was conducted in nursing homes, where bodies and brains are rarely stimulated, and this shaped beliefs about what it means to get old.
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Research at the University of Cambridge challenges the idea of cognitive ageing as a monolithic process of universal, inexorable, progressive decline.
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One was that they’d never retire –it would be tantamount to retiring from life. Another was that they were highly satisfied with their lives. This suggests that physical activity, work or an absorbing interest of some kind, as well as consciously maintaining social networks, both enrich the ageing process.
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Lighter can mean not spreading oneself so thinly, monotasking rather than multitasking, learning to say no. Yet in order to do this we may have to let go of a lifetime’s obsessions and grievances.
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It reminds us that, ultimately, pain can be modified by optimism and love. Why is this so hard to remember?
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A 100-year-old woman, when she was interviewed on radio, was asked if she had any regrets. ‘If I’d known I’d live to be 100’, she replied, ‘I’d have taken up the violin at 40. By now I could have been playing for 60 years!’
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It’s not just older people who are scared of ‘getting left behind’ –all of us are having to learn to live with long-term precariousness; we’re all only as good as our last project.
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This line of thought pits Us against Them and sees public policy as a zero-sum game: whatever They get leaves less for Us.
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Interestingly, too, the countries that have the fewest inequalities between generations also have the fewest inequalities within them.
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We’ve age-cleansed our society. Under the banner of welfare we’ve corralled old people into day-care centres and homes; removed them from families, schools, universities, workplaces, general-hospital wards and sports centres, creating age ghettoes. It might soon be perfectly possible to go through life without meeting an old person until you become one. No wonder the prospect of ageing is terrifying.
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Indeed young people’s lack of contact with old people not only encourages them to believe that they’ll never get old, but also to treat old people as if they’d never been young.
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Age segregation denies the fact that interests and preoccupations cross the ages: you can love reggae or oppose the renewal of Trident whatever your age –instead of age dividing us, passions can unite us.
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Homeshare programmes around the world introduce older homeowners who’d value company and assistance to younger people threatened with homelessness. In the USA ‘cyber-grandparents’, aged 60 to 105, are supplied by the Elder Wisdom Circle to provide anonymous advice to people in their twenties and thirties.
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A skincare company which surveyed a large number of them found that they become anxious about ‘losing their looks’ at around 28.
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Clive always thought his own lines and greying hair made him look ‘distinguished’, but he’s noticed a growing number of his colleagues of the same age resorting to the chemical and surgical procedures they’d always dismissed as women’s territory.
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And will the sexual older man ever lose the prefix ‘dirty’? The arrival of Viagra has only reinforced this description, confirming them as unreconstructed priapics and libertines. Though what it really demonstrates is precisely the opposite: that male sexuality can be a fragile thing.
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It’s easy to understand why we feel flattered when told that we don’t look our age. But basking in compliments like these brings only short-term relief. In the long term they’re dangerous: they only allow us to defer our discomfort until the time when we do look our age.
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The classicist Mary Beard, whenever she appears on television, has her appearance savaged on social media by trolls. Retorts Beard, ‘Grey is my hair colour. I really can’t see why I should change it. There clearly is a view of female normative behaviour but more women of 58 do look like me than like Victoria Beckham.’
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Whenever grievances about the invisibility of older women are voiced, paradoxically they reveal how older women are becoming culturally more prominent. They’re speaking out because they aren’t prepared to withdraw from public life and debate purely on grounds of their age and gender.
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When someone asked the German Princess Palatine in the eighteenth century at what age sexual desire disappeared, she replied, ‘How should I know? I’m only 80.’
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Some are resourceful. Jane Juska put an ad in the New York Review of Books that read ‘Before I turn 67, next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works fine.’
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There is no template for ageing, or ageing well. The best way is one’s own way.
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The first British Older Women’s Cohousing project, set to open in 2015, is a creative new way of maintaining independence while also combating isolation: its first residents, currently aged between 50 and 84, will own or rent their own flat but also have communal areas and will look out for each other.
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As with history, so with gender: the more we’re able to understand how ageist assumptions shape our thoughts and behaviour, the less hold they’ll have over us. If you recognize, for example, how far women are judged by their appearance and men by their vigour, you’ll find it easier, as you leave your teens and twenties, to situate and challenge those stereotypes of the woman who’s losing her looks and the man whose vigour is ebbing away.
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Since 1951 no one in the USA has died of old age. This was the year old age was deleted as a cause of death from death certificates; from then on you could only die of a disease.
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Severing any link between ageing and death is another manifestation of our denial of death –death has to go underground, and not just literally.
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Along with gerontophobia, our culture suffers from thanatophobia, an overwhelming fear of death.
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more people now die in hospital or a nursing home than in their own home. Such is the taboo against death that children are often excluded from the funerals of relatives on the grounds that ‘it will upset them’, though they often later express regret that they had no opportunity to say goodbye.
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In highly individualistic cultures death seems like a personal affront, a narcissistic wound, an attack on our individual subjectivity.
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researchers have found, for example, that nursing staff with high levels of ‘death anxiety’ have significantly more negative attitudes to older people.
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Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.
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At ‘Death Cafe’ events, people come together in a relaxed and safe setting to discuss death, drink tea and eat cake.
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Maggie Kuhn used to encourage people to compile a life line or life review from their birth. When she urged them to also put in the year they thought they’d die, people always gasped. She maintained, though, that this helped raise their consciousness of their own death. For once you start to really take on board the fact that you’re going to die, old age becomes a lot less terrifying: it means you’re not dead yet.
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‘Symmetry’, a TV ad for Marie Curie Cancer Care, attracted almost universal praise when it was launched in 2013.
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People who live their earlier lives as if they’re never going to age often find retirement and the loss of a professional identity particularly traumatic: they’ve failed to cultivate those qualities that can endure, and without the containing structure imposed by work, even if they complained about it at the time, they’re at a loss.
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In addition, researchers at King’s College London have found that twenty-two molecules already present when we’re born are linked to our health in old age.
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Henri Nouwen.
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In a slim cowritten volume called Aging: The Fulfillment of Life, first
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Germany is now ‘exporting’ –some call it ‘deporting’ –thousands of old and sick Germans to retirement and rehabilitation centres in Eastern Europe and Asia because it’s cheaper. This is ‘disowning’ old people literally.
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Powerlessness is perhaps the hardest state for us to tolerate today.
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We say that we cannot be human all by ourselves; we need each other.
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Psychotherapist Marie de Hennezel has observed many older people entrusting their body to other people’s care with grace, and without embarrassment or humiliation. It’s as if they help their carers look after them.
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Yet at every stage of life some attachments need to be given up for others to develop, in order to move forward.
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Mourning creates a space in which a sense of gratitude can develop –gratitude for what remains, or for what unfolds in place of what’s been lost.
Location 1399
Maggie Kuhn saw older people in precisely the opposite way. In the vanguard of social change, they’re society’s futurists –testing out new instruments, technologies, ideas and styles of living.
Location 1410
The ones who fare best not only care about what they leave behind for the next generation, but are also able to keep learning from people both older and younger than themselves.
Location 1449
Those who urge us to fight ageing are, in effect, inviting us to stop growing and developing. In so doing, they’re depriving us of the opportunity to carry out and successfully complete the task of being alive and human.
Location 1458
Gina is also coming to realize that growing older is a privilege which, instead of fearing, she might do better to hope for. (Hope I age –what a slogan this would be!) In short, she has started to understand that ageing is a process, and not a crisis.
Location 1482
Or the right for old people to remain embodied: as much as younger people, older people need to touch and be touched; to taste good food; to stretch, move and dance.
Location 1489
Acknowledging death graces us with a sense of perspective: it reminds us that we have only a finite number of breaths; it makes us ask ourselves ‘How will I feel when I get to the end of my life having done/ without having done this?’
Location 1502
For the novelist Edith Wharton it was being ‘unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.’ The cellist Pablo Casals, when asked by one of his pupils why, at the age of 91, he continued to practise, replied, ‘Because I am making progress.’
Location 1518
84k
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 11:01 on 1 January 2019I was trying to finish this book before the end of last year, as January is going to be a non-fiction only month for me.
I didn't make it, so this is the first book of the new year that I have finished!
I picked up this book because "by Claire North" and, let's be real, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was a fun read. This was also on NPR's recommended list, so I figured I'd read it.
While I believe I understand the message of the book (that when you put a price tag on people's lives, the system is incentivized to profit off of everything people do, to the detriment of the system), I didn't really enjoy this book. The format of past to present to past was good story-telling, I liked that aspect.
North (a pseudonym) has a number of other books, so I'll likely try another of hers. This book has good reviews from others, so maybe just me?
The man whose name was sometimes Theo Miller had been twenty-two years old when they abolished human rights. The government insisted it was necessary to counter terrorism and bring stable leadership to the country.
Location 301
They wavered, avoiding each other’s gaze. Finally Theo mumbled, looking at some place a few hundred miles above and a little to the left of her forehead, “Are you …”
Location 502
Love this description, "few hundred miles above."
If you’re rich enough, you get to pay less tax if you turn yourself into a company, and if you’re a company you can buy a parole.
Location 509
But as the years went by, anger had faded.
Most things faded, given time.
Location 952
Good rate of return that, decent interest on time spent, I respect that, I understand that, not my language but it’s my song.
Location 1296
[D]reams were for children and she was a grown-up now. Grown-ups just dealt with things. They carried on—that’s what being grown-up meant.
Location 1603
Beyond, the world carries on.
Location 1757
Vagrants could be Tasered on sight in this part of the city—they caused emotional distress, and emotional distress was basically assault.
Location 2027
By night Mala Choudhary practised Muay Thai. She won most of her fights but found those she lost more exciting.
Location 2057
He used to see them sometimes in the snarling boys who liked it when their dogs growled at passing strangers, because the dogs made people scared, and if people were scared of you then you were powerful, and if you were powerful, you mattered. Even if you didn’t know what mattering was good for.
Location 2319
The queen says this country is a slave state. That there aren’t any chains on our feet or beatings on our backs because there don’t need to be. Cos if you don’t play along with what the Company wants, you die. You die cos you can’t pay for the doctor to treat you. You die cos the police won’t come without insurance. Cos the fire brigade doesn’t cover your area, cos you can’t get a job, cos you can’t buy the food, cos the water stopped, cos there was no light at night and if that’s not slavery, if that’s not the world gone mad if that’s not … … but we got used to it. Just the way things are.
Location 3631
I don’t think it matters. We got taught not to care. It’ll pass. It’ll pass.
Location 3679
“Loneliness is a state of mind. You have to want something, to be lonely. You have to need some sort of reassurance, someone to tell you that this is who you are. I’m not lonely. I don’t want anything."
Location 4243
"Our lives exist in many different, contradictory states, all at once. I am a liar. I am a killer. I am honest. I am fighting for a good cause. I am burning the world. We want things simple, and safe, and when they aren’t, when the truth is something complicated, something hard, or scary, we stop. The words run out. Everything becomes …”
Location 4249
“It’s how it happens, of course. The worst of it. Not ‘My neighbour has been taken to be burned alive, their house stolen, their children dead and I am so, so scared to speak of it.’ Just ‘They went away. Just—away.’ And we smile. And everyone else is as scared as we are, and knows what that smile means. Is grateful that you didn’t make the terror real. Thankful that you haven’t caused a stink. Because it would hurt … someone. Someone who isn’t a stranger would get hurt, if we ever managed to speak the truth of things. If we ever had the courage to say what we really think, even if it destroyed who we want the world to think we are. Who it is we think we should be. There would be too much pain. So we say nothing. Things just … trail away into a smile, which everyone understands and doesn’t have to mean a thing. We are grateful for that silence, for the thing that can’t be expressed. To fill it would be a terrible thing.”
Location 4254
There was probably a bit of love left, somewhere. It simply hadn’t been a priority for either of them.
Location 4544
"Then I started screaming too, just screaming, and it felt good. I’d never done nothing like that before but I was crying after, I screamed and then there was nothing left and I just cried and it was the best thing it was … They don’t bother me now. They’ve got this guy, this boss bloke, he goes to the sea every morning and rages at it. Just rages at it, cos of how he was born into this shit, and he didn’t ever find no way to make his life good, and he rages at the sky cos it never helped him, and at the earth cos it never carried him somewhere else, and his raging it’s … it’s sorta good, you know? It’s like going to church, only different like. Sometimes I scream, it’s like praying, but different."
Location 4640
"Is she dead?” An afterthought, a thing which was probable but which the girl hadn’t wanted to ask.
Location 4662
The sea the sky the earth they never carried me I hate them for letting me be born for making me breathe I hate them I hate—but she gotta love ’em. If she’s your daughter you gotta find her, you gotta help her be something which isn’t … you know.
Location 4898
Even thin ice can puncture the hull, can sink a narrowboat. They drown as they sleep they wake the water rushing down their noses it is.
Location 4958
Indecision. Martyrdom. Suspension of all things, a failure to act, the need to look at things from a new perspective, a willing victim a … Neila doesn’t like the word “victim.” If you’re “willing” then how are you a “victim”? Victim is the denial of choice …
Location 4969
Or maybe … maybe that’s unfair. Maybe they care. But caring isn’t the same as doing something, and doing something is hard. It’s very, very hard.
Location 5178
Simon is a shit. I’m not saying this to excuse my son. My son is also a shit. But Simon was the shit that blocked the toilet, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Naturally he assumes he isn’t. Most people assume they aren’t shits. It’s just good business. That’s what it amounts to. Business is good. Good is business it is
Location 5868
I think he hits her sometimes, but she always says … when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, he always says sorry afterwards and that’s how she knows he loves her. I always thought I’d tell her to run away. It’s a very easy thing to say, much easier than anything that matters—but I never mustered the courage.
Location 5877
When my daughter died I spent so long trying to make it my fault, because if it was my fault it wasn’t just luck. It was the action of man, it was fate, it was God,
Location 5996
If you call him terrible you have to ask yourself why, you have to blame yourself and no one wants to do that. It’s the hardest thing in the world to say ‘I am a bad mother, and he is a bad father,’ it is impossible, it is devastating it is … because if I am a bad mother then I am … there is nothing worse.
Location 6321
And she said, “My brother had depression, he had depression and we all told him to get over it, we told him to just try and see the good side of things I mean, the good side it was just …”
Location 6888
“You ask people, when they tell you something terrible, you ask them ‘Are you okay?’ Of course they’re not fucking okay but what else are you meant to say. ‘Oh you must be feeling shit you must be so shit you must be …’”
Location 6892
The Hanged Man is the crossroads, is suspension, a choice that holds you back or will send you forward, a moment where all things stand on the edge.
Location 6908
Sometimes I catch myself making stories from the things that happened in my life, making stories of who I will be, and in these stories I’m always the hero or the villain because that way I made a choice, I made a choice and I chose to be here and there wasn’t ever anything which I couldn’t control, there wasn’t a part of me that is …”
Location 6920
“Do you regret?” she asked. “Do you look back, do you look at—when you think about the time you’ve had and the things—do you regret? Is that what you feel?” Theo thought about it. “I think I would,” he said at last. “If there wasn’t something more important to do.”
Location 6926
“Half the people we ask don’t even know if the queen is real, they can’t imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing, like this up yours to the world and maybe it’ll make a difference, maybe they count.
Location 6994
The Inevitable
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 17:17 on 29 December 2018Rob was reading this book, so I jumped in to start reading it, too. In it, Kelly posits twelve inevitable (hence the title) technological forces / trends / changes that will shape our future. He gives them odd names, so that they are all gerunds:
Becoming: everything's upgrading, so we'll always forever be newbies
Cognifying: I suspect a made up word, basically AI everywhere, even dumb ai
Flowing: everything is real-time and instant access becomes more instanter (yes, I did make up that word)
Screening: everything becomes a screen, hate this idea
Accessing: no one owns much, so the corps own the big stuff, we just rent
Sharing: no one owns much, so the corps own the big stuff, we just rent, and share it
Filtering: everything is curated, unfortunately, likely by the AI
Remixing: everyone steals from everyone else and makes a meme out of it, or at least makes things better, pretty much humankind forever
Interacting: AR / VR
Tracking: total surveillance nominally "for the benefit of citizens and consumers" but in reality to an authoritarian state
I think Kelly started reaching on these, but there's also:
Questioning: the idea that good questions are far more valuable than good answers (except that too many people don't question, don't think)
Beginning: going global
There were parts of the book that I really wanted to scream NO NO NO at. Except Kelly isn't saying "here's what I propose," he's saying, "here's what I see." Screaming "No!" at a wall of water doesn't stop the flood, building a seawall stops the worst of it. Which might have been a reason for writing and reading this book.
Worth reading. Maybe reading twice.
Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.
Location: 146
Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.
Location: 150
You may not want to upgrade, but you must because everyone else is. It’s an upgrade arms race. I used to upgrade my gear begrudgingly (why upgrade if it still works?) and at the last possible moment. You know how it goes: Upgrade this and suddenly you need to upgrade that, which triggers upgrades everywhere. I would put it off for years because I had the experiences of one “tiny” upgrade of a minor part disrupting my entire working life.
Location: 199
[D]elaying upgrading is even more disruptive. If you neglect ongoing minor upgrades, the change backs up so much that the eventual big upgrade reaches traumatic proportions.
Location: 203
I can confirm this statement.
Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades.
Location: 208
No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of “becoming,” everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble. That bears repeating. All of us—every one of us—will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up.
Location: 210
Second, because the new technology requires endless upgrades, you will remain in the newbie state. Third, because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating (the average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days!), you won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced, so you will remain in the newbie mode forever. Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.
Location: 214
We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled. Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continual discontentment.
Location: 220
This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth. We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart.
Location: 226
A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant.
Location: 231
None of us have to worry about these utopia paradoxes, because utopias never work. Every utopian scenario contains self-corrupting flaws.
Location: 233
The flaw in most dystopian narratives is that they are not sustainable. Shutting down civilization is actually hard.
Location: 238
Nature finds away. Especially when said nature contains people.
The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow.
Location: 249
The problem with constant becoming (especially in a protopian crawl) is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion.
Location: 266
The disruption ABC could not imagine was that this “internet stuff” enabled the formerly dismissed passive consumers to become active creators.
Location: 343
The total number of web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request, exceeds 60 trillion. That’s almost 10,000 pages per person alive.
Location: 349
What we all failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions.
Location: 369
The audience was a confirmed collective couch potato, as the ABC honchos assumed. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs in terms of cost and expertise.
Location: 378
One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is fueled by duty or passion.
Location: 388
In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it.
Location: 527
The list of Xs is endless. The more unlikely the field, the more powerful adding AI will be.
Location: 549
When you type “Easter Bunny” into the image search bar and then click on the most Easter Bunny–looking image, you are teaching the AI what an Easter Bunny looks like.
Location: 586
My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.
Location: 591
Cloud computing empowers the law of increasing returns, sometimes called the network effect, which holds that the value of a network increases much faster as it grows bigger. The bigger the network, the more attractive it is to new users, which makes it even bigger and thus more attractive, and so on. A cloud that serves AI will obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets.
Location: 632
As a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.
Location: 636
Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as the only self-conscious species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular.
Location: 665
One of the advantages of having AIs drive our cars is that they won’t drive like humans, with our easily distracted minds.
Location: 676
Imagine we land on an alien planet. How would we measure the level of the intelligences we encounter there? This is an extremely difficult question because we have no real definition of our own intelligence, in part because until now we didn’t need one.
Location: 693
Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.
Location: 732
Today, many scientific discoveries require hundreds of human minds to solve, but in the near future there may be classes of problems so deep that they require hundreds of different species of minds to solve. This will take us to a cultural edge because it won’t be easy to accept the answers from an alien intelligence. We already see that reluctance in our difficulty in approving mathematical proofs done by computer.
Location: 737
We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special?
Location: 763
We aren’t giving “good jobs” to robots. Most of the time we are giving them jobs we could never do. Without them, these jobs would remain undone.
Location: 860
It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.
Location: 878
The one thing humans can do that robots can’t (at least for a long while) is to decide what it is that humans want to do. This is not a trivial semantic trick; our desires are inspired by our previous inventions, making this a circular question.
Location: 881
This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines.
Location: 924
It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.
Location: 931
We can’t stop massive indiscriminate copying. Not only would that sabotage the engine of wealth if we could, but it would halt the internet itself.
Location: 947
The initial age of computing borrowed from the industrial age. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first commercial computers employed the metaphor of the office.
Location: 960
Then, in the second age, along came the web, and very quickly we expected everything the same day.
Location: 974
Our cycle time jumped from batch mode to daily mode. This was a big deal.
Location: 976
Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time.
Location: 978
In predigital days I bought printed books long before I intended to read them. If I spied an enticing book in a bookstore, I bought it.
Location: 985
The Phenomenon
Book Notes kitt decided around 17:24 on 20 December 2018 to publish this:Over the years, I have bought Kris a number of baseball-related books. Some have been peripherally baseball related, sorta like the movie For the Love of the Game is a baseball movie (for the record, it is not, it is a romance movie with baseball elements, it is not a baseball movie). Some were definitely baseball related.
This one, however, is the first baseball book Kris recommended back to me.
That's right, I bought baseball books for him, but hadn't actually read them.
So, on his recommendation, I read this one.
I didn't know Ankiel's story. In a few sentences: he was a baseball phenomenon, likely to be better than Sandy Koufax, who, depending on how your stats rank your pitchers, is considered the greatest pitcher of all time. Then he threw a wild pitch that got into his head, and he couldn't get it out. He tried, he failed, he left baseball, he came back a hitter and an outfielder instead. He had a good career.
This book is his autobiography of that career. Many parts of the book read like the inner dialog of a person talking with himself, trying to psych himself up, convince himself that he can do this next thing, that the last thing wasn't so bad.
A result of the style of inner chatter writing and not knowing Ankiel's story is that I was really confused in the first two chapters. of the book. By chapter five, Ankiel had written enough of his story that I understood the why of this book, and was engrossed in the story.
Had I been paying more attention when I was reading The Art of Fielding, I would have recognized Ankiel's name before reading this book, as he is mentioned.
I really enjoyed this book. If you like biographies, baseball, or stories about the hero's journey, this I strongly recommend this book. It isn't one where the hero triumphs, but it is a tale of continuing to do the work, to try, to succeed in a different way, and, in the end, to accept that the life you have isn't the one you wanted, but it can still be a good one.
I would stand behind him when he needed a push, before him when he needed a shield, beside him when he did not.
Location 76
Denise, my mom, wished she’d had the sense to leave Richard. Right then. The bruises generally healed while my father was away.
Location 419
I understand this wish.
She couldn’t shake the notion that a boy should have a father nearby. She couldn’t not believe in having a family, even if it were all fouled up and volatile and hurtful.
Location 450
Another problem was that Dad was a bully, and Mom, because she so wanted to believe the nightmare would end and didn’t want to be threatened again and also didn’t want to lie in a puddle of her own blood on the kitchen floor, was afraid. She had nowhere to go.
Location 453
I was too small, and then I was too afraid, and even when I grew up there remained the notion that to challenge one’s father was to call out the whole universe into the middle of the street to decide who was the better man. And how long would that have lasted? A punch or two? And what would that have cost my mother in bruises?
Location 505
An acquaintance of mine has this deep-seated belief that victims can alway speak, that they can always walk away or continue to fight. He never quite understands that sometimes the victim cannot do those things, because the victim understands the consequences of those actions can sometimes be worse than the abuse. My acquaintance does not understand that.a
My mother didn’t deserve the life she got, and I would not — could not — choose the same. I was going to chase something better. I was going to let myself dream and go after that.
Location 670
Though I’d worn a facsimile of the uniform briefly the fall before, the first day in a real clubhouse — a spring training clubhouse, but still, surrounded by real major leaguers — buttoning that bright jersey and curling the brim of that new cap felt meaningful.
Location 806
"... curling the brim ..." Hee!
The way to nine months of every single day was an hour at a time, a minute at a time even. Try not to look back. Definitely do not look forward, because the destination is tiny in the distance, and to chase that would be a reasonable path to exhaustion.
No, just hit the next mark in the routine. Do that, and when that is done the next mark will appear. Hit them all, and at the end of the day you’re fed and rested and healthy and strong and clear-headed and confident.
Miss one, then another, and that day gets wobbly, and the next is too full trying to cover for the previous one, and the next is messier, and this is how sore elbows and bad Aprils and doubt and stomachaches are born.
Location 922
Your brain quit on you. Unless, and this was something to think about, your brain knew best, and it really was protecting you. You don’t want to throw this pitch, it’s not going to end well, so I won’t let you throw it.
Location 1112
It’s a spark of fear, of humiliation, of regret before the fact.
Location 1121
“The yips,” he said, “can be explained in both psychological and neuromuscular terms, and it’s extremely complicated. It’s very difficult to treat and very difficult to understand.… What it boils down to, a mistake is made, ultimate trust is eroded, pressure interferes with the lack of trust, and that compounds the problem. Now there’s anxiety, and a vicious cycle ensues.”
Along come the obsessive thoughts, Dr. Oakley said, the failure, the pursuit of perfection now fouled by anxiety and more failure and more anxiety. “This,” he added, “is a phenomenon on steroids.”
Location 1151
“When a person’s really distressed, they’re overwhelmed by that,” Dr. Oakley said.
“Turn it on its head. Instead of curtailing that moment, bring it on. Experience that. Spend more time with it.
“Most people, of course, don’t want to spend time with it. It’s not a pleasant thing. So what I do, and it goes along with treating anxiety disorders, I try prolonged exposure to it. You actually need more time with it, what my friend Ken Ravizza calls ‘getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.’”
Location 1169
We knew that wouldn’t last forever, but twenty-one years old or even thirty-one years old hardly seemed a time to stop believing in tomorrow. Our arms were strong. Our hearts were set to the rhythms of the game. So we’d run our laps and take the ball and try to throw it past hitters. That was the plan.
Location 1275
In some ways, I told him, the Thing is not unlike cancer. A lot of people who get cancer did nothing to attract it. They are not flawed people. They did not abuse themselves. It’s not as though they stood too close to someone who already had cancer. So they, perhaps, can wonder why they were chosen, but they cannot blame themselves. “It’s not your fault,” I said, repeating a line I heard often.
Location 1390
Here's one of the things our the modern American culture: unfortunate random things happen to people and said people are blamed for being morally bankrupt and deserving the unfortunate random thing.
Which is, in reality, total bullshit.
In Lincoln's day, a clinically depressed person was supported by his community and had a chance to heal. Today, a clinically depressed person is thrown (likely non-effective) drugs and told to walk it off. Depression doesn't work that way. Sames as other random things like the yips. Or some cancers.
And if I couldn’t bury the monster, I would drown it. “Hey,” I said to Darryl Kile, “think you could get me a bottle of vodka?”
It was humiliating. He returned with a full bottle. Something cheap. No judgment. I shrugged. “Do what you gotta do, kid,” he said. “I understand.”
Location 1771
“Do what you have to do, Ank,” Harvey said, just like Darryl had said, maybe amused at the tactic and definitely concerned for the consequences. “Just know it’s not real.”
Location 1794
“Real,” I told Harvey, “and the rest of it is getting a little blurry right now. I have to pitch. This is how I can.”
“Ank,” he said, “it’s still there. You’re not winning. You’re stalling.”
Location 1798
I made three starts. They went like this: 4 1/ 3 innings, 3 hits, 17 walks, 12 wild pitches, a 20.77 ERA. That’s a lot to happen over 13 outs.
Location 1842
Wow.
Ouch.
In rookie ball, yes. Against a bunch of kids whose best stories were about high school.
Location 1878
I have a couple friends like this.
But I also didn’t have to pretend I was fine when I wasn’t. I could walk around between starts and not feel the weight of the last start and the next start.
Location 1888
“Real” tasted better chased by Bud Lights. It slept better with Xanax. It looked better after one last round and a boozy promise that tomorrow would be happier.
Location 1922
Darryl had been good to me for no reason but to be good to me, and I wanted more than anything in that moment to be his teammate again.
Location 1968
I quit drinking, a special point for Harvey, who for years had seen me hose down bad days with alcohol — and sometimes pills — and celebrate good days with the same.
Location 1991
Harvey’s point, that I must feel the pain in order to treat the pain, was that I’d require clarity to cope with whatever came next. To beat whatever came next. Or, perhaps, to live with whatever came next.
Location 2004
Every ballpark could be a test of past failures and buried memories, some new way to summon the anxiety that was only too eager to return.
Location 2029
But I’d become pretty skilled at keeping the bad thoughts out, holding off what before had felt — and surely was — the inevitable wave of panic.
Location 2041
By then, I was less afraid. Not unafraid,
Location 2056
Big difference.
I liked dawn for the way I remembered it smelling, that being before the accident and the concussion, which jostled just enough in my head to kill my sense of smell. I was thirteen then, being towed on a skateboard behind a go-cart, an event that concluded predictably with a crash, a trip to the emergency room, and my being down one sense.
Location 2119
Dislike mornings. Understand the lack of the sense of smell.
I liked dawn because of its coolness, how it foretold — demanded, even — a fresh start, a ball’s-stuck-in-the-tree do-over.
Location 2122
Oh.
“Today’s the day,” I said. “I’m going to do it.”
“OK, Ank. You go do it. We’ll talk later. You good?”
Location 2132
Ballplayers didn’t walk away. They were shoved, forcibly removed from the premises at the end of a cattle prod, railing against the injustices of age and declining skills and the idiots who decided who was too old and unskilled.
Location 2150
I. Can’t. Do. It. Anymore. Every word a hammer strike, loud and final. Each report echoing in my head as my old life vanished, my old dreams with it, dying of self-inflicted chaos.
Location 2160
I’d invited him out of obligation. I sat in a dark bus out of obligation. Those years were hard on him too, he said, and I listened out of obligation, for what I didn’t know. Maybe I was still hoping I was wrong about him, the evidence notwithstanding.
Location 2414
Obligation can be an ugly thing.
In this case, Ankiel tells it as this being a gift to his future wife, to try one more time. He tried, it didn't work out. Kudos to him for trying.
I don’t miss him. I miss the notion of a father, though.
Location 2417
[W]hen I rose to the top step to say thank you to those who were kind enough to remember me, I felt no pain. What I felt was strength. Power. Energy. The game was good again. And I was good at it again. My heart was smiling. And I wanted everyone to see.
Location 2488
"Yes, a very tough set of circumstances growing up, but not making excuses, not being a bum on the street, and here he is a father of two, so I love him. I just will never quit hoping that he had a good quality of life.’”
Location 2496
What happens to all of us. How a grown man who has performed a single act his entire life, an act that is so simple or has become so simple, finds that it becomes not simple and, beyond that, in a lot of ways, incapacitating.
Location 2661
[Harvey]’d tell me it wasn’t my fault. I was not responsible for who — more precisely, what — my father was, or what he’d done to my mother and me, or what I should have done about it.
Location 2687
What happened happened. Now what?
Location 2690
I’ve told my friends, “You ever find me hanging from the garage rafters, I was murdered.”
Location 2700
Harvey showed me how, sometimes simply by asking, “OK, what the fuck you gonna do about it?” Emphasis on the profanity, hard like that, as if to say, It’s a big-boy world out there, Ank, and bad stuff happens, and then you decide: I’m in or I’m out.
Location 2702
It’s what they called the guy who knew too well the doubts swimming in Domenick’s heart and head. Where they’d send him. How they’d probably never leave. But you fight. You find a way through it or around it. You ask for help. They send me in. And we go to breakfast.
Location 2754
We start there. So very few people actually got it. Fewer still knew how to help. And there was only one Harvey. We didn’t slay the monster together, but we stood shoulder to shoulder and tried. Then we bandaged up and got on our feet and tried again. Some days, we had our pick of monsters.
Location 2827
How many I’d told there was no trick to beating this thing, and hell, there might be no beating it at all, but there was no shame in trying. Trying was the only way to find out. Trying required courage. Trying meant allowing for failure. Trying was hard and lonely. So yeah, I recommended trying. I thought about Harvey. What would Harvey say? “Go on, Ank, what the fuck”? Or, maybe, “What’s the point, Ank? What do you have left to prove? Don’t do it for the money. Don’t do it for any reason except that you want to.”
Location 2914
The Hanging Tree
Book Notes Posted by kitt at 13:32 on 17 December 2018This is book 6 of the Peter Grant series.
I really enjoyed this book. I'm unsure why I enjoyed this one more than the others, and I enjoyed the others. Maybe the plot was more action, less internal thinking? Unsure.
This one has Peter tracking down the drugs involved in the death of a teen in an expensive, and empty, unit of One Hyde Park. A child of a river is involved, which said river would prefer not disclosed (doesn't happen). We also learn of another pocket of leftover magic pracitioners, passed down from mother to daughter for generations.
And there's search of the Third Principia, Newton's tome on magic. Oh, and the introduction of Guleed, a female Muslim cop who does just fine.
I will probably read the book again in a few years, and realize why I like this one more than the others. In the meantime, this is a "if you're reading the series, keep reading, this is a fun one."
I recommend the series in general. Start with Midnight Riot.
I waited about a minute, just so I could claim I’d waited five, and then headed back up the garden.
Page 4
Olivia glanced at the picture, then sideways at her mother, and I saw her make the wrong decision. But, before I could say anything, she opened her mouth and stuck her future in it.
Page 18
Guleed always knew how to keep her mouth shut, and had this mad way of just fading into the background whenever she wanted to. Well, we all have our ways of dealing with difficulties — mine is to ask stupid questions.
Page 30
Because, for police officers, “close relative” frequently rhymes with “prime suspect,”
Page 34
He spoke with that deliberately toned down posh accent that, before they allowed regional dialects on the radio, used to be known as BBC standard.
Page 36
Did not know.
Useful or not, it still had to be written up because a) empirically speaking a negative result is still a result, b) someone cleverer than you might make a connection you missed and c) in the event of a case review it’s sensible to at least look like you’re being competent.
Page 39
Yay, scientific method!
That’s the trouble with community policing — strangely, people start expecting you to be part of the community.
Page 44
Melanie who was one of those round perky people who give the impression that it’s only a great effort of will stopping them from bouncing around the room.
Page 44
Beverley said that she found that people stuck the first vaguely appropriate label on, whether it fit the facts or not.
Page 45
“I know it’s hard, Peter,” she’d said. “But if you could contain your erudition and ready wit for just a little while we’d be most grateful.”
“Am I allowed to be cheeky?” I’d asked.
“No you’re fucking not,” said Seawoll.
Page 53
That, as they say, is fighting talk. But, as Nightingale once told me during boxing practice, the best blow is the one your opponent doesn’t even notice until he keels over.
Page 54
The word “bollocks” is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster.
Page 57
Either the management were paying them way over the odds, or their HR department had been outsourced to Stepford, Connecticut.
Page 62
I love references like these.
I'm pretty sure I've missed over half of them, too.
Generally when you’re interviewing somebody and they seem remarkably calm about one crime, it’s because they’re relieved you haven’t found out about something else.
Page 81
You see, even the clever ones can’t resist being clever and the next move, if you want them to stay being clever, is to play dumb.
Page 81
“Women carried on “practicing”,” said Lady Helena, “just as they carried on composing, painting and all the other professions from which history has erased them. Mother taught daughter, who passed on the skills through the generations — just as women have always had to do."
Page 85
The media always calls this sort of thing senseless, but the motive made sense — it was just stupid, is what it was.
Page 112
This one was a white woman with slate gray eyes which she narrowed at me when I introduced myself.
Page 114
Slate gray eyes... hmmmmmm....
“My father was somebody important right up to the day he was nobody at all,” she said. “Power in the material world is fleeting.”
Page 121
So, back to Mayfair where the constant flow of money keeps the streets clean and free of unsightly poor people.
Page 122
This was off the books — I was not here, this never happened — the spice must flow.
Page 122
Cracking up.
“La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain,” said Nightingale later when we were preparing our case notes.
Which is French for “Them that has, gets.”
Page 151
Which was totally not my fault, I might add, although I probably shouldn’t have used the word Krynoid in my official report.
Page 153
Dying!
Though, I have to admit the Doctor Who reference was entertaining in and of itself to me, based on my ongoing and lifelong fascination with crinoids.
Every spare centimeter of the wall space had been covered with shelves, all of which were stuffed with books.
Page 165
Squeeeeee!
The previous summer I’d done the exact same thing while being chased by an invisible unicorn — so at least I had form.
Page 217
How not to be seen, lesson number one: Don’t stand up.
Page 220
Because the alternative is you, I wanted to shout back. But the second lesson on how not to be seen is: Don’t answer back.
Page 220
Sometimes courage is easy, and sometimes you have to scream at your own body to act in its own bloody best interest, and sometimes it refuses the call altogether. And the pisser is that you never know which one it’s going to be until you try.
Page 222
Mercifully it must have been quite late on because it wasn’t the featureless box so favored by the American modernists, and the architect had actually made an attempt to fit it in with the rest of street.
Page 228
“But we are not always the sons our fathers dream of — as you should know.” As I did know, and all the things sons do to make their fathers proud until you learn to choose your own life for your own reasons.
Page 251
Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think — that’s what we want for our town.
Page 251
It was full night by the time I crossed the street and the Portland stone of the Arch was bleached white by spotlights, the bronze on top lit up in blue.
Page 252
Once more into the breach, I thought.
Page 257
“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I think I’m going to have to see this through,” she said. “Inshallah.” As God wills it.
“Good show,” said Nightingale.
This is it, I thought. We’re all going to die.
Page 258
“When you’re married you get used to each other — you really only see the person you expect to see.”
Page 288