Friday, January 22, 2021

The difficult part is finding the "good"...........

 Of course, we shouldn't be credulous, but the antidote to credulity isn't to believe nothing, but to have the confidence to assess information with curiosity and a healthy scepticism.

     Good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic.  Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us see more clearly.  Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist.  If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves — both large and small — that we would not be able to see in any other way.

-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up:  Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

Reminiscent...............................

 If Mr. Trump was less than honorable in refusing to acknowledge defeat, his opponents are less than satisfied with mere electoral victory. The current impeachment is reminiscent of the beheading of Oliver Cromwell, which took place two years after his death.

-Arnold Kling, from this read-worthy post

Super-powers.....................



                  more wisdom here

A few simple rules...........................

      To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no super human genius is required.  A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

      If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. . . .

     If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. . . .

     A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. . . .

     Be wary of opinions that flatter your self esteem. . . .

-Bertrand Russell, from his 1943 essay An Outline Of Intellectual Rubbish, which is reprinted here

On freedom........................................

      What is freedom?  It is, first, the capacity to deliberate or weigh alternatives.  "Shall I be a teacher or a lawyer?"  "Shall I vote for this candidate or the other candidate?"  "Shall I be a Democrat, Republican, or Socialist?"  Second, freedom expresses itself in decision.  The word decision like the word incision involves the image of cutting.  Incision means to cut in, decision means to cut off.  When I make a decision I cut off alternatives and make a choice.  The existentialists say that we must choose, that we are choosing animals; and if we do not choose we sink into thinghood and the mass mind.  A third expression of freedom is responsibility.  This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decision.  No one else can respond for him.  He alone must respond, for his acts are determined by the centered totality of his being.

      From this analysis we can clearly see the evilness of segregation.  It cuts off one's capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond.

      The absence of freedom is the imposition of restraint on my deliberation as to what I shall do, where I shall live, how much I shall earn, the kind of tasks I shall pursue.  I am robbed of the basic quality of man-ness.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from a December 1962 speech, as reprinted in A Testament of Hope

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

The walk......................................

 ....................God’s canvas that he paints differently each day.

Different..........................

       As Arius would write, like Panaetius before him, we each have our own implanted gifts (aphormai), resources that can lead us to virtue.  Our personalities suit us differently to different paths of ethical development.  We all have different launching points, but these inborn tools together with hard effort will get us to where we want to go.

       We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours.  We must have courage.  We must be fair.  We must check our emotions.  We must, above all, be wise.

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Opening paragraphs..................

       On the phone, Tomlinson said to Ford, "When the deputy's wife and kids disappeared, moonshiners might've dumped their bodies in the lake—it was during Prohibition.  It wouldn't be the first time karma has waited decades to boot justice in the ass."

-Randy Wayne White, Mangrove Lightning

On unjust laws......................................

 Playboy:  Perhaps.  But the kind of extremism for which you've been criticized has to do not with love, but with your advocacy of willful disobedience of what you consider to be "unjust laws."  Do you feel you have the right to pass judgment on and defy the law — nonviolently or otherwise?

King:    Yes—morally, if not legally.  For there are two kinds of laws: man's and God's.  A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law.  But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law.  And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all.  Thus a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well.  Let us not forget, in the memories of six million who died, that everything that Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal." and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was "illegal."

-as excerpted from the January 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., as reprinted in A Testament of Hope

Editor's Note:  What gives power to King's willful disobedience, as with Gandhi before him, was the willingness to nonviolently accept the consequences of disobedience, ultimately bringing shame, and then change, to the oppressor.

Traveling..........................

 "The only true voyage would be, not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes."

-Proust, The Captive.  An epigraph used by Margaret Heffernan in the chapter Think Like An Artist from her book, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

Gifts..................................

 "You get different gifts in life, and one of my greatest gifts is my mom and dad."

-Jeff Bezos, as culled from Invent & Wander

I have a difficult time accepting the notion that I am privileged by my skin color.  I have absolutely no doubt that I have been highly privileged by growing up in the stable, safe, supportive, positive home of my parents.  The foundation they provided me has been priceless. 

The genius of knowing what to ignore...............

 Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both right and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones.  In that assessment of his own abilities, Einstein was very likely overly modest.  But part of his genius was an instinct for what mattered and the ability to pursue it vertically and connect it horizontally.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

Fifty years ago................................

Led Zeppelin.........................................Stairway To Heaven

 

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

The need to be "maladjusted".....................

       Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word.  It is the word "maladjusted."  Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.  But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call you to be maladjusted.   I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.  I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule.  I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism.  I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things.  I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, "Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."  As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free.  As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization.  And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as he concluded a June 7, 1957 speech.  From A Testament Of Hope

Shadows................................

       The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.

       We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.  We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is.  In trying to get this alignment, we lose sight of the fact that for most decisions, there are lots of ways things could turn out.

       Experience is supposed to by our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.  Doing so distorts our ability to use those experiences to figure out which decisions were good and which were bad.

Annie Duke, How To Decide:  Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

Likely so.............................

 


Fun with nature and a camera..................

                     Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2020

 

             via

The power elite?.....................................

 The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone.

-David Samuels, as extracted from this read-worthy essay

      via

In praise of chaos......................

 ..............four suggestions for investors.   Here's #2:

2.   Don’t base investment decisions on your gut feel for which way markets are headed. Instead, adopt practices that have worked through many different market cycles. Like a good poker player, don’t sweat the losses if you have a process in place that puts the probabilities in your favor. Focus on tax efficiency, holding down investment costs, diversifying broadly and investing in line with your risk tolerance.

If music is one of your things................................

 ......check in periodically with Any Major Dude With Half A Heart.

Decide......................................

 “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”

-J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

A different perspective...............................

 ..........................................................In praise of "bubbles."

Can I get an..................................

 .........................................................................Amen.

Monday, January 18, 2021

Fifty years ago.............................................

The Allman Brothers Band.............................Statesboro Blues

Recommended............................

 


     Raymond Aron said it in 1945:  "The quarrel of Machiavellianism is rekindled every time a Caesar subjects Europe anew to servitude and war."  Have we reached that point?  Perhaps not, or at least not yet.  If history is rife with Machiavellian moments, some are pronounced and some are less so—more discreet, insidious, stubborn.  The less pronounced moments are not always the least perilous, particularly when accompanied by a general lethargy.  Machiavelli is an awakener, because he is a writer.  He writes to scratch his pen in the open wound.  He writes not to revive the splendor of words but to say the truth about things.

-Patrick Boucheron,  Machiavelli:  The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear

A few snippets..............................

 "A platoon commander who joins at the age of twenty-four is commanding a battalion fifteen years later.  But we don't know what they will be asked to do in fifteen years so we have to train now for a deeply adaptive mind set."

But however big the Planning Machine was, it focused almost exclusively on financial information.  Pierre Wack, and idiosyncratic French oil executive, regarded the forecasts that emerged from these systems as wholly inadequate, a dangerous substitute for real thinking because it was too easy to mistake financial models for reality.

Scenarios should focus less on predicting outcomes and more on illuminating the forces at work across the organization and the environments in which it operates.  They must be relevant and challenging, pragmatic not ideological.  And that means that they won't be tidy:  like life, they are bound to be messy, patchy, full of paradox and contradictions.

Pierre Wack regarded computer modeling as the enemy of thought.  Once quantified, he believed, models become too rigid, their makers so wedded to them as to become blind to disconfirming data.

Sterility and paralysis might be blamed on corporate cultures but I've encountered it when running scenario exercises for individuals who find it cognitively or emotionally impossible to leave their past behind.  They can't imagine changing industries or jobs, learning a new skill, or enjoying more freedom.  They don't love where they are, but fear of change and addiction to certainty traps them, making present misery more comfortable than future hope.

Scenario planning always surfaces conflict and there is always a moment when everything seems to fall apart.  But getting the conflict out in the open, constructively, is critical; it's how and when people start to acknowledge and consider alternative perspectives.

"They looked in the mirror and said: 'We don't want to be that!'"

Kahane recalls a popular joke at the time that defined two options:  the practical option, in which everyone went down on their knees and prayed for angelic intervention, and the miraculous option, in which people learned to walk and work together.

If you build a model of the world that excludes people, ideas, and forces you don't like or understand, of course your vision appears perfect to you.  But nobody else inhabits that world or recognizes it as true.

"Making something binary seems simple but it is a way not to have a conversation . . . it's a form of bullying."

"nobody is an expert on what hasn't happened yet."

"The future is built from today. . . . There is no law of history that condemns us to be better or worse in 2030."

. . . much in the world is too complex to be predictable and that the future is too malleable to be revealed by hard data alone.  Absolutely accurate forecasting is feasible, but only where everything is known and predetermined—and nowhere is that true.

-all passages culled from the chapter Go Fast, Go Far in Margaret Heffernan's Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood....

 You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from one of the most amazing letters ever written

Sunday, January 17, 2021

Fifty years ago....................................

The Beach Boys.........................................Disney Girls (1957)

 

Next book up...................



      Why is it so important to have a high-quality decision process?

      Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out:  luck and the quality of your decisions.  You have control over only one of these two things.

      Luck, by definition, is out of your control.  Where and when you were born, whether your boss comes into work in a bad mood, which admissions officer happens to see your college application—these are all things that are out of your hands.

      What you do have some control over, what you can improve, is the quality of your decisions.  And when you make better-quality decisions, you increase the chances that good things will happen to you.

-Annie Duke, from the Introduction to How to Decide:  Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

Recommended.........................



      He was no visionary, no innovator.  He articulated no grand plan for the country or the world.  He did not start Reagan's revolution, nor the one that later swept Eastern Europe.  Yet he figured out how to channel these forces, to harness them and focus them on constructive outcomes while averting potential disasters.  He could bring together people who were more comfortable apart and find pragmatic ways to paper over any rifts.  There was little idealism involved and a fair degree of opportunism.  He was not above political hardball to advance his team's chances at the ballot box.  He never lost sight of what was good for Jim Baker and he survived the ruthless arena of Washington.  Asked in later years his biggest accomplishment, he regularly joked, "leaving Washington unindicted," a line he lifted from a Doonesbury cartoon.  But somehow in the main, it worked.  Things got done.  

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

One might question.......................

................................the entire notion of "control":

 Every day, facts on the grounds were outpacing political leaders struggling to adjust to a reality that seemed increasingly beyond their control.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.   The "facts on the grounds" were occurring in the fall of 1989 — the coming re-unification of East and West Germany, an event which no smart people predicted, or even anticipated.

On ends and means..............................

      All the same, this doesn't mean that the end justifies the means.  Machiavelli never wrote those words, nor would he have been capable of it.  His philosophy of necessity rests on the principle of the changeableness of the times and the unpredictability of political action.  It would be impossible for the means to justify the end, since, at the moment one is acting, the end is still unknown.  The end will always occur too late to justify the means of an action.  To govern is to act blindly within the indeterminacy of the times.

-Patrick Boucheron,  Machiavelli:  The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear