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

Cat Stevens................................................Wild World

 

Calibrate..............................................

 We don't win bets by being in love with our own ideas.  We win bets by relentlessly striving to calibrate our beliefs and predictions about the future to more accurately represent the world.  In the long run, the more objective person will win against the more biased person.  In that way, betting is a form of accountability to accuracy.  Calibration requires and open-minded consideration of diverse points of view and alternative hypotheses.

-Annie Duke, as culled from Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

True this..........................

 

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

Ocean...............................Put Your Hand In The Hand

 

The hopeful birth..............................

 

.............of a sub-division:   Episode 10

Installing a sanitary sewer manhole:

Preparing to set the big safety box

A bit of hand work with a shovel

Getting the elevation right

Leveling the gravel base

ready to install

The structure is easier to position while it is being
suspended by the track hoe.  Notice the developer's
fine footwear

Getting properly aligned

Connection made with the sewer pipe

That should work

bedding the sewer line with gravel

All in a day's work

On diversity and dissent...........................

 One of the frequent themes in On Liberty is the importance of diversity of opinion.  Diversity and dissent are not only checks on fallibility, but the only means of testing the ultimate truth of an opinion:  "The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.  No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; not is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other matter."

-Annie Duke, as culled from Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Good results compound..............................

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.  Even when that effort makes a small difference—more rational thinking and fewer emotional decisions, translated into an increased probability of better outcomes—it can have a significant impact on how our lives turn out.  Good results compound.  Good processes become habits, and make possible future calibration and improvement.

-Annie Duke, as culled from Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

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

Ringo Starr.................................It Don't Come Easy

 

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

      It was a modified bomber.  A Vickers Vimy.  All wood and linen and wire.  She was wide and lumbering, but Alcock still thought her a nippy little thing.  He patted her each time he climbed onboard and slid into the cockpit beside Brown.  One smooth motion of his body.  Hand on the throttle, feet on the rudder bar, he could already feel himself aloft.

-Colum McCann,  Trans Atlantic

Tick..............................

 No history is mute.  No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.  Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.

-Eduardo Galeano

 

Evergreen............................

 Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told.  Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.  On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness.  I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense.  I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age.  All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion.  In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.  The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies.  

-Bertrand Russell, as he commences his 1943 essay, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

The hopeful birth...........................

 .........................of a sub-division:  Episode 9

Sometimes the machine breaks and not much gets done.

A few more snippets from Bertrand Russell....

      The relation of philosophy to social conditions has continually been ignored by professional philosophers.  Marxists are interested in philosophy as an effect, but do not recognize it as a cause.  Yet plainly every important philosophy is both.

But China did one thing for me that the East is apt to do for Europeans who study it with sensitive sympathy:  it taught me to think in long stretches of time, and not to be reduced to despair by the badness of the present.

His most emphatic advice was that one must always re-write.  I conscientiously tried this, but found that my first draft was almost always better than my second.  This discovery has saved me an immense amount of time.

In fact, all imitation is dangerous.

Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods.

Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth.

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed.

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman 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 very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem.

-Bertrand Russell, as culled from this book

The hopeful birth........................................

 ...............................of a sub-division:  Episode 8

Installing the sanitary sewer mains.

Sewer pipe has to allow for a down hill flow to work.  Better
get the grades right the first time

Sand and gravel soil tends to slide.  Have to work in the box 
for safety's sake

cutting the sewer main pipe the right length

If I was a better geologist I might be able to explain the 
subtle variations of soil levels

backfill begins.  The white poles tell the next crew where
to connect the sewer laterals that serve the lots