AI will be baking a bigger pie.............?

 The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.

The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

-Marc Andreessen, from this Substack, why-ai-will-save-the-world

I am hoping......................

 ...........this means Chris Lynch is back.

Feels that way anyway..............

 more fun here

Wave of the future..............?

 more fun here

Highly recommended..........................

 

For all the books on all the shelves of all the world's libraries, life must in the end be lived as a series of discrete moments and individual decisions.  What we face may be complicated, but what we do about it is simple.  "Do the right thing," Laura White told her son.  "Do unto others," a teacher told his disciples, "as you would have them do unto you." . . .

How does one thrive through a maelstrom of change?  By standing on ground that is permanent.

savor............................

The lesson, so simple yet so difficult, is that life can be savored even though it contains hardship, disappointment, loss, and even brutality.  The choice to see its beauty is available to us at every moment.

-David Von Drehle, The Book of Charlie: Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man 

air moving..................

 Someone has insulted you?  You mean, rather, that you allowed them to insult you.

     Because regardless of their intention, what they say is just air moving between the two of you.  Their words become an insult only if you regard them as such.  Otherwise, they are the uttering of a fool.

     Try, therefore, not to be bewildered by appearances, and instead take a break from the situation, put some distance between yourself and the immediate impression.  That way you will find that it is easier to retain command of your ruling faculty, your ability to reason.

-Massimo Pigliucci, A Field Guide to a Happy Life

radical amazement......................

 

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.       . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

expensive.......................

 I don't know anything that a young business man ought to keep more entirely to himself than his dislikes, unless it is his likes.  It's generally expensive to have either, but it's bankruptcy to tell about them.  It's all right to say nothing about the dead but good, but it's better to apply the rule to the living, and especially to the house which is paying your salary.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

On giving............................

 It is impossible for you to become poor by giving.  It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

incompatible.....................

 Allowing a small number of technologists and financiers to dominate a huge portion of the economy and the information pipeline, and to monetize every aspect of human behavior, seems incompatible with democratic self-determination.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

our repertoire............................

I now turn to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility.  We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have not parallel in the lives of other species.  Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject, and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design.  Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past.  Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment. 

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

spells...........................

  Words are energy and cast spells, that’s why it’s called spelling. Change the way you speak about yourself and you can change your life.

-Bruce Lee, with more wisdom here

Thanks Ray

Opening sentences..................

 

I grew up under the Cantor's gaze.  The celebrated Haussmann portrait of Bach had been given to my parents for safekeeping for the duration of the war, and it took pride of place on the first-floor landing of the old mill in Dorset where I was born.  Every night on my way to bed I tried to avoid its forbidding stare.

-John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

thanks Kurt

unusual knacks.........................

 People often asked him the secret to longevity, and Charlie was always scrupulously honest: there's no secret, just luck.  But if he knew no secrets to a long life, he knew plenty about a happy life.  Through tragedy and loss, poverty and setbacks, missteps and blown chances, he maintained a steadiness, an evenness, and a self-reliance that today might be called resilience.  He had a gift for seizing joy, grabbing opportunities, and holding on to things that matter.  And he had an unusual knack for an even more difficult task: letting go of all the rest.

-David Von Drehle:  The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man

Once again, the magic of compounding......

 We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.  Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years.  A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

flashing red lights...................

     The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives.  If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts.  But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.

      There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education.  Rule by the most educated and highly credentialed people is profoundly illiberal, observes Yascha Motunk, a Harvard progressive.  Many elite progressives—the core of the clerisy—might prefer such a model for society, but it would endanger political pluralism, especially when the credentialed elites are overly sure of their own correctness.  A survey commissioned by the Atlantic notes that the highly educated are now arguably the least politically tolerant group in America. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

A pretty good explanation...................

 ...........................of the concept of "Woke".

the best we can................

 . . . we don't need to do great, powerful, spectacular things to make a genuine difference or to become heroes.  Nor do we need to be powerful beings or important leaders.  We simply need to do the best we can, even if it seems impossible that we'll end up doing anything special in the long run.  It is purely our motivation and great-hearted Bodhicitta in action that counts, not any attachment to a specific outcome.

-Lam Surya Das, Buddha Is As Buddha Does

the one commodity....................

 I dwell on this because I am a little disappointed that you should have made such a mistake in sizing up Milligan.  He isn't the brightest man in the office, but he is loyal to me and to the house, and when you have been in business as long as I have you will be inclined to put a pretty high value on loyalty.  It is the one commodity that hasn't any market value, and it's the one that you can't pay too much for.  You can trust any number of men with your money, but mighty few with your reputation.  Half the men who are with the house on pay day are against it the other six.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

Tom Hanks.............................

 .......................................does a Harvard commencement The American Way

When art meets art................

Rita Hayworth & Fred Astaire dance to Led Zeppelin

 

thanks

the subject at hand................

 

On laughter.....................

      Consider one of those features of people that set them apart from other species: laughter.  No other animal laughs.  What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter.  To be real laughter it would have to be an expression of amusement—laughter at something, founded in a complex pattern of thought.  True, there is also "laughter at what ceases to amuse," as Eliot puts it.  But we understand this "hollow" laughter as a deviation from the central case, which is the case of amusement.  But what is amusement?  No philosopher, it seems to me, has ever quite put a finger on it.  Hobbes's description of laughter as "sudden glory" has a certain magical quality; but "glory" suggests that all laughter is a form of triumph, which is surely far from the truth.  Schopenhauer, Berson, and Freud have attempted to identify the particular thought that lies at the heart of laughter: none, I think, with more than partial success. Helmuth Plessner has seen laughing and crying as keys to the human condition, features that typify our distinctiveness.  But his phenomenological language is opaque and leads to no clear analysis of either laughter or tears,

     One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair. . . . From that suggestion, however, another follows.  Only a being who makes judgments can laugh.  Typically we laugh at things that fall short or at witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

the critical skill of unlearning.....

 via

forced itself.......................

 I know it will be said that in this work I have pointed out a deep malady, and only suggested a superficial remedy.  I have tediously insisted that the natural system of banking is that of many banks keeping their own cash reserve, with the penalty of failure before them if they neglect it.  I have shown that our system is that of a single bank keeping the whole reserve under no effectual penalty of failure.  And yet I propose to retain this system, and only attempt to mend and palliate it.

     I can only reply that I propose to retain this system because I am quite sure that it is of no manner of use proposing to alter it.  A system of credit which has slowly grown up as years went on, which has suited itself to the course of business, which has forced itself on the habits of men, will not be altered because theorists disapprove of it, or because books are written against it.

-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

On prospering..................

 If we're going to prosper, we have to work. We have to have people subject to carrots and sticks.  If you take away the stick the whole system won't work.  You can't vote yourself rich.  It's an idiotic idea.

-Charlie Munger

judge well.........................

 Attention is not always within our control.  The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual in life abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time.  Attention is like a second skin, a meeting ground for our ever-present grappling with external and internal worlds.  Yet well used and nurtured carefully, our networks of attention are our foremost means to shaping our lives.  These networks give us extraordinary ways to master ourselves and our environment, offering the key to growth, connection, happiness.  Accepting a culture of eroding attention relinquishes this potential for sculpting our individual and collective futures.  To paraphrase Walter Mischel's caveat on will, we don't always want to exercise our highest powers of attention, yet if we cannot focus, observe, or judge well, the choice is lost.  Will we slip into a dark age of distraction?  At journey's end, I searched for final clues in contrasting realms of art and science where attention is nonetheless similarly dissected, rekindled, and venerated.  To reverse a darkening time, we must understand, strengthen, and lastly value attention.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

The more things change........................

      Although the revolution that is taking place in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed.  I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes, as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book Four, Chapter VIII

wisdom....................

. . . it is part of the wise man to recreate and refresh himself with pleasant food and drink, and also with perfumes, with the soft beauty of growing plants, with dress, with music, with many sports, with theatres, and the like, such as every man may make use of without injury to his neighbor. . . . Things are good only insofar as they assist a man to enjoy the life of the mind.

-Baruch de Spinoza