You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.
-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk
Every morning for the past twelve years (well, 345 days out of 365 anyway), I have walked for 45+ minutes down the hill from our house, across the little bridge, around the OSU-N/COTC campus, and back.
Apparently, bridges do not live forever, as ours has been taken out of commission for the next "111 days."
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| Younger Steve would have crossed this anyway |
Whatever, walks still need to be walked. There are more that 40 miles of paved "recreational trails" around here. This morning, my Sweetie and I traveled by car to the original Licking County bike path (+/-3.5 miles between Granville and Newark, initially paved in the mid-1970s.) It is as pretty as I remember it.
We will try a different path tomorrow.
In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.
From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.
-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here
As for "God," old-time members sometimes comment that "A.A. has only two things to say about the subject: First, there is one. And second, you're not it. From there, you're on your own."
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don't know where the pictures came from. And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'. Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you 'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?
-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, from the chapter describing the birth of Aslan and Narnia
We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestations of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
-Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
It seems that there's quite the divide between the happy face we post online and the disinterest we actually have in the narrative of our own years.
The first step is to take a breath and dare to entertain the thought that in the debris of your life would be stories worth examining. That they are, as I just wrote, a kind of treasure.
The less we do this, the more unanchored we become, and susceptible to a virtual reality that will fill our entire waking hours given a ghost of a chance. To give your lost stories some attention is a surprisingly radical act.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
For most of human history, children learned by living. A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough. A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory. Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom. Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself. No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours. Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.
Then Prussia lost a war. 1806. Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt. The Prussian government blamed their people. Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human. So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.
The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history. Children were sorted by age like industrial products. Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.
The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told. Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.
It worked so well that America imported it wholesale. Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system. He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."
Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.
But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping. Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest. This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will. This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization. In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you do this too. . . ." Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature. The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo David 1501-04 |
When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding.
.........................the critters beat us to them:
We ate our first tomato and cucumber from the garden today. The garden is a good one this year but I made the mistake of planting too closely.
In this petulant note—written in haste by an old man whose crankiness was exacerbated by a recent attack of kidney stones—we can sense the frustration that came from a lifetime spent battling those who viewed his profession with contempt. In the face of the skeptics and scoffers, Michelangelo promoted a new conception of the artist, one in which the crass demands of commerce and the demeaning associations of manual labor have been sloughed off to reveal a creature as yet ill-defined but still thoroughly magnificent. . . .
Michelangelo's determination to chart a new course embroiled him in endless quarrels as his claim of superiority clashed with his employers' own considerable egos. While patrons tended to regard him and his colleagues as, at best, highly trained professionals tasked with carrying out their vision, Michelangelo insisted on an unprecedented degree of freedom to pursue his own vision, on his own terms. Cardinal Cervini (soon to be elected Pope Marcellus II), in charge of overseeing the rebuilding of St. Peter's, was one of many who discovered how difficult it was to control the headstrong artist. When he asked Michelangelo to inform him of his plans, the artist snapped; "I am not obligated, nor do I intend to be obliged to say either to your highness or to any other person what I am bound or desirous to do." Even when his relationship with a patron was one of mutual respect, Michelangelo chafed at any restrictions placed on his freedom. "If Your Holiness wishes me to accomplish anything," he wrote to Pope Clement VII, "I beg you not to have authorities set over me in my own trade, but to have faith in me and give me a free hand. Your Holiness will see what I shall accomplish and the account I shall give of myself."
Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo Moses c 1513-16 marble sculpture |
.........................is its current untrustworthiness and error rate. If a startup has some crazy glitch on an AI-generated web site, it probably is not that damaging but the stakes are much higher for established companies. The problem in my mind boils down to the AI's lack of skepticism.
Everyone has heard of Descartes "I think therefore I am," but his actual logic was a bit different. It can best be summarized as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am." The core of thinking for Descartes was doubt, or as I call it, skepticism. By Descartes' definition, can AI be actually thinking without skepticism?
This isn't a problem limited to AI -- much of the human race seems to have lost the ability to be skeptical. It seems everyone is really good at a knee-jerk skepticism of anything originating across the political aisle, but the capacity for skepticism for one's own work or for inputs that reinforce one's core beliefs is limited.
-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post
Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments.
Always assume things will work out, then do the work to make it true. That combination creates a quiet confidence that allows you to tolerate uncertainty better than anything else.
-Sahil Bloom, from this newsletter
The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics. In America, this means cobbling together majority coalitions from a politically and culturally diverse continental nation. The second proposition is that the nation cannot have just one healthy party. When one welcomes contamination by the extremism and stupidity on its side of the spectrum, the other, relishing the collapse of standards, does likewise.
-George Will, as excerpted here
The old system said: “Obey.” The new system says: “Realize your potential,” which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. “Potential” is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda feel bad about.
-Eric Barker, from this post
It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.
-Françoise Sagan, as quoted here
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