.......................for dealing with uncertainty:
9. If all else fails, simplify. Einstein supposedly said the five levels of intelligence are smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius and simple.
As the world gets more complex you have to fight harder to keep things simple.
The solution to complexity is not more complexity. It’s simplicity.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo
It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.
-Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Confusing forgiving with forgetting sets another trap: We become convinced that mistakes and wrongdoings not only can, but should, be forgotten. Spiritual tradition sees it as a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of; instead, the sages and saints suggest, such difficulties are best put to use. The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by re-membering it that the possibility of atonement (making at-one) occurs and forgiveness comes to fruition. "Salvation lies in remembrance."
And so, finally, because the past is important, there can be no "unconditional forgiveness." Because we are human, and therefore limited, there can be no unconditional anything. We are not God. Forgetting that, as is our all-too-human tendency, we commit idolatry by assuming that since God loves and forgives unconditionally, we can be like God and do the same. But all "idolatry" has ironic consequences, producing the opposite of the goal intended. Thus the claim to "forgive unconditionally" is the antithesis of benign, for it devalues the one we are supposedly forgiving by implying that he is not responsible for his choices.
Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility. Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions. If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance—it comes to be interpreted as not caring. Every human being is responsible for his or her choices: which means, quite simply, that each of us has a need to matter—somehow, to someone. We especially need to know that our actions have an effect on the people we love.
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
No two more different people could be imagined than Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan: in appearance, in style, in manner, in speech and, it would seem, in what they stand for. Fuller is short and round and speaks in epic poetry. McLuhan is tall and angular and utters puns and epigrams. But both men became cult heroes at the same time, in the 1960s. And both for the same reason: they are bards and hot-gospellers of technology.
-Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
-Marshall McLuhan, as culled from here
Technology paces industry, but there's a long lag in the process. Industry paces economics. It changes the tools, a great ecological change. And in that manner we come finally to everyday life.
The politician is someone who deals in man's problems of adjustment. To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog.
"Why are you so wary of thought?" said the philosopher. "Thought is the one tool we have for organizing the world."
"True. But thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it."
To his disciples he later said, "A thought is a screen, not a mirror; that is why you live in a thought envelope, untouched by Reality."
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
-Paul Graham, from this essay
He asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic'. He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God." This remark kept me cheerful for about a week.
Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.
-attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein
An interesting study on the Labor Force in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was published last month. It was noted that, in the past five years, there was an out-migration, with 182,000 "net domestic residents" leaving the Commonwealth. Judging from the study, this is a problem.
As far as I can tell, they never asked the question: why did they leave? It's a puzzle.
The algorithms are designed to keep us as “users,” but the world needs us to be creators. When we move from being passive consumers to active curators, we learn better and build a body of work that matters.
If there is a common theme running though the actions of the US in the past year, it is fighting back against the institutions, governments, and entities which want to undermine capitalism. That would be a really Great Reset.
-Brian S. Wesbury, from this post
APOD offers the difference between mid-infrared (Webb) and ultraviolet (Hubble). If you go to the site, you will be offered both a better description and the ability to toggle between the two views. Much fun.
Forecasting the length and severity of war always seems easier with the benefit of hindsight, just like it is with markets.
-Ben Carlson, from this post
Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn’t about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.”
-Daniel Smith, from here
We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated." As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.
Simple and shallow sound the same until you ask the second question. The person who earned their simplicity can go ten levels deep when challenged. The person who skipped the work falls apart at level two.
-Shane Parrish, from this episode
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021.
-Noah Smith, contemplating world domination
Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.
But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.
-Cal Newport, as posted here
If you find yourself wondering how no one has thought of this before, that’s a warning sign. Chances are, there’s a quiet graveyard of leaders who learned something expensive that you haven’t yet uncovered. Go talk to them.
I’m pro-innovation. I believe in big ideas. But I’m skeptical of shiny ones—too clean, too theoretical, too detached from human realities. The best strategies are forged in constraint, humility, and patience. They’re honest about how many variables they’re trying to solve at once.
-Mike Sharrow, from here
...............war is a runaway train and we just don't know where it will take us.
....................with a friend called Fish.
I know intelligence when I see it. I’d recognize a Bigfoot, too, on sight, because it’s about as rare.
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