Knocking on your door..........

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

-Matt Shumer, from this post

Show up......................

 

anti-fragileness as a goal.............

 

The goal for both your body and finances is to make them anti-fragile systems. Growing stronger through controlled stress to avoid collapse under reckless intensity is the North Star for amplifying wealth and optimal health.

-Tony Isola, from here

Clarity.................

 

In the movies, there’s plenty of stirring music when the hero has to make their choice. But in our lives, there isn’t a single moment. Instead, there are a million of them.

The way we show up will rarely be perfect. But perfect isn’t the point. Countless tiny decisions add up to a whole. It helps to be clear about the purpose of the work we’re here to do.

-Seth Godin, from here

The gentle morph into a surveillance state......

 

During the Superbowl there was an amazing Rorschach test masquerading as a feel-good Ring doorbell commercial.  For those who missed it, find it here.  Essentially it touts a new service where neighborhood networks of Ring doorbell cameras can combine with Amazon AI to find a lost dog based on an uploaded photo.  Half the population reacted, "isn't that wonderful" and the other half of viewers, of whom I am one, reacted "that's freaking scary."

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post

Sixty years ago......................

 

Righteous Brothers............Soul and Inspiration

understanding......................

 

They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

-Milton Friedman, as cut-and-pasted from here

Avoidance...................

 

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

-Robert B. Cialdini

In praise of crooked trees..........

 

We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

-Rob Firchau, from this post

While hunting and gathering.............

 

 . . . shaped my future productivity strategies: focus on what matters most, since you rarely have time for everything. In the end, prioritising what truly matters is the key to meaningful achievement.

-Nicholas Bate

choosing..........

 

Focus means choosing what doesn’t matter.  What you refuse to do determines what you can do.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

On mastery.....................

 

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

-attributed to Lao-Tzu

Sixty years ago..................

 

The Beatles................................Michelle

Odds and ends...............

 

sovereignty.................

 

     The vanity of the ego is endless and vainglorious in its grandiose delusion that it can disprove the existence of God. . . .

     Why does the mind even struggle so valiantly to try to supplant Divinity?  The answer is that it really refutes and secretly hates any sovereignty other than its own.  That is the self-perpetuating core of narcissism.

-David R. Hawkins, Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man

In support of publick virtue.............

 

A general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the Whole Force of the Common Enemy.  While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader.  How necessary then is it for those who are determind to transmit the Blessings of Liberty as a fair Inheritance to Posterity, to associate on publick Principles in Support of publick virtue.

-Samuel Adams, from this 2/12/1779 letter

wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

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

 

     The first time I set eyes on Vincent I was standing in the snow next to my father, trembling under the authority of a loaded shotgun.  I remember that it had been a perfect night for poaching.  January cold and windless.  A full moon had whitewashed the thin layer of fog that lingered above the feeder creeks.  Above the sky was clear; below, the ground hard.  Deer had moved down from the forest to glean the wheat fields on Count Robert de Costebelle's estate.   Buyers in Paris waited in the wings, ready to pay cash for a carcass in good condition.

     I recall my father cursing and I remember wanting to hit him for being old and hardheaded and most of all for getting us caught.  A small gnarly terrier scurried between my feet, uprooting pockets of snow in a fit of agitation.  Vincent stood next to his uncle, Serge Lebuison, gamekeeper of Merlecourt.  The year was 1958.  I was eighteen years old.

-Guy De La Valdène, Red Stag

thanks Rob

Society.....................

 

Society is concerted action, cooperation.

     Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior.  This does not mean that individuals have concluded contracts by virtue of which they have founded human society.  The actions which have brought about social cooperation and daily bring it about anew do not aim at anything else than cooperation and coadjuvancy with others for the attainment of definite singular ends.  The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society.  It substitutes collaboration for the—at least conceivable—isolated life of individuals.  Society is division of labor and combination of labor.  In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal. 

     . . . The individual lives and acts within society.  But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.  It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men.  It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals.  To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

Hallelujah........................

 

This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can … reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.'

-Leonard Cohen, as channeled by Tim Ferriss

A question answered......................

 

........The why behind Mitigating Chaos.  Keep it going.

In the background (as it so often is)......

 

The Allman Brothers Band..............Eat A Peach

Well worth the trip...............

 

more fun here

straying....................

 

The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States.  Those ideas are still very much with us.  We are all of  us imbued with them.  They are part of the very fabric of our being.  But we have been straying from them.  We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else.  We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

     Fortunately, we are waking up.  We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, as they conclude their 1979 book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

Insuperable limits.............

 

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

-Friedrich August von Hayek, from his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture

Basic concepts.................

 

more fun here

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A............

 

Enlargeable photo and description may be found here.  I love the confidence they project in describing what we are looking at.

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

 

Bob Marley & the Wailers....Rastaman Vibration

Color me skeptical too...............

 

The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.

I am skeptical of this thesis.

-more on the subject from Adam Mastroianni here

A playful mind is inquisitive..........

 

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in.  Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.

-Bill Watterson, from his 1990 Commencement address at his alma mater, Kenyon College

A few more snippets:

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead. . . .

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.

Let it go...................

 

There is too much tendency to look inward at one's own moods, and to try to evaluate them.  To stand on the outside and try to look inside is futile; whatever was there will go away.  This also applies to a nebulous thing described as "Happiness."  To try to identify it is like turning on a light to look at the darkness.  Analyze it, and it is gone.

-Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

Scaling.......................

 

     Kroc sees the genius behind the Speedee Service System.  The genius isn't only in its ability do deliver a perfect burger within seconds.  The true genius is that it can be replicated nearly anywhere on planet Earth.  And that, as we know, is exactly what Ray Kroc did.  He took the Speedee Service System and went big time, bugger than even the brothers had anticipated.  He applied their methodology to thousands of McDonald's restaurants across the globe.  The brothers started with one store in 1937.  By 2020, there were almost forty thousand across the globe. . . .

Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.

-Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

I don't know...........................

 

Whatever success I've had has been more due to my knowing how to deal with what I don't know than anything I know.  Betting on the future is betting on probabilities and nothing is certain, not even the probabilities.  That's just the way it is.  While what I've given you up until this point is what I believe I know about the future based on my reasoning about the past, what I want to pass along that is probably more important is how I make decisions in life and in the markets based on what I don't know.  In a nutshell, here's what I try to do:

 *  Know all the possibilities, think about the worst-case scenarios and then find ways to eliminate the intolerable ones.

  * Diversify.

  * Put deferred gratification ahead of immediate gratification so you will be better off in the future.

  * Triangulate among the smartest people possible.

Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order:  Why Nations Succeed and Fail

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

 Joan Armatrading....the Joan Armatrading album

Certainly feels like it....................

 

.......................if you pay more attention to the news instead of the history books.

image via

precision and accuracy.............

 

Precision requires producing the same results each time. Repeatable, measurable, dependable.

Accuracy means hitting the target. . . .

The world we live in is recent, and was created by a revolution in precision. We’re still working on accuracy.

-Seth Godin, from here (adding yet another book to the shopping cart)