Snippets ....................

 

....................from Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age:

Cyberspace, in science fiction writer William Gibson's words, is a "consensual hallucination."

The fear was that the Internet would turn us all into hermits, and maladjusted hermits at that.

"I don't think people know how to socialize anymore, to sit down and come together, because there are so many alternatives.  They like to be entertained, not socialize."

We become attentional wanderers, sated by the mirage.

As economist Jeremy Rifkin reminds us, "the great turning points in human history are often triggered by changing conception of space and time."

A culture of divided attention fuels more than perpetual searching for lost threads and loose ends.  It stokes a culture of forgetting, the marker of a dark age.

Without safety nets of trust or secure traditions, he says, relations crumble into obsession and compulsion.  Or revenge.

Can we Google our way to wisdom?

But what constitutes a distraction? Are we paying attention to the screen or are we distracted by it?  The answer is slippery, tantalizing, daunting, for distraction is in the eye of the beholder.

We can create a culture of attention, recover the ability to pause, focus, connect, judge, and enter deeply into a relationship or an idea, or we can slip into numb days of easy diffusion and detachment. . . . The choice is ours.

pondering the future.......

 

Albert Robida         The Release of the Opera in the Year 2000       c. 1882, lithograph

Their every day will be caught in the wheels of mechanized society, to the point where I wonder how they will find the time to enjoy the most simple pleasures we had at our disposal: silence, calm, solitude.  Having never known them, they shall not be able to miss them.  As for me, I do—and I pity them.

-Albert Robida, from his short story "1965," written in 1920

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

 

The Alan Parson Project. . .Tales of Mystery etc . . .

finding....................

 

Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.

-Tara Mohr

via

Wisdom....................

 

I am not at all persuaded by skepticism.

-Arnold Kling, from this substack edition

Happy Valentine's..............

 

more here

To distracted to answer the question.......

 

Civil War historian Shelby Foote, when asked to cite anything about the American Civil War he did not understand, often replied, “I still don’t know how they did it… How does a starving man march 20 miles, then go into a 3-hour battle?”

That’s a great question. Each generation, in raising the next, has to wonder how much toughness to pass along and whether the deprivation of hardship is doing harm.

-Michael Wade, from this substack

Fun with memes............

 

more fun here

in the game.................

 

Success is endurance in disguise. It belongs to the person who can absorb the losses without absorbing the identity of "loser." It's the courage to start — and to stick with it — that is the real separator. Results tend to find the person who stays in the game.

-James Clear, from this edition

nibbles....................

 

     Robert Pirsig honors the aggravation.  "Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating," he writes. "Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting."  His approach is to inspect the aggravation itself.  He proposes that when you're baffled, it means your current theories about how to proceed aren't working.  You have to empty your mind of them, Zen-style, which takes time.  He advises:

     Just stare at the machine. . .Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long. . .you'll get a nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it... 

     After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. . .Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

     Three terms for his last sentence bear examining.  Pirsig's technique for becoming a "motorcycle scientist" is through studying how he arrives at solutions.  By "value rigidity" Pirsig means "an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values."

-Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything

Internally stable...............

 

Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome's success rested far more on its political system.  For him the Republic's constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom from the frequent revolution and civil strife that had plagued the Greek city-states.  Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival.  It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war.

-Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus

Down is up........................

 

     Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of the second degree of grace.

     Grace is the law of the descending movement.

     To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity.  Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights.

-Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

Ah, science...........

 

Apparently everywhere in the "developed world" human communities and their natural and cultural supports are being destroyed, not by natural calamities or "acts of God" or invasion by foreign enemies, but by a sort of legalized vandalism known as "the economy."  The economy now famously depends upon the authority and the applicable knowledge of science.  It would therefore be useful to say what is the character of this science that has benefited us in so many ways, and yet has cost us so dearly and exacted from us such deference and such questionable permissions.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is A Mircle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

True even for non-low stakes.............

 

When stakes are low, possibility is our playground. Curiosity is our guide. Mistakes are data. And the real reward is in watching yourself evolve.

-Tanmay Vora, from here

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

 

.........Any Major Dude With Half A Heart takes a quick musical dip into the year 1966.

Interesting...................

 

via

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