expertism..................

 

The problem with experts, put succinctly, is that experts are humans who are susceptible to all the human foibles. That ranges from being clueless about their own deficiencies to being downright evil.

Assuming anything benevolent about them, simply because they’re experts, is the surest way to make everything worse.

Should we listen to them? To a point. We need to consider what they have to say, but we also need to hear what the other experts have to say. We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.

-Tom Knighton, from this substack

clarity....................

 

Clarity isn't about knowing what you want to do with your life, it's about knowing what you want to do this week. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step.

-James Clear, from this edition

prepare for the unpredictable.................

One can only prepare for the unpredictable by trying to keep an open and unprejudiced mind — a feat which is extremely difficult to achieve, even with the best will in the world. Indeed, a completely open mind would be an empty one, and freedom from all prejudices and preconceptions is an unattainable ideal. Yet there is one form of mental exercise that can provide good basic training for would-be prophets: Anyone who wishes to cope with the future should travel back in imagination a single life-time — say to 1900 — and ask himself just how much of today’s technology would be, not merely incredible, but incomprehensible to the keenest scientific brains of that time.

1900 is a good round date to choose because it was just about then that all hell started to break loose in science.

-Arthur C. Clarke, from his 1962 essay, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination

If I could remember who set me off on the chase to find this essay, I would thank them

all kinds of scuffs................

 

     The God I follow has things to say about envy, and self-serving motivations.  He offers a road that doesn't indulge peering at our neighbours' fields and fuming with our supposed lack.  For you and I trying to get home, to become real human beings, to gather our thrown-away stories, this is a radical step in the right direction.  You can be a pious monk in fifth-century Egypt or a burlesque dancer in modern New York, but we all turn green sometimes.  Someone is our Akanida, someone evokes our smaller nature.  There be monsters.  Pat the gargoyle on the shoulder and tell it a story, I promise it will help.  There are all sorts of accumulated hurt in us, all kinds of scuffs.  A story helps settle the interior-den and brings these turbulent and evasive forces to the table.  In my decades as a story-teller I have become much more honest.  Stories are the most delightful vehicles for the brightening of consciousness.  True, archaic technology.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild

listen.......................

 

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time.  To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking.

-Albert Camus