In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”
-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Old age keeps being put back, like the completion of a government building project.
-Theodore Dalrymple, In Search of the Consolations of Age
A theory of intelligence might also finally decouple intelligence from consciousness. Intelligence is likely a computational quantity; consciousness is a phenomenal one. Of course, there is a chance that we might discover there is no general theory of intelligence at all; that like life, intelligence is a squishy, messy, almost illusionary phenomenon that cannot be encapsulated into a mathematical formula. That would be unfortunate, but good to know sooner rather than later.
-Kevin Kelly, from this substack episode
There is a tendency, as strong now as at any former time, to suppose that an oligarchy is admirable if it consists of 'good' men. The government of the Roman Empire was 'bad' until Constantine, and then it became 'good'. In the Book of Kings, there were those who did right in the sight of the Lord, and those who did evil. In English history as taught to children, there are 'good' kings and 'bad' kings. An oligarchy of Jews is 'bad', but one of Nazis is 'good'. The oligarchy of Tsarist aristocrats was 'bad', but that of the Communist Party is 'good'.
This attitude is unworthy of grown-up people. A child is 'good' when it obeys orders, and 'naughty' when it does not. When it grows up and becomes a political leader, it retains the ideas of the nursery, and defines the 'good' as those who obey its orders and the 'bad' as those who defy it. Consequently our own political party consists of 'good' men, and the opposite party consists of 'bad' men. 'Good' government is government by our group, 'bad' government that by the other group. The Montagues are 'good', the Capulets 'bad', or vice versa.
Such a point of view, if taken seriously, makes social life impossible.
-Bertrand Russell, The Taming of Power, circa 1938, from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
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
To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, from his essay El Dorado
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
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
............More stuff I never learned as a history major:
In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests. Baptists faced the brunt of arrests. By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .
Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.) This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.
Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers. Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.
-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.
-Michael Dresdale, from this essay
Emerson was a notorious freethinker, unburdened by the conventions of his time. He was basically a walking middle finger to the dumb traditions and sheeplike thinking that held people back. If he were alive today, he would be appalled at the educational uniformity, technological distraction, and immediate gratification that keep our most ambitious young people anesthetized and unable to find their life's meaning. He saw a version of the problem in his own time, in fact, and wrote a long essay called "Self-Reliance" on how, in seven steps, to rebel against the psychogenic epidemic.
-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life
I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers, and Other Essays
I think perhaps we have collectively been too eager to deny the relevance of 1776 to us today, too sure of our own superiority to listen to revolutionary leaders' advice about society, human nature, and government, and too quick to disparage or simply ignore the national past that began in those desperate and idealistic days 250 years ago.
-Brendan McConville, from his essay in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
Not everyone who supported the Revolution would necessarily see it as an opportunity to make wide-ranging changes in society. Dissolving the connections to Great Britain would be enough. People go go about their business in pretty much the same way as they had before. Of course, some changes would necessarily have to take place because the basic structure of a republic differs from that of a monarchy. Subjects become citizens with new responsibilities that would alter the contours of society. Men, though certainly not all of them, would have to get used to voting. . . .
If the Americans were not really operating with a tabula rasa after breaking from the British Empire, there was substantial opportunity to write a different story for the newly created United States, one that would help transform the world. Jefferson sounded this theme throughout his political career and until his death.
-Annette Gordon-Reed from her essay "Thomas Jefferson, Optimistic Visionary", as found in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
"Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man".
Per Bylund agrees and suggests we pay attention to Goodhart's Law.
....................................and restraint:
While there are many who compare Tim Cook to Steve Jobs and find him wanting on vision and flair, I am grateful, as an investor in Apple, for the restraint and discipline that he brought to the job. That gratitude will stay intact even if Apple's caution on AI turns out to be a mistake, since the restraint and rectitude that Cook brought to his job are management qualities that significantly undervalued. I don't teach from or write cases, but I would love to see more business school cases about CEOs like Cook who are not easily swayed by the temptation of more growth and ego-driven acquisitions. I loved the Steve Jobs movie, but I don't expect to see a Tim Cook movie anytime soon, and while that is understandable, it also explains why we will continue to have too many CEOs at companies viewing themselves as saviors, gambling shareholder money on turnarounds and rescues, when the better pathway would be acceptance and shrinkage. I believe that investors lose more money from companies trying to do too much rather than from them doing too little, and from overreaching than from underachieving.
-Aswarth Damodaran, from this essay
Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying. But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history. That will be the hardest thing. We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution.
-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay
Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy.
As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.
Cal Newport, from this essay
Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
-Abraham Maslow, as cut-and-pasted from A Theory of Human Motivation
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