choices........................

 

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

continuous judgment..........

 

The skill can’t be ‘learn the fixed answer,’ because there is no fixed answer. The skill has to be continuous judgment.

Speed matters, but speed without judgment is just fast failure.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

maybe.................

 

     She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday.  Or maybe that was all you needed.

-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

filtering....................

 

     Reality is what is happening right now.  It is the objective circumstance that is occurring without any meaning or judgment attached to it.  And so what we experience is not reality itself but our perception of reality.  Any meaning or thinking we give something is self-created and our choice. . . . the meaning we give something is the filter through which we see life.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think:  Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering

Activist judges......................?

 

And what I dare say our cunning Chief Justice [Marshall] would swear to, and find as many sophisms to twist it out of the general terms of our Declarations of rights, and even the stricter text of the Virginia 'act for the freedom of religion' as he did to twist Burr's neck out of the halter of treason.  May we not say then with him who was all candor and benevolence 'Woe unto you, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to bear.'

-Thomas Jefferson, from his 1/14/1814 letter to John Adams

navigating the social world..........

 

My hypothesis is that psychology usually operates close to the boundary between science and baloney sandwich. The reason is that all of us believe in some sort of folk psychology. In order to navigate the social world, we have to try to predict how other people will behave. We necessarily formulate psychological theories. We end up judging an academic’s psychological theory by how well it aligns with our personal folk psychology. This creates a playing field on which it is hard to tell by the uniform who is on the scientific team and who isn’t. It is likely that none of us are fully on the scientific team.

-Arnold Kling, from here

Incentives matter...................

 

We should also heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.” This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

-Charlie Munger, from his The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Can I get an amen................?

 

The ultimate goal of human action is always the satisfaction of the acting man's desire.  There is no standard of greater or lesser satisfaction other than individual judgements of value, different for various people and for the same people at various times.  What makes a man feel uneasy and less uneasy is established by him from the standard of his own will and judgment, from his personal and subjective valuation.  Nobody is in a position to decree what should make a fellow man happier.

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

good luck with this one..................

 

I don't believe I have the ability to say what is going to work.  Rather, I try to eliminate what's not going to work.  I think being successful is just about not making mistakes.  It's not about having correct judgment.  It's about avoiding incorrect judgments.

-Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

the courage to change...........

 

Just because you've begun down one path doesn't mean you're committed to it forever, especially if that path turns out to be flawed or impeded.  At that same time, this is not an excuse to be flighty or incessantly noncommittal.  It takes courage to decide to do things differently and to make a change, as well as discipline and awareness to know that the notion of "Oh, but this looks even better" is a temptation that cannot be endlessly indulged either.

-Ryan Holiday

Provided the judgment...................

................doesn't come with condemnation:

 A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

-George Santayana

granted....................

 

To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Ed. Note:  Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.

insulation....................

In ever more areas of life, algorithms are coming to substitute for judgment exercised by identifiable human beings who can be held to account. The rationale offered is that automated decision-making will be more reliable. But a further attraction is that it serves to insulate various forms of power from popular pressures.

-Matthew B. Crawford, from this essay

an interesting collection..................

  I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes. 

-Charlie Munger

noses........................

 

      It sure does beat all how prosperity makes a man critical of all who are less prosperous.  Seems like some folks no sooner get two dollars they can rattle together than they start looking down their noses at folks who only have two bits.

-Louis L'Amour, The Courting of Griselda

a desire for a desire..................

      One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures.  We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying.  Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires.

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

Highly recommended.................

 

Avoiding regret is a key component to life satisfaction.

Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgement will cost you a fortune.

Most errors in judgment happen when we don't know we're supposed to be exercising judgment.

The key to getting what you want out of life is to  identify how the world works and to align yourself with it.

But being wise requires more.  It's more than knowing how to get what you want.  It's also knowing which things are worth wanting—which things really matter.

lessons learned...............

      The judicious will not fail to extract other lessons from the two conventions.  For example, the lesson that politicians, in the main, are poor hands at practical politics—that their professional competence is very slight.  Very few of them, indeed, show any sign of ordinary good sense.  Their tricks are transparent and deceive no one, not even other politicians.  When they accomplish anything, it is usually by accident.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from a 7/14/1924 essay

the infallible judgement of reality........

      The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.  The seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.  He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.  Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.  But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.  His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

Accountability and the impartial other............

 Those principles have been taken as defining the field of "natural law," for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.

      Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith's mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the "impartial spectator" as the true judge of our moral duties.  When asking myself what should I do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye.  If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect.  The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature