We will be testing his theory......

 

    We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes.  Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

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Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

     There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

     Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)

Here is a radical idea...............

 

Can we build a conceptual framework for thinking about the world that is compatible with what we have learned about it from both theories?

     Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful—incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts.  Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms.  In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined,

     Twenty years ago the fog was thick.  Today paths have appeared that have elicited enthusiasm and optimism.  There are more than one of these, so it can't be said that the problem has been resolved.  The multiplicity generates controversy, but the debate is healthy: until the fog has lifted completely, it's good to have criticism and opposing views.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

On nostalgia...................

I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Whenever the discussion turns to how good the good-old-days were, my mind turns to 1968, my junior year in high school.  Antiwar protests and riots. President Lyndon Johnson stops his reelection campaign. Martin Luther King assassination, followed by riots all over the country.  Bobby Kennedy assassinated.  It was a brutal year.  The history major in me knows that there have been many brutal years.  Not sure I am buying his theory.  Would be my guess is that nostalgia is more about missing old friends and relationships, but that's just a guess.

change is difficult..................

 

When intellectuals discover that the world does not behave according to their theories, the conclusion they invariably draw is that the world must be changed. It must be awfully hard to change theories.

-Thomas Sowell

via

On coping properly.......................

 

When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of man’s many evolution-based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a “social animal,” greatly and automatically influenced by behavior he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited-size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy.

But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by much extreme irrationality, displayed in patterns and subpatterns. So surrounded, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory-structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. 

-Charlie Munger, from the opening of his speech, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

as theories go..........................

 

     Another trait of consumerism that thrives in the youth culture is that antipathy to so-called "drudgery" that has made us, with the help of salesmen and advertisers, a nation of suckers.  This is the pseudoaristocratic notion, early popularized in America, that one is too good for the fundamental and recurring tasks of domestic order and biological necessity; to dirty one's hands in the soil or to submerge them for very long in soapy water is degrading and brutalizing.  With one's hands thus occupied, the theory goes, one is unlikely to reach those elusive havens of "self-discovery" and "self-fulfillment"; but if one can escape such drudgery, one then has a fair chance of showing the world that one is really better than all previous evidence would have indicated.

-Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural

interesting theory....................

 

"the decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive."

The rust-belt’s problems were caused not by its industries' and workers' confrontation with economic competition but, instead, from their insulation from competition— . . .

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

Einstein's jewel............................

 

     There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear.  To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty—and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world.  Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

an equation.........................

 

Einstein wrote an equation that says that R is equivalent to the energy of matter.  That is to say: space curves where there is matter.  That is it.  The equation fits into half a line, and there is nothing more.  A vision—that space curves—became an equation.

     But within this equation there is a teeming universe.  And here the magical richness of the theory opens up into a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman but all have turned out to be true.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

In theory, anyway...............

 

     Nothing in science—nothing in life, for that matter—makes sense without theory.  It is our nature to put all knowledge into context in order to tell a story, and to re-create the world by this means.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

Accounting.............................

 

     Natural selection, in short, does not anticipate future needs.  But this principle, while explaining so much so well, presents a difficulty.  If the principle is universally true, how did natural selection prepare the mind for civilization before civilization existed?  That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

As a once-upon-a-time history major........

 

.........I am a firm believer in The Great Man Theory.

Choosing..................

 If you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.

-Paul Graham

I've always believed in it.........

 

The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar, or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.

-Mana Afsari

On theories............................

 Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

-attributed to Karl Popper

Hope for our political future.........?

 Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia.  It's the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever

Is the Big Bang Theory in trouble................?

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-Richard Feynman

Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope don't seem to be supporting it.  Story here.

via

Truth telling.........................

 My theory is that money spent on books and music is never wasted.

In contrast...........................

 

-Murry Davis, as literally cut-and-pasted from here

ideal......................................

 . . . "my ideal of a scientific man, accepting nothing upon authority, but putting every scientific theory to the severest test. . . . I hope I have learned from Professor Ludwig's precept and practice that the most important lesson for every man of science, not to be satisfied with loose thinking and half-proofs, not to speculate and theorize but to observe closely and carefully."

-William Henry Welch, as quoted in John Barry's The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History