..............................................success.
Sunday, March 24, 2024
Saturday, March 23, 2024
Friday, March 22, 2024
Beware the echo chamber..................
Taken together, these studies suggest an unnervingly plausible two-part engine of polarisation: first, given the choice, we seek out other people like us. Then, being surrounded by people like us makes us more extreme in our views and more confident that those views are correct.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
Our current information ecosystem offers us more choice than ever. Alongside social media we can pick and choose from websites, podcasts and YouTube channels to reflect any interest, geography and ideology. And how do we use that choice? Generally, by seeking out people who share our views, broadcasters who seem to “get” us and, often, by avoiding news altogether.
I am wary of blaming social media for all our ills. It can be a great source of support and information, particularly for people in an unusual situation: anything from having a disability to a minority sexual orientation to a niche hobby. There is a real benefit to being able to reach out and find like-minded people.
Yet we must acknowledge the risk that we are self-selecting into echo chambers. Social media algorithms may be giving us a push, recommending content to us that drives “engagement”, the most surprising, outrageous and often toxic material. But we shouldn’t blame algorithms steering us away from serious and thoughtful exposure to different points of view. We are quite capable of choosing that for ourselves.
-Tim Harford, from here
Be careful what you wish for......
Most Trump antagonists seem to be laughing and salivating. I suppose they would enjoy seeing the man tortured. It's bizarrely shortsighted. Do they think Trump is uniquely evil and nothing that happens to him will set a precedent?
-from this Althouse post
Happy Birthday...........................
This classic clip, featuring some interesting role reversals, is worth 3:42 minutes of your time.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
a now familiar paradox..............
In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.
-Adam Gopnik, from this review
Seems like an early spring this year..........
 |
| Supposed to fall to 20 degrees tonight. Fearing for the magnolia blooms - my favorite blooming tree. |
 |
| My Sweetie and I just finished covering the peony sprouts. They are very early this year. |
 |
| Too many daffodils to cover. They're on their own |
First world......................................
...........................................problems.
Opening paragraphs................
Clay Hutmacher Jr., twenty-five, stood knee-deep in the Twelve Sleep River, casting for trout with a determined look on his face and an engagement ring in his pocket. He was twelve miles from the town of Saddlestring, on the ranch his father managed and that, he hoped, he would take over some day. . . .
The wonderful thing about fly-fishing, he'd discovered, was that it was all-consuming. The tactics, the gear, reading the water, the choice of flies, keeping his balance on smooth round river rocks—all of that fully occupied his mind and pushed out other concerns.
Fly-fishing was like sex in that way.
-C. J. Box, Three-Inch Teeth: A Joe Pickett Novel
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Sort of interesting...................
-a few excerpts:
Their deepest underlying assumption may be that the tradeoff between doing well and being well is a false choice.
The best teams aren't the ones with the best thinkers. They're the teams that unearth and use the best thinking from everyone.
. . . that collective intelligence depends less on people's cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.
The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and will never achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.
If you doubt yourself, shouldn't you doubt your low opinion of yourself?
came naturally...................
Religion played a central role in his life and his thinking, as it would in the Revolution. It was no accident that so many Boston town meetings were conducted in houses of prayer, or the republicanism, as envisaged in Massachusetts Bay, traced the independent-minded, egalitarian, community-based lines of Puritanism. Men who preferred a church without a bishop came naturally to the idea of a state without a king.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Reflection..........................
The danger in trying to hide who you are is that you'll succeed, and you'll start to see a stranger in the mirror of other people.
brainwriting....................
To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we're better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise. . . .
Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
Believe......................
Some make the world believe that they believe what they do not believe. Others, in greater number, make themselves believe it, being unable to penetrate what it means to believe.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Monday, March 18, 2024
Classic......................
................................Christopher Hitchens:
Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-1990
-1990
I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying. There were a lot of other people born in April, 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them.
-2001
-2001
Of complexities..............
Of the complexities introduced by the "present vast and delicate division of labor," he wrote, "When everybody is working for everybody, everybody is injured by the mischances of everybody."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
seeds.........................
Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
-Maria Popova, from here
a summary......................
It is difficult to improve on the summary of the chronicler who delivered up Adam's first years in a single storm cloud of a sentence: "He read theology and abandoned the ministry, read law and abandoned the bar, entered business and lost a thousand pounds."
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
A love of reading often begins at home....
Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it's not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.
-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
If.............................
If we held to God by the mediation of a living faith, if we held to God through him and not through ourselves, if we had a divine foothold and foundation, human accidents would not have the power to shake us as they do.
-Michel de Montaigne, from An Apology to Raymond Sebond, also known as Chapter 12, Book 2 of his Complete Works
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Opening paragraphs.................
As someone who never really had one, maybe I am the least qualified person to defend the importance of family. But as someone with more education than I ever expected to receive, maybe I'm more qualified to say we give education more importance than we should. I am grateful for the miraculous trajectory of my life, but I had to experience upward mobility firsthand and reach the summit of education to understand its limitations. I've come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.
Rob Henderson, from the Preface to his book, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
taxing the mega-rich...................
...................to stop "transformational philanthropy"?
It doesn’t matter if you agree with Mr. Bankman-Fried about how to make the world better, whether you support his veganism, his global-warming alarmism or his priorities for spending his ill-gotten gains. History teaches us that the greatest crimes are committed by those who believe they are mankind’s benefactors.
Independent-mindedness...............
....................or, how to think for yourself:
The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert: fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to fill it.
The federal Board of Tea Experts........
....................................who knew?
It's a warning about the stickiness of bad ideas, about an inertia that can limit even the smallest attempts at trimming the state.
Saturday, March 16, 2024
effects.........................
I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves . . . It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself. It can be forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed.
People with the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite that the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly. He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
ground rules.................
Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.
Friday, March 15, 2024
Been in the..........................
................real estate brokerage business for a long time. I'm not sure they've thought this through:
The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more. . . .
Although it’s unclear what the future of the housing market will look like, Miller said he expected homebuying to pick up somewhat as costs fall dramatically for homebuyers.
Most pundits seemed to think that low interest rates helped the buyers. Strikes us that low interest rates actually helped the sellers.
Most buyers around here seem to think mostly in terms of their monthly mortgage payment. A monthly payment of $2,000 will amortize a $360,000 mortgage at 3% interest over twenty years. At 6% interest, that payment will only support a mortgage $280,000.
In a hot and competitive real estate market, which much of the country has experienced lately (mostly because of a shortage of supply of housing), who do you think reaps the reward of the extra $80,000 available mortgage financing that 3% interest provided? Why do you think housing prices got so high so quickly? You are kidding yourself if you don't think that part of the housing "affordability" problem was caused by ten years of 3% mortgage money. When it comes to real estate, low interest rates are inflationary, and that favors sellers.
A similar thing will likely happen with the real estate commission issue. If commissions fall, in a hot and competitive market, the buyer will not be seeing the benefit. It will likely go to the seller. All other things being equal, the buyer working with a broker who will work for a reduced fee, can now afford to offer more. If the supply problem ever gets fixed and a "buyers' market" emerges, then it might be different. In the meanwhile, two people can't save the same reduction in fees. (This assumes there will actually be a reduction in fees). It will benefit either the buyer or the seller. In a "sellers market," bet on the seller.
Time will tell, but my bet is that pundits thinking changing the long-established commission structure will help buyers, in what is still a "sellers' market," are fooling themselves - and the public.
Prickly..........................
When in doubt
let nature be your guide.
let nature be your guide.
Specifically, cactuses
Be still.
Stay hydrated.
Shelter owls.
Stab your predators.
Stay hydrated.
Shelter owls.
Stab your predators.
It's that easy.
The game.........................
The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.
-Michael Munger, Is Capitalism Sustainable?
the chess-board.................
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
About those plans................
Adams would proudly claim that he never troubled himself with plans for his future. All evidence corroborates that approach, one not everyone could afford.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
certain risks...............
I may know who and what I am. I cannot know in advance who or what I could become. There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
not your friends...........................
They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life. It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends.
-William Ewart Gladstone, 1871
such a thing as truth..........
Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."
-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Out walking.......................
When the cacophony of market doom reaches ear-piercing levels, the best remedy is to go outside and take a walk—by yourself.
-Tony Isola, from here
on being questioned.........................
In the last resort, man should not ask, "What is the meaning of my life?" but should realize that he himself is being questioned."
-Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy
the constitutive uncertainty................
Fatih is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
From Chris Lynch's..............................
..........................................latest substack:
Analysis true! Good life advice for avoiding problems and unworthy people...
Fifty years ago........................
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Past and present.................
. . . they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.
-Bari Weiss, from here
Constructive..........................
Having a calm mind that is focused on the outcome is our greatest asset when we are in conflict at workplace.
-Tanmay Vora, from this post
Not to say......................
...........................that paper cuts don't hurt:
1. Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut.
becoming........................
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
stumped.....................
I’ve always been stumped by people’s naivety, or willingness to accept for others what they themselves would never abide.
-Joel Hirst, from here
One can only hope...................
North America may suffer from some of the world’s poorest political leadership. Yet it seems destined to remain the wealthiest, most dominant place on Earth.
-Joel Kotkin, from here
Monday, March 11, 2024
Fifty years ago..............................
Vantage points....................
What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.
-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
20 investing lessons.....................
..........................from twenty years:
2. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee investment success. Warren Buffett once wrote, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”
I’ve met so many highly educated individuals who are terrible investors. They can’t control their emotions because their academic pedigree makes them overconfident in their abilities.
Emotional intelligence is the true sign of investment smarts.
The unknowable future.........
Are stock prices too high? I don’t know, and neither do you. I am too much of an Efficient Markets adherent to believe otherwise. Though, I am also Schumpeterian. So, yeah, we just may be in a new AI-powered economy where we will be much more productive, and the firms best poised to make money off this are worth a lot—and will be worth much more than what they are now. But until we figure many things out, and that could take decades (possibly many decades), there will be some froth along the way. We will make big bets on the wrong horses. Or some companies that seem poised for greatness will falter after a while. Or companies that seem unstoppable now may not exist then. Who the winners will be and what winning even looks like is unknowable right now.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
deep thoughts about deep thoughts.............
I had come to grad school as a nontraditional student, older than my peers, leaving my job at a real estate development business to pursue a life of the mind. I had failed as a student when I first went to college directly after high school, but when I returned in my twenties, I had a much different level of focus and commitment. Unlike my first brush with higher education, I knew why I wanted to be there.
When I reached my master's program, I took academia (and myself) very seriously. I wrote dense essays about John Milton's Paradise Lost. I attended conferences on pedagogy. I thought deep thoughts about deep thoughts, and I was eager to tell you about them. I used words like "epistemologies" before breakfast, without a hint of irony.
My mental health struggles, my insomnia, and my fear of fully committing myself lest I prove my best wasn't enough meant I missed class fairly often, but I was still on the path to being respectable. I was becoming a scholar. A writer. A professor. Somebody who left his small rustbelt town to do smart things with smart people. I didn't have time for frivolous women and their frivolous art doodles.
I was an idiot.
Recommended...................
The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation. More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Live (the ancient art of stoic joy)
A coming attraction.......................
..................Lots of hype in our part of the world about the coming (April 8th) total solar eclipse. One of my favorite memories about total solar eclipses was my junior high school reading of Mark Twain's tale, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, wherein our hero, Hank Morgan, outwits Merlin and King Arthur.
Surrender.................................
He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
C. S. Lewis, from his 1939 sermon, Learning In War-time
Fun with mergers and acquisitions..........
All of
these are big serious companies with good lawyers who have written these
contracts before. Chevron’s proposed acquisition of Hess is as
straightforward as can be, a completely standard all-stock reverse triangular
merger; there is no weird structuring here to either get around or trigger the
right of first refusal. It’s a simple question: Does the right of first refusal
apply to a normal merger of Hess? Exxon seems confident that it does; Chevron
and Hess seem confident that it does not.
Weird
stuff. I obviously cannot tell you who is right. The
language of the Stabroek joint operating agreement is not public, and neither
is the arbitration filing, so I don’t know what the contract says, and even if
I did I probably wouldn’t be sure what it means. The people who wrote it
aren’t sure!
redefinitions..................
We need to redefine "problems" into opportunities.
Problems are an opportunity to create value.
Problems are an opportunity to strengthen relationships.
Problems are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from others.
-Farnam Street, from here
Saturday, March 9, 2024
staying power..................
As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do.
-Matt Taibbi, from here
a point of view............
 |
| Edward Hopper Cape Cod Morning Oil on Canvas 1950 |
It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.
-Josephine Hopper remarking on her husband's painting, Cape Cod Morning.
Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window.
-Edward Hopper's reply
The very definition.........................
............................................of public service.
Who is not in favor....................
..........................of Type 2 growth?
In English there is a curious and unhelpful conflation of the two meanings of the word “growth.” The most immediate meaning is to increase in size, or increase in girth, to gain in weight, to add numbers, to get bigger. In short, growth means “more.” More dollars, more people, more land, more stuff. More is fundamentally what biological, economic, and technological systems want to do: dandelions and parking lots tend to fill all available empty places. If that is all they did, we’d be well to worry. But there is another equally valid and common use of the word “growth” to mean develop, as in to mature, to ripen, to evolve. We talk about growing up, or our own personal growth. This kind of growth is not about added pounds, but about betterment. It is what we might call evolutionary or developmental, or type 2 growth. It’s about using the same ingredients in better ways. Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine.
-Kevin Kelly
Friday, March 8, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
On nectar and honey..............
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real. It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
the absurd beauty of it all.......
There are wonders here.
Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.
Magic hidden in plain sight.
Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all. These are some facts that are easy to overlook.
These are facts that saved my life.
Some thoughts about AI.......
As soon as economists started doing experiments on generative AI, they found an incredibly consistent pattern: AI narrowed the productivity gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.
-Noah Smith, from here
Appreciation.......................
Instead of feeling guilty when someone helps you, your only obligation is to be grateful. Expressing appreciation doesn't just make givers feel good, it also motivates them to keep doing good. It allows them to feel values and shows them their time was well spent.
Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. Yes, you can reciprocate a favor by paying it back. But the best way to honor an act of kindness is by paying it forward.
-Adam Grant, from this substack
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
hijacks...............................
Our brains are special, fascinating miracles of the natural world, but they are also organs of the body. They are flesh and water and electricity, and the fact that they are the seat of our thoughts does not negate their physicality or susceptibility to sickness. Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.
If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more of itself, you wouldn't talk ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you? If you have a reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn't measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you? Can you imagine considering chickenpox to be an indictment of your life or evidence that you are lesser than other people?
No.
So how is it that our self-worth and the value of our personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that depression sufferers neither willfully create nor invite into our lives? Depression is not a mirror held up to our identities, nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of our essential selves.
It's the flu. It's a rash.
It's the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.
faith..........................
I have known people who lost their faith in God during the Holocaust, and others who kept it. But that anyone can have faith in humanity after Auschwitz to me defies belief.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
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